“About the motherfucker who shot him? I’m gonna kill him,” Jenkins said.

“You already said that.”

“I know. I’m reiterating. Don’t tell Shrake.”

—

On the way back to Wheatfield, Virgil thought about all the trips he’d made to hospitals, all the unhappiness he’d seen there. He’d been a few times himself and had the scars to show for it, but the worst trips were with cops he knew, or bad scenes he’d tumbled over when interviewing people in emergency rooms.

He’d once gone to a hospital to interview a woman who’d been shot by her boyfriend. She’d said it was an accident, and after Virgil checked the circumstances, he thought she was telling the truth. He was chatting with her doctor when a teenager was wheeled into the emergency room with an injured neck and no feeling in his limbs. His girlfriend was with him, and she told Virgil and the doc that the kid had jumped off a boat into the Minnesota River and apparently hit an underwater log with his head.

An X-ray was taken, and Virgil and the doc wandered back into the radiology department as the on-duty radiologist was bringing the images up on a video screen, and the first thing he said was, “Goddamnit . . . Goddamnit . . .”

He tapped the screen with a fingernail, and Virgil could see an abrupt shift in the narrow line of the kid’s spinal cord.

Virgil: “Is he . . . ?”

“Yeah. He’s a quad. He’s done.”

Virgil was leaving the emergency room when the kid’s parents arrived, worried, and they spotted the girlfriend, and asked, “Is he okay?”

“I think he just hit his head a little,” the girl said.

They didn’t know yet, but Virgil did, and he felt like crying that night, and into the next week, every time he thought about it.

—

He got back to Wheatfield at 2 o’clock in the morning and managed to get to sleep by 3. At 8, Jenkins called, and said, “I didn’t want to wake you up, but I’m heading over to Fairmont.”

“Give me fifteen minutes. I’ll pick you up,” Virgil said. “You got the arrows?”

“No, the sheriff’s got them. Carbon fiber, identical; three broadhead blades, sharp as razors. When we get the guy, maybe he’ll have a few more to match.”

When Virgil had bought his Tahoe, he’d negotiated to get premium seat covers thrown in the deal. They resembled the real leather seats beneath them but were actually a skillfully manufactured vinyl, because Virgil often transported untoward people and occasionally things like bait buckets. That had paid off, because when he went out to get in the truck, he found the passenger seat covered with dried blood.