Storm Front

out of the ditch.
    On May 1, he’d gone north to a friend’s cabin near Hayward, Wisconsin, to do some early-season fly-fishing for bluegills, and it had snowed the whole day, and the day after that, totaling sixteen inches of the stuff, and then it had spent two days raining old women and sticks, as the Welsh would say, although they’d actually say something more like
mae hi’n bwrw hen wragedd a ffyn.
    But the summer . . . ah, the summer, which was now coming to its peak, the summer was a joy to behold, even from the inside of a diner.
    —
    V IRGIL F LOWERS was sitting sideways in a booth in a Perkins restaurant on Highway 169 in Mankato, Minnesota, his cowboy boots hanging off the end of the seat. He was talking to Florence “Ma” Nobles about her involvement in a counterfeit lumber ring, of which she denied any knowledge. He’d been investigating her for a while, and had even met three of her five intra-ethnic fatherless boys—Mateo, Tall Bear, and Moses.
    Virgil picked up a french fry and jabbed it at her: “Dave Moss said you sold the same barn fifteen times, Ma. He says your boy Rolf has another two thousand board-feet of lumber down at the bottom of the Minnesota River, getting old. Dave says you’ll be peddling that all over New England next year.”
    Ma made a rude noise with her lips, and Virgil said, “C’mon, Ma, that’s not necessary.”
    Ma said, “That goddamn Moss can kiss my ass—though, to be honest, he already did that and seemed to like it all right. This is more a domestic dispute than anything else, Virgie. I broke it off with him, and he’s just getting back at me.”
    Virgil said, “I’m not sure I can believe that, Ma. There’s a fellow named Barry Spurgeon who spent forty-four thousand dollars buying lumber from your boy, so he can build some sort of a barn-mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. He got suspicious and did a tree-ring test and that tree was cut down last year.
Last year
, for Christ’s sakes, Ma. You didn’t even let it go
five
years. Spurgeon wants that money back because he paid for real old-timey barn lumber.”
    His phone rang and he picked it up and looked at it: Lucas Davenport.
    “I gotta take this,” he said. He pushed the “answer” tab on the phone and said, “Hang on a minute, Lucas,” and to Ma, “You sit right here. Do not run away.”
    “Instead of talking about barn lumber we oughta talk about how to scratch my itch,” Ma said, pushing out her lower lip. “Here it is July and I ain’t been laid since March the eighteenth. You’re just the boy to get ’er done, Virgie.”
    —
    V IRGIL SLID out of the booth and walked back toward the men’s room, where nobody was sitting. “What’s up?” he asked Davenport.
    “Got an assignment for you . . . easy duty,” Davenport said.
    “Aw, man. I left my shotgun at home.”
    “No, no, nothing like that,” Davenport said, though he’d been known to lie about such things. “There’s an Israeli investigator who needs to talk to a professor at Gustavus Adolphus, though the professor actually lives there in Mankato. Probably on your block. He’s a minister named, uh, let me look . . . Elijah Jones. A Lutheran minister, like your old man.”
    “An Israeli? What’s that about?”
    Virgil was keeping an eye on Ma as he spoke to Davenport, and it wasn’t particularly hard to do. She was undeniably a criminal redneck, but she was also a pretty blonde, only thirty-four, though she had five children, including a nineteen-year-old. She had a long, thick pigtail down her back, and a short, slender body. If, purely hypothetically, she were lying on a California king with that hair spread out over her . . .
    “. . . some kind of precious artifact—”
    “What? Say that over again,” Virgil said. “I’m sorry, I’m trying to keep an eye on a local criminal here . . . that barn-lumber scam I’ve been working.”
    “I said, the Israeli’s coming into MSP and it’d be nice if you’d pick her up,” Davenport said. “This Jones guy supposedly stole some kind of precious artifact from an archaeological dig and smuggled it back to the States. He apparently left Israel illegally—the Israeli cops tracked him to a port and he caught a boat to Cyprus and then flew home from there.”
    “What kind of artifact?” Virgil asked, now semi-interested. “Does it have mystical powers?”
    “I don’t know about mystical powers, but supposedly it’s a piece of a stele—a