Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(58)
“Then we’ve got a second stop . . . You put your gun in your pocket?”
“No, I didn’t think it was necessary. Let’s go knock. And, Margaret, be nice.”
—
Virgil led the way to Anderson’s trailer, which had a couple of concrete blocks for a step. Virgil stepped up, knocked a couple of times, stepped back down as he heard feet hit the floor inside, a heavy person walking toward the door, oil-canning the home’s aluminum floor as he/she walked across it.
A hulking, square-shouldered man pushed the door open, looked past Virgil at Griffin, and growled, “What’d I tell you about coming back?”
Before Griffin could reply, Virgil said, “I’m a cop. I’m looking for information about the people doing unauthorized and illegal alterations of Barbie and Ken dolls.”
“Wouldn’t know nothin’ about that,” Anderson said. “Now, get out of my fuckin’ yard. You want to talk to me, get a search warrant.” His brow beetled, and he said, “You know, I know all the cops in Buchanan County, and you ain’t one.”
“I’m with the state,” Virgil said. “I will be back with a search warrant. We’ll cuff your ass, sit you in the county jail until we have time to talk to you—could be a couple of weeks, with everything else going on—and tear your home apart, see what we find. If we find anything, of course, we’ll be talking prison time.”
He paused, waited for an answer, but Anderson simply looked confused and, after a moment, asked, “Virgil?”
“Yeah, Virgil. Instead of doing all that other shit, you could talk to us for a couple of minutes.”
Anderson put an earnest look on his face and said, “Listen, I don’t know nothing about this, Virgil. The lady behind you came and knocked on my door and said I got some UPS packages with illegal stuff in them. Well, I don’t know nothing about illegal stuff. My neighbor wasn’t home, and I told her I’d take the packages for her.”
“Which neighbor?” Virgil asked.
Anderson ducked his head and pointed to the next trailer down. “Jesse McGovern. She was in the process of moving out and said it was too late to change the address on the UPS packages, so I took them for her. She come out and picked them up a couple days after they got here.”
“She’s moved?” Virgil asked.
“Oh, yeah. She’s been gone a couple months now. Heard she moved to . . . New York.”
Griffin said, “Oh, bullshit. He’s lying, Virgil. The boxes came here, not to the next trailer. They had Anderson’s address on them. She’s still around here someplace.”
“It’s a ‘manufactured home,’ not a ‘trailer,’” Anderson said. “And I hate to break the news to you, but there’s only one address here. None of these lots are legal addresses—it’s all one lot, and one address.”
“You’re still lying about Jesse,” Virgil said. “I’ll tell you, Joe. I may have to come back out here and take your ass to jail. You don’t look like a bad guy, and I’d hate to do it—but, not to put too fine a point on it, Mattel has asked the governor to stop this crime and the governor has agreed.”
“The fuckin’ governor? Why would he give a stinkin’ wet shit about this deal?”
Virgil looked to his left, to his right, then back at Anderson, shrugged, and said, “I don’t know the details.”
Anderson said, “Oh, I see. Somebody paid the little prick, didn’t they? Donated to his campaign, or whatever they call it now.”
“That’s entirely unwarranted speculation,” Griffin said.
Anderson said, “Well, maybe we both have warrants in our future—me and the governor. Come and get me when you’ve got mine.”
He stepped back inside and closed the door.
Griffin, her arms akimbo, asked, “Well, what are you going to do, Virgil?”
Virgil said, “If you can come up with enough for me to get a search warrant, I’ll come back, like I said. We’re not there yet.”
—
They’d turned back to their vehicles when a door slammed down the way and they both looked, and a large woman in a parka was standing on her stoop, her back to them, locking the door of her mobile home. The mobile home with the assault wagon parked outside.
Virgil went that way. “Hey.”
The woman turned, looked at him, and said, “Virgil fuckin’ Flowers.” She came down off the steps and added, “How about I kick your ass again?”
Virgil opened his mouth to reply—something soothing and noncombative—but that apparently wasn’t how they did it in L.A. Margaret Griffin, standing next to him, flicked her hand, and a two-foot-long steel wand snapped open.
Griffin said, “Come and get us, bitch.”
Something about Griffin caused the woman to step sideways, circling to her left, which gave her a clear shot at Virgil, and suddenly she was moving more quickly than her size would have suggested, with newly painted and pointed fingernails flashing with Dior’s Victoire 758 right at Virgil’s face.
Virgil had his feet set, and he punched her.
—
A lot of great punches were thrown in the twentieth century. One of the most famous was captured in the painter George Bellows’s iconic work Dempsey and Firpo, also known as Dempsey Through the Ropes, in which Luis ángel Firpo, the “Wild Bull of the Pampas,” knocked Jack Dempsey entirely out of the ring in the first round of their 1923 fight.