Rough Country Read Free

asked.
    “They’re up in Bigfork, looking for Little Linda,” Davenport said. “That’s why Sanders needs the help—his investigators are all up there, and half his deputies. A woman on the Fox network is screaming her lungs out, they’re going nightly with it—”
    “Ah, Jesus.”
    Blond, blue-eyed Little Linda Pelli had disappeared from her parents’ summer home, day before last. She was fifteen, old enough not to get lost on her way to a girlfriend’s cabin. There were no hazards along the road, and if her bike had been clipped by a car, they would have found her in a ditch. Nobody had found either Little Linda or her black eighteen-speed Cannondale.
    Then a woman who worked at a local lodge had reported seeing an unshaven man “with silver eyes” and a crew cut, driving slowly along the road in a beat-up pickup. The television people went bat-shit, because they knew what that meant: somewhere, a silver-eyed demon, who probably had hair growing out of all his bodily orifices, had Little Linda chained in the basement of a backwoods cabin (the rare kind of cabin that had a basement) and was introducing her to the ways of the Cossacks.
    “Yeah,” Davenport said. “Little Linda. Listen, I feel bad about this. You’ve been talking about that tournament since June, but what can I tell you? Go fix this thing.”
    “I don’t even have a car,” Virgil said.
    “Go rent one,” Davenport said. “You got your gun?”
    “Yeah, somewhere.”
    “Then you’re all set,” Davenport said. “Call me when you’re done with it.”
    “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Virgil said. “I’ve got no idea where this place is. Gimme some directions, or something. There’re about a hundred Stone Lakes up here.”
    “You get off the water, I’ll get directions. Call you back in a bit.”
     
     
     
    THEY SHOT A ROOSTER TAIL back to the marina and Virgil showed the dock boy his identification and said, “We need to keep this boat handy. Put it someplace where we can get at it quick.”
    “Something going on?” the dock boy asked. He weighed about a hundred and six pounds and was fifty years old and had been the dock boy since Virgil had first come up to Vermilion as a teenager, with his father.
    “Can’t talk about it,” Virgil said. “But you keep that boat ready to go. If anybody gives you any shit, you tell them the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension told you so.”
    “Never heard of that,” the dock boy admitted. “The criminal thing.”
    Virgil took out his wallet, removed one of the three business cards he kept there, and a ten-dollar bill. “Anybody asks, show them the card.”
     
     
     
    HE AND JOHNSON walked across the parking lot to Johnson’s truck, carrying their lunch cooler between them, and Johnson said, looking back at the boat, “That’s pretty handy—we gotta do that more often. It’s like having a reserved parking space,” and then, “What do you want to do about getting around?”
    “If you could run me over to the scene, that’d be good,” Virgil said. “I’ll figure out something after I see it—if it’s gonna take a while, I’ll go down to Grand Rapids and rent a car.”
    “Think we’ll get back out on the lake?” Johnson asked, looking back again. Everybody in the world who counted was out on the lake. Everybody.
    “Man, I’d like to,” Virgil said. “But I got a bad feeling about this. Maybe you could hook up with somebody else.”
    At the truck, they unhitched the trailer and left it in the parking spot with a lock through the tongue, and loaded the cooler into the back of the crew cab. Johnson tossed Virgil the keys and said, “You drive. I need to get breakfast.”
     
     
     
    SINCE THE AIR-CONDITIONING WAS BROKEN , they drove with the windows down, their arms on the sills, headed out to Highway 1. Davenport called when they were halfway out to the highway and gave Johnson instructions on how to reach the Eagle Nest.
    Johnson wrote them down on the back of an