Muddy said, “Dad wrote that.”
“Are you kiddin’ me? Man alive, you got some serious talent. . . .”
—
BACK IN THE TRUCK Virgil said, “Jesus, I thought I’d stepped into old home week.”
“Hey, Dog Butt is a good band,” Johnson said. “Tight. They got two lead singers, a man and a woman, taking turns, and honest to God, you can boogey your ass off. You take your woman to hear Dog Butt, and you don’t get laid that night, you got a problem.”
“I will look into that,” Virgil said.
“Fine. But what we really got to look into is the dogs,” Johnson said. “This morning’s hike did not go down smooth with the guys. I’m a little worried, really. I don’t know what would happen if Zorn stopped in at Shanker’s at the wrong time. I even started wondering if we have a spy in the group—I mean, everybody said that nothing came out of this valley big enough to carry a lot of dogs, and we know people have heard a lot of dogs up there, but when we look—there aren’t any.”
“Only in the mornings, and then they shut up,” Virgil said, looking up at the hillside as they rolled out toward the end of the valley. “There’s something in that. It’s been mentioned a couple times: they bark, and then they shut up.”
“Not up there now. We didn’t miss much, this morning.”
“Not much, but maybe some small thing,” Virgil said.
10
VIRGIL DROPPED JOHNSON in town, back at his truck. “What are you gonna do next?” Johnson asked. “You gonna work on the dogs, or waste more time on that Conley thing?”
“Gotta waste some time on Conley, to keep up appearances,” Virgil said. “He was shot to death on a public highway.”
After dropping Johnson, Virgil drove back to the cabin to take a shower and change clothes. He hadn’t wanted to stop at the house of Ralph Huntington, the name given to him by Ruff, to ask about the dogs, because Huntington lived almost across the road from Zorn.
Instead, he called the number he’d gotten from Ruff, and when nobody answered, went to take his shower.
Out of the shower, he ate a bowl of cereal and tried to figure out who might have a copy of the school district’s budget, other than the district itself. He called the Department of Education and got a runaround of such massive proportions that he finally gave up: his feeling was, they had one, but nobody knew where it was, and nobody was inclined to look for it.
He talked to Sandy again. “I don’t want you to do anything illegal, but if you could take just the quickest peek inside the DOE’s computers, it’d be nice to find a digital copy of the Buchanan County Consolidated School’s annual budget. It ought to be in there somewhere.”
“You try the public library down there in Trippton? They’d probably have one.”
“I was just on my way there,” Virgil lied. “I wanted to get you started, in case they don’t have one.”
“Liar,” she said.
—
THE PUBLIC LIBRARY had a librarian who caused Virgil, at first look, to think, Now, that’s a librarian. She was tall, her dark hair pulled back in a bun, and she had what Virgil’s mom called “a good figure.” She also wore rectangular gold-rimmed glasses. If she’d had an overbite, Virgil thought, the world would have been complete, but she didn’t.
He came in, waited at the vacant librarian’s desk for a moment; the good-looking librarian glanced at him, then went back to filing something. Another librarian, a cheery short woman with a round face, started toward him from the magazine racks when the tall one finished filing and stepped back to the desk. “Looking for a quick read?”