Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(100)

“We read him his rights and recorded his confession,” Virgil said. “It was afterwards that we got into all the excitement.”

“I’m sending everything, man. Right now. They’ll be there by midnight. Uh . . . what about the Barbie-Os?”

“Jon, I want you to take this in the gentlest, most caring way,” Virgil said. “Go fuck yourself.”

—

Virgil and Pweters kept the deputies out of the scene of the shooting, but Virgil took a quick look around the kitchen and spotted an oversized bottle of champagne sitting on a countertop. The paper label on one side was damaged, and there was a hair stuck to it.

He pointed it out to Pweters, who said, “Let’s hope to hell it stays stuck until your crime scene gets here.”

It did.

—

When Birkmann was gone, and the shooting scene safely blocked off, Pweters started running his mouth while pacing around Birkmann’s kitchen. He didn’t stop talking even when he looked in Birkmann’s refrigerator and took out a carrot, which he munched on as he talked. He’d never seen a shooting take place, he said, although he’d seen a couple of aftermaths. “I mean like, holy shit, here I was sitting in the chair, and he had that fuckin’ cannon in his hand . . . You see that? It’s a freakin’ .357. It would’ve made a hole in you that you could push an orange through . . . I was trying to stretch my leg out so I’d have a chance at getting my pistol loose after he shot you . . .”

“He didn’t think I had a gun—he would have shot you first,” Virgil said.

“Whoa! I didn’t think of that. Man, I was like this far away from going for it.” He held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “And then when you shot him, and I thought he’d fired—I was still alive, and nothing hurt—but I didn’t know what the heck had happened and I yanked my gun and damn near shot myself in the leg getting it out. I got my finger in there on the trigger and I was in this huge hurry and I yanked . . . Man, I’m lucky I didn’t kill somebody . . .”

Virgil let him talk.

After a while, Pweters ran down and said finally, “I thought you never carried your gun. Like Dave said, everybody knows it.”

“Not never,” Virgil said. “I knew he had a gun that he’d used to kill Margot Moore. I’d seen him try to hit Corbel with that microphone stand. So I put the gun in my pocket.”

“Shot him in the guts,” Pweters marveled. “Old Bug Boy won’t be easy on the toilet for a few months. He’s lucky he wasn’t totally . . . exterminated. Know what I’m sayin’?”





THIRTY-ONE A cop-involved shooting was always messy.

The Buchanan County sheriff’s deputy who was serving as the temporary crime scene investigator got them to reenact the shooting, filmed it, took a thousand more still photographs, put crime scene tape on everything that didn’t move, and froze the scene until the BCA crime scene crew could get back to Trippton.

Virgil turned his pistol over to Jeff Purdy, who didn’t want it but would hold it for the BCA shooting team that would be down the next morning. The team would take statements from everybody and collect Virgil’s pistol and the two recorders. The crime scene crew would be right behind them. Birkmann’s pistol lay on the floor where it had fallen and wouldn’t be moved until the BCA crime scene crew picked it up and bagged it.

Birkmann was given preliminary treatment at the Trippton Clinic, along with a couple of units of blood, and was flown to Rochester. The Mayo surgeons did the best they could to put his guts and hip back together, although he lost a couple turns in his small intestine. His spine had not been involved, as the rapidly expanding bullet narrowly missed the sciatic nerve and knocked a quarter-sized chunk out of his ilium and a big piece of meat out of his butt.

The Mayo docs said when he came out of anesthesia, he wouldn’t respond even to medical questions and had begun weeping.

He would get better, but it was gonna hurt and it would take a while.

—

Virgil got back to Johnson’s cabin after midnight and found Johnson and Clarice waiting.

“Heard all about it,” Johnson said. “How come you didn’t shoot him in the heart?”

“I didn’t have a lot of time to perfect my aim,” Virgil said. “Or even get my gun out of my pocket. I ruined a perfectly good parka.”

Clarice said she’d have been happy to patch it for him, but she didn’t know how to sew. “Maybe Frankie does.”

“I don’t think she does, either,” Virgil said.

Every time he stuck his hand in his parka pocket, he pushed his finger through the bullet hole and looked down to see the finger wiggling at him. He couldn’t seem to help himself, and the hole was slowly getting larger. Even when he resolved not to put his hand in his pocket, he did it anyway. He took the coat off and hung it on a peg by the door.

Johnson asked, “Are the cops going to investigate you tonight?”

“Not any more,” Virgil said. “Why?”

“Because we’ve got an excellent bottle of wine, a 2014 Christopher Creek Pinot Noir, which I could have one glass of, and you and Clarice could finish, but I don’t want to do that if somebody’s coming over to test your alcohol content,” Johnson said.

“What, you guys are wine freaks now?”