Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(103)

“Do I know you?” she asked, turning back to him. She was nearly as tall as he was.

“We’ve spoken.”

She took only a second. “Virgil?”

Virgil nodded. “I hope you’re not going ahead with the i-Phone-eeeO. I don’t want to come down here again.”

“You couldn’t catch me this time . . . unless you’re doing it now.”

Virgil put up both hands. “No. Nope. No way. I’m going home, and Margaret S. Griffin should be back in L.A. by now. The thing is, if you go with the iPhone-eeeO, Apple will probably put out a hit on you. Those guys won’t be messing around with some low-rent PI with court papers. They’ll send out some guys with thick necks and they’ll cut your head off, and I’ll be down here on another murder.”

“How long do you think those two guys would last in Trippton? With my girls?”

“Okay . . . you got me. But I’m begging you, wait until I’m on vacation or something.”

She laughed, a happy sound, then cut it off and said in a hushed voice, “David Birkmann? I can’t believe it. It’s like saying a duck did it.”

“He has . . . issues,” Virgil said. “The whole thing would be a tragedy, if it weren’t basically so slipshod and stupid.”

They walked up to the counter together and checked out, McGovern with a Ding Dong and a Pepsi, Virgil with a Diet Coke and his crackers.

In the parking lot, she said, “I’d give you my new phone number and tell you to call me up the next time you’re in town, except you’d use the number to trace my call.”

“Well . . .”

His parka was open, and she caught the placket of his shirt with a forefinger, gave it a tug. “You take it easy, cowboy.”

“You, too,” Virgil said. Being the enlightened, feminist that he was, he would have denied checking out her ass as she climbed in the truck, but he did and found it seriously acceptable. When she backed out, he read off her truck license plate and wrote it down when he got in his rented 4Runner. Not as good as a phone number but useful nevertheless.

—

Frankie, of course, freaked out when she saw him. “What happened to you? You didn’t tell me . . .”

“Got beat up by some women; they moved around some cartilage,” Virgil said. “I’m basically okay. I know I look a little funny.”

The dog was bouncing his forepaws off Virgil’s chest, and Virgil gave him a thorough scratch, and Frankie pointed Virgil at a chair and said, “Tell me every bit of it. From the time you left on Sunday.”

He did, and at the end she said, “You were crazy to go in that house without your gun in your hand. I don’t care if you had it in your pocket. You knew he was a psycho.”

“A mistake,” Virgil admitted. “Though if we’d gone in with guns, he might have lawyered up, and we wouldn’t have gotten our voice recordings.”

“All right. Does your busted nose hurt so much that you’re off kissing for a while?”

“I don’t believe so,” Virgil said.

—

So then they did all the things you do when you get home from a trip, all the dirty clothes wadded up and tossed in the washing machine, the bag put away. Virgil told Frankie about his three-week suspension, with pay, and she suggested that they take a trip somewhere.

“We could run back over to Trippton,” he said. “Ice fishing, snowmobile riding, we could shop for sex toys in Bernie’s Books . . .”

“I’m thinking Phoenix or Los Angeles. Someplace warm and dry.”

“We’ll talk about it . . .” he said. “Hell, let’s do it. We’ll call for tickets tonight.”

At three-thirty, just before dark, Virgil walked Honus through some of the neighboring streets. When he was sure that nobody was looking, he let Honus take an oversized dump on the lawn of a guy neither of them particularly liked. Virgil kicked some snow over it, and the two of them went on their way. A fine Minnesota tradition, he thought. There’d be layers of well-preserved dog poop in the guy’s yard come spring, and he’d be rolling along with his lawn mower and SKAT! Dog shit everywhere.

Honus looked up at him, and they both laughed at the thought.

—

That night, he and Frankie fooled around again, then read in bed, Honus curled up between their feet. They slept in the next morning, Virgil finally crawling out at nine o’clock, Frankie rolling over for another five minutes.

He was shaving when she came in, stared in the mirror for a minute, said to herself, “Hello, gorgeous. You seem to look better every day. How do you keep it up?”

“Gotta be the great sex,” Virgil said.

She said, “Huh,” opened the medicine cabinet, and fished out her birth control pills.

Virgil said, “Give me those.” He took them from her fingers, dropped them in the wastebasket, and continued shaving.

She blinked a few times and said, “No way.”

“Way,” Virgil said.