They helped her get into Virgil’s truck, and Virgil put a leg-iron around one ankle and clipped it to a steel loop welded to the floor. When she was settled, Virgil asked, “What’s your name?”
“Carolyn Weaver,” the woman said.
Virgil said, “Okay, Carolyn, it’ll help if you get some cold on your face to hold down the swelling. I’m going to give you a big chunk of snow to put on it. I’m going inside your trailer to get something to wrap it in. Do you hear me?”
She nodded, and Virgil said to Griffin, “Hold the pad against her face until I get back.”
Virgil went to the trailer, where Weaver’s keys were still in the lock. Inside, the first thing he saw were large cardboard boxes full of Barbie dolls and smaller cardboard boxes full of the tiny voice boxes. He looked around, found a box of garbage bags, took one outside, put a couple of pounds of packed snow in one of them, carried it over to the truck, and said to Weaver, “Lean forward. I’m going to put the bag of snow against the back of the frontseat. Push against it with your face—but keep the pad pinned to your nose, too. We want the pad to stop the bleeding, the cold to stop the swelling. You got that?”
“Yeah.”
They did that, and Virgil said, “I’ll get you into the clinic in ten minutes. You have to hold it there until then. Hold it with your face.”
“’Kay.”
Virgil shut the truck door and said to Griffin, “The trailer is full of Barbie dolls and those voice things. She was making them here.”
“Terrific,” Griffin said. “You’ve made my day, Virgil. I’ll get a deputy with a search warrant. And, goddamnit, that was one of the best punches I’ve ever seen.Ever.That was like... totallyawesome.”
“Thank you. I thought it was a good one,” Virgil said. “I better go lock the trailer.”
Virgil went back to the trailer, and Griffin said, “Give me a peek.”
Before Virgil could say yes or no, she climbed the stoop and pushed the door open. In the next second or so, as Virgil was climbing the stoop, she snapped a few photos with a small Sony point-and-shoot camera, until Virgil told her to stop—“Technically, you shouldn’t be in there.”
“I’m in shock from the fight. I wasn’t thinking. When I saw the contraband, I reacted instinctively to take the pictures,” she said. “That’s my story, and I believe the court will accept it. Where are you headed now?”
“Into the Trippton Clinic,” Virgil said.
“I’ll follow you. As soon as Weaver is done with the doc, I’m going to drop some paper on her.”
The trip to town took fifteen minutes in the snow, and, on the way, Virgil said to Weaver, “I locked up your trailer.”
“Manufactured home,”she said. She began to cry, and hadn’t stopped when they arrived at the clinic.
SEVENTEENBirkmann sat frozen with fear in The Roasting Pig, thinking about what Margot Moore had said. Moore didn’t know what she knew—but if Flowers went back to her and she blurted it out, even in confusion, Flowers would be on that one simple fact like a duck on a june bug, and he, David Birkmann—Daveareeno, etc., Bug Boy—would be fucked.
So Birkmann sat in the coffee shop, running through a list of fantasies about how it all could be explained. Came up empty. As the sun disappeared behind the bluffs and the night came down like an Army blanket pulled over the head, the question occurred to him,What if Margot died?
Moore was some kind of health nut and obviously wasn’t going to drop dead on her own, so there was no point in pretending. If she was going to die, she’d have to be murdered.
An ugly word.
Murdered.
More fantasies, in which she died all on her own... And finally a dark, tickling thought, persistent, unavoidable: a perfectmurder weapon was at hand. Something nobody else in town had access to...
Birkmann’s father had dealt almost entirely with bugs. Insects. On a rare occasion, one of his clients might ask him to take care of an errant raccoon or skunk. Or an obstreperous possum, a too-visible rat. For those occasions, he carried a.22 caliber Ruger pistol in his van. The notable thing about the pistol was that it was made specifically for exterminators. And was silenced, so as not to disturb the peace when used in urban settings.
The pistol was in a wooden box at the back of a storage closet. The weapon had been purchased before all the current paperwork was required, probably forty years before. There was no sentimental value to it. But who threw away a gun? They were serious chunks of metal that, with even minimal care, would last forever. A ’70s gun in a common caliber was as good as a gun bought yesterday.
Birkmann dug it out, carried it up to the living room, and sat and stared at it. Worked the action...
—
Margot Moore’s second guest, Sandy Hart, came through the front door at seven o’clock, brushed a few snowflakes off her shoulders and out of her hair, pulled off her coat, and said, “My golly, when will this cold go away? It’s been a week, and I don’t see an end to it.”
Moore took her coat to put on the bed and said, “Don’t worry, we’ve got something to warm you up.”
