14
Virgil went to bed discouraged. Every time he found something that looked like a lead, it turned out to be a dead end. God didn’t show up that night, so he slipped off to sleep without conversation.
—
Bell Wood, the Iowa state investigator, called at 9 o’clock the next morning, and said, “We’re going through Humboldt right now, so we’re an hour out of Armstrong. We still on for ten o’clock?”
“Might as well be, I’m not solving any murders,” Virgil said. “And who’s ‘we’?”
“Special Agent Easton, Special Agent Rivers, and myself,” Wood said. “If this thing works out, I might take a day off and come up and solve your Wheatfield problem myself.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Virgil said. “See you in a bit.”
—
Virgil called Jenkins and Shrake, who were at Mom’s getting breakfast. “I’ll be there in four minutes,” he said. He drove to Mom’s, parked, went inside, and saw Jenkins and Shrake picking at their pancakes.
When they saw Virgil, Shrake pointed at his plate, and asked, “What are these things?”
“I asked the same question,” Virgil said. “Got a tip from Mom’s son: stay away from the meat products.”
“So what are we doing?” Jenkins asked, pushing the pancakes away.
“I’ll pick up Skinner and drive down to Armstrong, where he’ll take us to Ralph Van Den Berg’s place. You two will hide in Jenkins’s piece of shit and wait for Larry Van Den Berg to get back to his house. He’ll be back on the street about now, and it’ll take him twenty minutes to get here. If he heads south for Iowa, we want to know about it. If he doesn’t for an hour or two, we’ll raid Ralph’s place anyway.”
“We gotta find something to eat,” Shrake said.
“Skinner and Holland have chicken potpies that aren’t bad. I’ve had a couple of them,” Virgil said.
Shrake looked at Jenkins, and said, “We gotta hurry.”
—
Virgil picked up Skinner as Jenkins and Shrake ran into the store.
“They’re in a hurry,” Skinner said, looking after them.
“Breakfast,” Virgil explained. “They were down at Mom’s. They were uncertain about the food.”
They walked by Jenkins’s Crown Vic on the way to Virgil’s Tahoe, and Skinner asked, “What kind of car is that?”
“Crown Victoria—they quit making them before you started driving, even if you started driving when you were twelve,” Virgil said.
“Actually, I started when I was eight. I only started running into that cop when I was twelve.” Skinner stooped to peer through the Crown Vic’s side window. “Looks like a piece of shit.”
“You have naturally good taste,” Virgil said.
—
They headed south, and Skinner said, “I had a bad thought this morning. If the guy quits shooting right now, we’ll probably never get him. If Father Brice left the church open, we might have another chance.”
“What you mean is, if we let somebody else get murdered, we might be able to ambush him because we’d be waiting for the shooting.”
“The way you say it, it sounds wrong,” Skinner said.
“I apologize.”
“See? Now you’re giving me a hard time.”
