“State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Mattsson said. “We need to talk to Fred Reeves.”
The old woman was dressed from head to toe in black-a loose black sweatshirt and sweatpants and fleece-lined slippers. She had a cigarette hanging from her lower lip. She looked off to her right and said, “Fred! Cops want to talk to you. Get over here.”
They heard some movement, then another door banged and Mattsson shouted at Virgil, “He’s gone out the back.”
Virgil was already running, down the side of the house and around the back corner. There, probably forty feet away, a very large man was running toward the back corner of the neighboring house. Running slowly, like a tub of Jell-O with legs, though pumping his arms like a sprinter.
Virgil caught him in five seconds between the neighboring house and the next one over, and employing a technique shown to him by Jenkins: instead of trying to stop the man, he simply ran slightly behind him, a couple of feet away, and spoke to him. “Not getting away, Fred. I run three miles every night; I can keep up with you running backward. Want to see me run backward and keep up? Look at this, Freddie, I’m running backward.”
Virgil didn’t really run backward, but Reeves turned to look and stumbled, and finally stopped, bent to catch his breath, hands on his thighs, which was as far as he could bend; his pants rode down and his T-shirt up, exposing six inches of butt crack. Mattsson came up and said, “You should never have beat that woman up at night, Fred. Should have waited until it was light outside.”
Reeves was breathing hard after his forty-yard sprint and gasped, “What?”
Mattsson said, “See, if it was during the day, you could see some daylight. Now it’s gonna be a long time before you see daylight again, Freddie. Gonna lock your ass up and throw away the key. That Alvarez woman, looks like she could die.”
“I never touched her,” Reeves said. “Honest to God, I was just standing there.”
“Yeah, but you were there, you had to be Brad’s buddy,” Mattsson said. To Virgiclass="underline" “Put the cuffs on him, Virgil. Airmail his bubble butt to Stillwater prison.”
She went back to Reeves: “How much did Blankenship pay you, Fred? A hundred bucks? We hear old Castro gave him a grand to slap Ramona around. Did he give you half? Did you get your whole five hundred?”
Reeves’s breathing had slowed and he stood up straight and said, “He didn’t get no grand. Who told you he got a grand? He said two hundred.”
He was facing Mattsson and Virgil had stepped up close behind his shoulder with open cuffs in one hand. He caught Reeves’s left arm just above the elbow, but Reeves yanked it away and then snapped it back, with a lot more speed than Virgil had seen when he was running, and the quick heavy slap caught Virgil on the chin and Virgil staggered backward, caught a heel, and fell on his butt. Reeves went right at Mattsson with two canned-ham-sized fists, and as Virgil pushed himself awkwardly back to his feet, Mattsson sidestepped and slapped at Reeves and Reeves fell down shouting, “Oww! Oww! Oww!”
He was facedown in the dirt and Virgil sat on his back and with Mattsson’s help he bent his two arms together and cuffed them. Virgil caught one heavy arm and tried to help Reeves to his feet, but the huge man seemed disoriented and for a few seconds Virgil thought he might be having a heart attack or a stroke, but his eyes cleared and his mouth popped open and a thin stream of blood drizzled out.
Mattsson knelt next to Reeves’s head and started the routine: “You have the right to remain silent…”
–
What happened there?” Virgil asked, when she finished. “Why’d he go down like that?”
“Slapped him with mother’s little helper,” Mattsson said. She slipped a hand in her pocket and pulled out a flat leather-covered sap, nine inches long and an inch and a half wide. Virgil hadn’t seen one like it since his days as an army MP captain. “Don’t tell.”
Virgil nodded. “Get him on his feet.”
They got him up and Virgil asked him, “Where did you last see Blankenship?”
“He dropped me off,” Reeves said. “Don’t know where he went. Probably down to the Waterhole. Don’t put me in jail.”
“You think he only got two hundred?”
“That’s what he said,” Reeves said. “C’mon, I’ll talk to you. Don’t put me in jail. I didn’t hit nobody.”
“Gonna have to put you in jail for a while, but if you’re good, and you tell the truth about what happened, it might not be too long,” Mattsson said.
The old woman came walking around the corner of the house, carrying a can of beer. “You taking him?”
“Yeah,” Virgil said.
“Come and bail me out, Grandma,” Reeves said.
“Yeah, with what?” the woman asked. To Mattsson and Virgil she said, “He don’t get along so well in jail. You gotta tell the jail people that. If you leave him a belt, he’ll hang himself.”
“We’ll tell them,” Mattsson said.
“Come get me, Grandma,” Reeves said. He began to cry and shake, tipped his head up to the sky and wailed, “Don’t put me in jail…”
“Shouldn’t go beating up women,” Mattsson said.
–
They locked Reeves to a steel ring that was welded to the floor of Virgil’s truck, then got together outside, where Reeves couldn’t hear, and Mattsson said, “I cruised that Waterhole place. Not a good spot to make a bust. Gonna be a few guns in there.”
“So we take Reeves back to Mankato, let him look at the lockup, and interview him. I think we can squeeze him for whatever we need. Then we go over to Blankenship’s and bust him there. You know where he lives?”
“Yeah, I got an address.” She thought a moment, and then said, “That all sounds pretty good. Let’s see what we get from Reeves.”
“We need to ask him about Frankie, too.”
“Yup.”
–
They hauled Reeves into the Blue Earth County jail, stopping at Virgil’s to get his BCA-approved recorder. After they booked Reeves in, they took him to an interview room, read him his rights with the recorder running and the jail video turned on, and suggested that he spill his guts, which he did.
“Don’t put me in jail…”
He said that he’d worked with Blankenship doing security work at concerts and bars, and that Blankenship had told him that some dirty Mexicans had been sneaking left-wing union organizers into the Castro plant, and that somebody at the Castro plant-he didn’t think it was old man Castro himself-wanted to teach them a lesson.
They’d only spanked a couple of people, he said, one of the left-wingers at a Kwik Trip and then the Mexican earlier that night. Blankenship told him that they were protected, and there was no chance that the cops would even look into it.
“He said all the cops around here were on Castro’s payroll,” Reeves said.
“He was lying to you,” Virgil said.
“Why would he lie to me?”
“Because he wanted a chump to go along and watch his back while he beat up people,” Mattsson said.
“He didn’t really beat them up; he slapped them,” Reeves said.
“And kicked them a few times,” Virgil added.
Reeves turned away and muttered, “Yeah, Brad does that when he gets excited.”
When they’d wrung him out, a couple of jailers led him away to a cell. He was shaking uncontrollably as they led him away, and one of the jailers assured him he’d be alone in the lockup.
“Hope he doesn’t hurt himself,” Virgil said.
Mattsson: “At some point, even dumb people have to take responsibility for what they do. He wore a mask: he knew what they were doing was wrong.”
“Yeah, I know, but…”
“Stop being an asshole,” Mattsson said. “Let’s find Blankenship.”