Heat Lightning

And far down the lake, he could see the white line that meant a bigger powerboat was headed his way.
    “No. I’ve talked to him a couple times,” Davenport said. “He’s an asshole, but, you know . . . he’ll talk to you. He knows where things are at.”
    “All right. Listen, I gotta run. I’ll call you as soon as I hear something,” Virgil said.
    “Stay in touch. I’ll talk to Ruffe over at the Star Tribune, let him understand that things are breaking, that we should have something pretty quick. Maybe he could drop in a story that would take some pressure off.”
    In another thirty seconds, Davenport would hear the powerboat in the background. Virgil said, “Okay, I’m running. Talk to you.”
    Virgil stuck the phone back in his pocket and smiled: what Davenport didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Or Virgil. He cranked the motor and headed into shore, the water smooth as an old black mirror.
     
 
WHEN HE WAS cleaned up, wearing a fresh but ancient white Pogues T-shirt, and a black cotton sport coat over his jeans, he went off to the bar to talk with Root, who’d had a couple eye-openers, getting up a morning shine so that he could drift painlessly through the afternoon before getting totally crushed in the evening.
    “Virgil fuckin’ Flowers, ” Root said. There were three other men in the bar, two facing each other across a table, the other sitting at the bar, all three with beers. Root introduced Virgil: “This is my friend Virgil Flowers, the famous outdoor writer, who is also a cop and is up here investigating that murder in Bemidji, I bet. Is that right?”
    Virgil nodded, and said, “Good morning, David. I see the lake is empty of fish, as usual. Give me a Diet Coke.”
    “Empty of fish,” Root said. “If you knew a fuckin’ thing about fishing . . . whoops . . .” He grimaced at his own language, and Virgil turned and saw the fisherwoman and the little girl walking past the screen windows, and a moment later they came inside.
    The woman was probably forty, Virgil thought, thin, small-breasted, with a sprinkling of freckles across her nose, and nice brown eyes. She had a fisherwoman’s tanned face and arms, with a small white scar on one of her arms, and Virgil felt himself slipping over the edge into love.
    She glanced at Virgil and smiled and then said to Root, “We need a cream soda and an ice cream cone,” and Root got a soda from a cooler behind the bar and the little girl fished an ice cream cone out of a freezer by the door, the woman paid, and they took the soda and the cone to a corner table.
    Root said to Virgil, “So what happened to this Indian dude?” and the three drinking men bent his way.
    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