Storm Front

finishing when the ambulance arrived, and two minutes later, Ellen Case. She got out and ran after the ambulance guys and their gurney, paused as she was passing Virgil, catching his arm: “Is he alive?”
    “Yeah, but he’s hurt,” Virgil said.
    She ran inside after the ambulance guys, and Yael, Virgil, and the deputy followed. Inside, a paramedic was wrapping a big white bandage across the wound, as Jones told them about his cancer, and he said, “You gotta pick me up really careful, ’cause I’m like a big sack of loose guts. It could all fall apart.”
    “Aw, Dad,” Ellen cried, and patted his arm.
    “Take it easy, kid,” Jones said.
    When the wound was wrapped, the paramedic and the ambulance driver talked about the best way to half-roll, half-lift him onto the gurney. They did that, with Jones gritting his teeth, and then Jones, his face covered with sweat, said to Virgil, “Hand me that red bag over there, Flowers. That’s got my pills. Say hello to your dad for me.”
    Virgil got the bag and the paramedic put it on Jones’s chest, and they carried him to the door, dropped the legs, and began rolling him down the track to the ambulance.
    Virgil said to Ellen, “You better follow them in. When you’ve got the time, you can come back here with a friend and get the car. He wants you to turn it back in to the rental agency.”
    Virgil told the deputy to follow her out: that Jones was under arrest, and should be restrained after treatment. The deputy left behind Ellen.
    Yael said, “Now . . .”
    “Now we take the cabin apart,” Virgil said. “See if that goddamned stone is here. We’ll get a crime-scene crew out here later, to look at the place. If they can figure out where the gunfire was coming from, maybe they can locate some brass. If God is smiling on us, we could get a fingerprint.”
    “I’m not sure God would smile on anything to do with all this,” Yael said.
    “Unless it’s all a joke to begin with,” Virgil said. He opened the oven. “Okay. Not in the oven.”

11
    V irgil spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon cleaning up the aftermath of the shooting, including reports for two different law enforcement agencies; that part was never as swift as anybody would like it to be. He also spent an hour with Yael walking around in the woods behind the cabin, following game trails and peering into gullies, hoping to find a fresh patch of earth where the stone might be buried.
    They found nothing.
    He checked the GPS tracker tablet a couple of times during the day. Awad’s car was at the airport for four hours, and then had been driven back to the campus. He had, he thought, put his one tracker on the wrong car.
    When he’d finished all the reports, he drove to the hospital, asked where Jones was, and found him in a private room in the surgical area, with a drip of some kind plugged into his arm, another drip of a specific kind coming out from under the blanket and into a bag near the floor, and a massive bandage wrapped around one thigh and also anchored with a strip that went at an angle around his waist. There was a security cuff on one leg, which was attached to the bed frame with a steel chain.
    Ellen was sitting in a visitor’s chair, reading a newspaper, and when Virgil came in, she said, “Oh my God, I’m so grateful that you got there in time.”
    “Has he told you anything about the Solomon stone?”
    Jones, who was awake, said, “Hey, I’m right here. I’ve got a lawyer. You’re not allowed to question me.”
    “I’m not questioning you, I’m questioning her,” Virgil said, pointing at Ellen. “She’s a witness. Before you toddle off to the Great Hereafter, you might like to know that if she lies to me, I’ll put her in the women’s prison at Mankato, as a result of your moral and ethical failings.”
    “You’re a vicious little rat,” Jones snarled.
    “No,
you’re
the rat. I’m trying to keep people from being killed,” Virgil snarled back. “You’re trying to
get
them killed. If your daughter here ends up one of them, which seems possible since these people are willing, I hope you live long enough to see it. I’d want that blood on your head and I’d want you to know it.”
    “Virgil!” Ellen said. “What a horrible thing to say.”
    “Yeah, well, fuck him. He’s about to die, so he’s taking no risks messing around with these crazies. He’s all about the money, that’s all he is. But you’re not—you’ve still