Deadline

  ALSO BY JOHN SANDFORD

  Rules of Prey

  Shadow Prey

  Eyes of Prey

  Silent Prey

  Winter Prey

  Night Prey

  Mind Prey

  Sudden Prey

  The Night Crew

  Secret Prey

  Certain Prey

  Easy Prey

  Chosen Prey

  Mortal Prey

  Naked Prey

  Hidden Prey

  Broken Prey

  Dead Watch

  Invisible Prey

  Phantom Prey

  Wicked Prey

  Storm Prey

  Buried Prey

  Stolen Prey

  Silken Prey

  Field of Prey

  KIDD NOVELS

  The Fool’s Run

  The Empress File

  The Devil’s Code

  The Hanged Man’s Song

  VIRGIL FLOWERS NOVELS

  Dark of the Moon

  Heat Lightning

  Rough Country

  Bad Blood

  Shock Wave

  Mad River

  Storm Front

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

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  Copyright © 2014 by John Sandford

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sandford, John, date.

  Deadline / John Sandford.

  p. cm. — (A Virgil Flowers novel ; 8)

  ISBN 978-1-101-59776-7

  1. Flowers, Virgil (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Government investigators—Minnesota—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Minnesota—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.A516D44 2014 2014026891

  813'.54—dc23

  International edition ISBN: 978-0-399-17268-7

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by John Sandford

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  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 underpants, 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 something 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 th
e 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 call-back 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 fresh.”

  “Jesus, Johnson . . . dogs? You called me at three in the morning about dogs?”

  “They’re family, man . . . you gotta do something.”

  —

  AT TEN O’CLOCK the next morning, Virgil kissed Frankie good-bye and walked out to his truck, which was parked at the curb with the boat already hooked up. Virgil was recently back from New Mexico, where he’d caught and released every tiger musky in what he suspected was the remotest musky lake in North America. Nice fish, too, the biggest a finger-width short of fifty inches. He could still smell them as he walked past the boat and climbed into the cab of his 4Runner.

  The day was warm, and promising hot. The sun was doing its job out in front of the truck, but the sky had a sullen gray look about it. There’d been a quarter-inch of rain over the past twenty-four hours, and as he rolled out of Mankato, Minnesota, the countryside looked notably damp. But it was August, the best time of the year, and he was on the road, operating, elbow out the window, pheasants running across the road in front of him . . . nothing to complain about.

  As Virgil rode along, he thought about Frankie. He’d known her as Ma Nobles before he’d fallen into bed with her, because she had about a hundred children; or, at least, it felt that way. She was a compelling armful, and Virgil’s thoughts had drifted again to marriage, as they had three times before. The first three had been disasters, because, he thought, he had poor taste in women. He reconsidered: no, that wasn’t quite right. His three wives had all been pretty decent women, but, he thought, he was simply a poor judge of the prospects for compatibility.

  He and Frankie did not have that problem; they just got along.

  —

  AND VIRGIL THOUGHT about Lucas Davenport for a while—Davenport was his boss at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and not a bad guy, though a trifle intense. There was a distinct possibility that he would not be pleased with the idea of Virgil working a dognapping case. Especially since the shit had hit the fan up north, where a couple of high school kids had tripped over an abandoned farm cistern full of dead bodies.

  But Johnson Johnson was a hard man to turn down. Virgil thought he might be able to sneak in a couple good working days before Davenport even found out what he was doing. A dognapping, he thought, shouldn’t take too much time, one way or the other. The dogs might already be in Texas, chasing armadillos, or whatever it was they chased in Texas.

  Dognapping. He’d had calls on it before, though he’d never investigated one, and they’d always been during hunting season, or shortly before. Didn’t usually see one this early in the year.

  —

  JOHNSON JOHNSON RAN a lumber mill, specializing in hardwood timber—three varieties of oak, bird’s-eye maple, butternut, hickory, and some walnut and cherry—for flooring and cabinetry, with a side business of providing specialty cuts for sculptors. He and Virgil had met at the University of Minnesota, where they were studying women and baseball. Virgil had been a fair third baseman for a couple years, while Johnson was a better-than-fair catcher. He might even have caught onto the bottom edge of the pros, if baseball hadn’t bored him so badly. Johnson’s mill was a mile outside Trippton, Minnesota, in Buchanan County, in the Driftless Area along the Mississippi River.

  The Driftless Area had always interested Virgil, who had taken a degree in ecological science. Basically, the Driftless Area was a chunk of territory in Minnesota, Wisconsin, northern Iowa, and Illinois that had escaped the last glaciation—the glaciers had simply flowed around it, joining up again to the south, leaving the Driftless Area as an island in an ocean of ice. When the glaciers melted, they usually left behind loose dirt and rock, which was called drift. Not in the Driftless Area . . .

  Physically, the land was cut by steep valleys, up to six hundred feet deep, running down to the Mississippi River. Compared to the farmlands all around it, the Driftless Area was less fertile, and covered with hardwood forests. Towns were small and far between, set mostly along the river. The whole area was reminiscent of the Appalachians.

  Road time from Virgil’s home, in Mankato, to Trippton, on the river, was two and a half hours.

  —

  FOR MOST OF it Virgil put both the truck and his brain on cruise control. He’d driven the route a few dozen times, and there was not a lot to look at that he hadn’t seen before. Trippton was at the bottom of a long hill, on a sandspit that stuck out into the Mississippi; it was a religious town, with almost as many churches as bars. Virgil arrived at lunchtime, got caught in a minor traffic jam between the town’s three stoplights, and eventually wedged into a boat-sized double-length parking lane behind Shanker’s Bar and Grill.

  Johnson Johnson came rambling out the back door as Virgil pulled in. Johnson Jo
hnson’s father, Big Johnson, had been an outboard-motor enthusiast who fairly well lived on the Mississippi. He’d named his sons after outboard motors, and while Mercury Johnson had gotten off fairly easy, Johnson Johnson had been stuck with the odd double name. He was a large man, like his father, and well tattooed.

  “I can smell them fuckin’ muskies from here,” he said, as Virgil climbed out of the truck. He leaned into the boat and said, “I hope you brought something besides those fuckin’ phone poles,” by which he meant musky gear.

  “Yeah, yeah, I got some of everything,” Virgil said. “What about these dogs? You find them yet?”

  “Not yet,” Johnson said. He was uncharacteristically grim. “Come on inside. I got a whole bunch of ol’ boys and girls for you to talk to.”

  “We’re having a meeting?”

  “We’re having a lynch mob,” Johnson said.

  Virgil followed him in. One of the trucks he passed in the parking lot had a bumper sticker that asked, “Got Hollow Points?” Another said: “Heavily Armed . . . and easily pissed.” A third one: “Point and Click . . . means you’re out of ammo.”

  “Aw, jeez,” Virgil said.

  —

  VIRGIL WAS A tall man, made taller by his cowboy boots. He wore his blond hair too long for a cop—but country-long like Waylon Jennings, not sculptural long, like some New Jersey douche bag, so he got along okay.

  He dressed in jeans and band T-shirts, in this case, a rare pirated “Dogs Die in Hot Cars” shirt, which he hoped the local ’necks would take for a sign of solidarity. To his usual ensemble, he added a black sport coat when he needed to hide a gun, which wasn’t often. Most times, he left the guns in the truck.

  He sometimes wore a straw cowboy hat, on hot days out in the sun; at other times, a ball cap, his current favorite a black-on-black Iowa Hawkeyes hat, given to him by a devout Iowegian.

  Johnson led the way through the parking lot door, down a beer-smelling corridor past the restrooms, which had signs that said “Pointers” and “Setters,” to the back end of the bar, where twenty or so large outdoorsy-looking men and women hunched over rickety plastic tables, drinking beer and eating a variety of fried everything, with link sausages on the side.