Storm Front

except one piece of an old hay rake, a rusting fifty-five-gallon drum full of ashes, with two ancient yellow Pennzoil cans sitting on top. They were empty as they always are, with two triangular punch-holes in each of them.
    He looked at the weathered boards, then stepped outside, looked in his directory, and called Ma Nobles.
    She answered by saying, “Were you following me, Virgie?”
    “No, I wasn’t,” Virgil said. “I was actually on my way out to an abandoned farm owned by a guy I’m investigating, which is about a mile on down the highway from where you saw me. On the south side. Got an Edina Realty sign on it. They’re about to burn it down. I was looking at it, and realized the whole thing is made out of the kind of lumber you’re selling.”
    “In good shape?”
    “Authentic antique shape, but a lot of the boards look solid, like they could be cut and reused. Anyway, I could talk to the owner about giving it to you, free, or almost free, if you’d tell me where I might find a bunch of lumber at the bottom of the river . . . and how to get it out of there.”
    After a long silence, Ma said, “Free, huh?”
    “They don’t want to burn it,” Virgil said.
    “I’ll take a look at it, and call you,” Ma said.
    “I’ll tell you, Ma,” Virgil said. “We got a couple people looking at you real hard. This would be a good way to keep your ass out of jail. And your boy’s, too.”
    “I’ll take a look,” she said again, and hung up.
    —
    V IRGIL WAS WALKING back up the driveway when the two women came out of the house. Yael shook her head: nothing inside. Virgil told Ellen about Ma Nobles.
    “Well, sure, she can have it if she wants it,” Ellen said. “Maybe . . . for a few dollars.”
    “You’d have to work that out with her,” Virgil said, looking up at the house. “But you know, it’s just sort of old and neat. I’d hate to see it go up in flames.”
    Virgil gave her Ma Nobles’s phone number, and he and Yael got in his truck. As they backed toward the highway, Yael said, “She knows where her father is.”
    “Yeah, I know. The blood.”
    Yael nodded: “You told her there was blood on the floor of the house, and she never asked about it. She knows he’s not injured badly, and that he was bleeding in his house. And she did not ask about the artifact.”
    “Mmm. I’d hate to put her in jail, though,” Virgil said. “Probably doesn’t want to betray her father, which I can understand.”
    “It seems to me, after some discussion and observation, that you do not wish to put anyone in jail.”
    “Not true,” Virgil said. “I know about nine people right now that I’d like to put in jail, and who deserve it. Just not anyone you’ve met.”
    She asked, “Now what?”

7
    T he Reverend Elijah Jones, sweating like a pig in Miami, walked down the hillside through the trees toward the picnic tables, carrying the bowling bag in his left hand, his right hand in his pants pocket, pressed against the right side of his groin.
    He was not hurting, but only because he’d taken so much oxycodone that he wouldn’t have felt anything less than an amputation. Yet something down there, in his groin, something vital felt like it was coming loose. Without the pills, he thought, he’d have felt like he’d just dropped his balls into a bear trap.
    Walking two hundred yards down the hill hadn’t helped. He didn’t have much time left, he thought, before he’d be so clouded that he’d be incapable of pulling off any kind of deal, much less one with a Hezbollah agent, two Turks, or a famous TV star.
    He got to the bottom of the hill, walked across a patch of scrubby grass to the concrete table, had to lift the bowling bag to its surface, groaned as he did it.
    Not a groan of pain, but of incipient death. How much longer, Oh Lord? Two weeks? The docs had told him that the cancer in his brain would kill his ability to breathe, before it got to his reasoning faculties. He’d get to enjoy every minute of his own death.
    A hundred yards away, two men, remarkably out of place in the bucolic park, were watching him carefully. He’d told them to wait there, when they arrived, so he could be sure that they were alone, that there wasn’t a troop of Turkish cavalry over the hill. Now they were looking at him, a black-bearded man in a black suit and ministerial collar, and he lifted a hand and waved them over.
    They walked up, peering around as they came. The park had two softball diamonds