Deadline(2)

            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.