Storm Front

tell you, we’ve got our eye out.”
    “Good,” he said. “I’d like a few words with him myself. Or maybe not words. What I’d like to do is take this cane and shove it—”
    “Clarence!” Ma said severely, as Jones turned toward her, and she thought she saw a twinkle in his eye. They were a good team.
    —
    T HE DAYROOM was filled with people sitting in chairs, looking around, plus a couple of orderlies. That was it. People looking around, until an orderly walked up to a man and sniffed at him, and said, “Bob, we better go back to your room. You need to change.”
    “Change?”
    Ma looked away.
    Magda was sitting on a glider, gliding. She looked up and smiled when Jones and Ma walked up, and said, “Hi!” but there was no recognition in her eyes.
    Jones got close and said, “Magda, how are you feeling?”
    “I feel fine. Are you James?”
    “I’m Elijah,” Jones said.
    “Where’s Elijah?” Suddenly she looked frightened, and peered around the room, her smile disappearing. “Why don’t they let me see him?”
    Jones took her hand, and Ma suddenly realized she couldn’t deal with it, and said, “I’ll wait outside.”
    Jones looked at her, then nodded. “I’ll only be a couple of minutes.”
    He was more like ten minutes, and Ma, looking through the glass plate in the locked dayroom door, saw him holding Magda’s hand, talking gently with her, saw her shaking her head. But then the smile came back, and she began to talk. Jones listened to her for a minute or two, then said something to her, kissed her on the forehead, stood, kissed her again, and walked toward the door, looking reluctantly back. She was following him with her eyes, and he stopped and went back and kissed her on the lips, but she pulled away, as if shocked, and he kissed her on the forehead again, and then came through to the door.
    Ma said, “I’m sorry.”
    “Yeah,” Jones said, tears running down his moon face. “Tonight I’ll pray to the Good Lord, and thank him for taking me with cancer.”
    Then Ma started to cry, and, leaning on each other, they went out the door.
    —
    V IRGIL MET al-Lubnani and Awad in the laundry room, and as Virgil had said, the conversation didn’t take more than a couple of minutes. At the end of it, they all shook hands, and Virgil headed out to Ma’s place, where his tracker said that Bauer’s car was still parked. He was a few hundred yards out when a beat-up black Toyota pickup turned out of her driveway and headed toward him. As it passed, he recognized her oldest son, Rolf, at the wheel.
    Virgil had been cooperating with the Blue Earth County sheriff’s office on the lumber scam. He hadn’t actually talked to Rolf, though he’d seen photos of him. On a hunch, he rolled past Ma’s driveway—Bauer’s Range Rover was parked in the side yard—and kept going until the black pickup was hidden in its own gravel dust. He made a quick three-point turn and went after it.
    He was three hundred yards behind when the truck reached Highway 169, which paralleled the river as it turned north toward the Twin Cities. Virgil slowed as the pickup waited for a car to pass, hooked right onto the highway. Virgil drove to the intersection, thinking Rolf was probably going to Mankato—though he was taking a long way around—but then, a quarter mile down the highway, the pickup slowed, signaled a turn, and crossed over to a road on the other side, where it disappeared again.
    Now Rolf was only a few hundred yards from the river. Virgil followed. The road down to the water dead-ended, but Rolf turned at the very end of it and disappeared again. An unmarked track? Virgil pulled to the side of the road, dug out his iPad, and looked at a satellite view of the area on Google Maps. As far as he could see, there was no track or other road extension. Rolf was right at the river.
    Virgil drove on down, parked fifty yards out, got out, put his gun in the small of his back, and walked down to the end of the road.
    The Toyota had been pulled off and parked in a notch in the riverside trees. Virgil found a path going back into the woods—more than a game trail, but less than a regular fisherman’s access.
    The problem was, the woods were so dense that if Ma’s kid wanted to ambush him, he could. Virgil didn’t think that was likely, because Ma’s kids, those he’d met, seemed mellow enough. Still, he didn’t know this one, and he really needed to see what was going on.
    As he hesitated, the silence