Deadline: A Virgil Flowers Novel (Virgil Flowers, 8, Band 8) - Hardcover

Buch 8 von 12: Virgil Flowers

Sandford, John

 
9780399162374: Deadline: A Virgil Flowers Novel (Virgil Flowers, 8, Band 8)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0399162372 ISBN 13: 9780399162374
Verlag: Penguin US, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

In Southeast Minnesota, down on the Mississippi, a school board meeting is coming to an end. The board chairman announces that the rest of the meeting will be closed, due to personnel issues. Issues is correct. The proposal up for a vote before them is whether to authorize the killing of a local reporter.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

John Sandford is the author of twenty-four Prey novels; the Virgil Flowers novels, most recentlyStorm Front; and six other books. He lives in New Mexico.

John Sandford is the author of twenty-four Prey novels; the Virgil Flowers novels, most recentlyStorm Front; and six other books. He lives in New Mexico.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

Dark, moonless night, in the dog days of early August.
A funky warm drizzle kept the world quiet and wet and close.

D. Wayne Sharf slid across Winky Butterfield’s pasture like a
greased weasel headed for a chicken house. He carried two heavy
nylon leashes with choke-chain collars, two nylon muzzles with
Velcro straps, and a center-cut pork chop.
The target was Butterfield’s kennel, a chain-link enclosure in the
backyard, where Butterfield kept his two black Labs, one young,
one older. The pork chop would be used to make friends.

D. Wayne was wearing camo, head to foot, which was no change:
he always wore camo, head to foot. So did his children.
His ex-wife, Truly, whom he still occasionally visited, wore various
pieces of camo, depending on daily fashion demands—more at
Walmart, less at Target. She also had eight pairs of camo under
pants, size 4XL and 5XL, which she wore on a rotating basis: two
each of Mossy Oak, Realtree, Legend, and God’s Country, which
prompted D. Wayne to tell her one night, as he peeled them off,
“This really is God’s country, know what I’m sayin’, honeybunch?”

His new, alternative honeybunch wore black cotton, which she

called “panties,” and which didn’t do much for D. Wayne. Just some
thing hot about camo.

A few thousand cells in the back of his brain were sifting through
all of that as D. Wayne crossed a split-rail fence into Butterfield’s
yard, and one of the dogs, the young one, barked twice. There were
no lights in the house, and none came on. D. Wayne paused in his
approach, watching, then slipped the pork chop out of its plastic
bag. He sat for a couple of minutes, giving the dogs a chance to smell
the meat; while he waited, his own odor caught up with him, a combination
of sweat and whiskey-blend Copenhagen. If Butterfield
had the nose of a deer or a wolf, he would have been worried.

But Butterfield didn’t, and D. Wayne started moving again. He
got to the kennel, where the dogs were waiting, slobbering like
hounds . . . because they were hounds. He turned on the hunter’s
red, low-illumination LED lights mounted in his hat brim, ripped
the pork chop in half, held the pieces three feet apart, and pushed
them through the chain link. The dogs were all over the meat: and
while they were choking it down, he flipped the latch on the kennel
gate and duckwalked inside.

“Here you go, boys, good boys,” he muttered. The dogs came
over to lick his face and look for more pork chop, the young dog
prancing around him, and he slipped the choke collars over their
heads, one at a time. The young one took the muzzle okay—the
muzzle was meant to prevent barking, not biting—but the older
one resisted, growled, and then barked, twice, three times. A light
came on in the back of the Butterfield house.

D. Wayne said, “Uh-oh,” dropped the big dog’s muzzle, and
dragged the two dogs out of the kennel toward the fence. Again,
the younger one came without much resistance at first, but the
older one dug in. Another light came on, this one by the Butterfield
side door, and D. Wayne said, “Shit,” and he picked up the bigger
dog, two arms under its belly, and yanking the other one along on
the leash, cleared the fence and headed across the pasture at an
awkward trot.

The side door opened on Butterfield’s house, and D. Wayne,
having forgotten about the red LEDs on his hat brim, made the mistake
of looking back. Butterfield was standing under the porch
light, and saw him. Butterfield shouted, “Hey! Hey!” and “Carol,
somebody’s took the dogs,” and then, improbably, he went back
inside the house and D. Wayne thought for seven or eight seconds
that he’d caught a break. His truck was only forty yards or so away
now, and he was moving as fast as he could while carrying the
bigger dog, which must’ve weighed eighty pounds.

Then Butterfield reappeared and this time he was carrying a
gun. He yelled again, “Hey! Hey!” and let off a half-dozen rounds,
and D. Wayne said, “My gosh,” and threw the big dog through the
back door of his truck topper and then hoisted the smaller dog up
by his neck and threw him inside after the bigger one.

Another volley of bullets cracked overhead, making a truly unpleasant
whip-snap sound, but well off to one side. D. Wayne realized
that Butterfield couldn’t actually see the truck in the dark of
the night, and through the mist. Since D. Wayne was a semi-pro dog
snatcher, he had the truck’s interior and taillights on a cut-off
switch, and when he got in and fired that mother up, none of the
lights came on.

There was still the rumble of the truck, though, and Butterfield
fired another volley, and then D. Wayne was gone up the nearly, but
not quite, invisible road. A half-mile along, he turned on his lights
and accelerated away, and at the top of the hill that overlooked the
Butterfield place, he looked back and saw headlights.

Butterfield was coming.

D. Wayne dropped the hammer. The chase was short, because
D. Wayne had made provisions. At the Paxton place, over the crest
of the third low hill in a roller-coaster stretch of seven hills, he
swerved off the road, down the drive, and around behind the Paxton
kids’ bus shack, where the kids waited for the school bus on
wintry days.Butterfield went past at a hundred miles an hour,
and fifteen seconds later D. Wayne was going the other way.

A clean getaway, but D. Wayne had about peed himself when
Butterfield started working that gun. Had to be a better way to
make a living, he thought, as he took a left on a winding road back
toward home.

Not that he could easily think of one. There was stealing dogs,
cooking meth, and stripping copper wire and pipes out of unoccupied
summer cabins.

That was about it, in D. Wayne’s world.

2


Virgil Flowers nearly fell off the bed when the phone began to
vibrate. The bed was narrow and Frankie Nobles was using up the
middle and the other side. Virgil had to crawl over her naked body
to get to the phone, not an entirely unpleasant process, and she
muttered, “What? Again?”

“Phone,” Virgil said. He groaned and added, “Can’t be anything
good.”

He looked at the face of the phone and said, “Johnson Johnson.”
At that moment the phone stopped ringing.

Frankie was up on her elbows, where she could see the clock,
and said, “At three in the morning? The dumbass has been arrested
for something.”

“He wouldn’t call for that,” Virgil said. “And he’s not dumb.”

“There’s two kinds of dumb,” Frankie said. “Actual and deliberate.
Johnson’s the most deliberate dumbass I ever met. That whole
live-chicken-toss contest—”

“Yeah, yeah, it was for a good cause.” Virgil touched the callback
tab, and Johnson picked up on the first ring.

“Virgil, Jesus, we got big trouble, man. You remember Winky
Butterfield?” Johnson sounded wide awake.

“No, I don’t believe so.”

After a moment of silence Johnson said, “Maybe I didn’t introduce
you, come to think of it. Maybe it was somebody else.”

“Good. Can I go back to sleep?”

“Virgil, this is serious shit. Somebody dognapped Winky’s black
Labs. You gotta get your ass over here, man, while the trail is...

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Verlag
Penguin US
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0399162372
ISBN 13 
9780399162374
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
https://www.penguin.com/putnam/

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