Virgil’s girlfriend, Frankie, had said, “You’ll come back with your balls glowing in the dark.”
“Wrong, ignorant farm girl,” Virgil said. “The cooling water doesn’t touch the radioactive part. You could drink it.”
“You know that for sure?”
“Yeah, I looked it up,” Virgil said. They were taking down the Christmas tree, packing the glass ornaments into boxes of Styrofoam peanuts. “Besides, if my balls did glow in the dark, I’d have some light when I get up at night to pee.”
“Or, even better,” she said, “you could lead Santa’s sleigh if something happened to Rudolph.”
She was not only an ignorant farm girl but a wiseass.
—
Virgil’s great horned target had taken up residence in a nearby oak: Virgil could see its hulk as a dark oval through the bare branches. The day before, he’d seen it swoop down over the water twice but hadn’t yet gotten a good shot, hadn’t yet seen it nail a fish. The problem was, the owl didn’t hunt during bright daylight hours, except for the couple of hours before sundown and the hour or so after daybreak.
To shoot at those times, he used a Nikon 400mm f2.8, paid for by the good citizens of Minnesota who’d bought it in the belief that he would use its lens to apprehend the criminal element. The lens cost something like twelve thousand dollars. Should it roll down the riverbank into the Mississippi, he’d be looking at a major hole in his retirement plan.
So here he was, sitting in a camo tent, eating cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers, a prefocused, bazooka-like camera lens mounted on a tripod. He hadn’t gotten the owl yet, but he’dgotten several dozen photos of other forms of wildlife—foxes, minks, otters, bald eagles—all pulled in by the warmth of the open water and the fish roiling the shallows near the shore.
He had gotten one great sequence of two coyotes hunting mice, or maybe voles, in the snow-bent wild grass at the top of the bank. The coyotes would move silently across the snowfield, noses down, ears up, listening for movement under the snow. When they heard something, they’d rear up and come down on the mouse or vole with both feet, pinning the unfortunate rodent to the ground.
Best shot: the larger of the two coyotes passing a mouse off to the other one. Mates? Sisters? Couldn’t tell. Great sequence, but great coyote sequences were a dime a dozen, as were great bald eagle shots. Dozens of bald eagles hunted the open water during the winter, and he could easily fill up a memory card with shots.
—
Virgil was looking at the Safari browser on his iPhone when the owl made its first move of the day. Virgil caught the movement out of the corner of his eye, went to the camera’s viewfinder, picked up the bird, and turned the lens with the bird’s flight and hit the trigger, which fired an automatic sequence of shots, andBANG!
Nothing.
The bird’s talons had touched the water but come up fishless. The owl flapped its great silent wings a couple of times and returned to its perch onshore.
“Get a fish, you incompetent motherfucker,” Virgil muttered. The owl sat on the branch, its head swiveling as though on ball bearings, then cocking sideways.
Virgil, under his breath: “Go, go, go...”
The bird made a small downward movement, as though cocking itself, and dropped back toward the water, andBANG!This time, it came up with a flapping fish, probably a small white sucker. Virgil shot thirty frames, starting from the owl’s launching point, to the water, and back. He burned up a few more frames of the bird tearing the fish apart, sat back, and chimped the results.
Not bad, he thought, as he flipped through the images on the camera’s LCD screen. In fact, excellent. One thousand American dollars, unless the good folks atWing & Talonhad been shining him on.
—
Back at his truck, he put the folded blind away and the lens back in its case, pulled his iPad out of the backseat and transferred the photos. He also kept them on the memory card as a backup and, when he got home, would move them to the Cloud as even further insurance.
He started the truck and was backing out to the road when the phone burped. Frankie wouldn’t be calling, because he’d asked her not to call between three o’clock and sundown when a call could disturb the owl. He picked up the phone and looked at the screen: Jon Duncan, his nominal boss at the BCA. He was on vacation, so the call could be social. Maybe. Okay, maybe not.
“What’s up?” Virgil asked.
“Man, I know you’re on vacation—”
“No, no, no! Get somebody else.”
“It’s down in Trippton, your old stomping grounds. I’ve got to ask you to take a look. Do this for me, take the rest of yourvacation when it’s done,” Duncan said. “The big boss says nobody will check if you take a bunch of undertime on top of your vacation.”
“Undertime” was a concept widely used in state government: it was like overtime, but instead of working more, you worked less, while still getting paid. The real artists took undertime while on the clock for overtime, thus getting time-and-a-half for not working.
“How much undertime?” Virgil asked.
“However much you want... that isn’t outright theft.”
