Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(29)

“Thank you.”

“It’s no big deal,” Johnson said. “Anybody who’s worth a damn has had his nose broken at least once . . . Though, how many is this for you? Three? That’s bordering on too many. Does Frankie know about it?”

“No, and she better not find out,” Virgil said. “In the meantime, I’m looking for somebody associated with Jesse McGovern, who drives a red double-cab pickup and has one of those family stickers in the back with a husband, wife, five kids, some dogs and a cat.”

“Huh. Ford, Chevy, or Dodge?”

“I don’t know. Could be a Toyota, as far as I know.”

“Not in Trippton, it couldn’t be. I’ll tell you what. I don’t want you messin’ with Jesse, but this doesn’t sound like her,” Johnson said. “She’s a vegetarian, and vegetarians don’t go around beating people up. Probably one of her contractors. I’ll check around. What else can you tell me about them?”

“They wear parkas.”

“That’s a great fuckin’ clue right there,” Johnson said. “Too bad it’s not August, you could pick them right out.”

“That’s all I got,” Virgil said.

Johnson hung around for a while, and Virgil recounted his conversation with Justin Rhodes and Rob Knox about the Hemming murder, and concluded with his belief that Rhodes hadn’t done it but he wasn’t willing to make a judgment on Knox. Johnson agreed with that. “Justin’s not a bad guy, and he’s too mellow to hurt anyone. Besides, he’s got a contact for the best California pot you ever smoked. Knox, though, is an asshole. What’s next?”

“Talk to the guy who’s running the bank now and then go on down the list,” Virgil said. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure the killer is somebody you’d call a bad guy, not without knowing what he did. I might be looking for somebody you all consider a good guy.”

“I’ll think about that,” Johnson said. He offered to smuggle in some pork chops and beer. Virgil declined, and Johnson went home. And Virgil went to sleep. He woke up a couple times during the night with an odd kind of headache: it didn’t actually throb, but his head felt hollow, and it was disconcerting. In the morning, he felt better: instead of the hollow-head feeling, his face hurt, his hip and leg hurt when he moved them, and he was stiff all over, but the pain was local, and nothing he hadn’t felt before.

A nurse came in to check on him, and later to bring breakfast, and after he’d finished his Jell-O, he eased out of bed and took a few steps around the room. His balance was okay, the pain was tolerable.

The doc showed up and checked him over and said he’d release him if he would take it easy for a few days. Virgil said he would. The doc gave him some Tylenol, and told him not to fight any more women. Said he’d do the paperwork, and somebody would sign him out.

A nurse said the paperwork should be done “any minute,” but it wound up taking two hours. Virgil got dressed and lay back down on the bed to wait, and when the forms finally came in, he signed off and called the town taxi. The nurse insisted that she push him out to the parking lot in a wheelchair.

The cold air hit him as soon as they got to the lot. Felt good. The taxi driver, another morose Tripptonite, said, “Bad night at the Bunker, huh?”

The Bunker had a reputation as the worst bar in Trippton, but Virgil had never been in it. He said, “No, I fell down on my way into Shanker’s for a grilled cheese sandwich.”

“I’m not sure the wife’ll believe that,” the cabbie said.

“Fuck her if she can’t take a joke,” Virgil said. Ten minutes later, he was back at the cabin. He checked his watch: noon. He wanted to talk to Marvin Hiners, the VP at Second National, but the banker was probably at lunch, so Virgil decided to lie down and try to relax a bit. He did that, and when he woke up, he woke in darkness. He fumbled for the bedside lamp switch, turned it on, looked at his watch: ten minutes to six. He’d blown the whole day.

He hurt when he sat up. His hip was the sorest, but he also had some pain in his right shoulder, his punching arm. His mouth tasted foul, and maybe a bit like blood and chicken feathers, so he brushed his teeth, set the shower to the volcanic setting, and spent fifteen minutes standing under the near-boiling water. He was pulling on his shirt when headlights swept across the cabin windows. Johnson and Clarice came in a moment later, carrying food.

“Everything you like, as long as you like barbeque ribs and mac and cheese,” Clarice said. Virgil realized that he was starving. “We brought your truck back.”

“I ran into that private detective down at the Kettle,” Johnson said. “I told her what happened. She was going to come by right away, but I told her to hold off a day or two.”

“Thank you,” Virgil said.

“So who killed Gina Hemming?” Clarice asked.

“Not there yet. I didn’t have anything to think about before I got clobbered,” Virgil said. “She was found in the same dress that she wore to a meeting on Thursday night. I asked Rhodes about it and he said she was a fussy dresser: she would never wear the same outfit two days in a row. That means she was killed between the time the meeting ended and before she had a chance to go to bed. The sheriff’s office didn’t do much of an investigation but did find out that she almost always got to the office before the bank opened and usually stopped at The Roasting Pig for a latte before she went to work. That all suggests that she was usually up and getting dressed before eight o’clock in the morning . . .”