“I had to tell some lies,” she said.

Cops all lie, Virgil thought. But he said, “Let’s meet at the cathedral. I’ll sprinkle some holy water on your ass.”

“Sounds like a deal,” she said, with a slender note of invitation in her voice. She paused, looking for a reaction.

“ Sandy!” He was shocked. Sandy was the office virgin, though, he’d noticed, from a move he’d seen with another guy in a hallway, actual virginity was unlikely.

“Chicken,” she said. “All right, what I got is this. If Ray Bunton got an unexpected tax refund, and it was sent to an old girlfriend, and the girlfriend called his cousin up in Red Lake and asked where she could send the check, she’d get a phone number to call. The phone number is attached to an address in south Minneapolis, off Franklin.”

“Atta girl.”

“That’s what I need. More atta girls.” And she was gone.

Ray Bunton: Virgil looked up at the motel, sighed, and got back in the truck.

BUNTON WAS living in a ramshackle place off Franklin Avenue south of the Minneapolis loop, a house that hadn’t been painted in fifty years, a worn-out lawn that had been driven on repeatedly, dandelions glowing from patches of oily grass.

Virgil left the truck a few doors down so he could look at the house for a moment as he walked along; and after he stepped into the street, he thought about it for a moment, reached under the seat, got his pistol in the leather inside-the-belt holster, and stuck it in the small of his back, under his jacket.

As he headed down the street, he could hear somebody playing an old Black Sabbath piece, “Paranoid,” pounding out of a stereo or boom box. From the end of a cracked two-strip driveway that squeezed between the close-set houses, he could see a garage in back of Bunton’s place. A guy was lying under a rusted-out Blazer, which was up on steel ramps. A couple of work lights lay on the floor, shining on the underside of the car. A motorcycle, slung like a Harley softtail, sat on the drive in front of the garage.

Virgil watched for a few seconds, then wandered up the driveway. As he came up to the back of the house, the man pushed out from under the truck and wiped his hands on a rag. Virgil recognized him as Bunton. He walked up to the lip of the garage, hands in his jeans pockets, and stood there for a moment, until Bunton felt him and turned his face up, and Virgil said, “Hey.”

Bunton held up a finger, crawled across the floor to the boom box, and poked a button on it; the silence seemed to jump out of the ground.

Bunton asked, “You a cop?”

“Yeah. BCA. Trying to figure out what happened to Bob Sanderson,” Virgil said.

Bunton dropped his chin to his chest, then shook his head, crawled a few more feet across the garage, got a jean jacket, and shook a pack of Kools and a beat-up Zippo out of the pocket.

Bunton was gaunt, with bad teeth colored nicotine-brown under the brilliant work lights. Once-muscular arms, now going to flab, showed purple stains that had been tattoos. He lit a Kool after flicking the Zippo a few times, and the stink of lighter fluid sifted over to Virgil. Bunton took a drag and said, “Bob’s time ran out, you know. What the fuck.”

“You got any ideas why? Or who stopped his clock?” Virgil asked.

“No, I don’t, but I’d like to.”

“You know a guy name of Utecht from down in New Ulm?” Virgil asked.

“Ah, Christ, if it ain’t one thing, it’s another,” Bunton said, and Virgil felt the spark. Bunton knew Utecht: a connection.

Bunton stood up and stretched, and Virgil noticed that he was wearing a leg brace. These were old guys: these guys were older than Virgil’s father. “Somebody told you that we were going to meetings together, huh? Me ’n’ Bob?”

“Somebody,” Virgil said. “This all have something to do with Vietnam?”

Bunton laughed, and then coughed, a smoker’s hack. When he finished, he patted himself on the chest with his cigarette hand and said, “Tell you what, pal-what’s your name?”

“Virgil Flowers.”

“No shit? Good name. But tell you what: I went to Vietnam when I was nineteen, and since then, everything has something to do with Vietnam. Lot of people like that, you know? They even go back there, like tourists, to see if it was real.”

Bunton might have been part Indian, Virgil thought, but not too much: as in his photos, he looked more Scots than Indian-and a little like the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.

“Okay, I don’t understand that,” Virgil said. “I was in the military, but not in heavy combat. But I believe you.”

“That’s nice of you,” Bunton said.

“The thing is, I understand that Sanderson wasn’t in Vietnam,” Virgil said. “He was in Korea. Some guys have suggested I try to find out if he was in some kind of intelligence outfit and Korea was just a cover.”

“Ah, jeez. Not Bob. Bob was…” Bunton had a wrench in his hand, and he dropped it into an open steel toolbox and interrupted himself to say, “Hand me that other wrench there, will you?”

Virgil was standing beside the truck fender a couple feet from the old man, and he turned and looked at the hood and realized that there wasn’t a wrench there, and then he was hit by lightning.

The impact was right behind his ear, and he went down. No pain, no understanding of what had happened, it could have been an electrical shock. He hadn’t quite understood that Bunton had sucker-punched him, and he tried to push up to his hands and knees, and then Bunton hit him again.

There was a confused space.

He heard the motorcycle start up, he remembered later, and then it was quiet, and then there was some talk, and then he tried to get up and there was another old man there, who said, “What happened, buddy? What happened?”

And he fell down again and he heard the old man shout, “I think he’s having a heart attack or something. Call 911.” And the old man asked Virgil, “Where’s Ray?”

THE AMBULANCE took him to Hennepin Medical Center, and he woke up in a bed with a bunch of cops around, including Shrake and Jenkins. Virgil asked, “What happened? Was it that fuckin’ Bunton?”

Jenkins looked at Shrake and said, “He’s back.”

Maybe he was back, but Virgil’s head felt like it was in New Jersey. “What do you mean, I’m back?”

“For the past hour, you’ve been asking, ‘What happened?’ and we’d tell you, but the needle was stuck, and after we told you, you’d say, ‘What happened?’”

“Ah, man,” Virgil groaned. “That goddamned Bunton. Did he get my gun?”

“Nope. You’ve got your gun, you’ve got your wallet, got your ID-which is why we’re here,” Shrake said. “You got a lump on the back of your head and a contusion and a bruise, like you were sapped.”

“What happened to my truck?” Virgil asked.

“I don’t know,” Shrake said. “Where’d you leave it?”

“Ah, man…”

A nurse stuck her head in. “He’s back?”

“He’s back,” Jenkins told her. “Get the doc.”

“I’ve been out?” Virgil asked.

“Not exactly out,” Shrake said. “The lights were on, you know, but nobody was home.”

“Not the first time you heard that, huh?” Jenkins asked. “So: who do we kill?”

“Hey-I’m naked under here,” Virgil said, peering under the sheet that covered him.

“That’s cool-don’t have to show us,” Jenkins said.

The doctor came and told him that he’d suffered a concussion of modest severity-“Not terrible, but not nothing, either. You got hit pretty damn hard. You remember the MRI?”

“No.”

“Well, we did an MRI,” the doc said.

“I remember a loud noise…”

“That was it. Anyway, there’s no fracture, and we didn’t see any real organic damage, no bleeding, but you took a hit and got your circuits scrambled. We want you here overnight, to make sure that everything continues to work. Make sure that a clot doesn’t pop out of the woodwork.”