Virgil said, “I hurried, but I was just too far away. I should have told him to wait for me.”
“When you got out of the truck, to go in the school, did you have your gun with you? I mean, before you had to break that window out?” Shrake asked.
“No, I had to go back for the gun.”
“Which means that if Bacon had waited for you, and you’d gone right in . . . Kerns would have killed both of you, instead of just killing Bacon. You didn’t fuck up, Virgil: you just got crazy unlucky with the timing.”
—
THEY WERE STILL talking it over when headlights flashed in the side yard. Shrake and Virgil got their shotguns, and Johnson unlocked and raised a side window and shouted through the screen, “Who’s there?”
A man called back, “Henry Hetfield and Del Cray. We’re looking for Agent Flowers.”
“What do you want?”
“We have some information we think he needs. About the school board,” Hetfield shouted back.
Johnson looked at Virgil, who shrugged. Johnson shouted back, “Too late, dickhead.”
“Wait, this is important. We gotta talk.”
Virgil shouted back, “Oh, all right. Come on in. But we’ve got two shotguns and a .45, and at this short distance, they’d take off your heads. You understand that?”
“Please don’t shoot us. . . .”
—
THE NEXT MORNING, Virgil met Dave the lawyer at Ma and Pa’s Kettle, gave him some headphones and plugged him into the video of the school board meeting. Dave ate bacon and French toast, and drank Bloody Marys, and watched, fascinated, as it all came out.
“Not gonna wait,” he said, when the video ended and he’d pulled off the earphones. “We’re gonna bust them all. Now, today.”
“We’ve also got a couple of direct witnesses for you,” Virgil said, and he told him about Henry Hetfield and Del Cray from the night before.
“What’d you promise them?”
“Not a goddamn thing,” Virgil said. “I’ve got it on a voice recorder, me not promising them anything. I told them that I’d mention it to the judge, that they’d made a voluntary statement to me. That’s all on a flash drive,” Virgil said. He slid the flash drive across the table.
“This almost takes the fun out of it,” Dave grumbled. “We don’t have to negotiate, we don’t have to argue with anyone, we don’t have to do any real serious lawyer shit. A law student could convict them.”
Virgil told him about their hasty export of Vike Laughton from Wisconsin to Minnesota. “Well, that’s something,” Dave said, brightening a bit. “Those Cheeseheads can get a little testy about such things. Gonna have to look up the precise Latin phrase that means ‘Fuck off.’”
—
THE ROUNDUP STARTED at one o’clock. Dave had spent some time talking to the attorney general, who’d sent down a stack of warrants specifying a list of crimes that included murder, conspiracy to murder, attempted murder (the ambush at the cabin), a variety of charges involving assault on police officers and conspiracy to do the same, embezzlement, and a bunch of other stuff, including, as a garnish, charges of misprision of a felony against everybody. “That’ll get them an extra two weeks on top of the thirty years,” Dave said with satisfaction. “We’ll go for consecutive sentences.”
Jennifer Gedney wept. “I don’t have any money, I don’t have any money. How can you say I took money, when I don’t have any money. . . . Is that a TV camera?”