Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(28)

“Goddamn them,” Virgil said. He would have ground his teeth, but that would have hurt too much. He took the water bottle from the doc and swallowed another sip.

“Yeah, whoever ‘them’ is. We’ve got a deputy hanging around waiting to speak to you.”

“Bunch of women,” Virgil grunted.

“Women?” The doctor’s voice had a query in it as though he suspected Virgil might have taken a harder hit to the head than he’d believed.

Virgil took another pull of the water, added, “Four of them. Red pickup. Caught me behind Shanker’s. Could have hurt me a lot worse. Must’ve weighed six or seven hundred pounds . . . piled on.”

“Ah, I see,” the doctor said, reassured by the detail. “One of them also spent some time kicking you in the right hip and leg. Your leg looks like somebody was hitting you with a baseball bat. No bones broken, but you’ll hurt for a while.”

“Can I walk?”

“Oh, sure. Want to take it easy at first, to make sure all the ligaments and tendons and so on are still hooked up where they’re supposed to be, but we did some X-rays and range-of-motion tests while you were asleep and I don’t see a problem. Wouldn’t want you using any aspirin or other blood thinners for a while.”

When the doctor ran out of diagnoses, Virgil asked, “When can I leave?”

“If you’re concussed, it’s not too bad. I’m told you never completely lost consciousness, although you got your bell rung pretty good. I want you to take it easy here the rest of the day and overnight.”

Virgil didn’t protest because he really felt like he could use the rest. The doctor said, “I’ll check in on you every once in a while, but, right now, go to sleep.”

“Gimme my cell phone,” Virgil said. “As long as my tongue isn’t crippled, I need to make some calls.”

The doc said, “That’s the first thing everybody asks for when they wake up . . . Goddamn cell phones make me tired. Guy’s in cardiac arrest, he wants his phone . . . I’ll give it to you, but don’t use it any more than you have to—you really need the sleep.”

Virgil got the phone, called Johnson Johnson, and told him what had happened. “I need you to get my truck out from behind Shanker’s. You know where the backup key is. There’s guns and other stuff in there, and I don’t want anyone breaking in. Don’t take it to the cabin—take it up to your place, where you and Clarice can keep an eye on it. Then, get my iPad out of the seat pocket and bring it down here.”

Johnson: “Wait a minute. You say a bunch of women beat the shit out of you?”

Virgil said, “Johnson, get the fuckin’ truck, okay?”

When he had Johnson moving, he called Jon Duncan at the BCA and told him, and Duncan said, “Holy crap, Virgil. What are you into now?”

“It’s that goddamn Barbie doll thing you put me on,” Virgil said. “Doesn’t have anything to do with the murder. I’ll be moving again tomorrow. Do not tell Frankie about this or she’ll jump in her truck and come running over here, all worried. We don’t need that.”

“You need Jenkins and Shrake?” Jenkins and Shrake were the BCA house thugs.

“No. Not yet anyway. What I need is some sleep. I’ll call you tomorrow morning and tell you where I’m at.”

“Take it easy, Virgil. Don’t push it. Do what the doctors tell you. If you need more time to recover, take it.”

“Yeah. Call you tomorrow.”

—

While he was talking to Johnson, a woman in a sheriff’s deputy’s uniform stepped through the door. They spent five minutes talking: he gave her what details he had on the attack, and she said she was sorry, they’d try to find the truck. And she went away.

Virgil dropped back on the pillow, thinking about the women who’d attacked him, and about the mysterious Jesse McGovern. From the reactions he’d gotten from Trippton people, he’d begun to push McGovern further down his list of priorities.

As an experienced cop, he was completely aware of the tragedies that sometimes followed a too-slavish application of the law. His own girlfriend had lived on the edge of the law for years, sometimes tiptoeing over the border. But she was a good mother, maybe a great mother, with five kids and no husband. If she hadn’t supported them, if she’d been trucked off to jail, her kids would have been screwed.

What do you do about those situations?

He’d nearly decided to let McGovern slide; the women who had beaten him had convinced him otherwise. If he could find the four of them, they’d be trundling off to the Shakopee women’s prison, and Jesse McGovern could suck on it.





ELEVEN Johnson Johnson walked into the hospital room with Virgil’s truck keys, stopped, and said, “You got a blue squid on your face.”

“Holding my nose together,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, well, the word’s out that you got beat up by a bunch of women, but I’m doing the best I can to squash it,” Johnson said. “I’m telling everybody you were once ranked third as a light-heavyweight fighter, and there’s no way . . .”

“Well, it’s all true,” Virgil said. “All except the light-heavyweight part.”

“You have your facts, I have mine,” Johnson said. “Virgil, I got to tell you, you look like a fuckin’ raccoon. A raccoon with a blue squid on its face.”