Escape Clause by John Sandford
It did. Jenkins pulled onto the highway behind it, let the Ferrari move away. Virgil fell farther back. They tracked the red car all the way through St. Paul and east out of town to Radio Drive, where the Ferrari got off, took a right, and pulled into a Cub supermarket parking lot.
—
Peck seriously stank. Stank to the point where he could barely stand it.
Part of it was tiger poop, part of it was meat that was beginning to go bad, and part of it was his own sweat: with five dryers going at once in the closed-off barn basement, he was probably working in 110-degree heat. The male tiger was almost done. He’d take the night off, kill the female in the morning, and start processing her. With the female, he was thinking that he’d take only the glands, the various important organs, the eyes, and the bones. Fuck this jerky thing: it was killing him.
He’d taken to hosing himself off with cold well water, but nothing really seemed to help. He needed some kind of strong soap, he thought. Then Zhang Xiaomin called, said his father was coming to town, and wanted to see the tigers for himself. Zhang said the old man was bringing along another hundred grand.
What was he supposed to say to that? No thanks? He popped a Xanax and said, “Sure. Meet you at the same place, that Cub grocery store. If we don’t arrive at exactly the same time, I’ll see you by the battery rack. Ask a clerk for the battery rack.”
Peck was sitting toward the back of the lot staring at the “24-Hour Savings” sign on the front of the Cub store when he saw the Ferrari rolling through the lot to park in a slot near the front. Peck had wanted to be sure that Zhang Xiaomin got out of the car with an elderly Asian man, and not some marble-faced West Coast killer, as described by the late Barry King.
But an elderly Asian man got out of the Ferrari, his legs wobbling as he did so; Peck knew him from a half-dozen earlier meetings. Old man Zhang, all right. Zhang stopped to kick a tire and wave a hand at his son. He seemed to be saying a Rolls would be better than a low-slung sports job. The younger Zhang said nothing, but with his head down, led his father into the store.
Peck started the engine on the Tahoe and eased over toward the Ferrari, which had drawn a couple of Minnesotans in golf shirts, who were looking in the windows at the dashboard. “Fuckin’ dumbass and his fuckin’ Ferrari,” Peck muttered.
He parked a few slots away . . . and saw Virgil Flowers hop out of a 4Runner on the far side of the lot, put on a cowboy hat and some aviators, and walk toward the entrance of the Cub grocery store.
Flowers. Again. Peck slid down in his seat.
Flowers was obviously either following the Ferrari or conspiring with them. If he was conspiring with them, why would they meet here? Not so they could put the finger on Peck—Flowers already knew what he looked like.
Flowers had gotten onto Zhang Xiaomin. Somehow, some way. And that little Chinese prick would sell Peck out in a minute, if he could keep himself out of jail by doing it.
He started his truck again, swung out of the parking lot, and called Zhang Xiaomin. Zhang answered on the second ring, and Peck said, “You miserable piece of shit. Are you working with Flowers?”
“What? Flowers? What flowers?”
He was confused, and to Peck’s ear, not faking it. “Listen, a cop followed you into the store. He’s the guy who’s investigating the tiger theft. He’s tall, long blond hair, wearing a white straw cowboy hat and dark sunglasses. He’s onto you—I don’t know how. You need to buy some groceries, go back out to your car, drive back to the hotel, and wait. I will call you. We need to figure this out.”
“How could this happen?” Zhang sounded totally sincere.
“I don’t know, but we need to stay away from this guy. Go back to your hotel. Wait. Maybe . . . I don’t know. I will call when I think of something.”
“Oh! I saw him. He’s down the aisle, he’s looking at beer. We’re going. We’ll go back to the hotel.”
“Go.”
—
The Ferrari led Virgil and Jenkins back to Minneapolis, all the way to the Loews. Halfway back, Virgil called Jenkins and said, “Notice how fast he’s driving?”
“Pretty slow for a Ferrari,” Jenkins said.
“Pretty slow for a Yugo. On the way over here, he was driving a casual eighty, in and out of the traffic. Now he’s five miles an hour below the speed limit, in the slow lane.”
“He made us,” Jenkins said.
“I think so. I don’t know how. I’d be interested in knowing, because I swear to God they didn’t know when they went into the store.” Virgil thought about it for a few seconds, then said, “You know what? They were meeting Peck. Peck was in the goddamn parking lot and saw me go into the store. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Could have been,” Jenkins said.
At the Loews Hotel, the two Asian men took a bag of groceries out of the car and disappeared into the lobby as a valet took the Ferrari.
“Goddamnit,” Virgil said.
“What do you want to do?” Jenkins asked.
“I don’t know. If they know we’re watching them, then staking out Peck’s house won’t work. You and Shrake might as well go catch some lunch. Go to a movie. Hang out. I’ll call you when I think of something.”
22
Zhang Xiaomin drove his father in near silence back to the Loews Hotel, the silence broken only by the elder Zhang’s muttered expletives in Chinese. Zhang Xiaomin spoke only fair Chinese, having left China when he was seven years old. He didn’t recognize all of the words his father was using, but he recognized the tone.
His father was the kind of man who’d grown up rough, out on the countryside, without phones, running water, or indoor toilets. When he arrived in Shanghai, at exactly the right time to make money, he’d made it, and that had conferred on him, in his own eyes, a kind of nobility.
That reaction to new money wasn’t confined to Zhang Min, by any means, or even to nouveau riche Chinese; but Xiaomin’s old man had it bad. He was a tyrant at work and at home; and when Xiaomin was a boy, he would beat him mercilessly and bloodily for even small faults, or even non-faults, if alcohol was involved.
Xiaomin never fought back.
When he was seven, his father, then with his first flush of real money, began secretly moving some of it to the United States, out of reach of China’s authorities, should they come looking. He invested primarily in real estate—houses—another great move in the California of the eighties. He sent his wife and son to look after the houses. Xiaomin had grown up in San Marino, speaking Chinese to his mother, English everywhere else.
—
When they got back to the hotel, Zhang Min stalked without expression through the lobby, with his son padding along at his heels, carrying the groceries. In the elevator, Zhang Min pushed the buttons for both the penthouse level and the skyway level, and when the doors closed, he began slapping his son’s face, hard as he could, saying over and over, “Fuckin’, fuckin’, fuckin’” along with a few Chinese phrases, and Zhang Xiaomin took it, head down, the impacts batting his face back and forth. He knew if he raised his hands, his father’s hands would close and the open-handed slaps would become blows with fists.
When the elevator doors opened at the skyway level, both men were staring straight ahead, and only a close examination would show signs of blood around Xiaomin’s eyes, nose, and lips. Zhang Min said, “You disgust me. You are an insect.”
He led the way into the skyway and Zhang Xiaomin asked, “Where are we going?”
Zhang Min didn’t answer, but took a cell phone from his pocket, punched up an app, and called for an Uber car. One would meet them, a block away, in five minutes. They dumped the groceries in a trash can and a moment later passed a fast-food place, where Zhang Min stopped long enough to pull a few napkins from a dispenser. He handed them to his son and said, “Clean yourself. You are a weak bleeder. Clean yourself.”
Zhang Xiaomin pressed the napkins to his nose and face while his father made another call. “Peck: we are not followed. We will take an Uber to the same exit, but to the other side. I saw a sign for a Best Buy there. One half hour.”
He listened for a moment, then said, “Yes, I am sure. We were moving too quickly for them to set up on us. One half hour.”
The two men continued through the skyways to a Macy’s store, where, after a moment of confusion, they found their way down to street level. They waited inside the door until the Uber car showed, and in the car, Zhang Min told the driver, “A Best Buy store at Radio Drive east of St. Paul. I will point you when we get there.”
“There are Best Buys that are a lot closer . . .” the driver ventured.
“This is business, that’s the store we want,” Zhang Min said, in his softly accented English. “I will tip you twenty dollars above your Uber fee when we get there.”
“Outa here,” the driver said.
—
Zhang Xiaomin kept his face down, dabbing at it with the napkins. Although outwardly submissive, he was raging inside. Having Hayk Simonian slap him around was bad enough, but Simonian was a professional thug. His father was a small man, and yet . . .
The Uber driver dropped them at Best Buy. Two minutes later, Peck called them on Zhang Xiaomin’s cell phone.
“Are you absolutely positive you are clean?”
“Yes, my father knows how to do this, from the old country,” Zhang Xiaomin said. He gave a quick explanation—the fast turn-around in the hotel, the sneak through Macy’s, the Uber.
“I’m coming in,” Peck said. Another two minutes, and he rolled his Tahoe up to their feet. Zhang Xiaomin got in the backseat, the old man in the front passenger seat, and from there he began shouting at the two of them.
“Two people are dead? Am I hearing this now? You have killed to get these tigers? Are you this insane? I have nothing to do with this now. Nothing to do with this. I know nothing of this . . .”
Peck said, “Since you’re the one who employed the Simonians, I don’t think the cops’ll buy it. Besides, they don’t know who killed them.”
“Shut up! Shut up! They will know! They will! Because you two are incompetent fools, to kill someone for the tigers.”
“It was Hamlet’s fault—he left his fingerprints where the cops could find him. Hamlet was the guy you picked, not me,” Peck said. “Soon as they put pressure on him, he’d have rolled over on us. Had to be done . . .”
“Shut up! Shut up!” The old man stormed on, out of control, all the way to the barn. “No more money from me. No more money.” To his son: “You can get a job or you can starve.”
At the barn, he waved a hand at the house and asked, “Who is living here? Are they seeing me?”
“Nobody lives there, except me, for a while,” Peck said. “The animals are in the barn. When we finish with them, I plan to soak it in gasoline, along with the house, and burn them both to the ground. They’re wrecks, and I know for a fact that they’re insured, and people will think that the owner burned them for the money. No reason even to look for a tiger hair.”
Zhang Min walked once through the barn, stood a moment inspecting Katya, who inspected him back, then looked at the hanging corpse of Artur, and finally turned on his heel and said, “I have seen enough.”
He marched back to the truck and got in the passenger seat. Zhang Xiaomin trailed behind with Peck, and on the way said, “I have had enough. We will kill this old piece of shit. You think of a plan and we will do it. When I have the money, I will give you one hundred thousand dollars.”
“I don’t think so,” Peck said. “You’ll inherit something more than a hundred million. The fiancée goes away. For helping get this flea off your neck, I want one. One million dollars cash. Then I will go away and you will never hear from me again.”
They got to the truck and Peck got in the driver’s seat and Xiaomin got in the seat behind him.
Zhang Min said, “I was the bigger fool—the bigger fool for getting involved with the two of you.”
Zhang Xiaomin said to the back of Peck’s head, “Yes.”
Peck stopped the truck and said, “Wait one minute. I forgot my phone.”
He went back inside the barn, where Hayk Simonian had strung up the body of Artur with quarter-inch brown nylon rope. He picked up Simonian’s skinning knife, cut a four-foot length from the original roll, did a quick wrap around his fingers, stuck the wad of rope in his hip pocket. He took his iPhone out, turned the movie app on, picked up Simonian’s jacket, and walked back out to the car.
At the car, he walked around to the passenger side and pulled open the back door, handed the jacket to Zhang Xiaomin, who was sitting on the other side, and said, “Throw this in the back, will you?”
The old man was staring straight ahead, muttering something. Perfect. Peck pulled the rope out of his back pocket, threw it around the old man’s neck, yanked it back as hard as he could.
The old man fought and gurgled, tearing at the rope with his fingernails, breaking the manicured tips, and Peck handed the ends of the rope to Zhang Xiaomin, and shouted, “Pull, dummy. Pull the ropes.”
Xiaomin began dragging on the ropes, which were looped around the metal bars of the front seat head restraints, and Peck eased off the backseat and Xiaomin leaned across to get a better angle and began shouting “Die! Die, you old fuck.”
It took a while, three or four minutes before Zhang Min stopped thrashing, and a couple more minutes after that, before Xiaomin was satisfied that his old man was dead.
Peck filmed most of it; he tried to be subtle about it, holding the phone’s camera up by his chest, half turned away, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Xiaomin was so focused on his thrashing father that Peck could have used a full-scale movie camera and Xiaomin wouldn’t have noticed.
When it was over, Xiaomin began weeping, dropped the rope, and fell out of the far side of the car, where he crawled around in the dirt for a few seconds, then ran around to the passenger side and pulled open the door and said, “My father, my father, you shit, you asshole . . .”
The spasm of grief—or whatever it was—took a couple more minutes, with Peck filming as much as he could. Then Xiaomin asked, wiping away tears, “Now what?”
“Now we wrap him up in some plastic sheets and take him back to Minneapolis with us.”
“What?”
“Then you sneak back into the hotel, going through Macy’s, like you did on the way out. Stop in Macy’s, buy some workout shorts and gym shoes and a T-shirt. Pay cash. Go to the hotel, call down to the desk, find out where you can get a workout. They’ve probably got a gym of some kind. Get a trainer if you can. You’re establishing your presence.”
“What about Father?”
“I will leave him somewhere,” Peck said. “You should call his phone a few times during the afternoon and evening. There won’t be an answer. About nine o’clock, talk to the police about your missing father.”
“You think that’s safe?”
“I think it’s perfect,” Peck said. “When the police come to talk to you, think about the things your father’s meant to you—the good things. Cry a little, but don’t fake it. When they come to you about his body . . . then you can break down. Don’t fake it, but work your way up to it. You really want to be distraught. But you can’t fake it; you have to feel it.”
“I already feel it.”
“Well, feel it more.”
—
They took Hayk Simonian’s pickup to Minneapolis: a risk, but a necessary one. On the way, they talked alibis.
“What about this Flowers?” Zhang Xiaomin asked. “He followed us. The only reason I can think of is, he saw my car at your house.”
Peck had to think about that complication for a while. Eventually, he said, “Your father came here to meet b
“That is very . . . not so good,” Zhang said.
“Not great, but it’s simple and unbreakable,” Peck said. “Keep it that way, and you’ll inherit a hundred mil.”
“What will you do with Father?”
“You told me once that he liked strip shows. Pole dancers, lap dancers. Hookers.”
“Yes?”
“Keep thinking about that,” Peck said. “When the cops say they’ve found him, you can be surprised, but not too surprised.”
“What?”
“I’ll take care of it—you be surprised. And freaked out and broken up. He’s your father, for crissakes, and now he’s dead. When they ask you, think about what you did to him. Almost cut his freakin’ head off.”
Zhang Xiaomin buried his face in his hands and began to weep again.
“That’s very good,” Peck said. “Do it just like that.”
—
When he’d dropped Zhang, Peck wheeled around to the alley behind the Swedish Bikini Bar. There was a Dumpster in the alley that backed up to a wall; you couldn’t see behind it, but there was a space back there. Peck had often stood next to that space, during his brief adventure with crack cocaine, smoking with the woman who dealt it to him.
Now he got out of the truck, checked around for witnesses, dragged the body out of the back—hit the ground with an oof sound—and around behind the Dumpster.
There, he unwrapped the plastic sheeting and threw it back in the truck, and after a last look around, he got the hell out of there.