“Okay. Let’s get some cuffs on him. We got an ambulance one minute out.”
“That was quick,” Virgil said.
“No, we had it waiting, just in case. It’s on its way up the valley now.”
—
WHEN VIRGIL GOT DOWN to the sheds, five men were sitting on the ground, hands cuffed behind them, looking like prisoners of war. “We lost one of them,” Gomez said. “We saw two runners, but there were three. Bricks and Mortar are down at Zorn’s place, his old lady says he’s up in the Cities. We said, ‘So what’s his cell phone number, we need to call him.’ She said he doesn’t have one. We said, ‘Everybody has a cell phone.’ She pulls out a wooden kitchen match, scratches it on the screen door, fires up a Camel, and says, ‘Fuck you.’”
“That’s a high-class hillbilly, right there,” Virgil said.
“Yes, it is. Anyway, we got the crew, we got the sheds, we got the makings. We’ll make a movie of it all, and package it up for the U.S. Attorney. He’ll find the weak sister, and get him to talk about Zorn. Good job all the way around.”
“What about the drone?”
“Ah, it broke.”
“It broke?”
“Yeah, it broke. Don’t mention it, okay? I mean, if anybody asks. We’ve got some bugs to work out.”
—
VIRGIL LOOKED at the group of sitting men and asked, “You mind if I talk to the POWs?”
“They’ve all asked for attorneys, so you won’t get anything usable.”
“I don’t need it for a court. I just need some information.”
Gomez shrugged: “Go ahead.”
Virgil walked over to the prisoners, who were sitting in a shallow semicircle, all dressed in jeans and boots and work shirts, looking more like lumberjacks than dope manufacturers. He squatted down and said, “You all get attorneys, and you don’t have to answer any questions at all, but I’ve got one that doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
They all glanced at each other, then one of them said, “We’re not talking.”
Virgil: “You all look like country people to me, and some of you probably got dogs, and like dogs. Some asshole up this valley has been stealing dogs, including some pretty good hunting dogs. We know what they’re going to do with them—they’re going to sell them off to medical laboratories for experiments. Now, I know you wouldn’t want that to happen to your dogs. . . . So, you know anything at all about these stolen dogs? Where they might be? We know you don’t have them, but somebody up this valley does.”
After a few seconds one of the men said, “We didn’t have nothing to do with no dogs.”
“I’m not claiming that anybody did,” Virgil said. “You had other business up here. But I’m not DEA, I’m not a fed—I’m just trying to get these dogs back to their owners.”
“There’s some dogs on the other side of the valley, I don’t know where at,” one of the men said.
“Shut up, Eddy,” said another one of them. “You know we’re not supposed to say anything.”
“Fuck you, Dick,” Eddy said. “The man’s asking about dogs. Nothing to do with us.” He turned back to Virgil and said, “They sound like they’re close to the front end of the valley, high up on the other side.”