Read Rough Country for Free Online

knew who it was. Some guy from Lake City who fell out of his boat—”
    “Yeah, yeah, you told me.” He spit a piece of pimento out the window.
    “What I didn’t tell you was, this cop wanted to anchor the body until we could get a bigger boat out there to do the recovery,” Johnson said. “So he tied a line around it, so he could pull it over closer to the shore and tie it off to a tree. But the thing is, it’d been in the river for a week, and was all bloated and full of gas, and when he pulled on the line, the body came apart and the gas came out and rolled right over me.”
    “Ah, jeez,” Virgil said. “You know what you do in a situation like that? Course, I don’t suppose you had any Vicks . . .”
    “Hang on a minute,” Johnson said. “Anyway, I started barfing. I barfed up everything I had and then I kept barfing. Nothing was coming up but some spit, but I couldn’t stop. The cop was barfing, too, and I got out of there and went back to the cabin, and I kept . . . trying to barf. I couldn’t get the smell off me. I took a shower and washed my hair and I even burned the clothes, and I could still smell it and I’d start barfing again. That went on for a week, and then, like three weeks later, it started again, and went on for another couple of days. So, you know, this morning, I thought a murder scene might be interesting, but when I saw her in the water . . . I smelled that gas again.”
    “I didn’t smell much of anything, except lake water,” Virgil said.
    “It’s not real,” Johnson said. “It’s stuck in my brain. That smell.”
    “I’ve heard of that,” Virgil said. “People getting stuck with a smell or a mental image.”
    “The image doesn’t bother me—never saw that much of the guy’s body,” Johnson said. “But when I saw you get your face right down on top of her, and her hair floating out like that, I about blew my cookies. I don’t see how you do it.”
    “Job,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah, well . . .” Johnson sighed, turned around, dug a Budweiser out of the cooler, popped it open. “Think you better find yourself a ride, Virgil. I’m going back up to the V. This murder shit—I’m done with it. I thought it would be interesting, but it’s just nasty.”
     
     
     
    AT THE CLOSEST APPROACH to the pond, they pulled off onto the shoulder of the road, and the sheriff and Virgil walked one way, and Johnson the other, because Virgil knew that he’d spot the trail, and so would Johnson, but he wasn’t sure about the sheriff. He and the sheriff had walked thirty yards along the gravel road when he saw it: “There.” He turned and shouted, “Johnson!”
    Johnson jogged over and Virgil said, “Stay back from it—we’ll want the crime-scene guys to walk it.”
    There’d been no way the killer could have gotten in without leaving a trail: the soil was firm enough underfoot, but damp, and the plants were the soft, leafy, easily broken kind that you saw in the shade, on the edges of wetlands.
    “The question is, where’d he leave his car?” Virgil asked. The road was narrow, and there were no obvious turnoffs. “Couldn’t park it here; too many people would have seen it.”
    The sheriff said, “There’s some empty cabins up the way. He could park back there, and not get seen. But what if he dropped off a gun, then parked up at the lodge? You could walk down here in fifteen or twenty minutes. Gravel road like this, you could hear a car coming. A little care, you could just step into the woods before it went by.”
    “A guy would be noticed at the lodge, a stranger,” Virgil said. “Maybe a woman?”
    Johnson said, “If it was a woman, especially if it was one who was staying at the lodge, she’d see McDill going out in the boat. She might even have asked her where she was going . . . run down here, boom.”
    Virgil looked into the woods. “If that’s right, the gun might still be in there. Unless she came down last night and picked it up, but that’d