Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers #11)(79)

Virgil looked. He wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing, but he thought it might be the flashlight beam from a cell phone, maybe a hundred yards away toward the bridge. Jenkins breathed, “I think the idiot’s tangled up in the fence. You want to light him up?”

“Not until we’re a lot closer,” Virgil whispered back. “If he gets outside the flash coverage, we might not see him again. He could hide, and warn off the car picking him up . . .”

They continued on to the fence. There were three strands of barbed wire, which they managed to cross without incident, but then Virgil went knee-deep in muck in the roadside ditch. Jenkins whispered, “What happened?” and stepped into the same muddy hole.

Virgil got out, but Jenkins said, “I think I’m losing my fuckin’ shoe . . . Wait, wait . . .”

He had to reach, elbow-deep, into the sulfurous muck to get hold of the shoe and then managed to stagger out onto the dry ground of the roadside bank. “I lost my fuckin’ sock,” he said. He sat down on the highway and tried to clean out his shoe, to get it back on.

From not too far away, they heard somebody talking; couldn’t make it out, but it sounded like somebody had said “Motherfucker.”

“I think he fell in the ditch,” Jenkins whispered.

Virgil wanted to laugh at both of them but stuffed his knuckles into his mouth and managed to smother the impulse.

As they waited on the highway, they saw the cell phone light again, blinking off and on, as the person ahead of them walked toward the bridge. Virgil turned to block the light of his own phone, and looked at the time. Eight minutes to 10. “Wardell’s gotta be close,” he whispered to Jenkins. “We gotta move.”

Jenkins got on his feet, and they walked toward the bridge, Jenkins’s foot squeaking in its wet shoe. It was dark enough that they could stay on the road, and the road was quieter than walking on the gravel shoulders. They were fifty yards away from the mystery walker when the cell phone flash came on, and they saw it move down into the ditch.

“He’s hiding. Waiting for the drop.”

The cell phone light came on again, and they could see the other man’s arms windmilling in the night, and they could hear some more squealing.

“Mosquitoes,” Jenkins said, and Virgil could hear him trying not to laugh.

“Sneak up another few steps and sit down,” Virgil suggested.

They did that, and waited. The night was not quite silent: they could hear a bird, up in a tree, chirping like an old man muttering in the night; and also the sound of flowing water. The man up ahead coughed once, and then again.

A minute before 10 o’clock, a set of headlights turned onto Highway 18 from Highway 53, which was about a mile and a half away. Virgil nudged Jenkins, and they duckwalked onto the shoulder of the road. The headlights got closer, bright enough that Virgil couldn’t see the truck behind them, but he was sure it was Holland in the Tahoe.

The truck stopped on the bridge, the driver hopped out, walked around the abutment, was out of sight for a minute, and then was back in the truck. When the Tahoe passed them, Holland’s hand was pressed to the driver’s-side window glass: he must’ve caught them in the headlights, crouched on the side of the road. Another minute, and the truck turned north and was out of sight.

Ten minutes, then the cell phone flash came up, moved across the bridge, down under the abutment. A moment later, it was back, and whoever was holding it was jogging toward them. Virgil whispered, “I’m going to light him up.”

Frankie had referred to the flashlight as “thermonuclear.” Virgil had been given it by a DEA agent and was fairly sure that it could be seen on the moon. The man coming toward them was in the middle of the highway, and when he was thirty feet away, Virgil hit him in the face with the light, and Jenkins yelled, “Stop! Stop there!”

The man—Virgil recognized him as Jim Button—screeched to a stop, looked wildly around, as if for a place to run, dropped the brown manila envelope full of magazine pages cut to dollar-bill size, and said, “Ah, shit. There’s no money, is there?”

“How you doin’, Jim?” Virgil asked. And, “My friend here has a twelve-gauge pointed at you. It’d cut a hole the size of a softball in your chest . . . if you have a gun or knife, or whatever.”

“I don’t,” Button said. “Goddamnit.”

“So who’s the shooter?” Virgil asked.

Button stared at him for a few seconds, then said, “Well, it’s gotta be Barry Osborne.”

Jenkins asked, “Who is this guy?”

“One of the Nazis,” Virgil said. To Button: “Barry Osborne, is what you’ve got? That’s all? That’s it? I hate to tell you this, pal, but we’ve already eliminated him as a suspect.”

“Well, that’s dumb,” Button said.

Virgil said to Jenkins, “Get your Glock out and point it at his head. I’m gonna cuff him.”

Button said, “Aw, we gotta do that?”

“Yeah, we do, Jim. You tried to defraud the state government out of ten thousand dollars.”

Button refused to say where he would have been picked up, but Virgil suspected it would be the same place he was dropped off. He called Holland, who’d pulled off the highway a couple of miles away, and he came back to pick them up.