Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(4)

Birkmann finished drying his hands, pushed out into the hallway, hung his parka on a coat peg, and ambled out to the main room. He got a beer, signed up to sing. Twenty minutes later, Bob Hart said, “You’ve seen him before, you’ve heard him before, you’ve loved him before. You know what’s coming up now, folks. Here’s Big D—Daveareeno, Daveissimo, the Bug Boy—with Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman.’”

David did a decent “Pretty Woman” and got a respectable round of applause from the . . . witnesses . . . and when he got off the stage went and had another beer or two. And he talked to lots of people. Because everybody knew Bug Boy.

He went home, sobbing against the steering wheel of his van. And at one o’clock in the morning, with a storm coming in, he sat in the living room armchair and drank a last beer of the night, staring at the blank screen of the television.

Right into those dead gray eyes.

Dead. Gray. Eyes.





TWO Ben Potter was an old guy, unshaven half the time, smelling of fried eggs and something fishy—sardines? He occasionally walked around with his fly unzipped, mumbling to himself. His eyes were too pale, wandering and watery, half buried in the flesh of his eyelids. He was always heavily bundled up against the winter cold, a tanker cap askew on his head, fleece earflaps hanging loose. He’d inherited the cap from his older brother, now dead, who’d gotten it the ugly way, in Korea, during the war.

Potter was pushing eighty but got around all right on his two artificial hips. People paid no attention to him, except to say, “Hey, Ben,” or, “Mr. Potter, how’s things?”

Nobody really wanted to hear how things were.

Potter didn’t have many years left, and he’d spend them alone.

On Saturday afternoon, Potter collected his fishing gear and headed out to the sewage plant. The plant was on the river south of Trippton, and he’d been told any number of times that the water coming out of the effluent canal was clean enough to drink.

He was willing to believe that insofar as catfishing was concerned. He stopped at the Piggly Wiggly for a tub of chicken livers to use as bait and drove out to the plant.

There’d been a heavy snowstorm on Thursday night, followed by light but persistent snow all day Friday and Saturday morning. The sewage plant’s parking lot had been plowed clean, as he’d hoped, and he parked near the gate. He got his gear out of the back of the truck, pulled on his Sorel’s, his insulated overalls, and a parka. Years before, he’d epoxied a cheap thermometer to the back hatch of his camper. He peered at it now: five degrees above zero. He went back into the truck, found a face mask, and stuck it in his pocket in case it got really cold.

Headed downriver, a tough trek for an old guy, carrying poles with one hand and a plastic fishing bucket with a tackle box inside it with the other.

There was normally a walked-in path through the snow, but he was breaking trail now. He could see where the path was but not the individual ruts and rocks that littered it. He nearly fell twice, which he wanted to avoid at his age because getting back up was so difficult. He took fifteen minutes to make the four hundred yards down to where the warm effluent stream cut into the river’s ice, leaving an oblong pool of open, steaming water.

Potter was by himself. Too cold for fair-weather fishermen. Workers at the local tree service, who liked to fish, had set up a dozen cutoff cottonwood stumps around the outflow as chairs. Potter brushed the snow off one of them and sat down to bait his hooks.

That’s when he noticed the burgundy-colored cloth floating slowly in a wide circle around in the open water. The cloth caught the eye because . . . it was the size and shape of a body.

A body?

He kept looking, but the shape was partly submerged, and what he could see was mostly bumps of fabric, now pink against the black water.

Was that a sleeve?

Potter watched for a minute, then looked around. No help nearby. He hadn’t expected any, but he had looked anyway.

A body?

He swallowed once or twice, opened his tackle box, and found a treble-hooked bucktail. He clipped it on, hands trembling with cold and foreboding, cast and watched the bucktail fall in the open water on the other side of whatever it was. He reeled in the lure carefully until the bucktail hit the floating fabric. He set the hook and towed the thing over to his shore. There was weight to it. A lot of weight.

The closer it got, the more it looked like a body.

He got it right up to the narrow rim of ice around the open area, reached out with a bare hand, caught a bare foot, and dragged the body up on the rim of ice.

“Oh, jeez,” he muttered. He was afraid, literally shaking in his boots, his hands trembling so violently that he dropped his fishing rod. He rolled the body over to look at the face.

His hook had gone into the woman’s cheek, a couple inches below her eye. He didn’t try to remove it. He simply gawked . . .

Then, “Gina Hemming? Gina Hemming?”

Horrified, he turned and shouted into the winter’s silence, “Help! Help me!”

No response. There wouldn’t be one, he knew. He stepped away from the body, couldn’t help looking back, and looking again, and again, as he broke into a slow, stumbling old man’s run back to the sewage plant . . .





THREE Virgil Flowers sat uncomfortably hunched over in a camouflaged blind on the banks of the frozen Mississippi, roughly a hundred miles, as the crow flies, north of the Trippton sewage plant. He was wrapped from his chest to his stocking feet in a heavyweight sleeping bag, the lens of his Nikon D810 digital camera peeking out through the blind’s front screen. His boots sat next to him, stuffed with air-activated hand warmers.