Dark of the Moon

to be creditably sneaky.”
    “Ah.”
    “My place,” she said. “You could walk over in half an hour.”
    “I don’t want you going to your place tonight. I was thinking…your mother’s. You’d be close, but not where you’d have a target on you; he could be waiting for us to get back to your place…”
    “Well, we’re not doing anything at Mom’s…”
    So, they called it off.
    Hands all over each other, parked three blocks from Mom’s, like a couple of teenagers; and he dropped her.
    And woke up feeling good. Maybe he could take a break from the hook-and-bullet magazines, and write a piece for Vanity Fair : “Violence: The New Aphrodisiac.” But that wouldn’t be right—it’d always been an aphrodisiac, as far as he could tell. Something primitive there…
    Maybe, he thought, they should have stayed in the barn for a while, up in the hayloft.
    When he was a teenager, there were locker-room fantasy stories—maybe one or two were true—of guys getting the farmer’s daughter up in the hayloft. His best friend, Otis Ericson, had claimed to have nailed one of his girl cousins, Shirley, who was in their high school class, and even in eighth grade, had tits out to here.
    In what Virgil assumed was nothing more than an effort at verisimilitude, the alleged fuckee warned Virgil against hay cuts, or hay rash: “And you sure as shit don’t want to get any hay in her crack. She’ll be bitching and moaning for a week. Take a blanket.”
    The thought that Otis Ericson might have actually gotten Shirley Ericson naked, in a hayloft, had, at the time, seriously turned him on; still did, a little, though the last time he saw Shirley, she’d sort of spread out.
     
    L YING ON THE FLOOR , he looked at his watch: eight o’clock. Threw the cushions back on the couch, yawned, stretched, did his sit-ups and push-ups, cleaned up, and called Davenport.
    “Still too early,” Davenport said.
    “I was shot at last night,” Virgil said.
    “Virgil! You okay?”
    “Nothing but scared,” Virgil said. “The shooter wasn’t that good. Scoped rifle, I was up on a friend’s farm, missed me by a couple of feet and I wasn’t moving that fast.”
    “Tell me you had your gun,” Davenport said.
    “I had the gun. Saw him running, fired seven shots at maybe four hundred yards, chances of hitting him were zero…but…thought I should let you know. I’m pushing something here. I’m going to write some notes and e-mail them to you. Just in case.”
    “Goddamnit, Virgil, you take care,” Davenport said. “You want help?”
    “Just get me that paper that Sandy put together.”
     
    O N THE WAY to breakfast, the desk clerk said, “You’ve got mail,” fished an envelope out of a desk drawer, and handed it to him. The address was typed; no return address. Mailed yesterday from Bluestem. He went on to the dining room, holding the envelope by its edges, slit it open with a butter knife, and slid the letter out.
    You’re barking up the wrong tree. Look at Bill Judd Jr.’s debt and think “estate tax.” Look at Florence Mills, Inc.
    That was it—no signature, of course, and the note was typed, not printed. Who’d still have a typewriter? Somebody old, like Gerald Johnstone, the funeral director. The stamp was self-sticking, so there’d be no DNA.
    Estate tax? Florence Mills? Sounded like something more for Sandy to do, when she got back.
    He finished breakfast, went back to his room for his briefcase, went out to the truck; went back to the room to get his gun, back to the truck; and headed out to the Stryker farm, past the farm, around behind the hill.
    The far side of the hill, opposite the dell, had once been pastureland, before the countryside had emptied out, with the red quartzite right on the surface. There were clumps of wild plum and scrubby shrubs, thistle and open spaces with knee-high grass.
    Virgil cruised the backside of the hill until he saw the truck tracks leading off-road. He turned off, bounced across a shallow ditch, and then ran parallel to the tracks, up the hill, to a copse of trees and bushes just below the crest of the hill. The tracks swerved around the copse, and ended. This was where the shooter had parked, out of sight from the road. He sat in the car for a minute, watching the road, and saw not another single vehicle; he was alone except for a red-tailed hawk, which circled the slope, looking for voles.
    The hawk dropped, hit the ground, out of sight: breakfast. Virgil stepped out