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“You know how to woo a girl, you rascal.”
—
Virgil got outof bed, cleaned up. In the shower, soaping up, he ran his hand over the lump of scar caused by the bullet wound he’d suffered when he and Lucas had been shot. It no longer caused him any pain, but hurt a little then, as he touched it, as though he’d wakened it. But not much, and he forgot about it.
Out of the shower and dressed, he opened his laptop and started working. He’d written two unsuccessful novels before the third one sold, and one thing had become piercingly clear: he had to do the work. Every day, including Sundays and holidays.
Naturally restless, he could keep his ass in his chair for three hours, but after that, his brain was cooked. When he was working his day job, he wrote at night, when everyone was in bed. If he wrote until one o’clock, he could still be up and around by eight, which was good enough for government work.
When he was traveling, he had to grab the time when he could. To make sure he actually wrote, he kept a small red Moleskine notebook with his laptop, in which he recorded the number of words written each day. He hated days when there were less than a thousand.
He was into the flow, an hour and fifteen minutes, 1,047 wordsdownstream, according to Microsoft Word, when Durey called. “You probably won’t believe this, but the feds are going to get the search warrant for Heath’s place.”
“Uh-oh. Somebody’s gonna get in trouble,” Virgil said.
“But not us, which is the important thing,” Durey said. “Russo did the sales job, and he doesn’t care—he considers the feds a bunch of time-wasting bureaucrats anyway. As we understand it, they’ll hit the house about eleven o’clock. We’re invited. And Lucas, if you want him.”
“I’ll give him a call,” Virgil said.
Partly because he had a kind heart and knew Lucas slept late, but mostly because he wanted to get another four hundred and fifty-three words written, Virgil didn’t call Lucas until nine forty-five, when he’d gotten past the morning’s writing goal.
Lucas claimed to be already up, which Virgil didn’t believe, but let it go. “Okay, if you’re up, I’ll pick you up in fifteen,” Virgil said. “It looks like the FBI bought your idea about the guy getting out of the van. They’re gonna hit Heath at eleven.”
“We got time, then,” Lucas said. “Give me forty-five minutes. I’d like to get a couple miles in, loosen up.”
“You lie like a Persian carpet,” Virgil said. “See you in forty-five.”
—
Lucas got outof bed, dressed—jeans and a pullover, with cross-trainers, because he might be digging around some unusual areas of Heath’s old house, if the FBI would allow him to do that—and made pancakes for himself. He made no effort to get in two miles.
“You get your two?” Virgil asked, when he knocked at the door at ten forty-five.
“A little better than that,” Lucas lied. “Balance still isn’t as good as it should be. Especially with the shoes Weather bought me. Big fat soles. They save your knees but can kill your ankles, if you land wrong.”
Virgil had Apple CarPlay going, and they listened to Otis Taylor’sBanjoalbum as they made the short trip across town.
“Music for writing?” Lucas asked.
“Works for me.”
“You ever looked at the video for Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’?” Lucas asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“The music combined with the video might be the best thing ever done about LA,” Lucas said.
“I’ll look it up,” Virgil said. “I’ve been watching a little Postmodern Jukebox...”
They were still chatting about music as they rolled down Summit Avenue; they arrived at Heath’s house at eleven o’clock with no federal cars in sight, and nobody moving outside the house.
Virgil called Durey and asked: “Where’s everybody?”
“It’s the FBI,” Durey said. “They’re running late. Give them another fifteen. They’re on the way.”
“Where are you?”
“About a block east of the house. You just went by me.”
