“You know—two eggs over easy, four strips of bacon, toast, orange juice,” Lucas said. “Thinking I might have the last slice of coconut crème pie for dessert. Left over from last night.”
“Right. I know about Weather’s vegetarian diet kick,” Virgil said. “You’re having two celery sticks and half an avocado. With a glass of water.”
“See you in an hour and a half?”
“See you there.”
—
Virgil had beenworking on the new novel—tentatively titledRock’n a Hard Place, about a murderous country-rock band—since eight o’clock. He rang off, saved the manuscript to Microsoft’s cloud and two separate flash drives. The window was open and he could hear the distant sound of a tractor doing something, maybe cutting hay, and a crow calling closer by.
He was barefoot, wearing a vintage Queen tee-shirt and blue nylon workout pants. He changed into an extra soft pair of jeans, a checked long-sleeved shirt, and leather walking shoes. Another pair of jeans, underwear, and two shirts went into a duffel bag along with his dopp kit. A shotgun, Apple laptop, a separate keyboard and mouse, a Garmin GPS receiver, Nikon Z7II camera with a couple of lenses, and binoculars went into a gear bag. An iPad would go on the passenger seat. He hauled it all out to his Tahoe.
He’d begun reading the Grandfelt files the night before, which Frankie had printed out in a near two-hour session. He stuck a partially marked-up printout in a canvas shoulder bag, along with his Glock and two magazines from the gun safe. He relocked the safeand pulled on his canvas not-quite-a-sport-coat, to go with the shoulder bag. That done, he cracked the cap on a Dos Equis, slipped it into a jacket pocket, put a Dog Star Ranch hat on his head and walked across the farmyard to the barn.
Frankie was out behind it, in a horse-manure-smelling round pen, lunging a horse named Rush. She was a short, busty woman wearing a white mannish shirt and black riding pants tucked into knee-high English riding boots. Rush was a tall brown rescue of unknown heritage that Frankie thought she could make into something. Honus the Yellow Dog was slumbering outside the pen.
Virgil put his forearms on the pole fence and shouted, “I gotta go. Up to Woodbury. You gotta pick up the kids at preschool.”
“Wait!” Frankie slowed Rush to a walk, then led him over to Virgil. She was sweating, a pleasant salty summer scent. “Where?”
“Woodbury. Lucas called. Something’s happening and he wants me to take a look. I could be a day or two.”
“You get any work done?” she asked.
“Maybe twelve hundred words,” Virgil said. “Not great, but not terrible. Needs work.”
Frankie said, “I’ve been thinking about the sex scene from last night. It slows things down too much and it’s not that interesting.”
“I fixed that. Took out the foreplay.”
“That’s the part I would have left in. Anyway…you won’t be back tonight?” she asked.
“Probably not. I’ll be at the Radisson. I can catch the rest of the daily quota tonight. Three hundred words. Maybe put some of the foreplay back in.” His daily quota was fifteen hundred good words, which editing would reduce to a thousand keepers.
They talked about scheduling—missing days and nights were still routine in the cop business—and Frankie climbed on the bottom rail of the fence to kiss him good-bye. As Virgil walked back to the Tahoe, Frankie started Rush again, circling him at a gallop, the horse moving like an elite athlete, the sound of his hooves sending Virgil off.
He pointed the truck mostly north, flipped the cap off the Dos Equis, put the bottle in the cupholder, said a brief prayer to St. Waylon, the protector of drivers against the evil eye of the highway patrol, and settled in for the ride.
—
August is thebest month in Minnesota, though some argue for September. The drive through the farmland was pleasant, aside from a dozen windshield bugs, coming off the near flood-stage Minnesota River, their yellow spatters like flicks of custard on the glass. The bug guts tended to bake on in the summer heat and it would get hot later in the day. He carried Windex and a roll of paper towels for cleanups. Of course, the random grasshopper collisions of August were nothing compared to a heavy mayfly emergence, so-called because they usually hatched in June.
So Virgil went on, thinking about not much, taking in the countryside, occasionally flashing on the Grandfelt crime-scene photos he’d reviewed the night before. He soon enough found himself threading through the town of Shakopee and then onto I-494, which would take him around the southern side of the Twin Cities to the crime scene.
Take him around the Twin Cities slowly: half the metro area was overrun with orange traffic-warning barrels, marking out construction zones and piling up traffic.
—
He crossed theMississippi, turned north, his iPad map app directing him off I-494, through a maze of tree-lined residential streets, past small houses that dated to the fifties and sixties, to Shawnee Park, in the suburban town of Woodbury. He spotted a jammed-up parking lot with twenty cars in it, three of them cop cars, and he rolled slowly that way.
The park, as he could see it from his truck, was a bowl with two baseball fields built into it, facing each other, with a shared outfield. A park building, probably for maintenance and possibly for bathrooms, was in front of him as he parked, and behind it, he could see a circular white wall that looked like it might be an outdoor hockey rink in the winter.
Across the playing fields, a line of tall trees—cottonwoods, aspens, what looked like box elders and maples—marked the edge of the playing fields, and behind the scrim of forest, sunlight sparkled off water.
As Virgil got out of his truck, a uniformed Woodbury cop walked over, checking Virgil’s grille lights as he came, and asked, “You a cop?”
“BCA.”
