“Yeah?”
“The guy in the truck — he must’ve been slouched down in the truck, or sitting in the weeds off to the side. If I’d pulled in there and looked in the window, if I’d seen him, he might’ve killed me.”
Virgil nodded. “Yeah. I’ll tell you what, Muddy. I don’t want to scare you unnecessarily, but we’ve got a nutcake on our hands. That’s why you’ve got to stay clear. If this guy came back, it wouldn’t make any difference if you had your rifle. He’s a back-shooter. He’d kill you like he was stepping on a bug.”
“Okay,” Muddy said.
Virgil looked at him for a moment, then said, “Okay.” He added, “I need to talk to your father. You got a cell phone for him?”
Virgil drove back down the valley to a mailbox that said “Carlson,” got a flashlight out of his toolbox, and walked around the turnout. He found nothing usefuclass="underline" it was all loose gravel, nothing that would hold tire tracks. Neither did he find any fresh cigarette butts, matchbooks from Spike’s Biker Bar and Grill, or discarded receipts with a credit card number. He did see a Northern Walkingstick, Diapheromera femorata, making its ponderous way across the gravel.
He went up the driveway, and a motion-sensor light came on, and there were lights in the house, but nobody answered the door. As he was standing there, one of the lights in the back winked out, but a lamp turned on, and he could see it, and nobody was standing by it: timer switches.
He drove back to the crime scene, where somebody had put a plastic sheet over Zorn’s body, and checked with Purdy: “Are you okay with Alewort working this, or you want me to bring down a BCA crime-scene team?”
Purdy said, “I think we’re good, Virgil. There just isn’t much to the scene.”
Virgil told him to have his investigator check with Muddy Ruff: “He saw a red Ford pickup parked up the valley. He thinks it could have been the shooter’s truck. He might be right, but he doesn’t have much on it. Tell your investigator that I might stop back here tomorrow and have another run at Miz Zorn.”
On the way out of the valley, he called Muddy’s father, but the call clicked through to the answering service, and he left a message asking for a callback. He called Johnson Johnson: “You gotta call around to your friends. I need to know if any of them might have gone after Roy Zorn tonight.”
“What happened?”
“Somebody shot Zorn in his driveway.”
“Better than shootin’ him in his heart,” Johnson said.
“Johnson…”
“All right, all right. Is he dead?”
“Yeah, and it looks like the same guy who took out Conley. There’s something going on, Mr. Johnson, and we don’t know what it is.”
“If one of the boys shot Zorn, they wouldn’t tell me, but I might find out if somebody’s nervous,” Johnson said.
“You be careful when you ask, I don’t need to teach somebody else how to fish.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“And listen, I’m going back up there early tomorrow — same place we went the other day, but at five o’clock in the morning. I want to be hidden by five-thirty. You up for that?”
“Can I bring my gun?”
“Would it make any difference if I said no?”
“Not really, but I’m a polite guy, so I thought I’d ask. There’s a carp fisherman’s turnoff four or five hundred yards south of where we parked the other day. Let’s go back in there, we can leave our cars by the ramp. Shouldn’t nobody from the valley see them back there.”
Virgil was back to town when Julius Ruff called him back: “Something happen?” he asked, sounding scared.
Virgil told him about it, and said, “You gotta nail down Muddy — he can’t go wandering around up there, not until we’re done with this. He said he was going up tomorrow, and I told him not to, but he might anyway. Keep him out of it.”
“I will. I’ll keep him out of it, I swear to God,” Ruff said.
Back at the cabin, Virgil got in bed and read one of Johnson’s Randy Wayne White novels for a while, then spent some time thinking about God and why he would allow dogs to be mistreated. Before he fell asleep, he thought that it was time that he catch Buster Gedney by himself, away from his wife, and squeeze hard. He was the source of the three-burst .223 kits, Virgil knew it in his heart. He set his clock for five in the morning, and killed the light.
Turned it back on five minutes later, read one more chapter in the Randy Wayne White novel, then turned it off again and went to sleep.
12
The night was losing its grip, and the early morning steam was hanging off the river’s surface, when they pulled into the parking area near the dirt ramp. A pickup followed them in, towing a trailer that carried a twenty-foot-long jon boat.
The truck driver swung in a wide circle, backed up — fast — toward the waterline at the ramp, hit his brakes, and the boat slid off the trailer into the water. The fisherman jumped out of the truck, walked around to the trailer, untied the line that kept the boat from floating away, tied it to a pole stuck in the ground next to the ramp, got in the truck, and pulled it up beside Virgil’s SUV.
He hopped out, nodded at Virgil, and said, “Johnson, morning,” and Johnson said, “Syz, how they hangin’,” and they all went their separate ways. By the time Virgil and Johnson got to the highway, Syz was roaring out into the river.
“He’s a Polack from Chicago, a carp fisherman,” Johnson told Virgil. “They like their smoked carp, the Polacks do. Smoke it almost till it’s brown. Kinda nicotine-colored.”
They walked up the highway, dodged across when they got a break in the high-speed traffic, and began climbing the hill. They were both carrying their packs; Virgil’s pistol was in his, with a couple bottles of water and the large-sized Payday peanut candy bar. At five-twenty they were at the top of the ridge at the far eastern end of the valley. They found a grassy mound inside a clump of sumac, made sure it wasn’t an anthill, and sat down.
Johnson took a beer out of the pack and popped the top.
They were waiting, and didn’t have much to talk about, so Virgil said, “I’m starting to worry about your drinking.”
Johnson said, “Me, too.”
“Then why don’t you quit?”
“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it, but never got around to it,” Johnson said. “I talked to Clarice about getting married, you know, but she said she won’t do it, if I keep drinking.”
“How many beers are you up to?”
“Don’t really count, but I pretty much do a six-pack a day, I guess. Give or take. Mostly give.”
“Jesus, Johnson, you gotta quit,” Virgil said. “You’re hanging around a lumber mill, for Christ’s sakes. Circular saws. Chain saws.”
“Yeah, I guess. All right.”
“All right, what?”
“All right, I’ll quit. I’ll drink these two, and that’ll be the end of it,” Johnson said.
Virgil told him about the murder of Zorn, and the scene the night before, and his encounter with Muddy Ruff. “That kid knows more than he lets on,” Johnson said. “You ought to get close to him. If he thinks you’re a friend, he’d talk.”
“You mean, exploit him.”
“Well, yeah.”
They didn’t talk for a while. Johnson popped the top on the second beer, took a long swig, then tossed the nearly full can over his shoulder and down the hill. “Good-bye, old friend,” he said.
“I’ll believe it a year from now,” Virgil said.
Johnson: “Say, this whole stop-drinking thing… it doesn’t include margaritas, does it?”
Virgil was checking the time on his cell phone—6:50—when they first heard the dogs, like a distant pack of foxhounds off in the English hills, somewhere. The barking got louder, over the next couple of minutes, and faster than a dog could run, Virgil thought. He took his weapon out of his pack, with its holster, tucked it into the back of his pants, and said, “Let’s go. I don’t want to see your gun unless I’m shot.”