—
Before going to Andorra’s, he drove over the ridge and down to the shooting area, which was a series of ranges based around a parking lot in the middle of a deep bowl, with a creek oxbowing at the bottom of the lot. The ranges weren’t fancy, mostly defined by a row of picnic-style tables and benches, with a roof overhead for shelter. The rifle range was in the deeper part of the bowl, and shooters fired at a series of bulldozer-built berms. To Virgil’s eye, the berms appeared to have been set at fifty, one hundred, one hundred and fifty, and two hundred yards, and then four more berms out to six hundred yards. A narrow dirt two-track ran down the length of the range, so shooters could drive down to check out their targets.
The shooting end of the range featured four benches with picnic table seats and a flagpole atop which a red flag fluttered in the breeze to make newcomers aware that shooting was going on.
Two men were sitting at one of the benches, one of them with a rifle snuggled on top of Army-green sandbags, the other looking downrange through a scope, his rifle lying on a case off to the side. The aimed rifle went boom, the shooter jerked with the recoil, and the scope man said something to him. Virgil got out of the truck, and called to them: “Hey! Excuse me.”
They were both wearing electronic earmuffs, which cut the sound of a muzzle blast but allowed them to hear normal speech. They both turned to look, and Virgil walked down and identified himself.
“I’m looking at the shootings up in Wheatfield,” he said. “I’d be interested in anyone shooting a .223 at longer ranges—four hundred to five hundred yards, or so—maybe with a scoped bolt-action.”
The two men looked at each other and then simultaneously shook their heads. The shooter said, “There are a couple of Nazis on the county line over toward Blue Earth, they got .223s, but Glen kicked them out when they announced they were Nazis. Only one of them had a card anyway; he’d bring the other one in with him.”
“Is that common?” Virgil asked.
“Hell, no,” the man said. “Membership costs fifty bucks a year. Me’n Bill are shooting up a box of .300 Winchester Magnums, goes for forty bucks a box. A year out here costs less than a box and a half of ammo. A heck of a bargain, and they wouldn’t even pay that. Pissed some of us off even before they were Nazis.”
The scope man said, “It wasn’t the Nazis that shot those people in town, though. They had about the cheapest guns that would actually work and thirty-dollar scopes. They had trouble keeping their shots on the paper at a hundred yards, never mind for four or five blocks.”
“All right,” Virgil said. “Have you seen Glen Andorra around today?”
“Haven’t seen him for a while,” the shooter said. “But I’m not out here that much. Can’t afford it.”
“That’s where a .223 would be good, if you could get a bolt-action,” the scope man said to the shooter. “Get more practice with centerfires, don’t get banged up by the recoil. Then, shoot the mag enough to be sure its hittin’ where you want, and don’t go burnin’ whole boxes of million-dollar ammo.”
“What are you usin’ the mag for anyway?” Virgil asked.
“Brother’s got a place out in Colorado with elk on it. Me’n Bill drive out every year,” the shooter said.
“Good deal,” Virgil said.
They talked guns and hunting for a few minutes, and Virgil mentioned his sideline as an outdoors writer. The shooter said, “You oughta do an article on supercheap elk hunts. Everyone thinks they’re superexpensive, but they don’t have to be. You get somebody with a piece of land out in Wyoming or Colorado, bunk on their kitchen floor, you’re only spending three hundred bucks for gas. Plus, you gotta pay for the tags. That’s another six hundred. We shot a big cow elk out there, we took a hundred and eighty pounds of boned meat off her—that’s five bucks a pound for better than anything you’d get out of a supermarket. Don’t have all them chemicals, and so on.”
“Not a bad idea,” Virgil admitted. He took their names, and said, “I might call you about that.”
As Virgil was walking away, another pickup rolled down into the shooting bowl and turned off toward the pistol range. Virgil stopped to talk as the couple in the truck were getting their weapons out of the back of the camper, but the woman said, “We don’t pay much attention to the rifle people. We shoot handguns at seven yards.”
They hadn’t seen Andorra for a couple of weeks, and the man said they came out to shoot most evenings.
* * *
—
No card was needed to get out of the range. The gate slid sideways as Virgil approached it, and he took the dirt road out to the highway and turned left. Andorra lived in a typical early-twentieth-century Minnesota farmhouse, a white four-square clapboard, with a front porch, a side entrance off the driveway, and triangular attic dormers.
The place was neatly kept, without having been modernized. There was still a clothesline, on the side of the property opposite the driveway, with a rug hanging on it; the lawn needed to be cut, if you were a serious lawn guy. Virgil couldn’t see any cars, but they could be in the garage in back. He got out, sniffed the country air—cows, he thought, but not too nearby—went to the side door, and rang the bell. And rang again. No movement inside.
He walked down the driveway to the garage and looked in the windows. He could see a newer Mustang 5.0 parked next to a Bob-Cat.
He said, “Huh,” scratched his head, and glanced back at the house. He was getting a bad feeling about this. He called Wardell Holland. Holland answered on the second ring, and Virgil asked, “Do you know Glen Andorra?”
“Sort of. I nod at him,” Holland said. “He doesn’t live in town.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m out at his place. Do you know anyone who would know him well enough to have his phone number?”
“Yeah. Try Doug Cooper. Let me get Doug’s cell number for you . . . He farms out there.”
Virgil called Cooper, who didn’t have Andorra’s phone number. “Why are you looking for him?”
Virgil explained, and Cooper said, “Tell you what, I thought about checking on him. I drive by his place every day—I’m about two miles down the road—and there’s been this rug hanging on his clothesline for a couple of weeks now. That’s not like Glen. He’s a fussy guy, and we’ve had some rain coming through, but the rug never moved, so . . . I thought about checking on him.”
“I’ll check, I guess,” Virgil said. “There’s a Mustang in his garage . . .”
“Well, that’s his only car. Since you’re the law, I’d go look inside, if I were you.”
* * *
—
Virgil walked all the way around the house and wound up climbing the six steps of the front porch and peering through the hand-sized cut-glass windows in the door and the big window on the porch itself.
The only thing he saw that might be useful was a double-hung window on the far side of the house that appeared to be cracked open at the bottom. He walked around to check it, but the window was up eight feet. He went to the garage, found the door unlocked, borrowed a stepladder, walked it around to the side of the house, set it under the window, climbed up, looked inside.
The window was open, but only two or three inches. Virgil stared into what was once a dining room but was now being used as a place to watch television. The wide-screen was tuned to a game show, the cheery quizmaster joking with a group of D-list Hollywood celebrities. A man whom he assumed was Glen Andorra was lying back in an easy chair, and he had the withered, rotted look of a genuine zombie.
And Virgil could smell him in the air that wafted out through the window.
“Ah, jeez,” he said aloud. He got on the phone to the sheriff’s office, and Zimmer said he’d send a bunch of cars. “Does it look natural?”