“Wish I was going,” Letty said.

“But you’re not. You’re gonna sit on your butt until your ribs heal up,” Lucas said. “Even if I gotta handcuff you to a chair.”

Weather was unhappy that Lucas was leaving Letty at the cabin alone, but Lucas said, with a crackle of impatience, “Listen. Nobody’s gonna find her at the cabin. We give highly detailed maps to friends and they still can’t find it. She’ll be alone for four hours, watching TV. If you insist, she can go up in the attic and pull out the shotgun. But if I’ve got to sit here, staring at her for four hours, and then go over to Baudette, I’ll have to stay overnight. I was hoping to get home tonight.”

“All right. All right. We’ll get there as fast as we can,” Weather said. “I’ll be righteously pissed if you don’t make it home tonight, though.”

So he left Letty at the cabin with a kiss on the forehead, with easy access to food and a Beretta 12-gauge, and headed west. He passed the Juggalo encampment, which had grown even further, still with a cluster of cop cars around the murder scene.

As he went through Hayward, he got on the phone to Virgil Flowers: “Are you still in Fergus Falls?”

A moment of silence: “Where the hell else would I be?”

“Hey, you don’t have to be rude about it.”

“Fuck you, I’m hanging up.”

But he didn’t, not quite quickly enough. Lucas asked, “How fast can you get to Baudette?”

“Are you kidding me? I can leave in one minute,” Flowers said. “If I have to stay here for more than another ten minutes, I’m going to start shooting at a state senator’s cousins.”

“Use your pistol. At least that way, you won’t actually hit anyone.” Lucas and Flowers had once been in a shoot-out in which Flowers attempted to shoot a woman in the chest. He hit her in the foot.

“I’m laughing inside,” Flowers said. “Of all the miserable, rotten, corrupt, useless, political-payoff assignments in the universe . . . I’m out spying on sheep in the middle of the night, I’m talking to a guy who says he was taken up in a flying saucer and had sexual experiments done on him—which, I got to say, is probably the only sexual experiments he’s ever had done on him, that didn’t involve a heifer, because he’s the single least likable motherfucker in the state of Minnesota.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You weren’t really supposed to investigate, Virgil, you were supposed to pretend to investigate. You knew that. Anyway, this is serious. I’m headed over to Baudette . . .”

He explained the situation, and Flowers asked, “Letty’s really okay?” Despite their difference in ages, there’d always been an electrical buzz between Letty and Flowers. And Flowers wasn’t that old.

“She’s fine. She hurts, but I have to say, a little pain will probably be good for her,” Lucas said. “She walks up to an insane killer—literally insane—and gives him shit, and gets off with a black eye and some cracked ribs. I’ll take that.”

“I wouldn’t, if I had a daughter,” Flowers said. “I’d hunt him down and shoot him. With a rifle. Or maybe just beat him into tomato paste.”

“From what I’ve heard about Frankie, you probably will, sooner or later, have the chance to do something like that, and probably sooner. Then you’ll be begging for daughter-raising advice. Like the first time she comes home with her bra on backwards.”

“Whatever. See you in Baudette. If I get there first, I’ll check at the courthouse and find out where this guy actually lives.”

“See you there,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

LUCAS WORRIED ABOUT Letty all the way through Duluth, heading west and then north in the Mercedes until Weather called and said, “We’ve got her. She’s still alive. But jeez, that’s a black eye for the ages.”

“Tell her to remember to take her stool softener,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

WITH LETTY SAFE, he worried about Flowers for a while. Flowers was one of the best investigators he’d ever met, or even heard of, and had gotten himself tangled up in some strange cases: but he’d been right about the Fergus Falls assignment. The assignment had been phony from the start and Flowers was in Fergus Falls basically as a sop to a state senator who had some influence over a piece of the BCA budget.

The fact that the senator was crazier than a bedbug and dumber than a crescent wrench hadn’t changed that one salient fact: he had some influence.

So Flowers had gone . . . and Lucas had been dragged under another inch.

•   •   •

THE DRIVE TO BAUDETTE was fundamentally boring, through low, swampy country for the most part, though the straight sections of the empty highway gave him a chance to blow the excess oil out of the Benz’s cylinders—he could get it to 121, but then it started to make some strange noises, and the road was rough enough that the truck was hopping around like a grasshopper on a griddle. Lucas was closing in on Baudette when Flowers called: “I’ve got the address, some satellite photos, and a search warrant. Supposedly an old farm gone to seed. Where are you?”

“The nav system says I’m fifteen miles out,” Lucas said. “What’s this about a search warrant?”

“The sheriff knows the place and the kid you’re looking for. Says he’s no-good white trash and probably heavily armed. I told him the situation and he took me over to a judge’s house and got us a search warrant. I didn’t see any reason to say no,” Virgil said. “If you’re fifteen miles out, you probably just passed the farm. We can either come that way—me and the sheriff’s deputy, with the warrant—or you can come on into town. I’m at a Holiday station.”

“I need gas and something to eat. I’ll meet you there.”

“Look for the giant walleye,” Flowers said.

•   •   •

LUCAS EASED OFF the accelerator as he came into town, eventually crossed a bridge, and simultaneously spotted the giant walleye, the Holiday station, and Virgil Flowers. Flowers was sitting on the hood of his 4Runner, in the Holiday parking lot, wearing a tan straw cowboy hat and eating an ice cream cone; his boat was hooked to the back of the truck. Seated next to him on the hood was the deputy, also licking an ice cream cone, and the first thing that Lucas noticed about her was that she was noticeable, and she was laughing at something Flowers had said.

“Fuckin’ Flowers,” he muttered to himself.

Lucas parked and got out of the truck, and Flowers introduced the deputy as Nancy Mahler. Mahler hopped down and shook his hand and said, “Virgie has been telling me all about you. I’m honored.”

Lucas said, “Jesus, Virgil, what’d you tell her?” though he didn’t mind the attention.

“About how you rescued that deputy last year,” she said. She had eyes the color of new-mown hay and blond hair cut close. “He said if you hadn’t kicked down the door and gone in there alone, she’d be dead now.”

“Well, we don’t really know that,” Lucas said. But he clapped Flowers on the shoulder and said, “Good to see you, guy. Let me get something to eat and we’ll figure out what we’re doing.”

•   •   •

LUCAS GOT A suspicious-looking egg salad sandwich, a pack of Sno Balls, some strips of beef jerky, and a Diet Coke. They all got in his Benz, with Mahler peering over their shoulders from the backseat as they thumbed through the aerial photos Flowers had downloaded at the sheriff’s office.