Rough country

21

VIRGIL SPENT SOME TIME with God that night, thinking about the way things were-about how somebody like Jud Windrow might now be lying dead somewhere, for no discernible reason-and why they were like that, and why a believer like himself would be going around cursing as he did: goddamnit.

Virgil held intricate unconventional beliefs, not necessarily Christian, but not necessarily un-Christian, either, derived from his years of studying nature, and his earlier years, his childhood years, with the Bible. God, he suspected, might not be a steady-state consciousness, omnipotent, omnipresent, timeless. God might be like a wave front, moving into an unknowable future; human souls might be like neurons, cells of God's own intelligence…

Far out, dude; pass the joint.

Whatever God was, Virgil seriously doubted that he worried too much about profanity, sex, or even death. He left the world alone, people alone, each to work out a separate destiny. And he stranded people like Virgil, who wonder about the unseen world, but were trapped in their own animal passions, and operated out of moralities that almost certainly weren't God's own, if, indeed, he had one.

Virgil further worried that he was a guy who simply wanted to eat his cake, and have it, too-his philosophy, as a born-again once pointed out to him, pretty much allowed him to carry on as he wished, like your average godless commie.

He got to "godless commie" and went to sleep.

And worried in his sleep.

FIVE HOURS LATER, his cell phone went off, and he sat bolt upright, fumbled around for it, found it in his jeans pocket, on the floor at the foot of the bed.

"Hello?"

Sandy said, "Slibe Ashbach has a Visa card and a check card. He used the Visa card at an independent gas station in Grand Rapids early in the morning of the day Constance Lifry was murdered. He used the card again later that day in Clear Lake, Iowa, and at three o'clock the next morning, again in Clear Lake, and finally, later that second day, in Grand Rapids.

"It's about three hundred miles from Grand Rapids to Clear Lake. It's something between a hundred and fifty and a hundred and seventy miles from Clear Lake to Swanson, Iowa, depending on which route you take, or three hundred to three hundred and forty miles, round-trip. Then, another three hundred miles back to Grand Rapids. So, if you figure that his truck needs to be refueled every three hundred miles or so, which is reasonable, then it's quite consistent with the idea that he drove from Grand Rapids to Clear Lake, Clear Lake to Swanson, back to Clear Lake, and then on to Grand Rapids. In fact, it fits perfectly. Even the time fits, if Constance was killed at ten o'clock at night."

"You're a treasure beyond value," Virgil said. "E-mail that to me."

"Treasure beyond value, my ass," Sandy said. "That's not what you were saying the last time I talked to you."

"I don't have time for an emotional, ah, encounter, right now," Virgil began.

"You've never had time for an emotional encounter," she said. "If you ever find time, give me a ring."

She hung up; Virgil winced, sighed, and scratched his nuts.