“Don’t even start,” Virgil said. “You were in this up to your neck.”
—
Dawn finally arrived an hour after people began asking “Is it getting lighter in the east?” which it hadn’t been, but by 5 o’clock it had. A crowd of Wheatfieldians had gathered across the street, and an ambulance from Fairmont had joined the cop cars, as a precaution.
“We’ll wait until the sun’s up,” Virgil said. “Jenkins and I will clear the place... and”—he looked at Bakker, who was leaning against the fender of his patrol car, the combat shotgun resting behind him—“we’ll take Darren as backup.”
“Ooo. Gives me a hard-on,” Bakker said.
Banning: “’Bout time something did.”
“Hey...”
—
At 5:45, Jenkins kicked the side door.
He, Virgil, and Bakker were armored up, Jenkins and Bakker both wearing helmets and leading the way in, Virgil trailing. They first went down to the basement, Bakker now leading the way with the muzzle of his shotgun. The basement had wall-top, dirt-grimed windows on all four sides, and they could see that one of the windows under the porch was hanging open. The basement floor was dusty and crisscrossed by woman-sized footprints, which finally went up the stairs.
It appeared that she’d gone up and down several times—“maybe when Apel was talking to her,” Jenkins said. The basement was empty of anything useful. There were no lightbulbs in the sockets;an old workbench stood against one wall, not worth salvaging; and built-in shelves had been stripped of whatever they’d been holding, except for a pile of decades-oldTarweveld Advertisers. A hot-water tank was tilted on one rusty, broken foot. The centerpiece was a huge old coal-burning furnace, like the abandoned one in the Apels’ house, its heavy metal door hanging open; to one side was a coalbin. Virgil checked the bin, thinking that Apel might have gone out its door, but it had been nailed shut.
“Gotta be upstairs,” Jenkins said.
They turned toward the stairs. Virgil said, “Take it slow. Darren, if you want to lead... What?”
Bakker was looking at the furnace, then put a finger to his lips, and said, quietly, to Virgil, “Remember that hotfoot at the Nazis’ place?”
Jenkins said, “What?”
Bakker stepped over to the pile of old newspapers, said, aloud, “If we gotta search the house, there’s no point in freezing our asses off while we’re doing it. Help me get some wood in the furnace.”
He pointed at the ducts coming out of the ancient furnace; one of them was two feet in diameter.
Virgil said, “Yeah, you’re probably right.” He wrenched one of the rotting shelves off the wall and banged the side of the furnace.
Bakker took a cigarette lighter out of his pocket, muttered, “I’m probably gonna feel like an asshole,” lit the newspaper, got a smoky fire going on the crumpling newsprint, stuck it in the furnace, and waved it around.
Ann Apel cried, “Don’t do that.”
Virgil stuck his head in the furnace. “Ann! Come out of there.” She was in the largest of the ducts.
Her voice wavered. “I’m going to kill myself.”
Virgil: “Don’t do that. Ann, c’mon...”
“Go away!”
“We can’t go away, Ann. Listen, you’ve still got all your rights to a—”
BANG!
They all jumped, and Jenkins said, “Oh, no.”
There was a metallic rattling in the furnace, and a rifle stock fell partway out of the duct where Apel had been hiding. From upstairs, Zimmer shouted, “We’re coming in!”
Bakker reached into the furnace, grabbed the rifle stock, and pulled it out.
Virgil was the thinnest of the cops, and he managed to crawl into the furnace up to his waist. Behind him, up the stairs, Zimmer was shouting, “What happened? What happened?”
