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She was talking about her back hurting and one of the guys at another pump said, “I’d call the cops if I were you. Make sure they know what happened.”
With Ryan still screaming at him, he got a piece of paper and a pen from his car and wrote down the license plates of everyone at the pumps, and then called the cops.
Fifteen minutes later, they were telling their stories to the police. The guy who suggested that he call the cops testified that Ryan had entered the parking lot at high speed and was at fault. She started to cry, and the cops took Hess aside and said, “Listen, this is all on private property and she doesn’t seem hurt and you say you’re not, so it’s pretty much up to your insurance companies...”
Both cars were drivable, but the whole situation ate up an hour. He was late to the job, angry about his car, sapped by the screaming, and at the end of the training session, he went home and went to bed.
He’d worked too long, spent too much emotional energy in the arguments with Ryan, to murder anyone.
Tomorrow.
25
Lucas wanted to drive, so the next morning he backed out of his garage and Virgil parked his Tahoe inside, out of the snow.
The snow wasn’t a big deal, more like a heavy flurry, but the weather had turned colder. Before getting into Lucas’s Cayenne, Virgil unzipped his equipment bag and took out the lighter of his two Patagonia parkas, and cross-country ski gloves, and pulled them on.
Lucas, in the Cayenne, had dressed for the cold. “Maybe this’ll be like an old-timey winter,” Lucas said, as Virgil got in the passenger seat.
“You mean like when the chicken house got buried by fifteen-foot drifts, your best friend got his tongue stuck to the school flagpole, and children got lost and froze to death after stepping off the school bus and they couldn’t see the house thirty feet away?”
“No, I mean like between 1982 and 1990. Six of those years had at least one day when it was colder than minus 30 in Minneapolis, and between 1980 and 2000, every year had at least one day colder than minus 24,” Lucas said.
“Ooo, you’re the weather boy, now.”
“No, I’ve been a couch potato since we got shot, and you gotta do something on the couch,” Lucas said. “I spent some time looking up the weather.”
“I didn’t mind the cold so much,” Virgil said, after a while as he looked at the newly white landscape. “That’s why we got parkas and mittens. What I didn’t like was working out on the prairie, the fucking ground blizzards. You could look straight up and see blue sky and little puffy clouds, but from ground level to six feet up, you could see exactly jack shit. You’d wind up plastered with ice crystals and dirt.”
“That’s bad,” Lucas agreed. “I’ve been in a couple, out in the Red River Valley. I’ve been here through enough winters that October makes me think of Key West.”
They’d decided to stop and see Cooper, who was still at Regions Hospital. Lucas had talked to Weather, who was unconcerned about the repairs to Cooper’s face: she’d be fine, Weather said. The cuts had been deep but clean and hadn’t damaged any critical nerves and only one serious blood vessel, which she’d repaired.
Virgil had spoken to Durey that morning, who told him that the renewed search of Heath’s house had turned up nothing on the murders of either Hinton or Pollard. The examination of both his office and home computers was ongoing.
“Some emails were recently erased, and they might be able to recover those, but that’s uncertain. Thieves don’t usually go out oftheir way to document the thefts,” Virgil said. “If we can’t get him to say something, to step on his dick, we could have a problem getting him to trial.”
“Got him for the attack on Maggie,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, but... his lawyers are already putting up the ‘fighting words’ defense. They claim that Cooper unreasonably provoked him, knowing that he was already under severe stress. They say he didn’t hurt her, the cuts on her face were accidental, caused by a breaking water glass which, they say, Maggie pulled down on top of herself. So...”
“Yeah.”
The snow was coming down a bit harder when Lucas and Virgil got to the hospital. They parked, went inside, tracked down Cooper’s room, and found her sitting up in bed with Melton in a visitor’s chair, rocking Chelsea. When they saw Lucas and Virgil come in, Melton stood up, picked up a towel, tossed it over Virgil’s shoulder, and handed him the baby. “She needs to be burped.”
Virgil took the baby and began patting her on the back as Lucas moved over to Cooper’s bed and said, “Weather says your face will be fine.”
“I know. We talked last night and she called me already this morning. I’m still not...” She reached up and touched the bandages covering her cheek, and her eyes seemed to kick back in their sockets, crazy eyes, and they trembled there and quickly came down and refocused. “I’m not sure about it. I once cut my wrist with a piece of broken glass, way back when I was a kid, and I still can see a scar.”
“Probably not fixed by the best plastic surgeon in the business,” Lucas said. “I’m... uh, let me show you something.”
He took off his parka, a sweater, and his button-front shirt. Hewas wearing a tee-shirt under all that, and he pulled down the neckline so she could see the scar where the surgeons had gone in to fix his broken arm. “That was done by an orthopedic surgeon. They use suture material that Weather calls ‘ropes.’ Still, my scar is this little white line.” He pulled the neck of the shirt back up. “To find your scars, a person would have to use a microscope.”
“That makes me happier, I guess,” Cooper said. “I appreciate the striptease.”
“He used to be one of those groundhog guys,” Virgil said.
“Chipmunks,” Melton said.
