Dark of the Moon

she might be involved?”
    “He was unpleasant,” Joan said, “But he’s never been a real pleasant man.”
    “I keep trying to think, who else?”
     
    S LEEP PULLED HIM UNDER. He woke up at two o’clock, and Joan was gone. Went to the bathroom, and then back to the bed, went under again, thinking…Who else? Nobody had said a thing about the .357…
    Of course, Jesse wouldn’t; but he didn’t think that Jesse was the killer, because that would be aesthetically incongruent. She was just too good-looking.
    He smiled, and mentally wrote his little story, in which the best-looking woman would never be the guilty one:
    Homer shook his head. The shoot-out with Feur, the death of Feur, had blocked up a lot of potential information.
    Brilliant, though, the way Stryker had picked up that seam in the hillside. Homer would never have seen it. And thank God for Stryker’s reflexes: he cut Feur down before he had a chance to open up on Homer himself.
    Mmmm…
    Anyway:
     
    A RCHDUKE F RANZ F ERDINAND of Austria got his ass shot in Sarajevo in 1914, touching off World War I. His wife was killed at the same time. A little less than ninety years later, a bunch of guys in Scotland formed a band called Franz Ferdinand, which was why Virgil was pulling a Franz Ferdinand T-shirt over his head the next morning at seven o’clock.
    Find out what happened to the DEA guys. He stopped at a gas station across the street from the motel and bought a MoonPie and a Coke: sugar, fat, and caffeine, the breakfast of champions.
    Pirelli was awake in a standard room, Gomez asleep on a couch under a window. Virgil asked, “How’re you doing?”
    Pirelli said, “I’m hurting. Ah, God.”
    “How’re your guys?”
    “Both still alive.” Pirelli reached out his good hand, and knocked on the wood-grained plastic of the bedside table. “I think, I hope…”
    “What about Harmon?”
    “I talked to his wife last night,” Pirelli said. “She’s coming out today.”
    “I don’t want to be there,” Virgil said.
    “Neither do I.”
    They both looked into a corner for a moment, and then Virgil asked, “Was it worth it? If you’d had a good idea somebody was going to be killed…?”
    “Fuck no, it wasn’t worth it.” Pirelli shook his head. “Don’t tell anybody I said that. If I’d known what was going to happen, I’d have set up five hundred yards away and hosed down Franks and his trucks and the house and killed the whole bunch of them. But I didn’t know.”
    “So what’s next? For you?”
    Pirelli shrugged: “Media, today. Docs say I’m gonna be out of work for six months or so. Then back to Chicago. Try to figure out why we’re all of a sudden rolling in heroin down in Gary…same ol’ same ol’.”
    “Nobody’s pissed at you?”
    Pirelli shook his head. “DEA guys get killed. It’s not like the FBI.”
     
    S TRYKER CAME IN. “Morning, bright eyes,” he said to Pirelli. Gomez sat up on the couch, shaking his head, smacking his lips. Stryker said, “Talked to the doc one minute ago: things aren’t looking too bad, but they’re gonna move you all to Rochester today. Mayo.”
    “I don’t think I need the Mayo…” Pirelli started.
    “They say you’re gonna need some reconstruction on that shoulder,” Stryker said. “A couple of pins. Might as well get the best.”
     
    T HEY TALKED FOR A WHILE. A DEA team was flying in from Washington to reconstruct the fight, and the house, and do an after-action report. The South Dakota ethanol plant had been taken down without a fight; most of the plant was legit. The lab was not: it was a clean, efficient, meth production line. There was a national stop-and-hold on Bill Judd Jr.
    They were talking about that when Stryker took a call, listened for a minute, then said, “Five minutes.”
    And to Pirelli, Gomez, and Virgil: “Bill Judd. He’s dead. Up at his old man’s place.”
     
    S TRYKER AND V IRGIL went together in a county truck. Gomez and another agent followed in one of the blacked-out DEA trucks, out to the main drag, out of town and up the hill to the Buffalo Ridge park entrance, through the park gate, and up the driveway to Judd’s.
    Four sheriff’s cars were parked by the burned-out basement, one deputy leaning on his car, talking on his radio, four more deputies standing in the high grass, north of the house, near the crest of the hill. Virgil and Stryker hopped out of the truck and Stryker raised a hand to the deputy at the car, and then they