12

VIRGIL OPENED his eyes: daylight.

He felt good, but a little stiff from sleeping on the floor.

Worried about the gunman, he'd taken the cushions off the couch, and had thrown them on the floor behind the bed, and put the pistol under the bed next to his hand. He didn't like the idea of sleeping through the night next to a sliding glass door. Joan was at her mother's. No point in taking a chance.

But he did feel good. Things were happening, and he was still alive.

Part of it was the absence of sex after the long naked interval in the pool. He'd tried to talk Joan into sneaking through the glass door into the Holiday Inn, but she turned him down: "Everybody in town would know before you got the curtain pulled. It's all right to sneak around and have sex, but it has to be creditably sneaky."

"Ah."

"My place," she said. "You could walk over in half an hour."

"I don't want you going to your place tonight. I was thinking…your mother's. You'd be close, but not where you'd have a target on you; he could be waiting for us to get back to your place…"

"Well, we're not doing anything at Mom's…"

So, they called it off.

Hands all over each other, parked three blocks from Mom's, like a couple of teenagers; and he dropped her.

And woke up feeling good. Maybe he could take a break from the hook-and-bullet magazines, and write a piece for Vanity Fair: "Violence: The New Aphrodisiac." But that wouldn't be right-it'd always been an aphrodisiac, as far as he could tell. Something primitive there…

Maybe, he thought, they should have stayed in the barn for a while, up in the hayloft.

When he was a teenager, there were locker-room fantasy stories-maybe one or two were true-of guys getting the farmer's daughter up in the hayloft. His best friend, Otis Ericson, had claimed to have nailed one of his girl cousins, Shirley, who was in their high school class, and even in eighth grade, had tits out to here.

In what Virgil assumed was nothing more than an effort at verisimilitude, the alleged fuckee warned Virgil against hay cuts, or hay rash: "And you sure as shit don't want to get any hay in her crack. She'll be bitching and moaning for a week. Take a blanket."

The thought that Otis Ericson might have actually gotten Shirley Ericson naked, in a hayloft, had, at the time, seriously turned him on; still did, a little, though the last time he saw Shirley, she'd sort of spread out.

LYING ON THE FLOOR, he looked at his watch: eight o'clock. Threw the cushions back on the couch, yawned, stretched, did his sit-ups and push-ups, cleaned up, and called Davenport.

"Still too early," Davenport said.

"I was shot at last night," Virgil said.

"Virgil! You okay?"

"Nothing but scared," Virgil said. "The shooter wasn't that good. Scoped rifle, I was up on a friend's farm, missed me by a couple of feet and I wasn't moving that fast."

"Tell me you had your gun," Davenport said.

"I had the gun. Saw him running, fired seven shots at maybe four hundred yards, chances of hitting him were zero…but…thought I should let you know. I'm pushing something here. I'm going to write some notes and e-mail them to you. Just in case."

"Goddamnit, Virgil, you take care," Davenport said. "You want help?"

"Just get me that paper that Sandy put together."

ON THE WAY to breakfast, the desk clerk said, "You've got mail," fished an envelope out of a desk drawer, and handed it to him. The address was typed; no return address. Mailed yesterday from Bluestem. He went on to the dining room, holding the envelope by its edges, slit it open with a butter knife, and slid the letter out.

You're barking up the wrong tree. Look at Bill Judd Jr.'s debt and think "estate tax." Look at Florence Mills, Inc.

That was it-no signature, of course, and the note was typed, not printed. Who'd still have a typewriter? Somebody old, like Gerald Johnstone, the funeral director. The stamp was self-sticking, so there'd be no DNA.

Estate tax? Florence Mills? Sounded like something more for Sandy to do, when she got back.

He finished breakfast, went back to his room for his briefcase, went out to the truck; went back to the room to get his gun, back to the truck; and headed out to the Stryker farm, past the farm, around behind the hill.

The far side of the hill, opposite the dell, had once been pastureland, before the countryside had emptied out, with the red quartzite right on the surface. There were clumps of wild plum and scrubby shrubs, thistle and open spaces with knee-high grass.

Virgil cruised the backside of the hill until he saw the truck tracks leading off-road. He turned off, bounced across a shallow ditch, and then ran parallel to the tracks, up the hill, to a copse of trees and bushes just below the crest of the hill. The tracks swerved around the copse, and ended. This was where the shooter had parked, out of sight from the road. He sat in the car for a minute, watching the road, and saw not another single vehicle; he was alone except for a red-tailed hawk, which circled the slope, looking for voles.

The hawk dropped, hit the ground, out of sight: breakfast. Virgil stepped out of the truck and looked at the tracks made by the shooter's vehicle. There were enough weeds and grass that any tread marks were hidden. He followed one of the tracks back down the hill, and never saw a clear print. Followed the other one back up, found nothing.

From the car park, looking up the hill, with the sun still at his back, he could see disturbed grass where the shooter had been. He got the shotgun out of the back of the truck, loaded it alternately with buckshot and solid slugs, jacked a shell into the chamber, and followed the trail to the top of the hill. A hundred yards over the crest, he could see the front lip of the pool, and the farther down the hill he went, the more of the pool he could see. The trail wasn't straight at this point. It moved between clumps of shrubs, which meant that he and Joan must've already been at the pool.

Another hundred yards, and he found the shooter's stand: a circle of crushed grass next to the broken-off and rotted stump of a small tree. If he'd rested the rifle on the stump, he'd have been able to see two-thirds of the pool. To see more, he would have had to go right up to the lip of the dell, without cover.

He checked around the nest: no brass. The guy had cleaned up after himself.

FROM VIRGIL'S VIEWPOINT, the dell, down below, didn't look like much: a crack in the landscape, with a wider spot, and a pool, near the bottom. He walked down, and when he got right on top of it, the character changed. Down here, the ground seemed to have been hit with a mammoth cleaver, carving a sharp trench right through the quartzite down to the pool.

If the shooter had been cooler, or braver, he could have waited until they were fooling around under the spring, out of sight, and then walked or crawled up to the back wall. From there he would have had them at sixty or seventy yards, and there would have been no place for Virgil and Joan to hide.

On the other hand, if they'd seen him sneaking down, and had gotten back to Virgil's gun and down the canyon, he'd have been screwed. In the folded, broken rocks of the canyon, a guy with a pistol could hold off a small army.

On that thought, Virgil took out his cell phone: he had a signal. You might not down in the dell, but you wouldn't know unless you were down there. Maybe the shooter had taken that into account. He could not allow somebody to see him, and walk away…

LOT TO THINK ABOUT. The day would be hot again. Another good day for the pool, but he wouldn't be swimming again until the killer was caught, or dead.

Virgil went back to the truck, shucked the shells out of the shotgun and put it away, and headed back to Roman Schmidt's place. Larry Jensen, Stryker's investigator, was there, with the crime-scene people. Virgil took Jensen aside.