Rough Country

stream of tobacco juice into the lake. Roy, who looked like an aging gray-bearded Hells Angel, in a red-and-black lumberjack shirt, if a Hells Angel ever wore one of those, said, “Virgil, a guy named Lucas Davenport is trying to get you.”
    “You tell him to go fuck himself?”
    Roy grinned. “I was going to, until he said who he was. He told me to break into your cabin and get your cell phone, since you wouldn’t have it with you. He was right about that.” He fished Virgil’s cell phone out of his shirt pocket and passed it across. “Sorry.”
    “Goldarnit, Roy,” Johnson said.
    “Probably got no reception,” Virgil said. He punched up the phone and got four bars and Roy waggled his eyebrows at him.
    “I tell you what, Virgil, there ain’t many things more important to me than this tournament, so I know how you feel,” Roy said. “But Davenport said there’s a murdered woman over at Stone Lake and you need to look at her. That seemed more important.”
    “You know her?” Johnson asked.
    “No, I don’t,” Roy said.
    “Then how in the heck could she be more important?” Johnson asked. “People die all the time. You worry about all of them?”
    “Kinda wondered about that myself,” Arnie said. To Roy: “We’re losing a lot of fishing time, man.”
     
     
     
    ROY AND ARNIE MOTORED OFF and Virgil sat down, Johnson bitching and moaning and working his Double Cowgirl as they continued the drift. Virgil stuck a finger in his off-ear and punched Davenport’s home number on the speed dial. Davenport answered on the second ring.
    “You on the lake?” Davenport asked.
    “Yeah. Two hours,” Virgil said. “We’ve seen two fish.”
    “Nice day?”
    “Perfect.” Virgil looked around in the growing light: and he was right. It was perfect. “Partly cloudy, enough breeze to keep us cool, not enough to bang us around.”
    “Virgil, man, I’m sorry.”
    “What happened?”
    “A woman got shot by a sniper at Eagle Nest Lodge on Stone Lake, over by Grand Rapids. Her name is—was—Erica McDill. She’s the CEO of Ruff-Harcourt-McDill, the ad agency in Minneapolis.”
    “I’ve heard of it,” Virgil said.
    “So two things—she was a big Democrat and the governor would want us to take a look no matter what. Plus, the sheriff up there, Bob Sanders, is asking for help.”
    “When did they find her?”
    “Right at sunup—an hour and a half ago. Sanders is out looking at the body now.”
    “Where are the Bemidji guys?” Virgil asked.
    “They’re up in Bigfork, looking for Little Linda,” Davenport said. “That’s why Sanders needs the help—his investigators are all up there, and half his deputies. A woman on the Fox network is screaming her lungs out, they’re going nightly with it—”
    “Ah, Jesus.”
    Blond, blue-eyed Little Linda Pelli had disappeared from her parents’ summer home, day before last. She was fifteen, old enough not to get lost on her way to a girlfriend’s cabin. There were no hazards along the road, and if her bike had been clipped by a car, they would have found her in a ditch. Nobody had found either Little Linda or her black eighteen-speed Cannondale.
    Then a woman who worked at a local lodge had reported seeing an unshaven man “with silver eyes” and a crew cut, driving slowly along the road in a beat-up pickup. The television people went bat-shit, because they knew what that meant: somewhere, a silver-eyed demon, who probably had hair growing out of all his bodily orifices, had Little Linda chained in the basement of a backwoods cabin (the rare kind of cabin that had a basement) and was introducing her to the ways of the Cossacks.
    “Yeah,” Davenport said. “Little Linda. Listen, I feel bad about this. You’ve been talking about that tournament since June, but what can I tell you? Go fix this thing.”
    “I don’t even have a car,” Virgil said.
    “Go rent one,” Davenport said. “You got your gun?”
    “Yeah, somewhere.”
    “Then you’re all set,” Davenport said. “Call me when you’re done with it.”
    “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Virgil said. “I’ve got no idea where this place is. Gimme some directions, or something. There’re about a hundred Stone Lakes up here.”
    “You get off the water, I’ll get directions. Call you back in a bit.”
     
     
     
    THEY SHOT A ROOSTER TAIL back to the marina and Virgil showed the dock boy his identification and said, “We need to keep this boat handy. Put it someplace where