“I’m gone,” Flowers said. He grabbed the shotgun and jogged down the far side of the house and disappeared.
Tillus stepped back and shouted, “What’s going on? I know my rights. I want an attorney—”
Mahler: “You’ll get an attorney—”
Lucas hooked her by the arm, said, “Get behind my truck, pull your firearm, I’ve got to cover Virgil.”
“What?”
“Just do it.”
Lucas pulled his gun and ran past Tillus, down the near side of the house. At the back, he saw a line of people running, seven of them, strung out toward the campgrounds. Flowers had passed two of them, women wearing long dresses and head scarves, and then slowed and pointed his shotgun into the air and fired a shot.
BOOM!
The 12-gauge sounded like an artillery piece, and the five runners ahead of Flowers slowed, and looked back, and one cried out something that Lucas didn’t understand, and they slowed and finally stopped on the dirt track. Far down the track, Lucas saw two young children and a woman run into a clump of trees.
Ahead, Flowers was shouting, and the runners now had all their hands in the air. They were tall, thin people, frightened. Lucas came up and Flowers said, “Illegals. He’s running a campground for Somalis coming across from Canada. Goddamnit.”
They got the Somalis back to the house, checked them for weapons, had them sit on the porch with Tillus, who’d gone silent, and left them with Mahler, who said more cops were on the way.
? ? ?
FLOWERS GOT AN M16 out of the back of his truck, gave it to Lucas, and the two of them walked back to the campground, where they found seven more Somalis, four women and three children, hiding in the single-wides. No guns, anywhere. They waited until the women had packed up some clothing, then escorted them back to the house.
On the way, Flowers said, “They come in by ship, get dropped off on the Canadian North Shore, get trucked over here, and cross the river at night. Next day, they’re in Minneapolis.”
“How do you know all that?”
“From a story in Musky Hunter magazine,” Flowers said. Then: “Just kiddin’. Saw it on Channel Two.”
At the house, two more sheriff’s cars had arrived, and the late-arriving deputies were chatting with Mahler, and watching the Somalis.
Mahler asked, “That all of them?”
“Might be some hiding out in the weeds, I don’t know,” Lucas said. He didn’t much care, either.
“I called the Border Patrol. Ought to have somebody here in ten minutes,” Mahler said. Another sheriff’s car turned in the driveway.
“All I want to do is look in the house,” Lucas said.
“Fuckin’ Nazis,” Pap shouted at them.
? ? ?
HE AND FLOWERS went into the house, stepping through the Somalis now clustered despondently on the porch. One of the kids was crying and Flowers said, “I kinda wish we hadn’t done this.”
Lucas nodded. “Didn’t want to. As far as I’m concerned, they can put them in a bus and haul them down to Minneapolis and turn them loose.”
Not going to happen; they were now in the system.
“Stinks,” Flowers said, as they stepped into the house.
The interior of the house was old, moldy, and poorly kept. The kitchen appeared to have been built in the 1930s, and not cleaned since, smelling of bacon grease, fried eggs, and flatulence. The refrigerator was full of ready-to-microwave frozen food, in the top compartment, and a dozen eggs and the remains of a pound of butter in the lower. An overflowing trash can smelled of rotten coffee grounds.
Tillus had used what had once been a parlor as storage for every kind of paper—bills, magazines, catalogs, newspapers; the rug on the parlor floor was not much thicker than a sheet, most of the nap worn through. The living room featured an oversized television, two chairs facing it, and probably thirty fox tails pinned to the crown molding, so that they hung down all around the room like fuzzy red icicles.
As they walked around, pulling drawers, looking in corners, they found a half dozen guns—three rifles, three revolvers, ranging in age from old to ancient.
A wired telephone sat on a side table in the living room. Lucas went there while Flowers, still with his shotgun, crept up the stairs, ready for trouble if any was up there.
Lucas found a sheet of paper under the phone and the stub of a pencil off to one side. A dozen phone numbers were written on the paper, a doctor, the “county,” a few names that meant nothing to Lucas, and one that might have said “Chet.”
Lucas wrote down the Chet number, and started for the door, when Flowers called from the second floor: “Hey, Lucas. You better come up here.”
Lucas turned back and climbed the stairs. Halfway up, a long strip of wallpaper had fallen from the wall, and now seemed to be mostly held up by spiderwebs. At the top of the stairs, he found two bedrooms and a bathroom. Flowers was standing in the front bedroom, shotgun over his shoulders, next to an antique single bed with flat springs and a two-inch-thick mattress, like an army bunk. It was covered with a dirt-gray sheet, flocked with dust bunnies.
Lucas recognized the symptoms: “What have you done, Virgil?”
Flowers said, “There’s a roll of carpet under the bed.”
“What?”
“A roll of carpet under the bed.” Flowers was smiling, sort of, but his voice wasn’t.
Lucas knelt next to the end of the bed, saw a carpet roll—and in the middle of the roll, a fold of clear plastic, maybe Saran Wrap, now as dusty as the top sheet, but very clearly wrapped around the bones of a human foot, which were held in place by the wrapping plastic.
Lucas stood up and brushed off his knees and said, “You know what? We ought to sneak out of here and let the deputies find the body.”
Flowers said, “Even if we could work it . . .”
“Yeah. We’re too straight,” Lucas said. “Goddamnit, all I wanted was a fuckin’ phone number.”
“You get it?” Flowers asked.
“Maybe. Gotta check.”
Flowers said, “We better go tell them.”