Deadline(19)

            “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.





                     5


            OVERNIGHT, THEY HEARD NOTHING from the lookouts by the river. At first light, Johnson ran two more guys up the river, and retrieved the ones who’d spent the night in the blind. They were surprisingly pleased with themselves, though they’d seen nothing relevant. Like back in National Guard days, they said.