Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers #11)(51)

“I asked the same question,” Virgil said. “Got a tip from Mom’s son: stay away from the meat products.”

“So what are we doing?” Jenkins asked, pushing the pancakes away.

“I’ll pick up Skinner and drive down to Armstrong, where he’ll take us to Ralph Van Den Berg’s place. You two will hide in Jenkins’s piece of shit and wait for Larry Van Den Berg to get back to his house. He’ll be back on the street about now, and it’ll take him twenty minutes to get here. If he heads south for Iowa, we want to know about it. If he doesn’t for an hour or two, we’ll raid Ralph’s place anyway.”

“We gotta find something to eat,” Shrake said.

“Skinner and Holland have chicken potpies that aren’t bad. I’ve had a couple of them,” Virgil said.

Shrake looked at Jenkins, and said, “We gotta hurry.”



* * *



—

Virgil picked up Skinner as Jenkins and Shrake ran into the store.

“They’re in a hurry,” Skinner said, looking after them.

“Breakfast,” Virgil explained. “They were down at Mom’s. They were uncertain about the food.”

They walked by Jenkins’s Crown Vic on the way to Virgil’s Tahoe, and Skinner asked, “What kind of car is that?”

“Crown Victoria—they quit making them before you started driving, even if you started driving when you were twelve,” Virgil said.

“Actually, I started when I was eight. I only started running into that cop when I was twelve.” Skinner stooped to peer through the Crown Vic’s side window. “Looks like a piece of shit.”

“You have naturally good taste,” Virgil said.



* * *



—

They headed south, and Skinner said, “I had a bad thought this morning. If the guy quits shooting right now, we’ll probably never get him. If Father Brice left the church open, we might have another chance.”

“What you mean is, if we let somebody else get murdered, we might be able to ambush him because we’d be waiting for the shooting.”

“The way you say it, it sounds wrong,” Skinner said.

“I apologize.”

“See? Now you’re giving me a hard time.”

They engaged in more pointless speculation all the way to the Iowa line; and Skinner filled in some of his own background. His mother, he said, was a pleasant, intellectual woman who communed with the earth and Buddha, and sometimes went on earth-or Buddha-related trips, and other times on mind-expanding trips, depending on what was coming in from Colorado. “She’s a positive enough person, but ambition to my mom is like kryptonite to Superman,” Skinner said. “She wants nothing to do with it. With the money from the trust fund Grandpa set up for her, it’s not a problem. We’re not rich, but we’re not poor, either.”

He was not curious about the identity of his father. Virgil suggested the red hair might be a tip-off, but Skinner said his mother was tall, red-haired, and freckled, so appearance wouldn’t help.



* * *



—

In Armstrong, Skinner pointed out the high school. “I played a basketball game there in junior high. I can’t remember why.”

A pickup truck with a camper back and a dusty black Mustang pulled into the parking lot ahead of them, moved to one side, and parked. Bell Wood got out of the Mustang, hitched up his pants, and looked around, and, a second later, a woman got out of the other side. Another man got out of the pickup, wearing overalls, a plaid shirt, and a ball cap. Skinner muttered, “Cops.”

“Yeah, what’d you expect?”

“Cops. They look like cops. They dress like farmers and they still look like cops. The stink hangs on them. Even the chick,” Skinner said.

“Careful with that ‘chick.’ She’s probably armed.”

“See, the thing you don’t know is, lots of women cops want you to think of them as chicks,” Skinner said “Because the alternative is, they’re like Nazi prison guards, all waxy-faced and carrying billy clubs. You gotta think about their self-image, not some kind of artificial construct in your own head. And they think they’re ‘chicks.’”

Virgil couldn’t think of an immediate rebuttal—“artificial construct”?—and let it go.



* * *



—

Bell Wood was a big, square man with a brush mustache and gold-rimmed glasses that made him look a little like Teddy Roosevelt, which he knew. He was a major in the Iowa National Guard and had done a tour in Iraq. His subordinates, relishing the double entendre, called him Major Wood behind his back and occasionally to his face.

The woman with him was slender and square-chinned, had pale brown hair and amber eyes—possibly the best-looking woman in Iowa and all adjacent states. The man who’d driven the pickup truck was narrow-faced, with shoulder-length brown hair and a three-day beard; he would have looked at home on a bench in a bus station. Skinner was right: despite the surface patina of a farmer, he was giving off a distinct law enforcement vibe.

Skinner, in the meantime, had introduced himself to the woman, whom he then introduced to Virgil as Katie Easton. Virgil shook her hand, and he shook hands with the bus bench guy, Joe Rivers, and Wood asked Skinner, “You’re the kid who found the trailer?”