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  “Ought to look at a plat map, see who owns what,” Virgil said.

  “Do that at the courthouse,” Johnson said.

  “Might be handy to have a rope to come down off that bluff line,” Virgil said.

  “Get that over at Fleet Farm,” Johnson said.

  When they finished eating, Johnson looked at his watch and said, “Ag office oughta be open.”

  They left their cars in the street and walked two blocks over to the Buchanan County Soil and Water Conservation District, where they talked to a clerk who pulled out large-scale, high-resolution aerial photos of the land around Orly’s Creek.

  The clerk left them, and they bent over the photos, tracing Orly’s Creek Road up to the spring. The cleft of the valley was clear on the photos: the land up on top was the dark green of heavy forest, cut by the lighter green of the valleys, from which most of the trees had been cleared.

  Virgil tapped County Road NN, which ran west a half-mile north of Orly’s Creek. “If we leave my truck at this bridge”—he looked at the scale—“which is about three-quarters of a mile from 26, we could walk along the edge of this field and into woods, up the hill and down the other side. No houses close by . . . and it looks like there’s a gap in the bluff line . . . here . . . and here.”

  “Still gonna be pretty goddamned steep,” Johnson said.

  “That’s why we take some rope.”

  “We could probably get down, but we won’t be able to get out in a hurry,” Johnson said. “If we have to run for it, we might best go all the way down to the road. Tell you something else—might be tough calling for help. In those deep valleys, the cell phone service is kinda iffy.”

  Virgil said, “We’ll take it slow.” He tapped the map, a line that ran near the top of the valley, just below the bluffs. “See this line? It looks too heavy to be a game trail, and it comes up to this flat patch. It looks like something built is in there.”

  “Kennels?”

  “Looks like something. If we can come over the bluff line . . . here . . . we could move right along the trail, and it’s not more than a couple hundred yards.”

  “Worth a look,” Johnson said.

  —

  VIRGIL GOT THE CLERK to make a Xerox copy of the photo, paid for it, and they continued down the street to the county courthouse, where they looked at plat maps. The man Virgil had talked to the day before, Zorn, owned the land from the road up to his house, and perhaps fifty yards on either side of it, and behind it—not more than two acres or so, a relatively small patch compared to some of the other holdings. The largest plot was at the end of the valley, on the north side. A hundred and twenty acres of woods, and what looked like a small house, showing no mowed fields or outbuildings, under the name of Deland.

  “Don’t know any Delands,” Johnson said. A quick check with the tax records showed a mailing address in the Twin Cities suburb of Eagan.

  “Could be a hunting cabin,” Virgil said. “That kid must have come down from here.” He touched the image of a house on the south side, on twenty acres, showing a large garden to one side, and what appeared to be a small orchard, judging from the way the trees were spaced. The tax records said the bill went to a Julius Ruff. After a last review, he said, “Let’s get some rope and go on out there.”

  —

  THEY BOUGHT a hundred feet of three-quarter-inch nylon rope at Fleet Farm, stopped at Johnson’s cabin on the way north, so they both could change into running shoes, and took Highway 26 past Orly’s Creek Road for half a mile, took a left on NN, and drove to the small bridge where they’d leave the truck. The creek below it was barely damp.

  Virgil had weapons in the back, and after debating with himself about the options, put a “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension” sign on the dashboard, activated the car alarm, and locked everything up.

  He did take his pistol with him, a standard-issue Glock 9mm, and though he didn’t ask, was sure that Johnson had his .45 in his military-style rucksack, along with a couple of cans of Budweiser and a GPS receiver that he’d bought for his boat. Before leaving the ag service, Johnson had found the GPS references for what looked like the easiest breaks in the bluff line above Orly’s Creek valley.

  In his own pack, Virgil carried two bottles of water, the rope, a multi-tool and two extra magazines for the Glock, a Sony RX100 compact camera, and a homemade first aid kit.

  They left the truck and crossed the roadside ditch, climbed one fence into an alfalfa field, and walked along another that stretched up to the woods at the top of the hill they were climbing. The woods would extend over the crest, down into the Orly’s Creek valley.

  The day was hot, and they took it easy climbing the hill, breaking a light sweat that attracted mosquitoes when they crossed from the alfalfa field into the woods. The climb got steeper as they got deeper into the woods, and eventually they moved from one sapling to the next, hanging on to the brush to stay upright. Fifteen minutes after they left the truck, they reached the crest of the hill, which was punctuated with outcrops of soft yellow rock.

  A game trail ran along the crest. Johnson shucked off his pack and said, “We should replace some fluids while we have the time. Stay quiet, see what we can hear.”

  Virgil took a few sips of water, while Johnson popped open a beer, and they listened: and heard the woods, but nothing out of place. When Johnson had finished the beer, they walked to their right along the game trail until Johnson, who was watching the GPS, said, “We’re about there. We need to go off this way. . . .”

  He led the way downslope, into the Orly’s Creek valley. A few dozen yards into the trees, they found themselves paralleling a shallow dry gully, and Virgil said, “This probably goes down to the break in the bluff.”

  Johnson nodded, and they followed it down; a minute later the gully got deeper, and the way was blocked by a shoulder of the yellow rock. They moved into the gully, which got steeper, but took them through the lip of the bluffs. At that point, the slope became even steeper, and they paused to assess. The ground beneath their feet was a combination of damp black earth and crumbled bits of the yellow rock.

  “It’s doable, if we use the rope,” Johnson said. “But we couldn’t get back up unless we left the rope here.”

  “Don’t want to do that,” Virgil said. “If we had to get out some other way, they’d know where we’re getting in.”

  They decided to take a chance—they’d use the rope, doubled around a tree trunk, then they’d pull it down, and find another way out of the valley. Doing that, after the decision, took only a couple of minutes, with Virgil leading the way down. They pulled the rope down after them, repacked it, and walked down the valley wall to the trail they’d seen in the ag service photos.

  It turned out to be six feet wide, and well packed, marked with ATV tracks. A few incipient gullies across the trail, caused by water draining from above, had been filled with broken rock.

  “Some good work here,” Johnson said. He looked up and down the track. “But why would they build it?”

  “Cooking meth,” Virgil said. “But it’d have to be an industrial operation to build a road like this.”

  Johnson was looking up at the overhanging trees. “You know what? Half the trees here are sugar and black maple. They could be cooking syrup.”

  “Thought that was all up north.”

  “No, they got sugar bushes all the way down into Iowa,” Johnson said. “The wood makes damn good flooring, I can tell you.”

  “I know about flooring, now. Frankie salvages it from old farmhouses.”

  “Yeah, that’s a fashion,” Johnson said. They were both looking up and down the trail.

  Virgil asked, “Which way?”

  “Right. I think.”

  They moved off down the trail, listening and watching. Virgil asked, “What is it with these trees?” He pointed to a young maple that had been
girdled with an ax or hatchet, but left standing.

  “They’re killing the tree, but leaving it standing to dry out. Making firewood,” Johnson said. A hundred yards farther on they came to the built spot that Virgil had seen on the photos, and it turned out to be a woodlot, with a few face cords of stacked wood set off to one side.

  “Could be the answer to the trail,” Johnson said. “Somebody’s harvesting firewood. You’d need an ATV to tow it out of here.”

  “But this isn’t the end of it . . .”

  Virgil led the way out of the woodlot. The trail had narrowed to a single-wide track, blocked by a pile of brush—the leftover ends of trees cut up for firewood. An ATV could get around it, but nothing wider. The trail eventually led to three metal sheds of the kind sold at lumberyards. They’d been painted with a green-on-black camouflage pattern, and all had tightly sealed doors, with padlocks. A half-dozen propane cylinders sat on the ground beside one of them.

  “Smell it?” Virgil asked.

  “Yeah.”

  They could smell the acetone.

  “Cooking meth,” Virgil said. “And not long ago.”

  “They could use the same setup to cook syrup, the same setup I have,” Johnson said. “I wonder why that never occurred to me.”

  “Because, despite your many enormous personal flaws, character weaknesses, and innate criminality, you’re too much of a gutless coward to cook meth,” Virgil said.

  “I wondered about that,” Johnson said. “Thanks for the explanation.”

  Virgil tested all the locks and found them solid. He took out his camera, made a few photos, and then saw, farther down the slope, a hump of raw dirt, like the fill from a double-long grave. When Virgil went to look, he found a dump: trashed containers that once contained the raw materials for methamphetamine. He took some more photos, then put the camera away and walked back up the slope to Johnson. “Can you get a GPS reading here?”

  “Maybe,” Johnson said, looking up at the canopy of maple leaves. He had one a minute later, and saved it to the receiver’s memory.

  “Let’s go upslope and see if we can find a way out,” Virgil said.

  “What about the dogs?”

  “This operation is more important than the dogs,” Virgil said. “They could be taking a ton of meth out of here. Johnson: this is sort of a big deal.”

  “I’ll give you that,” Johnson said. “I still want the dogs.”

  “We’ll be back,” Virgil promised. The trail had ended at the shed, and following the points on the GPS, Johnson led them to another of the openings in the bluff line. When they got there, the slope was still too steep, and they moved along to the last one, two hundred yards farther along the valley. This one was steep, but had saplings growing all the way up, and by using the trees to pull themselves along, they managed to climb to the crest.

  Twenty minutes later, they were back at the truck.

  “Now what?” Johnson asked. He cracked his second Bud as they did a U-turn and headed back toward the river.

  “Got to think about that,” Virgil said. “To tell the truth, I don’t entirely trust your trusty sheriff.”

  “You’re more perceptive than you look,” Johnson said. “Not to say that he’s an outright criminal. He may accept a little help now and then.”

  “Okay. I’m thinking DEA. I’ve got a good connection there.”

  “It’s your call,” Johnson said. “I’m just in it for the dogs.”

  —

  VIRGIL’S MAN WITH the DEA was named Harry Gomez, and he was now working out of Chicago. He’d directed the biggest shoot-out Virgil had ever seen, and one of the biggest he’d ever heard of.

  Back at the cabin, Virgil called Gomez, who was a modest-sized big shot, and had to talk his way through a protective secretary. “Just tell him who’s calling,” Virgil said. “He’ll take it. I’ve saved his life on many occasions.”

  She didn’t believe him, but Gomez took the call. “Hey, Virg. Please, please don’t tell me you found another meth lab.”

  “I was calling to shoot the shit for a while,” Virgil said. “I’m not doing much, and I was wondering, what’s Harry Gomez doing? I mean, other than blowing some higher-up—”

  “Really?” Gomez sounded almost hopeful.

  “No. I found another meth lab. A big one.”

  “Ah, shit. Why do you keep doing this, Virgil? It causes a lot of trouble for everyone. Couldn’t you just shoot the cook and call it a day?”

  “That would be unethical,” Virgil said. He explained how they’d found the sheds, and about the dogs. “Anyway, they’ve got three fifteen-foot metal sheds hid out in the woods, along with an ATV trail to haul the stuff out. It’s nothing like the first one we hit, but it’s substantial.”

  “All right. They cooking right now?”

  “Not at this very minute, but they were at it not long ago. I could smell it yesterday. . . .”

  Virgil told him about the layout, and Gomez said that he’d move in a six-man team to do surveillance, and then fire off the raid when the cooking began again.

  “When do you want to start?” Virgil asked.

  “The team can be there tomorrow morning. They’ll go in like you did, from the top. We can stash them up in Winona, so nobody’ll know. You stay out of there until we do this: don’t go chasing the dogs through there.”

  “All right. Tell your guys to call, and we’ll hook up.”

  “We’ll bring maps . . . and, Virgil? Thank you. Really. We could use a good one. The budget’s being parceled out and most of it’s going down south.”

  “Thank me after no one gets killed,” Virgil said.

  When he’d rung off, Johnson asked, “What about the dogs?”

  “They’re gonna have to wait,” Virgil said. “The DEA is going to swat that place in the next few days, and they don’t want a lot of cops running through there beforehand.”

  “Well, Jesus, Virgil, the dogs could be gone before that happens.”

  “Johnson—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s a big operation. But you know what, Virgil? You’re never going to stop it. Meth’s too easy to make, and there’s too much money involved. But the dogs . . . we could get the dogs back, and change some lives.”

  “You know what we’re gonna do?” Virgil asked. “We’re gonna organize a posse.”

  Johnson was confused: “What?”

  “You got all those hunters with their dogs, let’s stick a few of them in the trees on the other side of the highway, watching everything that comes out of Orly’s Creek—twenty-four hours a day, until the DEA raids the place. I’ll be on standby, right here in the cabin, and if anybody sees more than two dogs in a car coming out of there, I’ll pull them over. That good enough?”

  “Oh, a posse.” Johnson thought about it for a minute, rubbed a lip and said, “Yeah . . . I guess. I’m sure I can get a few of the boys to be the watchers. Need to scout out a place for them to watch from.”

  “We can do that,” Virgil said. “You start calling the best guys, and we’ll go find a lookout, and a way to get in there.”

  “Come in by water,” Johnson said.

  “See? You’re already thinking,” Virgil said. “This’ll be a snap.”

  —

  AS IT TURNED OUT, not quite a snap. People were willing, but had to work, too, and they had more volunteers for overnight watches than for daytime. Because the watcher would be close to the river, and the mosquitoes would be bad, they found a volunteer who had a deer blind with shoot-through mesh that would be inconspicuous. Another of the volunteers had an expensive pair of second-generation night-vision hunting binoculars that he could lend to the effort.

  Virgil: “Why would anyone have a pair of night-vision hunting binoculars?”

  Johnson: “Let’s not ask that question.”

 
Virgil: “By the time it was dark enough to use them, it’d be too dark to shoot anything.”

  Johnson: “Let’s not ask that question.”

  Virgil: “Oh.”

  It wouldn’t be too dark to shoot, say, a trophy buck—not if you were wearing night-vision glasses.

  —

  THEY SPENT THE REST of the afternoon setting it up: hauling the blind up the Mississippi River bank, hiding it in the brush, then cutting a trail up from the river; and organizing the watches.

  Gomez called at seven o’clock and said his team was on the way.

  “Two guys’ll meet you by that bridge tomorrow, right at first light. You can show them the site, and we’ll be five by five.”

  Virgil said, “Good. Okay. I’ll be there,” though he didn’t know what five by five meant. He looked it up later, in Wikipedia: “Five by five is the best of twenty-five subjective responses used to describe the quality of communications, specifically the signal-to-noise ratio.”

  Five by five—he’d have to use it next time he talked to Davenport.

  That evening, just before sundown, they ferried the first shift of watchers up to the blind, with binoculars, sandwiches, bottles of water, and a few beers to cut the taste of all the water. On the way back down the river, Johnson said, “We’ll be running right over a nice little walleye hole, behind that wing dam.”

  “Be a crime not to take advantage of that,” Virgil said.

  So they did; and sat, anchored, off the wing dam, and watched the towboats going to and fro, and the night fishermen going out, and the pleasure cruisers running for home, the white, red, and green lights winking across the river, the tip-tops of the Wisconsin trees going pink as the sun disappeared below the Minnesota horizon.

  “Don’t get much better than this,” Johnson said, his voice low in the quiet of the night.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Virgil said. “I could do this for a thousand years.”

  They were still sitting there, in the growing darkness, when Clancy Conley got shot in the back.