Rough Country

hausfrau mode, her mind going dull as her ass got wider. She was probably at home right now, baking a pumpkin pie or something.
    In a way, McDill thought, the takeover of the agency changed everything.
    Everything.
    The agency was hot, she was hot.
    Time to shine, by God.
     
     
     
    THE EAGLE CAME BACK.
    She saw it coming a half-mile out, unmistakable in its size, a giant bird floating along on unmoving wings.
    A thousand feet away, it carved a turn in the crystalline air, like a skier on a downhill, and banked away.
    McDill wondered why: the eagles had never been bothered by her presence before. She was farther away now than she had been last night, when she coasted right up to the tree trunk.
    Huh. Had the eagle sensed something else?
    McDill turned and scanned the shoreline, and then, in her last seconds, saw movement, frowned, and sat forward. What was that? A wink of glass . . .
    The killer shot her in the forehead.

2
    FIVE-THIRTY IN THE MORNING.
    The moon was dropping down toward the horizon, the bottom edge touching the wisps of fog that rose off the early-morning water. Virgil Flowers was standing in the stern of a seventeen-foot Tuffy, a Thorne Brothers custom musky rod in his hand, looking over the side. Johnson, in the bow of the boat, did a wide figure-eight with an orange-bladed Double Cowgirl, his rod stuck in the lake up to the reel.
    “See her?” Virgil asked, doubt in his voice.
    “Not anymore,” Johnson said. He gave up, straightened, pulled the rod out of the water. “Shoot. Too much to ask, anyway. You ain’t gonna get one in the first five minutes.”
    “Good one?”
    “Hell, I don’t know. Flash of white.” Johnson looked at the moon, then to the east. The sun wouldn’t be up for ten minutes, but the horizon was getting bright. “Need more light on the water.”
    He plopped down in the bow seat and Virgil threw a noisy top-water bait toward the shore, reeled it in, saw nothing, threw it again.
    “With the fog and stuff, the moon looks like one of those fake potato chips,” Johnson said.
    “What?” Virgil wasn’t sure he’d heard it right.
    “One of those Pringles,” Johnson said.
    Virgil paused between casts and said, “I don’t want to disagree with you, Johnson, but the moon doesn’t look like a Pringle.”
    “Yes, it does. Exactly like a Pringle,” Johnson said.
    “It looks like one of those balls of butter you get at Country Kitchen, with the French toast,” Virgil said.
    “Ball of butter?” Johnson blinked, looked at the moon, then back at Virgil. “You been smokin’ that shit again?”
    “Looks a hell of a lot more like a butterball than it does like a Pringle,” Virgil said. “I’m embarrassed to be in the same boat with a guy that says the moon looks like a Pringle.”
    You need a good line of bullshit when you’re musky fishing, because there’re never a hell of a lot of fish to talk about. Johnson looked out over the lake, the dark water, the lights scattered through the shoreline pines, the lilacs and purples of the western sky, vibrating against the luminous yellow of the Pringle- or butterball-like moon. “Sure is pretty out here,” he said. “God’s country, man.”
    “That’s the truth, Johnson.”
    Vermilion Lake, the Big V, far northern Minnesota. They floated along for a while, not working hard; it’d be a long day on the water. A boat went by in a hurry, two men in it, on the way to a better spot, if there was such a thing.

    WHEN THE SUN CAME UP , a finger of wind arrived, a riffle across the water, enough to set up a slow motorless drift down a weedline at the edge of a drop-off. They were two hours on the water, halfway down the drift, when another boat came up from the east, running fast, then slowed as it passed, the faces of the two men in the boat white ovals, looking at Virgil and Johnson. The boat slowed some more and hooked in toward the weedline.
    “Sucker’s gonna cut our drift,” Johnson said. He had no time for mass murderers, boy-child rapers, or people who cut your drift.
    “Looks like Roy,” Virgil said. Roy was the tournament chairman.
    “Huh.” Roy knew better than to cut somebody’s drift.
    The guy on the tiller of the other boat chopped the motor, and they drifted in a long arc, sliding up next to the Tuffy.
    “Morning, Virgil. Johnson.” Roy reached out and caught their gunwale and pulled the boats close.
    “Morning, Roy,” Johnson said. “Arnie, how you doing?”
    Arnie nodded and ejected a