Bad Blood

could probably get a car if we needed it.”
    “We can work that out,” Jenkins said.
    “I know it’s all sort of ramshackle, but I’m in a big hurry, and this is what I’ve got,” Virgil said.
     
     
    TWO HOURS WENT BY, and they moved the cars around the block, scattering them. Jenkins and Virgil stayed in the house with Gordon, while Dennis Brown went to the house on one side of Holley’s, Shrake and Schickel to the house on the other side, and Holley went down to his girlfriend’s place. Everybody would be watching the street, linked with cell phones and radios.
    Gordon started cleaning up after the party, and Jenkins set up a half-dozen wireless microphones, with recording equipment under the bed. Virgil, Jenkins, and Shrake would have headphones to monitor the talk, although Shrake’s wouldn’t work until he was just outside the house.
     
     
    AND THEY WAITED, watching TV.
    They asked one question, two hundred times. “Do you think they looked up the phone number?”
    Virgil found it hard to believe that they’d be too stupid to do that; that somebody wouldn’t do it.
    “Our big problem is gonna be if they come hat in hand, are polite, say their piece, and leave,” Virgil said. “Even if there are some little threats buried in there . . . you know, ‘We’d sure be unhappy, Miz Lucy, to hear you were telling lies about us.’ If they go that way, we’ve got nothing.”
    They got past three hours, and past four hours, but they didn’t get past five hours.

18
    T hey came in a crew-cab pickup, three of them. The first word came from an elderly couple who lived at the end of the block, an excited woman on her cell to Virgil: “Big pickup, not from town, turning the corner like they’re lost, looking at house numbers.”
    Virgil clocked his radio: “Incoming,” he said.
    “We got them,” Dennis Brown said. “The guy in the driver’s seat is Emmett Einstadt Junior. They call him ‘Junior.’ There are two more, I think, but I can’t see who they are. Could be one in the back—that’d make four.”
    The big Chevy crew cab stopped in front of Holley’s house, and a minute later three men climbed out, awkwardly, a little stiff from the ride, and regrouped on the sidewalk.
    Jenkins hurried across the house and down the stairs into the basement, while Virgil crouched in the front bedroom, looking out through a hole in a venetian blind. Gordon stood behind him, in the doorway, twisting her hands nervously. They had wrapped a woman’s bulletproof vest around her, and covered it with a thick quilted housecoat. She still looked a little porky, but with her round face and fleshy hands, not unconvincing.
    A radio beeped, and Virgil said, “Yeah?”
    “The guy with the black watch cap is Roland Olms, and the third guy—”
    “Wally Rooney,” Virgil said. Outside, Rooney had pulled off his baseball cap to scrub at his hair, and then replaced it. “Excellent.”
    He turned and repeated the information to Gordon, and she repeated it, “Cowboy hat is Junior, the other guy is Wally Rooney, and I know Roland. . . .”
    She was almost hyperventilating, and Virgil grinned at her and said, “Take it easy. This isn’t as hard as it looks, and it’s gonna be interesting. They didn’t bring their shooter with them, so I don’t think we have to worry about that. You just get out there and argue with them.”
    “They brought this Rooney man you told me about—do you want me to tell them that you think he’s messing with Flood’s daughters?”
    “Keep it in mind, and if it comes up, mention it. Don’t force anything,” Virgil said. “Okay, they’re coming up the walk. When the doorbell rings—”
    “Count to five.”
    “Jenkins is right at the bottom of the basement stairs, I’ll be right here. . . . Leave the bedroom door open.” He was looking out through the blind. “Okay, they’re on the porch. Here we go.”
    He put the radio to his face and said, “Shrake, as soon as they’re inside, and talking, I’ll double-click, and you get up by the side door.”
    “Got that,” Shrake said.
    The doorbell rang, and Virgil stepped over to the bedroom closet and said, “Break a leg,” and stepped inside and plugged in the radio earpiece and turned off the speaker. Gordon was headed toward the door and he said into the radio, “Showtime.”
     
     
    GORDON PULLED the inside door open and looked through the storm door. Roland Olms was there, and she looked at him and said, aloud,