Storm Front

cut away the pants where the blood was showing through. The wound was a bloody channel through skin and fat on the outside of Jones’s hip. It was bleeding, but not pumping blood. “There’s some blood,” Virgil said. “We need to get an ambulance out here, but I don’t think we have to do anything radical. I’ll call for one. What about the shooters? How long have they been gone?”
    “Five or six minutes. I heard them crashing off towards the lake. I suspect they parked on another track over on the other side. They’ll be gone by now.”
    “You know who they were?”
    “No. I was too busy looking for cover,” Jones said. “They really shot the place up.”
    “Maybe because you shot them, in the park?”
    “The Turks? I doubt it. How’d they find me?”
    “Good question,” Virgil said. “To which I don’t have the answer.”
    “Ah, golly, that hurts,” Jones said. “That really hurts. I mean, a lot.”
    —
    V IRGIL STOOD , called 911, and got an ambulance started. The dispatcher told him a sheriff’s car should arrive in the next minute or so, and when Virgil hung up, he could hear a distant siren.
    He went back to Jones. “You didn’t make any arrangements to meet somebody here?”
    “No. Nobody knew I was here. I heard them coming. They were on foot, coming in from the back, then around to the side. They cut me off from my car. There was more than one—maybe two. I got my gun, and called out to them, and then they started shooting. Didn’t even say how-do-you-do? Just opened up. Good gosh, it was like a war. I got between the table and the cookstove, and called Ellen and she said she’d call you.”
    “She’s on the way,” Virgil said. “Where’s the stone?”
    “What stone?”
    “Reverend Jones, I’m about to arrest you for aggravated assault on a couple of Turks, so you won’t be peddling any stones for a minimum of six to ten years,” Virgil said. “You might as well tell us. It’s an ethical responsibility, a moral responsibility, as much as anything else.”
    “I’m not about to do
anything
for six to ten years. I’m not going to do anything for more than two to three weeks, at the outside. And I don’t need a cop to tell me where my moral and ethical responsibilities lie,” Jones snapped, and then he groaned again and said, “Don’t make me mad. It hurts when I shout.”
    Virgil said, “You’re a friend of my old man, Lewis Flowers from Marshall. I went to church every Sunday and Wednesday for eighteen years, and got lectures on ethics and morality twice a week. You can’t tell me that stealing a country’s national heritage, and using a gun to assault a couple of people, put the fear of death in them, is all that moral or ethical.”
    Jones just said, “Really? You’re Lewis’s kid? I think I’ve read about you.”
    “That’s really great,” Virgil said. “About the stone?”
    Jones groaned again and said, “Hey, Officer Flowers?”
    “Yeah?”
    “I want a lawyer.”
    —
    V IRGIL LEFT HIM on the floor and walked out to the truck. Yael was waiting at the front bumper, and as he came up to her, a sheriff’s patrol car turned off the road and onto the track and accelerated toward them.
    Virgil said to Yael, “He’s been shot, but he’ll live. For the time being, anyway. He says he doesn’t know anything about the stone. I’m gonna arrest him, and send him to the hospital, and then we’ll see.”
    Virgil climbed in the truck and killed the siren.
    In the deafening silence, Yael asked, “What happened with the assassins?”
    “I don’t know—they walked in, they probably had a car over on the other side of the woods, Jones said. They’re gone. I’ll get the sheriff’s people to see if anybody saw them.”
    The sheriff’s deputy came up, climbed out of the car, and called, “Do I need my shotgun?”
    “Don’t think so,” Virgil said. “We got one down, got an ambulance on the way. C’mon, I’ll show you the layout.”
    Yael and the deputy followed Virgil back down the track, and Virgil said, “We’re gonna take the cabin and his car apart. I can’t believe the stone is far away.”
    —
    J ONES ’ S CAR WAS a rental, he said, and he asked Virgil to ask Ellen to turn it in for him. “Costing me a hundred bucks a day,” he said.
    Virgil got the keys, and he and the deputy and Yael worked through it, and concluded that unless Jones had sewn the rock into one of the car seats, it wasn’t in the car.
    They were just