Deadline(46)

            “You called me at one o’clock in the morning about some dogs?”

            Virgil could hear Clarice laughing in the background. Satisfied, Virgil hung up, and when he got to the cabin, fell into bed.

            —

            THE POSSE MET the next day at high noon, at Shanker’s: nine guys and a woman in various pieces of camo, plus a sheriff’s deputy named Boyce, but who everyone called “Bongo,” which caused Virgil to worry. Only he and Bongo would be armed, he told everybody, and he caught a quick flash of eyes between some of the men, which meant that a few of them probably had sidearms tucked into their belts.

            “Listen, I’m serious now, if anybody other than myself and Bongo is carrying a gun, I’m telling you, leave it in your truck,” Virgil said. “If I see one up on that hill, I’ll send you home.”

            Communications would be through a whole bunch of hunter’s walkie-talkies, since phones didn’t always work up in the deep valleys. One guy suggested that the slower climbers—“You know who you are”—stay behind to look after the vehicles. “These hillbillies, if they thought they were gonna lose the dogs, they’d come down and slash our tires, or worse.”

            “Whatever happens to the vehicles, don’t go shooting anybody,” he said. “If you’re watching the trucks, and anybody gives you trouble, you yell for help and we’ll come running.”

            Virgil explained how the process would work: “This is basically just a search of public property. Before last night’s meth lab raid, the federal agents did quite a bit of research, in an effort to find out who would be legally responsible for the meth lab—who the landowner would be. As it turns out, the privately owned land involves fairly compact tracts bordering on the road, and going no more than a couple hundred yards back. The forest land along most of the top and sides of the valley is state forest. So we’ll be on public land. We’ll spread out across from it, with me in the center and Bongo at the top near the bluffs, and Johnson Johnson at the bottom, along the edge of the privately owned land. We’ll climb up from the shoulder of the highway, so we never cross private land. And, by doing it that way, we might surprise somebody. That’s gonna be a tough climb though, so if any of you people have heart problems . . .”

            —

            WHEN ALL WAS said and done, two of the guys opted to stay with the cars. The rest were prepared to climb. With that all settled, they loaded into their pickups and SUVs and trucked on up Highway 26 in a caravan.

            Virgil led them to the shoulder of the road, and after the car-watchers were subtracted, nine of them began climbing the steep hill just south of the entrance to the valley. The hill was roughly as high as the Washington Monument, climbing through weeds and sumac and, higher up, scrubby oaks and then full-sized oaks. When they got into the tree line, Virgil called for a rest, and they sat on the hill and looked out over the Mississippi, and didn’t talk much. Virgil gave them ten full minutes, and then they resumed the climb. They stopped once more, for another ten minutes, talking via the walkie-talkies to the trucks below.

            Another ten minutes saw them to the top of the hill at the end of the valley; there would be more hill to climb later, but at the moment they walked single file, bunched too close for a combat patrol, over the edge to the downhill slope of the south valley wall.

            Virgil spread them out down the hill, with Johnson on the bottom and Bongo at the top. Virgil was in the middle, and they began walking west. They’d walked perhaps a quarter-mile when Bongo called and said, “Hey, we got something up here. Looks like a pen. Another twenty-five yards, right under that yellow bluff.”

            Virgil got on his radio and said, “Okay, guys, let’s climb up to the bluff.”

            They all began clumping up the hill, and could smell the cage before they got to it. When they got to the bluff, they found Bongo and the four guys who’d been above Virgil looking at a chain-link fence, a semicircle with the bluff forming the back side. Inside the wire was a lot of raw dirt, a lot of dog shit, and three beaten-up dogs who wobbled to their feet when they saw the men walking up to the fence. Scattered inside the fence were a bunch of plastic tubs; most were empty, the others contained some water.