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  When Virgil caught up with him, Johnson said, in a loud voice, without any sign of levity, “Okay, boys and girls. This here’s the cop I was talking about, so put away your fuckin’ weed and methamphetamine, those that has them, and pay attention. Virgil?”

  Virgil said, “For those of you with meth, I’d like to speak to you for a minute out back. . . .”

  There were a few chuckles, and Virgil said, “I mostly came to listen. What’s going on with these dogs? Somebody stand up so we all can hear you, and tell us.”

  A heavyset man heaved himself to his feet and said, “Well, I thought Johnson would have told you, but somebody’s snatching our dogs.”

  A drunk at the front of the bar, who’d turned around on his barstool to watch the meeting, called, “Better’n having your snatch dogged.”

  The heavyset man shouted back, “Shut up, Eddy, or we’ll kick your ass out of here.”

  “Just trying to be human,” Eddy said, but he turned back to the bar.

  “All right,” Virgil said. “Somebody’s taking dogs. You know who it is?”

  “Yeah, we got our suspicions,” the big man said. “There’re some hillbillies up at Orly’s Crick, all along the valley, and you can hear the dogs howling at night. Dogs, not coyotes. Dozens of them. But when you go up there, there’s only one dog per yard. You’d have to sneak up on ’em, to find the ones that are howling. Problem is, there’s only one little road going in, and they can see you coming, and they move the dogs before you can get there. I tried to come down from on top, but you can’t get down them bluffs without breaking your neck.”

  “And you could get your ass killed,” somebody added. “Fuckin’ peckerwoods are all carrying .223s. Pick you off like sittin’ ducks.”

  Another big man stood up, and everybody turned to look; his face was red, and it appeared that he’d been weeping. He took off his camo cap and said, “I’m Winfred Butterfield. Winky. They took my two Labs last night. Right out of the kennel. My dogs’re gone, sir. Snatched right out of my yard. Knowed what they was doin’, too—left behind some pork chop bone and a cloth muzzle, used to keep them quiet.”

  He told the story, until he got to the part where he “let off some shots in that direction.” He paused and then said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “You hit anyone?” Virgil asked.

  “Naw, I wasn’t trying. I mean, I wouldn’t mind shooting that miserable motherfucker, if I had a clear shot, but I was afraid I might hit one of the dogs.”

  Somebody said, “You got that right.”

  “Okay, just a note here. Let’s decide right now that we’re not going to shoot anybody over a dog,” Virgil said. “Let me handle this the legal way.”

  The men all looked around, and then one of the women said, “Kinda afraid we can’t do that, Virgil.” And they all nodded.

  “Well, goddamnit, people.”

  “This is organized crime, Virgil,” she said. “If we don’t shut these people down, no dog will be safe.”

  —

  VIRGIL WAS WORRIED. Everyone at the meeting seemed stone-cold sober, and they talked about shooting the dognappers with the cool determination of people who might actually do that, given the chance. They didn’t seem anxious to do it, like a bunch of goofy gun nuts—they sounded more like farmers planning to eliminate a varmint that had been killing their geese.

  Virgil asked them about the hillbillies on Orly’s Creek, and a dozen people gave him bits of information—sightings, rumors, incidents—that made him think they were quite possibly right.

  One of the men said, “I saw this old gray truck going by Dan Busch’s place, two or three times over a week. Driving slow, looking around . . . Couple days later, Dan’s beagles got ripped off.”

  “Four of them,” another man said, who added, “I’m Dan.”

  The first man said, “Anyway, a couple weeks later I was driving up 26, and I see this old gray truck coming out of the Orly’s Crick Road. Same truck. Couldn’t prove it, but it was.”

  Another man said, “There’s this guy called Roy, I think his last name is Zorn, he lives up there. Tall red-haired guy, skinny, got about nine million freckles on his face. They got his picture in all the animal shelters and humane societies, telling them NOT to give him any dogs or cats, because he was going around, getting them, and then he’d sell them off to animal bunchers.”

  Virgil said, “Excuse me? What’s a buncher?”

  “That’s guys who collect animals for the laboratories, for experiments. He’d go around and get these free animals, saying he was looking for a pet, and then he’d sell them off to the bunchers,” the big man said. “We know damn well, he’d get kittens that way, too. You know, somebody’d put an ad in the paper, saying, ‘Free Kittens,’ and he’d take as many as they’d give him, sayin’ he needed mousers for his barn. The animal people caught on, and somebody took his picture, and now he can’t go into those places.”

  “I’ll go talk to him,” Virgil said. He turned to Butterfield and asked, “Winky—how much did you pay for those Labs?”

  “These were top dogs, partially trained. I paid fifteen hundred for one, twelve hundred for the other,” Butterfield said. “But I don’t give a damn about the money—they’re my best friends.”

  “The money makes stealing them a felony,” Virgil said. “It always helps to have a felony backing you up, when you talk to people.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” said one of the women. “Most everybody here has had dogs stolen, which is why they are here. The rest of us are worried. If you took all the dogs stolen, they’d be worth twenty or thirty thousand dollars, easy. Maybe even more.”

  Virgil said he’d look into it: “I’ll be honest with you, this is not what I usually do. In fact, I’ve never done it before. I can see you’re serious folks, so I’ll take it on. No promises. I could get called off . . . but if I do, I’ll be back. You all take care, though. Don’t go out there with guns, I don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

  —

  WHEN THE MEETING broke up, he and Johnson drove over to the law enforcement center, which housed the Buchanan County Sheriff and the Trippton Police Department, which were one and the same, and a few holding cells. In the parking lot Johnson said, “I’ll hang out here. Jeff don’t appreciate my good qualities,” and Virgil went in alone.

  Entry to the sheriff’s office was through a locked black-steel door, with a bulletproof window next to it; there was nobody behind the window, so Virgil rang the bell, and a moment later a deputy stuck his head around the window and said, “Virgil Flowers, as I live and die.”

  “That’s me,” Virgil agreed. The deputy buzzed him in, and Virgil followed him down the hall to the sheriff’s office. The sheriff, Jeff Purdy, was a small, round man who wore fifties-style gray hats, the narrow-brimmed Stetson “Open Road” style; he had his feet up on his desk and was reading a New Yorker magazine. When he heard the footsteps in the hallway, he looked over the magazine and saw Virgil coming.

  “I hope you’re here to fish,” he said.

  “Not exactly, though it’d be nice to get out for a couple hours,” Virgil said. “I just came from a meeting down at Shanker’s. . . .”

  Virgil told him the story, and the sheriff sighed and said, “You’re welcome to it, Virgil. I know those people have a complaint, but what the hell am I supposed to do? We patrol up Orly’s Crick, but we never see a thing.”

  “You know a guy named Roy Zorn?”

  “Yeah, yeah, we’ve been told he cooks some meth up there, but we never caught him at it. Basically, he’s a small-time motorcycle hood, rode with the Seed for a while, over in Green Bay, before he came here. And I know all about that thing he used to do with cats and dogs, him getting banned from the Humane Society. But we got nothing on him. Can’t get anything, either. If I had ten more men . . .”

  “You don
’t mind if I take a look?”

  “Go on ahead. Keep me up on what you’re doing,” Purdy said. “If you find something specific, I could spring a couple guys to help out on a short-term basis. Very short-term, like a raid, something like that.”

  “That’s all I wanted,” Virgil said. “There’s a good chance I won’t find a thing, but if I do, I might call for backup.”

  “Deal,” Purdy said.

  The deputy who’d taken Virgil back to the sheriff’s office returned and said, “Sheriff, Sidney Migg’s walking around naked in her backyard, again.”

  The sheriff grunted and boosted himself out of his chair. “I better handle this myself.”

  —

  BACK OUTSIDE, Virgil took a minute to call Davenport’s office. He didn’t actually want to talk to him, which was why he called the office: Davenport was out working a multiple murder that everybody was calling the Black Hole case, in which a BCA agent had been murdered.

  Virgil hadn’t worked the case, and was happy about that, because the killing of Bob Shaffer would have preyed on his mind for weeks, or years, whether or not the killer was caught. He left a message for Davenport, which might possibly cover his ass, if worse came to worst.

  Then he and Johnson drove out to Johnson’s river cabin and rolled Virgil’s boat into the water and tied it to Johnson’s dock. Johnson’s jon boat had been pulled up on shore, and a long orange extension cord snaked out of the cabin to a power drill that lay in the bottom of the boat.

  “You break something?” Virgil asked.

  “Changing the oarlocks,” Johnson said. “They were getting too wore down.”

  “You never rowed six feet in your entire sorry life,” Virgil said. “How’d they get wore down? I mean, worn down?”

  “Pedant,” Johnson said. “Anyway, I use them to steer my drifts. Saves gas.”

  They unhooked the trailer, parked it behind the house, stuck a tongue lock on it, and went inside for coffee and to continue the conversation about dogs and hillbilly dognappers.

  Virgil said, “Since the sheriff couldn’t handle it, you call the high-priced BCA guy down to figure it out?”

  “Actually, I was calling my old fishin’ buddy Virgil to figure it out,” Johnson said.

  “Well, fuck you, Johnson, that puts a kind of unnecessary obligation on it. I mean, would you do that for me?”

  “You don’t have a dog.”

  “Well, something like this . . .”

  “Suppose you were going away for a couple of weeks,” Johnson said, “and you needed somebody to keep Frankie warmed up. I’d jump in my truck—”

  “All right, okay.” Virgil waved him off. “Where’s this Orly’s Crick?”

  —

  IN SOUTHERN MINNESOTA, the Mississippi flowed through a deep, wide valley. The main channel of the river was rarely down the middle of the valley. Instead, it usually flowed down one side or the other, snaking between steep valley walls. The other side of the valley was often occupied by sloughs or marshes, before they ran into equally steep bluffs.

  The bluffs were dissected by free-flowing streams, ranging from seasonal creeks to full-sized rivers. Johnson’s place was tucked into the north end of a slough, where the river began to bend away from the Minnesota side, toward Wisconsin; so his cabin was protected from the waves generated by the towboats and their barges, but he still had fast access to the river itself.

  When he and Virgil left Johnson’s cabin, they drove a few hundred yards west to Highway 26, and then north for fifteen miles. By the time they got to Orly’s Creek Road, the river was running right beside the highway. Orly’s Creek ran below a fifty-foot-long bridge, into the river, with the road going into the valley on the north side of the bridge.

  “Goes back here about a mile, or a little more,” Johnson said. “The crick comes out of Orly’s Spring, which gathers up a lot of water from west of here, then runs underground to the spring. The good thing about that is, it hardly ever floods at all. Don’t believe I’ve ever seen water over the road.”

  “Any trout in there?” The creek was maybe twenty feet wide, tumbling over limestone blocks, with an occasional pool.

  “Yup. I’d be a little nervous about eating them, down at this end, anyway. Lots of old septic systems, don’t work so good, anymore. Up on top, by the spring, the crick would be cleaner than Fiji Water.”

  “You know about Fiji Water?”

  “Fuck you.”

  —

  THE FIRST HABITATION in the valley was a single-wide trailer, crunched on one end, as though a tree had fallen on it. Two nineties cars were parked in a hard-dirt yard, with a mottled-gray pit bull tied to a stake.

  “That’s the lookout,” Johnson said. “There are more places further in.” Johnson tried to scrunch down in his seat, and pulled his hat down over his eyes. “They might kinda recognize me up here.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “I prefer to remain anonymous.”

  They passed a few more mobile homes, most, like the first one, located fifty or a hundred feet off the road, up the valley wall. “Must be hell to get up there in the winter,” Virgil said.

  “Doubt they try. They all got cutouts down here on the road,” Johnson said. He pointed out over the dashboard to an old yellow clapboard house, with narrow fields on either side of it, running steeply down to the creek. An apple tree stood next to the house, with a Jeep Wrangler parked in front of it, and a half-dozen stripped and abandoned cars off to the right. “That’s Zorn’s place. His wife’s name is Bunny. I think she’s probably his sister.”

  Virgil looked over at him, and Johnson said, “Okay. Maybe not.”

  Virgil turned off at Zorn’s place, past a no-trespassing sign, and pulled up into the yard. All of the doors and windows at Zorn’s were open, behind screens; and when they pulled into his yard, they saw Zorn look warily out through the door, disappear for a minute, then come through the door to his porch, where he stood waiting. As advertised, he was a tall, rawboned red-haired man with about a million freckles splashed across his face.

  Virgil said, “You wait here.”

  “Yes, dear,” Johnson said.

  Virgil got out of the truck, keeping his hands in view, and ambled up to the porch.

  “You can’t read my sign, or you just not give a shit?” Zorn asked.

  “I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “A state cop.”

  “What you want with me?” Zorn asked. His head twitched to one side. Virgil saw a movement at a window to his left.

  “We’re looking into some stolen dogs,” Virgil said. “We understand you’ve had some problems in that area.”

  “Never done a single thing illegal—got them all fair and square, and sold them up to the university for important medical research,” Zorn said. “Now, if you’re done with me, I’ll thank you to get the fuck off my lawn. You come back, bring a warrant.”

  “Don’t want to talk about dogs, then,” Virgil said.

  “I don’t know nothin’ about dogs,” Zorn said.

  “Don’t know anybody up or down Orly’s Creek who might have come up with a few extra?”

  “I don’t stick my nose into other people’s business,” Zorn said. “Now git—or I’ll call my attorney.”

  Virgil considered for a moment, looking into Zorn’s narrow green eyes, and then said, “You keep that attorney close, Mr. Zorn. These recent dog thefts—the dogs are valuable, and the thefts amount to felonies. When I arrest you for them, you’ll be going away for quite some time. So keep that attorney close—and you might want to buy a new toothbrush.”

  “Bullshit—nobody’s sending anybody anywhere for some fuckin’ mutts.”

  “You should talk to your attorney about that. He’ll set you straight,” Virgil said. He backed away, keeping the window in sight. “Be see
in’ you.”

  —

  VIRGIL WENT CAREFULLY back to his truck, climbed inside, and found Johnson with a high-capacity Para-Ordnance .45 in his lap.

  “Jesus, Johnson, what were you gonna do with that?”

  “I saw somebody at the window,” Johnson said. “If they shot you, I was gonna hose the place down.”

  Virgil thought about that for a minute, then said, “All right.” He looked up at the porch. Zorn had gone back inside, but Virgil could see him hovering behind the screen. “That’s a bad man, right there,” Virgil said. “Doesn’t even bother to trim his nose hair.”

  “That is a bad man,” Johnson said.

  —

  THEY CONTINUED UP the valley, looking at houses and dogs; most of the houses were ramshackle, but a few were neatly kept, with American flags on front-yard poles, and with good-looking gardens and neatly mown lawns. As someone had said at the Shanker’s meeting, they hardly ever saw more than one dog per house, usually in a chain-link kennel.

  “One thing we ought to do, is get a list of everyone who lives up here,” Virgil said. “Looks like there might be some respectable people. If we could get a couple of them to talk to us, we’d be ahead of the game.”

  Johnson was skeptical: “You think any of these people would talk, knowing their neighbors are assholes with M15s? Respectable is okay, long as it doesn’t buy you a bullet in the back.”

  At the far end of the valley, the road went to a stretch of gravel, then to dirt, which ended at a fence. At the side of the road, the spring appeared, a fifty-foot-long pool, maybe thirty feet wide, and deep, flowing out over six-foot chunks of broken limestone, and on down the valley.

  Virgil stopped the truck, and they got out to look at the spring. “That’s a piece of water I wouldn’t mind owning,” Johnson said.

  Virgil knelt, put his hand in the water: cool, probably seventy degrees. In a shallow spot, he could see a school of minnows probing through underwater grass.

  Johnson muttered, “Uh-oh. Look at this. On your left.”