Dark of the Moon

decent piece of fiction.

5
    Wednesday Morning
    F OUR FAT GUYS in short-sleeved shirts, standing outside the courthouse, stopped talking and stared at Virgil inside. Virgil gave the high sign to the secretary, who took in his antique Stones/Paris T-shirt, and shook her head and sighed as though a great weight were sitting on her soul.
    He ambled past her desk and stuck his head in Stryker’s office. Stryker was sitting with his feet up on his desk and a stunned look on his face. He pointed Virgil at a chair and rubbed his face with his hands and said, “Ah, shit.”
    Virgil sat. “What?”
    Stryker dropped his feet to the floor, turned his chair around, opened a two-six-pack-sized office refrigerator, and took out a bottle of Coke. “You wanna Coke?”
    “No, thanks…”
    “Got the goddamnedest telephone call,” Stryker said, twisting the top off the bottle. He tossed the bottle top at a wastebasket, sank the shot. “There’s a woman lives out in Roche—you know where that is?”
    “Yeah. Other side of Dunn.”
    “That’s it. Town the size of my dick. Her name is Margaret Laymon and she called me up, about five minutes ago. Says her daughter, Jessica, is the natural daughter of William Judd. She wants to make sure that her daughter gets her rights. As she put it.”
    They sat staring for a moment, then Virgil said, “Jesus. If there’s no will, and she can prove it…”
    Stryker nodded: “Bill Jr. is gonna have a stroke.”
    “Wonder if there are any more little Judds running around?”
    “That’s an interesting question, but I don’t know how you’d find out,” Stryker said. “Unless they call you up and tell you.”
    “Huh. You gonna tell Junior?”
    “Not up to me,” Stryker said. “I told Margaret to hire a lawyer, real quick. She’s going to do that. I suppose, what? She’d file something with the court?”
    “I don’t know. There’d be some DNA tests to do…”
    “She says that’s not a problem. But I’ll tell you what is a problem.” He turned his chair around again, a full circle, thinking, and then said, “Of all the women I ever wanted in my entire life, Jesse Laymon is right at the top of the list. We even went out twice, but not three times. She wants somebody with more of an edge. A ramblin’ gamblin’ man.”
    “A bad country song,” Virgil said. The second he’d found in so many days. The prairie was full of them.
    “But it’s true,” Stryker said. He took a hit on the Coke. “I get my heart in my mouth every time I see her, but the fact is, what she wants is one of those black-eyed dope-dealing rascals who drinks too much and drives too fast and dances good. That’s not me.”
    “Well, hell.”
    “Yeah.”
     
    T HEY SAT for a minute, thinking it over, then Virgil said, “Maybe it’s because your dick is the size of Roche.”
    Stryker had been taking another sip of Coke, and he choked, sputtering, laughed, said, “Come to speak of it, what were you and Joanie doing on her front porch last night about ten o’clock?”
    Virgil laughed, but not hard, touched by a finger of guilt. So much apparent friendship, and he was sitting here smiling, and thinking that the Strykers would be suspects in the Judd killing, on any rational list…
     
    V IRGIL SAID, “I’m gonna go talk to Todd Williamson, see if he’ll let me look in his files, if he’s got any. Then I’m heading out to see George Feur.”
    Stryker’s eyebrows went up. “You got something?”
    “Not exactly. I want to talk to him, look him over, push him a little,” Virgil said.
    “When you say, ‘Not exactly’…”
    “Feur’s a Bible beater and he’s an asshole and he was working on Judd,” Virgil said. “Bible beaters don’t beat anything harder than the book of Revelation. I noticed when I was up at the Gleasons’ yesterday, that Anna Gleason had a book of Revelation right under her hand when she was shot. A pretty new one, it looked like.”
    “She did?” Stryker frowned and leaned forward. “Why didn’t I know that?”
    Virgil shrugged. “Maybe nobody noticed. This was before Judd was killed, and Feur’s name didn’t really come up until the fire.”
    “Hell of a thing not to notice, though,” Stryker said. “I’ll have to talk to Larry and Margo about this. They should have seen it. At least had it in the back of their minds.”
    Virgil didn’t disagree. “Maybe they should have,” he said. “Especially for a guy with Feur’s history.”
    “You know