He plopped down in the bow seat and Virgil threw a noisy top-water bait toward the shore, reeled it in, saw nothing, threw it again.
"With the fog and stuff, the moon looks like one of those fake potato chips," Johnson said.
"What?" Virgil wasn't sure he'd heard it right.
"One of those Pringles," Johnson said.
Virgil paused between casts and said, "I don't want to disagree with you, Johnson, but the moon doesn't look like a Pringle."
"Yes, it does. Exactly like a Pringle," Johnson said.
"It looks like one of those balls of butter you get at Country Kitchen, with the French toast," Virgil said.
"Ball of butter?" Johnson blinked, looked at the moon, then back at Virgil. "You been smokin' that shit again?"
"Looks a hell of a lot more like a butterball than it does like a Pringle," Virgil said. "I'm embarrassed to be in the same boat with a guy that says the moon looks like a Pringle."
You need a good line of bullshit when you're musky fishing, because there're never a hell of a lot of fish to talk about. Johnson looked out over the lake, the dark water, the lights scattered through the shoreline pines, the lilacs and purples of the western sky, vibrating against the luminous yellow of the Pringle- or butterball-like moon. "Sure is pretty out here," he said. "God's country, man."
"That's the truth, Johnson."
Vermilion Lake, the Big V, far northern Minnesota. They floated along for a while, not working hard; it'd be a long day on the water. A boat went by in a hurry, two men in it, on the way to a better spot, if there was such a thing.
WHEN THE SUN CAME UP, a finger of wind arrived, a riffle across the water, enough to set up a slow motorless drift down a weedline at the edge of a drop-off. They were two hours on the water, halfway down the drift, when another boat came up from the east, running fast, then slowed as it passed, the faces of the two men in the boat white ovals, looking at Virgil and Johnson. The boat slowed some more and hooked in toward the weedline.
"Sucker's gonna cut our drift," Johnson said. He had no time for mass murderers, boy-child rapers, or people who cut your drift.
"Looks like Roy," Virgil said. Roy was the tournament chairman.
"Huh." Roy knew better than to cut somebody's drift.
The guy on the tiller of the other boat chopped the motor, and they drifted in a long arc, sliding up next to the Tuffy.
"Morning, Virgil. Johnson." Roy reached out and caught their gunwale and pulled the boats close.
"Morning, Roy," Johnson said. "Arnie, how you doing?"
Arnie nodded and ejected a stream of tobacco juice into the lake. Roy, who looked like an aging gray-bearded Hells Angel, in a red-and-black lumberjack shirt, if a Hells Angel ever wore one of those, said, "Virgil, a guy named Lucas Davenport is trying to get you."
"You tell him to go fuck himself?"
Roy grinned. "I was going to, until he said who he was. He told me to break into your cabin and get your cell phone, since you wouldn't have it with you. He was right about that." He fished Virgil's cell phone out of his shirt pocket and passed it across. "Sorry."
"Goldarnit, Roy," Johnson said.
"Probably got no reception," Virgil said. He punched up the phone and got four bars and Roy waggled his eyebrows at him.
"I tell you what, Virgil, there ain't many things more important to me than this tournament, so I know how you feel," Roy said. "But Davenport said there's a murdered woman over at Stone Lake and you need to look at her. That seemed more important."
"You know her?" Johnson asked.
"No, I don't," Roy said.
"Then how in the heck could she be more important?" Johnson asked. "People die all the time. You worry about all of them?"
"Kinda wondered about that myself," Arnie said. To Roy: "We're losing a lot of fishing time, man."
ROY AND ARNIE MOTORED OFF and Virgil sat down, Johnson bitching and moaning and working his Double Cowgirl as they continued the drift. Virgil stuck a finger in his off-ear and punched Davenport's home number on the speed dial. Davenport answered on the second ring.
"You on the lake?" Davenport asked.
"Yeah. Two hours," Virgil said. "We've seen two fish."
"Nice day?"
"Perfect." Virgil looked around in the growing light: and he was right. It was perfect. "Partly cloudy, enough breeze to keep us cool, not enough to bang us around."
"Virgil, man, I'm sorry."
"What happened?"
"A woman got shot by a sniper at Eagle Nest Lodge on Stone Lake, over by Grand Rapids. Her name is-was-Erica McDill. She's the CEO of Ruff-Harcourt-McDill, the ad agency in Minneapolis."
"I've heard of it," Virgil said.
"So two things-she was a big Democrat and the governor would want us to take a look no matter what. Plus, the sheriff up there, Bob Sanders, is asking for help."
"When did they find her?"
"Right at sunup-an hour and a half ago. Sanders is out looking at the body now."
"Where are the Bemidji guys?" Virgil asked.
"They're up in Bigfork, looking for Little Linda," Davenport said. "That's why Sanders needs the help-his investigators are all up there, and half his deputies. A woman on the Fox network is screaming her lungs out, they're going nightly with it-"
"Ah, Jesus."
Blond, blue-eyed Little Linda Pelli had disappeared from her parents' summer home, day before last. She was fifteen, old enough not to get lost on her way to a girlfriend's cabin. There were no hazards along the road, and if her bike had been clipped by a car, they would have found her in a ditch. Nobody had found either Little Linda or her black eighteen-speed Cannondale.
Then a woman who worked at a local lodge had reported seeing an unshaven man "with silver eyes" and a crew cut, driving slowly along the road in a beat-up pickup. The television people went bat-shit, because they knew what that meant: somewhere, a silver-eyed demon, who probably had hair growing out of all his bodily orifices, had Little Linda chained in the basement of a backwoods cabin (the rare kind of cabin that had a basement) and was introducing her to the ways of the Cossacks.
"Yeah," Davenport said. "Little Linda. Listen, I feel bad about this. You've been talking about that tournament since June, but what can I tell you? Go fix this thing."
"I don't even have a car," Virgil said.
"Go rent one," Davenport said. "You got your gun?"
"Yeah, somewhere."
"Then you're all set," Davenport said. "Call me when you're done with it."
"Wait a minute, wait a minute," Virgil said. "I've got no idea where this place is. Gimme some directions, or something. There're about a hundred Stone Lakes up here."
"You get off the water, I'll get directions. Call you back in a bit."
THEY SHOT A ROOSTER TAIL back to the marina and Virgil showed the dock boy his identification and said, "We need to keep this boat handy. Put it someplace where we can get at it quick."
"Something going on?" the dock boy asked. He weighed about a hundred and six pounds and was fifty years old and had been the dock boy since Virgil had first come up to Vermilion as a teenager, with his father.
"Can't talk about it," Virgil said. "But you keep that boat ready to go. If anybody gives you any shit, you tell them the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension told you so."
"Never heard of that," the dock boy admitted. "The criminal thing."
Virgil took out his wallet, removed one of the three business cards he kept there, and a ten-dollar bill. "Anybody asks, show them the card."
HE AND JOHNSON walked across the parking lot to Johnson's truck, carrying their lunch cooler between them, and Johnson said, looking back at the boat, "That's pretty handy-we gotta do that more often. It's like having a reserved parking space," and then, "What do you want to do about getting around?"
"If you could run me over to the scene, that'd be good," Virgil said. "I'll figure out something after I see it-if it's gonna take a while, I'll go down to Grand Rapids and rent a car."