Bad Blood

four-ought shells went in the back, and a 9mm Glock, with two extra magazines, in the center console. Only two extra, because he figured if he needed more than forty-two shots, he’d be better off running away.
    He turned the house heat down to 64 and hooked up his new answering gadget. When you called, and pressed “9,” the machine would answer and tell you the inside temperature. That way, if the furnace went out while you were gone, you had a chance to catch it before the pipes froze, burst, and flooded the place.
    He went next door and told Mrs. Wilson that he’d be out of town for a few days. “See anybody in my house, go ahead and shoot ’em.”
    “I’ll do that,” she said. She was about a hundred years old, but reliable. “You take care, Virgil. And don’t go fuckin’ around with them country women.”
     
     
    HE ROLLED OUT of the driveway at noon, got Outlaw Country on the satellite radio—the Del McCoury Band with “1952 Vincent Black Lightning”—and was on his way, down Highway 60 to Highway 15, and down 15 to I-90 to Fairmont, and west from there to Homestead. Eighty-plus-plus miles, snowplow banks on both sides of the highways, but bare concrete under the wheels.
    The countryside was nothing but farms: corn and beans and corn and beans and corn and beans, and over there some wild man had apparently planted wheat or oats, judging from the stubble; the countryside all black trees and brush and white snow and houses and red barns, with a little tan where the wind had scoured the snow down, squared off acreages rolling away to the horizon, with lines of smoke climbing out of chimneys into the sky.
    And over there, a yellow house, like a finger in the eye.
    He didn’t worry much about the fact that his target was a cop. Virgil wasn’t a brother-cop believer; he was not disposed to either like or dislike other cops before he met them, because he’d known too many of them. To Virgil, cops were just people, and people with more than their fair share of stress and temptation. Most resisted the temptations. Some didn’t. Fact of life.
    He did wind up liking most of them, though, simply because of shared backgrounds, and the fact that Virgil was a social guy. So social, he’d been married three times over a short space of years, until he finally gave it up. He didn’t plan to resume until he’d grown old enough to distinguish love from infatuation. He felt he was making progress, but he’d thought that the other three times, too.
    He considered Lee Coakley, and thought, Huh . She had a glint in her eye, and he knew for a fact that she was recently divorced. And she carried a gun. He liked that in a woman, because it sometimes meant that he didn’t have to.
     
     
    HE CUT I-90 at Fairmont, stopped to stretch and get a Diet Coke, and headed west. The sun was already low and deep into the southwest, and the sky was going gray.
    Homestead was an old country town of fourteen thousand people or so, the Warren County seat, founded in the 1850s on rolling land along a chain of lakes. Warren was in the first tier of counties north of the Iowa line, west of Martin County, east of Jackson. Most of the downtown buildings, and many of the homes, were put up in the first half of the twentieth century. Interstate 90 passed just to the north of town, and Virgil stopped as he went by and reserved a room at the Holiday Inn. That done, he drove on into town, to the sheriff’s office. Her office was in an eighties-era yellow brick building built behind an older, mid-century courthouse. The office included working space for the worn deputies, a comm center, and a jail.
     
     
    COAKLEY WAS WAITING, with two deputies, big men in their thirties, both weathered, square-jawed Germans, one in civilian clothes, the other in a sheriff’s uniform.
    “Agent Flowers,” Coakley said, “I’ve got your warrant. These men are Gene Schickel and Greg Dunn, they’ll be going out with you.”
    He shook hands with the two, and Virgil said to Dunn, “I remember you from the Larson accident.” Dunn nodded and said, “That was a mess,” and added, “I gotta tell you, I don’t like this.”
    “Nobody ever does,” Virgil said. “Me coming in, it’s like internal affairs. When I was a cop up in St. Paul, I shaded away from those guys as much as anybody. No reason to, but I know what you’re talking about.”
    Dunn said, “Just a feeling that maybe we should clean up our own messes.”
    Virgil nodded. “But