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“With a car door.”
“Yep. Cut my forehead trying to crawl out of the car when the guns came out. Still got the scar. I was trying to get behind the engine block, because car bodies are now made out of toilet paper.”
“That would be correct,” Lucas said. “I even remember you walking around the office with a gauze thing on your head. A patch.”
“Looking for a little disability downtime. Yankees were in town for a four-game stand,” Kowalska said. “How are you, by the way? You working?”
“Maybe,” Lucas said. “Listen, I’m not sure I got this right, but I heard around the office that you thought Mrs. Brickell—”
“That would be Ms. Cheryl Lundgren. She of the missing meds.”
“Whatever. I heard that you thought she was the shooter, not Brickell.”
“I still think that. I mean, I’m sure I saw her at the window,” Kowalska said. “I was fifty yards away, but she’s a blonde and Brickell has dark hair and anyway, he was wearing a red ballcap. I saw a blonde behind the gun. Shot a hole in the back window of the car.”
“But that didn’t go anywhere... You thinking it was Lundgard.”
“Lundgren. No, it didn’t. Because Brickell confessed,” Kowalska said. “He was lying through his teeth to protect her. He was already going to prison, got a deal by pleading to ag assault on the shoot-out. I guess he figured what the hell, he could do the extra three. And then, maybe you gotta know Ms. Lundgren to fully understand it.”
“She’s not unattractive?”
“That’s not it. Sheisunattractive. But she has a... pull. She latches onto you. She shot a hole in my car and before I finished talking to her, I felt sorry for her,” Kowalska said. “Don’t tell any of my fellow right-wingers at the office that I said that.”
“She tall?”
“Oh, sort of, one of those tall skinny Scandinavians. Five-eight, five-ten, I’d say.”
“How sure are you about the shooting? That she was the shooter?”
“Ninety-seven percent. No, check that. Ninety-eight-point-five percent,” Kowalska said. “She tried to shoot me and Loren McCord. Loren never saw her at the window, he was eatin’ dirt. What are you looking at?”
“Not sure. I may have to go up and see her,” Lucas said.
“Careful. Stay away from her goats.”
“Goats?”
“She’s got a bunch of goats,” Kowalska said. “She makes goat cheese for a living. She’s got this one mean billy goat, went after Loren. You know that thing about billy goats butting people? It’s true. The goddamn things are dangerous.”
“I’ll be careful,” Lucas said. “And I’ll, uh, say hello from you.”
“Do that. Tell her I hope she’s doing okay.”
—
Lucas went onlineto the Marshals Service and looked at the file on Brickell as well as the linked file on Lundgren. Brickell was a run-of-the-mill redneck asshole, more likely to use a baseball bat than a gun, apparently familiar with both the manufacturing and habitual ingestion of methamphetamine. Because of his attraction to underage girls, along with a history of dealing weed, he was no longer allowed closer than five hundred yards from the Paynesville Area Secondary School.
The county judge who issued the restraining order referred toBrickell as a “spittle stain on the good name of Stearns County,” which made Lucas think he might like the judge.
Lundgren also had a police record, all for involvements in bar fights, which she apparently started. Her mug shot made her look harsh, but then, it was a mug shot, and she had a split lip and a black eye.
Lucas sent a phone message to Virgil: “Cecil’s tomorrow at nine o’clock. Leave for Stearns County at ten. Bring a gun.”
He got back a thumbs-up and no further message, not even a question of why they were going to Stearns County, which suggested to Lucas that Virgil was either deep into the financial matter, or working on his next novel.
Almost certainly the novel.
—
