Rough Country Read Free Page A

old gas receipt, said good-bye, gave Virgil’s phone back, threw the empty Budweiser breakfast can into a ditch, and dug his Minnesota atlas out from behind the seat. Virgil slowed, stopped, backed up, got out of the truck, retrieved the beer can, and threw it in a waste cooler in the back of the truck.
    “Found it,” Johnson said, when Virgil got back in the cab. “We’re gonna have to cut across country.”
    He outlined the route on the map, and they took off again. Johnson finished a second beer and said, “You’re starting to annoy the shit out of me, picking up the cans.”
    “I’m tired of arguing about it, Johnson,” Virgil said. “You throw the cans out the window, I stop and pick them up.”
    “Well, fuck you,” Johnson said. He tipped up the second can, making sure he’d gotten every last drop, and this time stuck the can under the seat. “That make you happy, you fuckin’ tree hugger?”
     
     
     
    VIRGIL WAS LANKY and blond, a surfer-looking dude with hair too long for a cop, and a predilection for T-shirts sold by indie rock bands; today’s shirt was by Sebadoh. At a little more than six feet, Virgil looked like a good third baseman, and had been a mediocre one for a couple of seasons in college; a good fielder with an excellent arm, he couldn’t see a college fastball. He’d drifted through school and got what turned out to be a bullshit degree in ecological science (“It ain’t biology, and it ain’t botany, and it ain’t enough of either one,” he’d once been told during a job interview).
    Unable to get an ecological science job after college, he’d volunteered for the army’s Officer Candidate School, figuring they’d put him in intelligence, or one of those black jumping-out-of-airplanes units.
    They gave him all the tests and made him a cop.
     
     
     
    OUT OF THE ARMY, he’d spent ten years with the St. Paul police, running up a clearance record that had never been touched, and then had been recruited by Davenport, the BCA’s official bad boy. “We’ll give you the hard stuff,” Davenport had told him, and so far, he had.
    On the side, Virgil was building a reputation as an outdoor writer, the stories researched on what Virgil referred to as under-time. He’d sold a two-story non-outdoor sequence to The New York Times Magazine , about a case he’d worked. The sale had given him a big head, and caused him briefly to shop for a Rolex.
    Davenport didn’t care about the big head or the under-time—Virgil gave him his money’s worth—but did worry about Virgil dragging his boat around behind a state-owned truck. And he worried that Virgil sometimes forgot where he put his gun; and that he had in the past slept with witnesses to the crimes he was investigating.
    Still, there was that clearance record, rolling along, solid as ever. Davenport was a pragmatist: if it worked, don’t mess with it.
    But he worried.
     
     
     
    “YOU KNOW,” JOHNSON SAID, “in some ways, your job resembles slavery. They tell you get your ass out in the cotton field, and that’s what you do. My friend, you have traded your freedom for a paycheck, and not that big a paycheck.”
    “Good benefits,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah. If you get shot, they pay to patch you up,” Johnson said. “I mean, you could be a big-time writer, have women hanging on you, wear one of those sport coats with patches on the sleeves, smoke a pipe or something. Your time would be your own—you could go hang out in Hollywood. Write movies if you felt like it. Fuck Madonna.”
    “Basically, I like the work,” Virgil said. “I just don’t like it all the time.”
     
     
     
    JOHNSON WAS AN OLD FISHING PAL , going back to Virgil’s college days. A lean, scarred-up veteran of too many alcohol-related accidents in vehicles ranging from snowmobiles to trucks to Ever-glades airboats, Johnson had grown up in the timber business. He ran a sawmill in the hardwood hills of southeast Minnesota, cutting hardwood flooring