Bloody Genius Read Free Page B

dollars to paint their logo on my stomach.” She was blimp-like. She’d started out short, slender, and busty but now sometimes seemed to Virgil to be wider than she was tall.
    “Ah, well. Another couple of months, babe.”
    She rubbed her stomach. “I don’t know. I’ve been through this a few times and I think it could be sooner. Hope so. This is getting to be a load.”
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    —
    Virgil rolled out the driveway the next morning at ten-fifteen, having kissed both Frankie and his yellow dog, Honus, good-bye. He took two days’ worth of clothes, figuring he wouldn’t beworking on Sunday and would be back home. On the way out the door, Frankie called, “You wanna know what was the last thing Honus licked before he kissed you good-bye?”
    Well, no, he didn’t, but he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, thinking, Probably his balls. I hope his balls.
    Though the morning had been cool, Virgil’s aching arms and neck were covered with thin red scratches from the bales of dried alfalfa he’d been throwing; it would have been much worse if it’d been hot and he’d had to work in a T-shirt. They still hadn’t gotten in more than half the field, but Frankie’s second- and third-oldest boys, Tall Bear and Moses, would be throwing that afternoon.
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    —
    Virgil liked all the aspects of living on a farm, except for the farmwork. His parents always had a garden, and the teenage Virgil was expected to put in time picking and pulling and shucking, not because they needed the food, but because it was good for him . Later, as a teenager, he’d detassled corn in the summer to make money.
    He hated it all. He was a rocker, not a horticulturalist.
    Frankie kept an oversized vegetable garden—potatoes, tomatoes, sweet corn, squash, cucumbers, radishes, carrots, green beans, like that—out behind the barn in what had been, decades earlier, a pigsty. A variety of annual flower and herb beds sprawled along the driveway and the front of the house, and all had to be prepped, planted, watered, and harvested.
    A month earlier, Virgil had yanked a stunted orange, dirt-smelling carrot out of the ground, had flicked an earthworm off it, and said, “All of that fuckin’ work for this? Are you kiddin’ me?”
    Frankie’d laughed. She’d thought he was joking. He wasn’t.
    And she had that clothesline in the side yard, left over fromthe seventeenth century or something. She had a perfectly good clothes dryer, but she made Virgil tote the wet bedsheets and blankets out to the line in the summer because, she said, they smelled like sunshine when they were dry. Virgil had to admit she was right about that.
    But carrots? You could get a perfectly good bag of peeled carrots at the supermarket for, what, a couple of bucks?
    And that was more carrots than he’d eat in a month . . .
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    —
    He cut 169 at St. Peter, headed north, rolled past the farm fields and suburbs and then up the interstate highway, I-35W, toward the glass towers of downtown Minneapolis, Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore on the satellite radio singing “Downey to Lubbock.” If he could play guitar like Alvin, or the harp like Gilmore, he’d now be famous in Texas, Virgil thought. Part of Texas anyway. Okay, maybe only in Cut and Shoot, but somewhere in Texas.
    He parked outside the Minneapolis City Hall in one of the spots reserved for cops, put a BCA card on the dashboard, sighed, and went inside.
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    —
    The Minneapolis City Hall was not a pretty place, inside or out, and was the most barren public building Virgil had ever been in. Narrow, empty hallways were punctured by closed doors that rarely seemed to open at all. Hard benches that resembled church pews were spotted along the hallways, but he’d never seen anyone sitting on one. Strange things were undoubtedly happening behind all those doors, but he couldn’t imagine what they might be.
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    —
    Minneapolis Homicide was part of a broader department that included other violent-crime units.