Rough Country

by John Sandford

  “How do you know all this stuff? How old were you when it happened? Ten?”

  “I got it from Wendy. We were together for a while. It was the big thing in her life.”

  “Slibe never . . .”

  “No, no, no . . . they didn’t. At least Wendy said they didn’t,” Zoe said. “I asked, too. But: I don’t think he wants her to leave him. I think he wants to keep her. I think Slibe believes he owns her. Like he owned Maria. She’s his.”

  “He seems to be pretty cool about the fact that she’s a lesbian,” Virgil said.

  “Well—he’s got the man attitude. If she was hooked up with a guy, that guy would own her. The ownership would go from Slibe to the guy. He doesn’t want that. Lesbians, in his eyes, it’s just chicks being chicks. But a guy . . .”

  Virgil said, “Huh.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  His phone rang, and he fished it out of his pocket and looked at it—the sheriff ’s department—said, “Virgil,” and Sanders said, “They got her, and she’s madder’n a hornet.”

  “You don’t sound too worried.”

  “Naw, if anything goes wrong, I plan to blame it on you,” Sanders said.

  “Good plan,” Virgil said. “I’ll go on over there.”

  He stood up, and Zoe asked, “Is there any possibility you’ll be seeing my sister tonight?”

  Sig must have talked, Virgil thought: “I might drop by, have a beer.”

  “Yeah, have a beer. She went to shave her legs,” Zoe said.

  “Well, shoot. I was gonna offer to do it for her,” Virgil said.

  Zoe laughed and then said, “Slibe.”

  BERNI KELLY WAS EXACTLY as mad as a hornet. She was sitting in an orange plastic chair looking at a guy behind a desk reading a newspaper. Virgil came up from slightly behind her and thought he could hear her buzzing; and she was—she was doing an angry hum, like his first ex-wife used to do.

  He put an offensive smile on his face and said, “Berni! Thanks for dropping by.”

  She turned in the plastic chair and said, “You motherfucker,” and came up out of the chair and Virgil thought she might be going for his eyes. The cop behind the desk felt it, too, and stood up, but Virgil put his hands up and said, “Whoa, whoa. Just want to talk.”

  She started to cry, and he saw that she’d already been crying, and that her eyeliner had started to run. “I think Wendy’s gonna kick me out of the band.”

  “Really?”

  “Aw, that guy who came up here with you, Jud, he’s telling her that she needs a better drummer.”

  “You talked to Jud about it?”

  “No, he told her, and she’s telling me. They say they haven’t made a decision, but they’ve made a decision . . . and then you go and get that fuckin’ deputy to drag me outa there.”

  “Still got a mouth on you,” the cop said.

  She turned around and said, “Shut up, Carl,” and to Virgil, “Carl’s wanted to fuck me since he was in the ninth grade and I was in the fifth. Isn’t that right, Carl?”

  Carl said to Virgil, “You want to take her in the interview room? I don’t want to put up with her anymore.” And to Berni, “Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things, are worthy of death.”

  “Oh, yeah, I heard you got born again,” she said. “Which you needed, since they fucked up the first time.”

  Virgil edged her toward the interview room. “C’mon, let’s go talk,” he said, and to Carl, who’d pissed him off, “The soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.”

  “That didn’t mean they were queer,” Carl called after them, as they went into the interview room. He sounded anxious about it.

  Berni asked, “What was that all about?”

  “I’m a preacher’s kid,” Virgil said. “I know all that stuff, for and against.”

  “Was David queer?”

  Virgil said, “Who knows? Donatello apparently thought so.”

  “Don who?”

  VIRGIL SAT HER DOWN on the opposite side of the conference table and said, “Berni, we’ve been through all the evidence, the sheriff and I, and it’s pretty obvious that you’re involved in these killings somehow.”

  She started to protest but he held up his hands. “Hear me out. First of all, we’ve had two band-related killings, plus a third shooting, which was done with the same rifle that killed McDill. You have no real alibis. So we started putting together a case, including the tracks back into the sniper’s nest, which were left by a woman—”

  “I didn’t do it,” she groaned. “I never went back there.”

  “Look: we can make our case, and what we’re really looking at now is state of mind. If you feel that you were . . . upset . . . that could always be worked into a pretty good defense. If you were emotionally unstable because of McDill’s relationship with Wendy—”

  “I didn’t know about that,” she said.

  “We’ve got the tracks,” Virgil said.

  “Not mine.”

  “But everybody else has an alibi,” Virgil said. “And you gotta admit, these killings are tied to the band.”

  “McDill’s woman, down in the Cities . . .”

  “Has an absolute watertight alibi,” Virgil said. “Look, I don’t know how familiar you are with the legal system. If you cooperate, this will count toward some leniency, if that’s the way the court wants to go. You don’t have any prior record—”

  “But I didn’t do it.”

  “Well . . .” Virgil threw his hands up; he was helpless, apologetic. Getting to the point. “We believe you’re involved. I mean, you say you didn’t do it, but if you didn’t, who did?”

  She looked sideways, and then said, “Oh, God, I was hoping you’d catch him yourself. Wendy’s gonna kill me.”

  “If it wasn’t you . . . I mean, if you know something, you better speak up. He seems to be shutting down everybody who knows something,” Virgil said.

  She looked up: “You think?”

  “I don’t think anybody’s safe,” Virgil said. “This person is unbalanced. He, or she, needs help. If you did it, that’s the way we’d go: get you some help.”

  “I didn’t . . .” She turned away and began humming again, thinking, and then said, “I don’t know. I don’t know a single thing about it, but I think you need to look at the Deuce.”

  “The Deuce? Not Slibe?”

  “Slibe . . . I don’t know. I do know that the Deuce has this sex thing going for Wendy, and always has. Ever since they were little. If you get Wendy off by herself, she’ll tell you that. Deuce would never want her to go away. Never.”

  “Is the Deuce sexually active?”

  “Oh, hell yes, all the time. With himself. Him and his little Hormel.”

  “I meant, does he have a girlfriend?” Virgil asked.

  “As far as I know, he’s a virgin,” she said. “If he’s not, he paid for it. But he’s . . . really . . . different. He watches you, all the time. Pretends like he isn’t, but you can see that his eyes are on you.”

  “Maybe he’s interested in you, not in Wendy,” Virgil suggested.

  “I think he’s all slobbery interested in sex,” she said. “I mean, God, he’s seventeen, you know he wants it—but Wendy’s the center of the universe.”

  “Huh.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “Wendy seems to be the center of a lot of universes,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah. Including her own,” Berni said.

  Virgil tried to look like he was thinking it over. Then he said, “I don’t know, Berni. I admit we haven’t been looking at the Deuce. I don’t know what his alibi is, but you have to admit that there’s good reason to think you might be involved.”

  He continued to push her around, coming back for more about Wendy, Slibe, and the Deuce, whenever she gave him the opening. Cranking her up.

  Setting her up.

  She’d talk to Wendy, Wendy would tal
k to everybody . . .

  And the killer would hear; and might do something.

  HE LET HER GO at five o’clock, told her to stay around town.

  Back at the motel, he took a short nap, showered, shaved again, put on a fresh T-shirt, jeans, and a sport coat. For the T-shirt, he was torn between two of his newest, a Blood Red Shoes and an Appleseed Cast, and went with the Appleseed after deciding that in the circumstances, Blood Red Shoes might be in poor taste.

  Sig was ready when he got there; came skipping out the door, wearing a cotton dress, kissed him in the driveway, slipped a couple fingers under his belt as she did it, then said, “Steak! Burnt!”

  “Where’re we going?”

  “The Duck Inn. Back downtown. They are so cool that they’ve got little individual packets of sesame crackers on every table.”

  Virgil laughed: “Can’t pass on that.”

  SIG TURNED OUT to be pretty funny, when he actually talked to her. She knew almost everybody in town, and their foibles; and she told him about finding out that Zoe had been experiment ing with a female friend of hers. “I was absolutely not shocked. For me, you know, if they don’t got that thang, it doesn’t make any sense. But I found out that Zoe liked women, it seemed perfectly normal.”

  Sig and Virgil had overlapped at the University of Minnesota, and, they thought, might have even had a common acquaintance, a woman who was methodically working her way through every art form known to mankind. Having demonstrated little ability in painting, sculpture, ceramics, architecture, botanical drawing, music, and dance—she’d played the classical guitar, badly, and the dance instructor had suggested that her true métier might involve a pole—she’d moved on to creative writing, where Virgil thought he’d met her.

  “Can’t remember a single thing she wrote, though,” he said.

  “I can remember one piece of art,” Sig said. “She had a boyfriend who hunted, and she did an engraving of a skinned rabbit. Scared the shit out of everybody who saw it.”

  “Maybe it was good, then? If it had that effect?”

  “No . . . it didn’t look like a skinned rabbit, but you could tell it was, you know, an animal that something bad happened to,” Signy said. “But it looked like a mutant. A mutant that had been beaten with a hammer or something . . . But you know, maybe you’re right. I can’t think of any other art that I remember that well, for that long. Maybe it was good. But she quit, anyway.”

  THE DUCK INN was a fake log cabin with a neon duck sign with flapping red-blue-green wings and a gravel parking lot planted with sickly pines. Going in the door, they met Jud Windrow, coming out.

  “Hey, Virgil,” Windrow said, taking a long look at Signy. “You going up to the Wild Goose tonight?”

  “Probably have to pass. I have a forensics conference tonight,” Virgil said. “The case, you know.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m heading over there now. We had a meeting out at their trailer-home, and Wendy’s gonna sign up.”

  “You fix the drummer thing?” Virgil asked.

  “Yeah, I think. Berni told us about talking to you this afternoon. She was pretty upset.”

  “People are dead,” Virgil said.

  “I hear you, brother.” Windrow looked Sig over again and said to Virgil, “Don’t do anything Willie wouldn’t.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, partner,” Virgil said.

  Windrow laughed: “Yeah, partner. Well: better get my young ass over there.”

  SIG WAS MILDLY INSULTED by the exchange and, when they got inside, asked, “What was that about?”

  Virgil told her about Windrow, and she said, “He was pretty . . . presumptuous.”

  Virgil leaned across the table and said, “You don’t know how good-looking you are. The guys in this place have their tongues hanging out. That’s what he was reacting to.”

  She said, “Well . . .”

  They got on famously. She ate a burnt steak with mashed potatoes and drank two-thirds of a bottle of Santa Barbara Pinot Grigio and told him the joke about the minister checking in at the motel (“I certainly hope the pornography channel in my room is disabled”—“No, it’s just regular pornography, you sick fuck”) and he told her about how his aunt Laurie on his mother’s side ran away with a minister, and how his father tormented his mother for a week by suggesting he might preach on the topic.

  An hour and a half slipped away, and when they finished, she insisted on a walk through the downtown, so she could show him around. They looked in at a couple of bars, and she said hello to a couple of people, and a half-hour later, back at the truck, she asked, “Have you got your cell phone?”

  “Sure—you need to make a call?”

  “No. But this time, leave it in the truck, huh?”

  “Yes!” He took the cell phone out of his pocket and put it in the cup holder. “You are a woman of great practicality.”

  “Damn right,” she said.

  BACK AT HER HOUSE, she popped a Norah Jones album in her Wave CD/radio and went off to the bathroom, and when she came back out Virgil put a hand on her hip and said, “Dance,” and they danced around the room to “Come Away with Me,” “One Flight Down,” and “The Nearness of You,” and she said, “Oh, God, Virgil,” and licked his earlobe, and he pushed her against a handy wall. . . .

  Headlights swept through the front windows, the automatic yard light came on, and Virgil moaned, “No!”

  Sig pushed free and went to the window and peered out through a curtain and said, “It’s Zoe. She knew you were coming over. We’ll tell her it’s inconvenient. She’ll take off.”

  Virgil wrapped her up from behind and said, “Honest to God, and not to be crude about it, but if I don’t get you on the bed tonight, something could break. I mean, something might fall off.”

  Sig reached back and squeezed his thigh: “We’ll just get rid of her.”

  Zoe knocked.

  17

  THE DOUBLE-WIDE SMELLED like Dinty Moore beef stew, coffee, sweat, and the vagrant vegetable odor of marijuana. Jud Windrow leaned back in the beanbag chair, scuffing his boot heels across the shag carpet; sucked on a Budweiser, tried to stay alert, and listened to Wendy, Berni, and Slibe snarl at one another.

  He’d seen all this before. You had artists who’d spent thousands of hours learning how to play a musical instrument, who could tell you anything you might want to know about writing a song, about bridges and transitions and about single specific words that you couldn’t use in a song. Cadaver? Had anyone ever used cadaver in a song?

  They knew all that, worked it, groomed it, smoothed it out, sat up all night, night after night, doing it—and they didn’t know a single fucking thing about business. They were in a business, but they didn’t know it. They thought they were in an art form.

  He sighed and let them fight it out.

  HE’D PUT THE SKUNK among the chickens when he mentioned the necessity of recruiting another drummer, and possibly somebody different on the keyboards. Berni had gone ballistic, and he’d thought for a few seconds that she might come after him, physically, but then she had started pleading with Wendy, trying to save her job, and when Wendy had looked away, Berni began to cry.

  “I . . . I . . . I get this asshole cop who drags me down to the police station and tortures me, and now you guys are kicking me out of the band . . . No, don’t say you’re not.”

  Windrow then suggested that she could help front the band: play a rhythm instrument of some kind, sing backups, and she’d quieted down a bit.

  “As long as I get to stay . . .”

  Wendy defended the keyboard player: “We put too much weight on her, is all. She’s fine on recordings, but hasn’t got an act, you know? She stands back there and plays and looks kinda dead. We can work on that.”

  “She can play,” Windrow said. “But you don’t see many big bands without everybody having some kind of personality.”

  “We’ll get her a hat,” Wendy said. “I’ll work on her. The thing is . . . she does the melodies
on the songs. She made the ‘Artists’ Waltz’ into a waltz . . . used to be a straight-up ballad.”

  “Okay,” Windrow said. “So she’s okay. Get her a hat.”

  THEN THEY MOVED ON to the terms of the contract, and that’s where Slibe jumped in with both feet. There were terms which, Windrow admitted, were favorable to him. After the initial month-long house-band gig, they agreed to play the Spodee-Odee for a week in each of the next five years, at Windrow’s option. If they refused, they’d agree to pay Windrow the equivalent of fifteen percent of the royalties from any records released during that period. On the other hand, if Windrow didn’t want them, in any particular year, he could cancel them without penalty.

  Slibe shouted at Wendy: “You see what happens? This guy takes a cut out of everything. He owns your ass.”

  “Not her entire ass,” Windrow said. “Fifteen percent of it.”

  “That’s how these guys steal from you,” Slibe said. “They get you all tied up in legal contracts that you can’t get out of.”

  Wendy wanted to sign anyway, for reasons that Windrow told her were good.

  “Listen: you can stay up here and be a ratshit band and play at the Wild Goose or maybe get a couple gigs down in the Twin Cities, or wherever, but you aren’t going to break out that way. You won’t,” he said.

  “They could get people to listen to them up here—” Slibe began, but Wendy said, “Shut up, Dad, let him talk.”

  Windrow went on. “If you wanna break out, you gotta put it on the line. That means I bring you down for a month, expose you to some of the top acts and top managers and agents in the business. And I pay you. What do I get? I get a new band that nobody knows—but you’re pretty good, and my big payoff comes if you do well. You make a couple records and they sell okay. So then you gotta come back and play the Spodee-Odee for not much money, but hell, that won’t hurt your reputation any. It’s one of the top slots on the circuit. I pack the place for a week, and you get to keep all the money from your albums.”