Dark of the Moon

"THAT YOU, JIMMY?"

Stryker turned. He was a tall man, square-chinned, with pale hair and hard jade-green eyes. Like most prairie males, he was weather-burnt and wore cowboy boots. "That you, Virgil?"

"Yeah. What happened?"

Stryker turned back to the fire. "Don't know. I was down in my house, and one minute I looked out the window and didn't see anything, and the next minute, I heard the siren going, looked out the window, and there it was. We got a guy who was driving through town, saw it happen: he said it just exploded."

"What about Judd?"

Stryker nodded at the house. "I could be wrong, but I do believe he's in there."

Up closer to the fire, a man in a trench coat, carrying an umbrella, was standing with three firemen, waving his free hand at the fire, and at the trucks, jabbing a finger. In the light of the flames, Virgil could see his mouth working, but couldn't hear what he was saying.

Strkyer said, "That's Bill Judd Jr. He's pissed because they're not putting out the fire."

"The New York City Fire Department couldn't put that out," Virgil said. The heat came through the rain, hot as a hair dryer, even at fifty yards. "That thing is burning a hole in the storm."

"Tell that to Junior."

The fire stank: of burning fabrics and old wood and insulation and water and linoleum and oil and everything else that gets stuck in a house, and maybe a little flesh. They watched for another moment, feeling the heat on the fire side, the cool rain spattering off the hoods on their rain suits, down their backs and necks. Virgil asked, "Think he was smoking in bed?"

Stryker's features were harsh in the firelight, and the corners of his mouth turned down at Virgil's question. "Bill Parker, he's a guy lives up in Lismore, was coming into town on Highway Eight. He saw the fire, mmm, must've been a few minutes after it started. He was driving toward it when a truck went by, moving fast. He figures it was going eighty, ninety miles an hour. And it was raining to beat the band. It took the turn on Highway Three, headed down to Ninety."

"He see what kind of truck?"

"Nope. Not even sure it was a pickup. Might've been an SUV," Stryker said. "All he could see was, the lights was set up high."

They looked at the fire some more and then Virgil said, "Lot of people hated him."

"Yup." A few locals sidled past, grinning, hiding beer cans, having snuck past the cops below. Small town, you took care of yourself: Stryker told them, "You folks stay back out of the way."

They watched for another minute, then Virgil yawned. "Well, good luck to you, Jimmy. I'm heading down to the Holiday Inn."

"Why'd you come up?"

"Just rubbernecking," Virgil said. "Saw the fire when I was coming down Ninety. Knew what it must be."

"Goddamnedest thing," Stryker said, peering into the flames. "I hope that old sonofabitch was dead before the fire got to him. Nobody needs to be burned to death."

"If he did."

"If he did." Stryker frowned suddenly, again turned his green eyes to Virgil. "You don't think he might've faked it? Skipped out to wherever he put that money?"

"I think the money might be a legend, is what I think," Virgil said. He slapped Stryker on the shoulder. "You take it easy, Jimmy. I'll see you tomorrow."

"Not too early. I'll be out here awhile." As Virgil walked away, Stryker called, "That money wasn't no legend, Virgil. He's burnin' because of that money."

Behind him, up closer to the fire, Bill Judd Jr. was still screaming at the firemen, looking like he was one step from a heart attack.

THE HOLIDAY INN was smoke free, and Strictly No Pets, but Virgil's room smelled of smoke and pets anyway-snuck cigarettes and cats in the night-as well as whatever kind of chemical they sprayed in the air to kill the smell of smoke and cat pee. You got two beds whether you wanted them or not. Virgil tossed his bag on one of them, pulled off the rain suit, and hung it over the showerhead to drip-dry.

He was a medium-tall man with blond hair and gray eyes, a half inch over six feet, lean, broad shouldered, long armed with big hands; his hair was way too long for a cop's, but fell short of his shoulders. He'd played the big-three sports in high school, had lettered in all of them, a wide receiver in football, a guard in basketball, a third baseman in baseball. He wasn't big enough or fast enough for college football, he was too short for basketball, and had the arm for college baseball, but couldn't hit the pitching.

He drifted through a degree in ecological science, with a minor in creative writing, because it was easy and interesting and he liked the outdoors, the botany, and the girls in the writing classes. He joined the Army after graduation, got semicoerced into the military police, saw some trouble, but never fired his weapon in anger.

He came back home, found that there was no huge demand for bachelor-degree ecologists, and went off to the Police Academy. Got married, got divorced, got married, got divorced, got married, got divorced, and at the end of a five-year round of silliness, decided he didn't want to be a four-time loser, so he stopped getting married.

He was working for the City of St. Paul as an investigator-eight years on the force, getting bored-when he was borrowed by a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) unit looking into a home-invasion ring. One thing led to another, and he moved to the BCA. There, he fell into the orbit of a political appointee named Lucas Davenport who made him an offer he couldn't refuse: "We'll only give you the hard stuff."

HE'D BEEN DOING the hard stuff for three years, with a personal side-venture as an outdoor writer. He had credits at most of the magazines that still took freelance stuff, but he wasn't going to make a living at it; not unless he got a staff job, and magazines weren't looking real healthy.

Didn't know if he wanted to, anyway.

Davenport had told him that smart crooks were the most interesting game, and Virgil sometimes agreed.

VIRGIL WORE native dress out on the prairie: faded jeans and scuffed cowboy boots and musical T-shirts, and because he was a cop, a sport coat. In the sun, in the summer, he wore a straw hat and sunglasses. He usually didn't wear a gun, unless he was in St. Paul, where Davenport might see him. The law required him to go armed, but in Virgil's opinion, handguns were just too goddamned heavy and uncomfortable, so he kept his under the seat of the car, or in his briefcase.

After hanging his rain suit in the shower, he got a laptop out of his briefcase, went online. In his personal e-mail, he found the note from Black Horizon, a Canadian outdoor magazine, that he'd been expecting for a couple of days. They were working late in Thunder Bay: "Virg, I had to take a couple graphs out of the section on the portage-nothing I could do about it, it's all about the space. I tried not to hack it up too bad. Anyway, it works for us if it works for you. Get back to us, and I'll stick a check in the mail."

He was pleased. This was his third piece in BH. He was becoming a regular. He opened the attached Word document, looked through the edited section.

Good enough. He closed the document and sent a note to the editor: "Thanks, Henry. It's fine. I'll look for the check. Virgil."

Whistling now, he went to the National Weather Service, typed in the zip code for Bluestem, got the week's forecast: thunderstorms tonight-no shit-with fair skies and warm weather the next three or four days, thunderstorms possible in the afternoons. He checked Google News to make sure London hadn't been nuked since he left Mankato; it hadn't.

He shut down the computer, got undressed, shook the little remaining water off his rain suit, got in the shower, cranked the heat until he couldn't stand it anymore, then turned it up one more notch. He got out, scalded half to death, crawled into bed, and thought about Bill Judd roasting like a bratwurst in the embers of his own home, and a truck speeding away in the night. That would be an interesting murder.

THEN HE THOUGHT about God for a while, as he did most nights.

The son of a Presbyterian minister and a professor of engineering, who saw in God the Great Engineer and believed as devoutly as her husband, Virgil had gotten down on his knees every night of his life, to pray before bed, until the first night he'd spent in the dorm at the University of Minnesota. That night, embarrassed, he hadn't gotten down on his knees, and he'd shivered and shaken in fear that the world would end because he hadn't said his prayers.

By Christmas, like most freshmen, he was done with religion, and he mooched around campus with a copy of The Stranger under his arm, hoping to impress women with long dark hair and mysteries that needed to be solved.

He'd never gotten back to religion, but he had gotten back some faith. It came all at once, in a bull session in an Army bachelor-officers' quarters, when one of the guys professed to being an atheist. Another one, and one who wasn't too bright, in Virgil's estimation, had said, urgently, "Oh, but you're wrong: look at all the wonders of the world. There are too many wonders."

Virgil, having grown up in the countryside, where there were wonders, and having studied ecology, where he found even more, had been stricken by the correctness of that statement from the not-too-bright believer: there were too many wonders. Atheists, he came to believe, generally worked in man-made cubes, with blackboards and computers and fast food. They didn't believe in wonders because they never saw any.

So faith came back, but a strange one, with a God his father wouldn't have recognized. Virgil thought about Him almost every night, about his sense of humor, and the apparent fact that He'd made rules that even He couldn't bend…

Then at one o'clock in the morning, having thought of God, Virgil drifted off to sleep, and dreamt of men sitting in motel rooms, in the dark, secretly smoking Marlboros, watching their cats ghosting illegally around their rooms.