Storm Front

anyone. Never.”
    Virgil said, “Well, he did. You have to understand, he doesn’t seem to be acting like himself. Could be drugs, maybe the disease is affecting his brain, who knows?” He took out his notebook and asked, “Who are his friends? Who might be inclined to hide him? Who’d keep hiding him after the evening news? Because he’s going to be on the evening news, big-time.”
    She gave him a half-dozen names, but said that she doubted that any of them would hide him after word got out of the shooting. “They’re all very respectable. They would tell him to give himself up, and they would give him up themselves, if he didn’t.”
    “So where do you think he is?”
    She had to think about it for a moment, and then said, “From what you tell me . . . I suspect he went back home to get his hiking gear, and he’s probably camping out somewhere. He hunts and fishes, knows all of southeast Minnesota like his own backyard, every nook and cranny. When he was healthy, he probably spent thirty or forty nights a year in his sleeping bag.”
    “Where’d he keep his hiking gear?”
    “A big gear closet in his garage. If his gear is gone, then . . .” She shrugged. “He’s in the woods.”
    “Does he have any special outdoorsy friends?”
    “Yes, on the list I gave you? Sugarman,” she said. And, “Virgil, don’t hurt my dad.”
    —
    Y AEL CAME BACK , unstung by yellow jackets. “Now what?”
    Virgil said, “I’ll tell you what.” He stepped past her, as though on his way down the driveway toward the machine shed, and as he passed her, he yanked the purse off her shoulder. She tried to grab it as it came free, but he twisted it away.
    “What are you, what are you . . .” She danced around him trying to get it back, but he dug inside and pulled out a pistol—a full-sized 9mm Beretta.
    Yael shouted at him: “You can’t do that.”
    “It’s against the law to carry a concealed weapon in Minnesota without a permit. Since it takes a while to get one, you don’t have one, because you just got here,” Virgil said. He said to Ma, “This is another reason why women take their purses with them: they’re packing heat.”
    “Got me there,” Ma said.
    Virgil said, “Yael works for the Mossad. Or Shabak. She’s like an Israeli killer.”

8
    T he conversation languished on the way back to Mankato. Virgil had put the Beretta into his backseat gun safe, and after a couple of protests, Yael crossed her arms and went into a sulk, refusing to speak to him, even to answer questions.
    Finally, Virgil said, “All right, don’t talk. I’m going to see the Texan. You can come if you want, or walk back to your hotel. It’s only a couple of blocks.”
    Not a word.
    “I’m not giving you the gun back. I’ll send it up to BCA headquarters in St. Paul. If you can get it back from them, or your embassy can get it back, then so be it.”
    Not a word.
    Not a word until they’d parked at the Holiday Inn, where she got out of the truck and said, “You’re hunting a man who shot two Turks. You don’t carry a gun yourself. You say that when you do, you can’t shoot it. You’re risking both our lives.”
    “Jones wasn’t trying to kill anyone,” Virgil said. “In my estimation, you’re more likely to get killed when you carry a gun than when you don’t. Besides, if we run into Jones, I have a feeling that you’d kill him. I don’t think that’s necessary. Not for some rock.”
    She stepped back and crossed her arms again, and Virgil sighed and led the way up to Sewickey’s room. When they got to the right door, Virgil lifted a hand to knock, but Yael’s grabbed his wrist before he could, and pulled him back.
    “What?”
    “Listen.”
    She was standing with her ear next to the room’s window, and gestured to it. Virgil put his ear to the glass, and after a second or two, separated out the background noise. What was left was the sounds of vigorous sexual activity, and a woman having a screaming orgasm. And she didn’t stop. And she still didn’t stop.
    After a minute of the woman not stopping, Virgil said, “Ah, he’s watching porn.”
    “I hope, or this woman is going to explode.”
    Yael put her ear back to the glass as Virgil knocked on the door, and three seconds later, she said, “The orgasms have stopped. At least on the TV.”
    “That’s because the TV has been turned off,” Virgil said.
    “But is Sewickey?” she asked.
    —
    V IRGIL KNOCKED AGAIN , and they felt