Rough Country

knees to search through the boxes, and now Virgil sat back on his heels and asked, “What gas card do you use?”
    “I don’t have one. I use my Visa,” she said. “You can check that with a credit agency.”
    He thumbed through the Visa again, found charges for gas three days before Lifry was killed, and four days after. Nothing between. Of course, you could pay for gas with cash, though it never occurred to most people.
    Huh.
    He took his phone out of his pocket, looked up a number, and punched it up. It rang six times, and then Sandy, the hippie, said, “Virgil. Do you know what time it is?”
    “Hang on a minute, I’ll check,” he said.
    “Are you out on the town? I thought you were—”
    “I’m up north, working a case,” Virgil said. “Get a pencil. I need some information by the time I get up tomorrow, which will probably be about ten o’clock.”
    “I’ve got human osteology class at ten o’clock.”
    “So I’ll call at nine-fifty,” Virgil said. “We need to check the credit agencies for credit cards held by a guy named Slibe Ashbach. You got a pencil?” She did—he spelled the name. “And we need to see when and where he bought gas. . . .”
    He gave her the dates.
    “Virgil, you know, you are a real treat,” Sandy said.
    A male voice in the background mumbled something, and Virgil asked, “Who was that?”
    “I have friends,” she said.
    “Sandy . . .”
    “Virgil, shut up.”
     
     
     
    ZOE SAID, “Was that a special friend?”
    Virgil said, “She’s a researcher at the office.”
    “She ever done any research into Virgil Flowers?”
    “Maybe,” he said.
     
     
     
    THEY SAT for a minute, and she asked, “Well, what’s the verdict?”
    “I never thought you did it. You’re too stable. Though you have some stability problems when it comes to Wendy. If you were gonna kill somebody, you’d probably kill Berni. Or Wendy. Or yourself,” Virgil said. He pinched his lower lip, thinking about it. “But it’s complicated. If you figured that she was going to dump Berni anyway, eventually, like everybody does, maybe you wouldn’t kill Berni. Maybe McDill was more of a threat, both to take Wendy away and to take the lodge away from you.”
    “Oh, for Christ’s sakes, I’m going to bed,” Zoe said, pushing up off the floor. “If you decide to arrest me, call ahead so I’ll have time to wash my hair.”
    “That’s what they all say,” Virgil said.
    Outside, sitting in the truck, he drew a line through Zoe: he’d make a few checks, so he wouldn’t get bitten on the ass again, but she didn’t do it.

21
    VIRGIL SPENT SOME TIME with God that night, thinking about the way things were—about how somebody like Jud Windrow might now be lying dead somewhere, for no discernible reason—and why they were like that, and why a believer like himself would be going around cursing as he did: goddamnit.
    Virgil held intricate unconventional beliefs, not necessarily Christian, but not necessarily un-Christian, either, derived from his years of studying nature, and his earlier years, his childhood years, with the Bible. God, he suspected, might not be a steady-state consciousness, omnipotent, omnipresent, timeless. God might be like a wave front, moving into an unknowable future; human souls might be like neurons, cells of God’s own intelligence. . . .
    Far out, dude; pass the joint.
    Whatever God was, Virgil seriously doubted that he worried too much about profanity, sex, or even death. He left the world alone, people alone, each to work out a separate destiny. And he stranded people like Virgil, who wonder about the unseen world, but were trapped in their own animal passions, and operated out of moralities that almost certainly weren’t God’s own, if, indeed, he had one.
    Virgil further worried that he was a guy who simply wanted to eat his cake, and have it, too—his philosophy, as a born-again once pointed out to him, pretty much allowed him to carry on as he wished, like your average godless commie.
    He got to “godless commie” and went to sleep.
    And worried in his sleep.
     
     
     
    FIVE HOURS LATER, his cell phone went off, and he sat bolt upright, fumbled around for it, found it in his jeans pocket, on the floor at the foot of the bed.
    “Hello?”
    Sandy said, “Slibe Ashbach has a Visa card and a check card. He used the Visa card at an independent gas station in Grand Rapids early in the morning of the day Constance Lifry was murdered. He used the