"Something going on?" the dock boy asked. He weighed about a hundred and six pounds and was fifty years old and had been the dock boy since Virgil had first come up to Vermilion as a teenager, with his father.

"Can't talk about it," Virgil said. "But you keep that boat ready to go. If anybody gives you any shit, you tell them the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension told you so."

"Never heard of that," the dock boy admitted. "The criminal thing."

Virgil took out his wallet, removed one of the three business cards he kept there, and a ten-dollar bill. "Anybody asks, show them the card."

HE AND JOHNSON walked across the parking lot to Johnson's truck, carrying their lunch cooler between them, and Johnson said, looking back at the boat, "That's pretty handy-we gotta do that more often. It's like having a reserved parking space," and then, "What do you want to do about getting around?"

"If you could run me over to the scene, that'd be good," Virgil said. "I'll figure out something after I see it-if it's gonna take a while, I'll go down to Grand Rapids and rent a car."

"Think we'll get back out on the lake?" Johnson asked, looking back again. Everybody in the world who counted was out on the lake. Everybody.

"Man, I'd like to," Virgil said. "But I got a bad feeling about this. Maybe you could hook up with somebody else."

At the truck, they unhitched the trailer and left it in the parking spot with a lock through the tongue, and loaded the cooler into the back of the crew cab. Johnson tossed Virgil the keys and said, "You drive. I need to get breakfast."

SINCE THE AIR-CONDITIONING WAS BROKEN, they drove with the windows down, their arms on the sills, headed out to Highway 1. Davenport called when they were halfway out to the highway and gave Johnson instructions on how to reach the Eagle Nest.

Johnson wrote them down on the back of an old gas receipt, said good-bye, gave Virgil's phone back, threw the empty Budweiser breakfast can into a ditch, and dug his Minnesota atlas out from behind the seat. Virgil slowed, stopped, backed up, got out of the truck, retrieved the beer can, and threw it in a waste cooler in the back of the truck.

"Found it," Johnson said, when Virgil got back in the cab. "We're gonna have to cut across country."

He outlined the route on the map, and they took off again. Johnson finished a second beer and said, "You're starting to annoy the shit out of me, picking up the cans."

"I'm tired of arguing about it, Johnson," Virgil said. "You throw the cans out the window, I stop and pick them up."

"Well, fuck you," Johnson said. He tipped up the second can, making sure he'd gotten every last drop, and this time stuck the can under the seat. "That make you happy, you fuckin' tree hugger?"

VIRGIL WAS LANKY and blond, a surfer-looking dude with hair too long for a cop, and a predilection for T-shirts sold by indie rock bands; today's shirt was by Sebadoh. At a little more than six feet, Virgil looked like a good third baseman, and had been a mediocre one for a couple of seasons in college; a good fielder with an excellent arm, he couldn't see a college fastball. He'd drifted through school and got what turned out to be a bullshit degree in ecological science ("It ain't biology, and it ain't botany, and it ain't enough of either one," he'd once been told during a job interview).

Unable to get an ecological science job after college, he'd volunteered for the army's Officer Candidate School, figuring they'd put him in intelligence, or one of those black jumping-out-of-airplanes units.

They gave him all the tests and made him a cop.

OUT OF THE ARMY, he'd spent ten years with the St. Paul police, running up a clearance record that had never been touched, and then had been recruited by Davenport, the BCA's official bad boy. "We'll give you the hard stuff," Davenport had told him, and so far, he had.

On the side, Virgil was building a reputation as an outdoor writer, the stories researched on what Virgil referred to as under-time. He'd sold a two-story non-outdoor sequence to The New York Times Magazine, about a case he'd worked. The sale had given him a big head, and caused him briefly to shop for a Rolex.

Davenport didn't care about the big head or the under-time-Virgil gave him his money's worth-but did worry about Virgil dragging his boat around behind a state-owned truck. And he worried that Virgil sometimes forgot where he put his gun; and that he had in the past slept with witnesses to the crimes he was investigating.

Still, there was that clearance record, rolling along, solid as ever. Davenport was a pragmatist: if it worked, don't mess with it.

But he worried.

"YOU KNOW," JOHNSON SAID, "in some ways, your job resembles slavery. They tell you get your ass out in the cotton field, and that's what you do. My friend, you have traded your freedom for a paycheck, and not that big a paycheck."

"Good benefits," Virgil said.

"Yeah. If you get shot, they pay to patch you up," Johnson said. "I mean, you could be a big-time writer, have women hanging on you, wear one of those sport coats with patches on the sleeves, smoke a pipe or something. Your time would be your own-you could go hang out in Hollywood. Write movies if you felt like it. Fuck Madonna."

"Basically, I like the work," Virgil said. "I just don't like it all the time."

JOHNSON WAS AN OLD FISHING PAL, going back to Virgil's college days. A lean, scarred-up veteran of too many alcohol-related accidents in vehicles ranging from snowmobiles to trucks to Ever-glades airboats, Johnson had grown up in the timber business. He ran a sawmill in the hardwood hills of southeast Minnesota, cutting hardwood flooring material, with a sideline in custom cutting and curing oversized chunks of maple and cherry for artists. A lifelong fisherman, he knew the Mississippi between Winona and LaCrosse like the back of his hand, and was always good for an outstate musky run.

Johnson wore jeans and a T-shirt. When it got a little cooler, he pulled a sweatshirt over the T-shirt. When it got cooler than that, he pulled on a jean jacket. Cooler than that, a Carhartt. Cooler than that, he said fuck it and went to the Bahamas with a suitcase full of T-shirts and a Speedo bathing suit that he called the slingshot.

NOW HE DIRECTED VIRGIL across the back roads between highways 1 and 79, generally south and west, over flat green wet country with not too much to look at, except tamarack trees and marshy fields and here and there, a marginal farm with a couple of horses. As they got closer to the Eagle Nest, the woods got denser and the terrain started to roll, the roads got narrower and lakes glinted blue or black behind the screens of trees.

"Wonder how long it took them to think of the name Eagle Nest?" Johnson wondered. "About three seconds?"

"They could have called it the Porcupine Lodge or the Dun Rovin or Sunset Shores or Musky Point," Virgil said.

"You're getting grumpier," Johnson said. "Back at the V, I was the one who was pissed."

"Well, goddamnit, I've been working like a dog all year," Virgil said.

"Except for the under-time," Johnson said.

"Doesn't count. I was still working, just not for the state."

"You oughta model yourself after me," Johnson said. "I'm a resilient type. I roll with the punches, unlike you fragile pretty boys."

"Fragile. Big word for a guy like you," Virgil said.

Johnson grinned: "Turnoff coming up."

ON THE WAY DOWN, Virgil had formed a picture of the Eagle Nest in his mind: a peeled-log lodge with a Rolling Rock sign at one end, at the bar, a fish-cleaning house down by the dock. A dozen little plywood cabins would be scattered through the pines along the shore, a battered aluminum boat for each cabin, a machine shed in the back, the smell of gasoline and oil mixed with dirt and leaf humus; and on calm nights, a hint of septic tank. Exactly how that fit with a rich advertising woman, he didn't know-maybe an old family place that she'd been going to for years.