Virgil shrugged and said, “Well-I know about what you do. The killer’s the same guy who killed those guys down in the Cities, and the guy in New Ulm. We know that. Now it’s just… working through it.”
“What are the chances of getting him?” one of the men asked.
“Oh, we’ll get him,” Virgil said. “The guy’s asking for it, and he’s gonna get it. The question is, will he kill anybody else before we get him.”
“That is a question,” Root said. “The answer is, I think I’ll have a beer.”
SO THEY SAT and talked about murder, fishing, hunting, and boats; and after a bit, the woman finished her cream soda and she and the girl left, the woman raising a hand to Root, saying, “See ya, Dave,” and he said, “See ya, El,” and when she was gone, Virgil asked, “Who was that?”
“Her name is Loren; everybody calls her El, like the letter L. She and her husband got a place down the lake,” Root said. “He works in the Cities four days a week, comes up here three. Four days, though, she’s sorta… untended-to.”
“Untended-to, my ass,” one of the men said. “You tend to her, her old man’ll blow you up, that’s a fact.”
“You know him?” Virgil asked.
“Asshole,” the man said. “Big shot at Pillsbury.”
“How does that make him an asshole?” Dave asked, the beer bottle poised at his lower lip.
“I dunno. He’s an asshole because he’s married to her and I’m not,” the guy said. “I’m sitting in a dogshit tavern at eleven-fourteen in the morning drinking beer.”
“But that’s a good thing,” Dave said.
THEY SAT UNTIL almost noon, adding women to the list of murder, fishing, hunting, and boats, and then Virgil excused himself and wandered off. His cabin was in easy sight of the driveway. He thought about it for a minute, then went to his truck, fished around under the seat, got his pistol and a leather inside-the-waistband holster, and tucked the gun into the small of his back.
Then he sat on the top step of the cabin’s stoop, where he could be seen from the driveway. The woman and the girl were down at the dock, messing around in a boat, and Virgil watched for a couple of minutes, then a Jeep rolled into the parking lot and parked. The two men who got out weren’t fishermen, Virgil thought, and he stood up, and as they looked around, he nodded and they walked over.
“Virgil?” The two looked like bookends: tall, dark-haired men with bent noses and an air of competency, both wearing black sport coats and khaki slacks and L.L. Bean hiking shoes and black sunglasses.
“That’s me. But neither one of you is Carl,” Virgil said, remembering the portrait photo at the dealership.
“No, Carl’s coming in, he’ll be here in a minute or two,” the man said. He looked down at the lake, and the half-dozen boats tied to the pier, and the woman and kid. “Sal, why don’t you go get a few beers.”
Sal nodded wordlessly and walked down to the bar.
Virgil said, “You’re security.”
“Yeah, sorta.”
“Where’d you get your nose bent?” Virgil asked.
The man grinned, and Virgil suspected all of his short glittering-white teeth had been capped by a very good dentist. “ Chicago, actually.” He looked down at the pier. “You know the chick?”
“I asked about her, they know her in the bar,” Virgil said. “And the owner didn’t know I was coming until this morning-I sorta dropped in.”
“All right. Woman with a kid, they make a good recon team, you know?” the guy said. “You got a woman with a kid on the street, who’d think they might be wired-up?”
Virgil said, “I’ll write that in my notebook.”
The man said, “You do that.” Then he tapped Virgil’s chest. “The Pogues. Goddamn good band. I’m Irish myself.”
“You didn’t say what your name was,” Virgil said.
“Pat. O’Hoolihan. Pat O’Hoolihan.”
“You’re shittin’ me.”
The man showed his teeth again. “Yeah. I am.”
Sal came back with two cold six-packs: “Four drunks talking about bait. I thought my ears was gonna fall off, and I was only there for two minutes.”
“Gotta learn to relax,” Virgil said. “Get in the flow of the conversation.”
Sal popped his gum. “I’d rather be dead.”
The man who wasn’t named Pat O’Hoolihan got on his cell phone, dialed a number, and said, “We good.”
KNOX ARRIVED in a black GMC sport-utility vehicle with an unnecessary chrome brush guard on the front, and two little tiny chromed brush guards on the back taillights, and Virgil said to Sal, “These taillight brush guards look kinda gay.”
Sal popped his gum. “I hadn’t thought about it, but you’re right.”
Knox climbed out of the passenger seat, and another bent-nosed guy from the driver’s seat. Knox was a large man, balding, with a fleshy face and a heavy gut, who looked like he might deal in bulldozers. He was wearing khaki cargo pants, a white shirt, a black sport coat, and more L.L. Bean hiking shoes.
He walked down to Virgil’s place and said, “Mr. Flowers.” Not a question.
Virgil shook hands with him and said, “Why don’t we go inside?”
Knox looked at the cabin and shook his head. “Nah. I hate enclosed spaces that I don’t know about. Let’s go find a stump.” To the security guys, he said, “Why don’t you guys hang out?” and to the one who wasn’t named Pat, he said, “Larry, come on with us.”
Virgil said, “Yeah, come on, Larry.”
Larry said, “That’d be Mr. Larry to you, Virgil. Let me get one of those six-packs.”
THE THREE OF THEM strolled down to a picnic table behind one of the cabins, out of sight of the bar, out of sight of the driveway. The mom and daughter were kneeling on the dock, peering into the water, and Larry said, “Nice ass,” and Knox said, “C’mon, man, she’s only eight,” and Virgil had to laugh despite himself. They all took a beer and settled on the picnic table bench. Larry faced away from them, looking up at the cabins; the other two men were wandering around the driveway.
“So what’s the deal?” Knox said. “I understand you’ve been talking to my daughter.”
“The deal is, somebody is killing people-and all the people who are dead went to Vietnam in ’75 and stole a bunch of bulldozers. The last guy to get killed…”
“Ray.”
“Yeah. Ray. Ray told me a story. He said that while you guys were stealing the bulldozers…”
“Weren’t stealing them,” Knox said. “It was more of a repo.”
“Whatever. When you’d finished taking the bulldozers, there was a nasty shooting incident. Murders, is what it was. Ray said that Chuck Utecht was talking about a public confession about the killings, and somebody needed to shut him up. But by then, Utecht had talked to Sanderson, and Sanderson had talked to Ray, and it was all getting out of control. The killings are professional. So we asked ourselves, ‘Who is still alive, who might be able to find some bent-nosed killers from someplace like Chicago to come in here and clean up his mess?’ I guess-well, hell, we thought of you.”
They were sitting facing the lake, their legs away from the table, their elbows back on it. When Virgil stopped talking, Knox said, “You hear that, Larry? You’re a bent-nosed killer from Chicago.”
“I resent the hell out of that characterization,” Larry said. He burped beer. “I have many fine qualities.”
The repartee, Virgil thought, was a cover: Knox was thinking about it. Then he said, “This was a really long time ago, and I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“That’s what Ray said-he didn’t have anything to do with it. He said he was driving a lowboy back and forth, and when he got back the last time, some house was burning down and somebody had gotten shot.”
More silence. Then: “It wasn’t one. It was four. At least. And that wasn’t all…” He shook his head.