Read Rough Country for Free Online Page B

“You stay off that Budweiser when you’re driving.”
    “Yeah, yeah . . .”
    “I mean it, Johnson. I got enough goddamn dead people on my hands.”
    Johnson cracked a smile: “First turn I get around, I’m gonna throw a beer can out the window. I’ll call it the Virgil Flowers memorial beer can. It’ll still be there when the next glacier comes through.”
    And he was gone.
     
     
     
    VIRGIL TOLD SANDERS that he needed to talk to Rainy, the guide, and then to Stanhope, and then to anyone that they might suggest. “Gonna be a while,” he said.
    The sheriff shrugged, “Well—it’s a murder, so I guess that takes a while,” and a couple of seconds later, “You’re not gonna get much from George.”
    “Yeah?”
    “George is a drunk,” Sanders said. “Every day that he works, he stops at the liquor store and picks up a fifth and he takes it home and drinks it. He’s trying to drink himself to death. He did that last night. He was in no shape to ambush anybody.”
    “Any particular reason he’s doing that?” Virgil asked.
    “Not as far as I know. I think he’s tired of being here,” Sanders said.
     
     
     
    THEY FOUND RAINY and interviewed him in a room called “the library,” a cube with three soft chairs and a few hundred hard-backs with sun-faded covers, and six geraniums in the window, in terra-cotta pots. Rainy lived fifteen minutes away, toward Grand Rapids, but outside of town. He worked a half-dozen lakes in the area, guiding fishermen in the summer, deer and bear hunters in the fall. He got a hundred dollars a day plus tips, had worked on another lake the day before the killing, and had been scheduled to take out a couple of women in the morning and teach them how to fish for walleye.
    “Got down to the dock, and they was runnin’ around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off. They thought Miz McDill might of gone down toward that pond. So I says, ‘Well, why don’t I go take a look?’ So I jumps in a boat and runs down there, and there she was. Wasn’t like I investigated—I come out the pipe and there she was. I spotted her as soon as I come out, the boat and her shirt.”
    “You touch her?” Virgil asked.
    “Shit no. I watch TV,” the guide said.
    Virgil nodded. “Okay. No ideas?”
    Rainy shook his head: “Nope. Well . . . one. Don’t mention it to Miz Stanhope; I need to work here.”
    “I can keep my mouth shut,” Virgil said, and the sheriff nodded.
    “The women here, you know, a lot of them are singing on our side of the choir,” Rainy said.
    Virgil looked at the sheriff, who did a little head bob that suggested that he agreed, but hadn’t mentioned it out of politeness.
    “You think. . .”
    Rainy nodded. “Rug munchers,” he said. “The thing is, you know, they’d go on down to the bars—the Goose in particular—and you’d hear that there were some fights when they got the liquor in them. I don’t mean like, out in the parking lot, but you know, screaming at each other. Fighting over who was munchin’ who. So . . . it could be a sex thing.”
    Virgil asked the sheriff, “Miss McDill . . . ?”
    “Don’t know. I do know that a lot of the women who come up here aren’t gay,” Sanders said. “Margery told me once that a lot of them want to come up here without having to put up with macho North Woods bullshit. Don’t mind men, they just want to get away for a while, get back to nature on their own.”
    “How’d that come up?” Virgil asked. “About who was gay?”
    “Somebody made a comment at the Chamber of Commerce, and she was steamed about it,” the sheriff said. “I bumped into her, purely by accident, and she let it out. We’ve known each other since grade school.”
    “Huh.”
    The sheriff chuckled. “You just said, ‘Huh,’ like a cop.”
    “No, no . . . but you wonder, if this was done by an outsider, somebody who was staying here at the lodge, how’d they know exactly how to walk in there? To the pond?” Virgil