God didn’t have a plan, Virgil believed.
God had His limits, and one of them was, He didn’t always know what would happen; or if He did know, He didn’t care; or if He cared, He was constrained by His own logic and couldn’t do anything about death and destruction. Virgil believed that God was actually a part of a rolling wave front, hurtling into an unknown future; and that humans, animals and, possibly, trees and chinch bugs had souls that would rejoin God at death.
Which brought him to Camus’ big question, and he didn’t like to think about Camus, so he went to sleep.
He woke up at eight, bone-tired, rushed through a shower, got his musky rod out of the car and his emergency tackle box and walked down to the boat, pushed it off; heard a man yelling at him, looked back and saw Root, standing on the grass shore, barefoot, in black Jockey shorts and a white T-shirt.
Root shouted, “Hey, big ballplayer,” and he heaved a perfect, twenty-yard spiral pass and Virgil plucked a bottle of Miller Genuine Draft out of the air, ice cold. “Back in an hour,” Virgil called, and he headed across the lake, into the wind, to the far shoreline, where he set up a drift and began casting along the edge of a weed bank.
The water was clear and the sun was on his back and he could see into the water as though it were an aquarium, and it all smelled wonderful, like pine and algae and fish, and nothing at all like a blood-soaked car. In forty-five minutes, in three drifts, he caught two hammer-handle northerns, threw them back, and had a follow from a decent, but not great, musky. He was happy to see the fish in the water and he worked a figure eight, trying to get it to strike, and finally gave up, sat down, and cracked the Miller.
The beer was pretty much dog piss, he thought as he drank it, but not bad on a morning that was cold on the verge of turning hot. He finished the beer and dropped the bottle in the bottom of the boat. He felt like a horse’s ass for doing it, but took out his cell phone and checked for messages.
Two: Davenport and Carl Knox.
He stared at the Knox call for a moment, then clicked through to the number, and sat there on the bench seat looking at a woman and a small girl fly-fishing on the far shore, the woman showing the girl how to roll a cast out over the water, and Knox answered after two rings.
“Virgil Flowers, BCA, returning your call,” Virgil said.
“Flowers-where are you?”
“ Bemidji,” Virgil said.
“Then you know about Ray,” Knox said.
“Yeah-how did you know about it?”
“Have you looked at a TV this morning?” Knox asked.
“All right. We need to talk,” Virgil said.
“Yeah. But I’ve got myself ditched where this asshole can’t find me, and I’ve got my own security,” Knox said. “I’m pretty far from Bemidji, but I can get there. We need to meet someplace… obscure.”
Virgil scratched his head, looking in toward the RootyToot. “Okay. Where are you coming from?”
Hesitation. Then: “Down south of you a couple of hours.”
Liar, Virgil thought. “Okay. There’s a broken-ass resort northwest of Bemidji on Highway 89 about four miles north of Highway 2. It’s called the RootyToot.”
“Wait, wait, let me look at my atlas… page seventy-one… okay, I see it, south of Pony Lake.”
“That’s it,” Virgil said. “There’s a Budweiser sign right on the highway. See you when? Noon?”
“Noon. Be there right on the nose. I ain’t hanging out.”
TWO HOURS and a little more; he could spend more time on the water, and he did, until the sun started cooking his nose. He had some suntan lotion in his tackle box, but he didn’t want to get started with that; he needed to go in and shave. He called Sandy and said, “I want you to do something for me. You heard that Ray Bunton got killed?”
“Yes. It’s everywhere. All the TV people are flying up there, wherever you are,” she said.
“Okay. What I need is, I need you to do research on Ray Bunton, and see if you can spot his mother’s house without knowing her name. If there’s a way to track Bunton through the res, somehow, and get to that house.”
“I see what you’re getting at,” she said. “I’ll start right now.”
HE CALLED Davenport before he started the motor, and Davenport came up and said, “What happened?”
“You probably know as much as I do-or, if you don’t, call Chuck Whiting. What you don’t know is, Carl Knox called me and we just negotiated a meet-up north of Bemidji. He says he’s coming up from the south, but he’s lying-he’s coming down from International Falls.”
“You gonna bust him?”
“I’ve got nothing to bust him with. He says he’s hiding out from the shooter. But he wants to meet because he’s got something. We’re set up to meet at a place called the RootyToot Resort, whatever the heck that is. I gotta get my atlas out and find it, I’m heading up there to scout it out.”
“Careful, Virgil. This might be a place that he’s got locked down,” Davenport said.
“You don’t think he’d pull anything? With a cop?” Across the lake, the woman with the fly rod had hooked into a panfish of some kind, probably a bluegill, and handed the rod to the little girl, who played it in. And far down the lake, he could see the white line that meant a bigger powerboat was headed his way.
“No. I’ve talked to him a couple times,” Davenport said. “He’s an asshole, but, you know… he’ll talk to you. He knows where things are at.”
“All right. Listen, I gotta run. I’ll call you as soon as I hear something,” Virgil said.
“Stay in touch. I’ll talk to Ruffe over at the Star Tribune, let him understand that things are breaking, that we should have something pretty quick. Maybe he could drop in a story that would take some pressure off.”
In another thirty seconds, Davenport would hear the powerboat in the background. Virgil said, “Okay, I’m running. Talk to you.”
Virgil stuck the phone back in his pocket and smiled: what Davenport didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Or Virgil. He cranked the motor and headed into shore, the water smooth as an old black mirror.
WHEN HE WAS cleaned up, wearing a fresh but ancient white Pogues T-shirt, and a black cotton sport coat over his jeans, he went off to the bar to talk with Root, who’d had a couple eye-openers, getting up a morning shine so that he could drift painlessly through the afternoon before getting totally crushed in the evening.
“Virgil fuckin’ Flowers, ” Root said. There were three other men in the bar, two facing each other across a table, the other sitting at the bar, all three with beers. Root introduced Virgiclass="underline" “This is my friend Virgil Flowers, the famous outdoor writer, who is also a cop and is up here investigating that murder in Bemidji, I bet. Is that right?”
Virgil nodded, and said, “Good morning, David. I see the lake is empty of fish, as usual. Give me a Diet Coke.”
“Empty of fish,” Root said. “If you knew a fuckin’ thing about fishing… whoops…” He grimaced at his own language, and Virgil turned and saw the fisherwoman and the little girl walking past the screen windows, and a moment later they came inside.
The woman was probably forty, Virgil thought, thin, small-breasted, with a sprinkling of freckles across her nose, and nice brown eyes. She had a fisherwoman’s tanned face and arms, with a small white scar on one of her arms, and Virgil felt himself slipping over the edge into love.
She glanced at Virgil and smiled and then said to Root, “We need a cream soda and an ice cream cone,” and Root got a soda from a cooler behind the bar and the little girl fished an ice cream cone out of a freezer by the door, the woman paid, and they took the soda and the cone to a corner table.
Root said to Virgil, “So what happened to this Indian dude?” and the three drinking men bent his way.