“Deserved every bit of it,” she said. “Go, Katya.”
–
If anything, Virgil’s ankles hurt worse in the morning, a shooting pain when he moved that told him to stay off his feet. At ten o’clock, he got a call from Bea Sawyer, head of the crime-scene crew.
“Can you talk?”
“Yeah, it’s my ankles that hurt, not my tongue,” Virgil said.
“Okay. Anyway, we found Peck’s cell phone on the barn floor, and guess what? It was another one of those fingerprint-password things. The tiger hadn’t eaten his fingers, and we still had the body, so we opened it up and changed the settings to eliminate the password…”
“Yeah, yeah, and what?”
“Roger went through his photos, to see if he’d documented all of this, and he found the most amazing documentary film. It shows a younger Asian man strangling an older Asian man in the front seat of Peck’s truck.”
“Aw, man,” Virgil said. “You gotta call Howser at Minneapolis homicide.”
“It’s done,” she said. “That Zhang guy was leaving for the airport when they snagged him.”
“Bea: thank you.”
“One more thing,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“That firebomb that was thrown through the window of your neighbor’s house? We’re thinking it came from Peck’s barn. A Ball jar was used to hold the gasoline in the firebomb, and the basement in the farmhouse is full of old Ball jars. There’s a piece missing from an apron in the barn, and it looks like the same fabric used on the bomb.”
“Oh, boy. I’m going to have to do some patching up with the neighbors.”
–
He watched the noon news and Shrake had been right: they were heroes for the moment. There was some question about whether Katya would have to be put down, since she’d killed a human being. On the other hand, Jon Duncan-did he have a tear in his eye?-told the story of Virgil using the tiger to defend himself against a mass murderer, so there was a solid argument that the killing had been justified.
–
As they’d sat waiting on the farmhouse porch for everybody to arrive, Mattsson told Virgil that Blankenship had bailed out of the Blue Earth County jail. “Freddie has already made a deal with the county attorney. He’s given them a statement saying that Blankenship was the person who did the beating in both assaults. They’ve already gotten a gum scrub from Blankenship for the DNA match, so that should nail it down. He’s going to jail, or maybe even prison, but he probably won’t get as much time as you want.”
“Can’t know that yet,” Virgil said. “Frankie’s friends with every judge in Blue Earth and Nicollet counties. So…”
That all became relevant as Virgil sat on the couch at home that afternoon, with his feet up in the air. Frankie was at her salvage shop at the farm. Sparkle called in a panic. “That Blankenship guy who beat up Frankie and Ramona-me and Bill were out on the road, getting mail, and he cruised us. I’m almost sure it was him. It was a red Ford truck and I got the license number. He was looking at us.”
“Ah, man. All right, let’s get the sheriff on it,” Virgil said. “If the tag number checks out, he can have somebody go over and talk to him. Warn him off.”
“Virgil, the guy’s not only mean, he’s insane.”
“I’ll talk to the sheriff now.”
–
That evening, every news channel that Virgil saw reported that the population of Minnesota was in an uproar about the possibility that Katya might be put down. The possibility was evaporating.
–
By the second day, after a continuous regime of rest, ice, compression, and elevation, and a couple of long chats about life with Father Bill, Virgil started moving around the house with the help of crutches that Frankie got from a drugstore.
He was alone in the house, headed back to the couch, when an RV pulled up to the curb. Virgil said to himself, “The fuckin’ Simonians. Exactly what I needed.”
Sure enough, six of them got out and seemed to arrange themselves by age and size. Levon led the way up Virgil’s porch and pushed the doorbell. Virgil pulled the door open and said, “You might as well come in. I can’t move around so well.”
The Simonians followed him into the living room. The youngest one asked, “You need anything? Painkillers, a little weed, some liquor, anything to make it easier?”
“I’m fine,” Virgil said. “What’s up with you guys?”
Levon said, “We will go back to Glendale, thank the Good Lord, as soon as we wind up our business here, the arrangements for Hayk and Hamlet.”
“I’m sorry they were killed,” Virgil said. “We think Peck might have murdered another man as well, but there’s no body, and Peck, of course, can’t tell us one way or the other where he might be.”
Levon said, “We see this on the television news. We have also researched this ‘Virgil Flowers’ on the Internet, because we have a large Simonian problem.”
Virgiclass="underline" “Which would be?”
“This man Peck murders two of our Simonians. We wanted to deal with this ourselves, but that did not happen. Then we find out that our friend Virgil Flowers feeds Peck to a tiger, and this is better than anything we could think of.”
“I didn’t exactly feed him… but anyway, uh, I don’t see a Simonian problem there.”
Levon said, “We have a large debt to you. Our Simonian honor requires that the debt be paid, so we come here and ask, what does Virgil Flowers want?”
“A little peace and quiet, that’s about all,” Virgil said.
Levon pulled on his chin, glanced out to the street, as if checking for cops, and said, “I tell you, Virgil, coming from LA, you have here more peace and quiet than I could stand.”
“Yeah, okay,” Virgil said. “But, guys, what happened was my job. I got paid for it. You don’t owe me anything.”
“This is where you are wrong,” Levon said, and the other five Simonians all nodded. “Anyway, we tell you, we will pay this debt. We will be here, the medical examiner says, for another week, maybe ten days, but since the murderer is dead, and there will be no trial, they will not have to hold the bodies of our Simonians longer than that. We will find a way to pay.”
Virgil said, “You don’t owe me. Get that through your heads. Anything you give me, I’d have to turn in to the state. I can’t take any kind of payment outside my job-that would be considered a bribe.”
Levon nodded and said, “Stupid law. We will go around it.”
They all filed out, each of them giving Virgil a slap on the back or an elbow nudge, and when the RV pulled away from the curb, Virgil collapsed on the couch, grateful for the thickness of his peace and quiet.
–
The sheriff talked to Blankenship and told Virgil, “He denied being out there, but he was lying. I told him that if he messed with Ms. Nobles or her sister or you or anybody else, or even looked at any of you, I’ll jerk his bail so fast his head will be spinning for a week.”
Mattsson came down to give a statement in the Blankenship case and stopped at Frankie’s farm on the way back home. They all had a nice chat and Virgil again didn’t know whether to hug her or shake hands when she left, as she stepped away and said, “See you around.”
When she was gone, Sam, the youngest, said, “That chick is really hot.”
They all looked at him, but he didn’t back off. When you’re right, you’re right.
–
On the third day, Maxine Knowles was charged with another count of attempted murder for her assault on Toby Strait, and her bail was pulled on the first count. A newspaper story said that the trial on the first count was scheduled to start in a month and a half. That was actually at the bottom of the news story: at the top was a long feature about a rich animal lover named Crewdson from Minnetonka who had donated a quarter-million dollars to Knowles’s animal refuge and its elderly caretakers.