“Good point.” Jerry was looking at the man in the car, who’d stopped at the light down the street. He said nothing about Elaine, but he did say to Brett, “You’re right. That was weird.” He lifted his cell phone and took a shot of the car.

“You don’t think . . .” Quill turned and watched as the car accelerated through the now green light and went on down Cleveland Avenue.

Brett: “What?”

“That he might have done it? That he was checking us out to see what we knew?”

“Oh, fuck no,” Brett said. “Did he seem like a killer to you? He didn’t to me.”

“You can never tell,” Quill said. “The killer could be anybody.”

* * *

—

That night, at dark, the man was waiting outside Nancy Quill’s condo when the Jaguar pulled into a visitor’s parking slot. He knew the Jag, and the man who got out of it, and Quill as well, who waited for the driver to walk around and open the passenger door. He did, and they went up. The man looked at his watch. It was eight-twenty; her date had picked her up at six o’clock, they’d gone to a restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, and now they were back.

The man said, “C’mon, nail her. Give me something. Give me something.”

But at eight twenty-five, the visitor walked out the condo’s door, climbed in the Jag, and drove away.

The man shook his head, turned on the radio, and headed for home.

* * *

—

The man lived in an older area of St. Paul called Frogtown. The access to his rented house lay down a narrow unpaved alley. He turned in, followed his lights to the garage, which wasn’t rented with the house—the owner used it to store lumber for his woodworking hobby—and parked beside it.

He got out of the car, looked up at the stars as he walked past the garage, and because he was looking up, instead of down, he caught the rush coming in from the side. He never actually saw much but felt that rush and put up his right arm and caught the club on his forearm, which broke, and he went down, screaming, and the attacker was all over him, a stout man in a black coat and a ski mask, nothing of his face visible. The club came down again, a flash of yellow wood, maybe a two-by-two, and the man put up his broken arm and caught another blow, which broke another bone, and he rolled, shrieking with pain, and the attacker was still there, swinging again, and the man put up his other arm, caught the blow, and his left arm broke, and the attacker cursed, and the man couldn’t make out the words but it definitely sounded like a curse, and he rolled twice more, bellowing.

The attacker tried to hit the man’s head and managed to scrape the side of his skull and rip his ear. And then somebody else was shouting, and the attacker swung once more, catching the man on the left side of his rib cage, cracking ribs, and then the attacker ran away . . .

Another man stood over him, and said, “Oh, man . . . Oh, man, are you okay? . . . Are you . . . I’m calling the cops . . . I’m calling an ambulance . . . Lay still . . .”

And the man heard the second man shouting into his cell phone, and, a little while later, a cop came, the man registering the flashing lights, which seemed to add to the pain in his arms and rib cage and the fire in his scalp, then an ambulance was there, and they picked him up and took him away, and the cool pillow felt good behind his head . . .

CHAPTER

SEVEN

   Trane met Virgil at Quill’s house the next morning at eight o’clock. She was looking fashionable in a dark blue blouse and black slacks, with low-heeled black boots. Virgil was wearing the same thing he’d worn the day before, except that he’d changed to a “Lamb Chop” T-shirt.

Trane was unlocking the door as Virgil walked up, and she said, “My rational side says there’s not a chance in hell. My gut thinks I’m onto something. After you were talking about it last night, I had that damn song stuck in my head until I went to sleep, and this idea popped up. The song didn’t go away, though. Probably going to be with me all day. ‘Home, home on the range / Where the deer and the antelope play . . .’”

“Stop, please,” Virgil said. And, “You know how to destroy any earworm?”

“Tell me.”

“You hum that Walt Disney thing, ‘It’s a Small World.’ It’ll kill anything, but it’s such a miserable song, such complete shit, it won’t stay stuck in your head on its own,” Virgil said, as they climbed the stairs to Quill’s office. “It’ll kill, but it won’t hang out.”

“Like whoever murdered Quill,” she said.

“Over in that direction,” Virgil agreed.

In the office, they turned on the CD player and, a minute later, were listening to “Home on the Range.” Virgil picked up a remote and skipped to the next track, and “Git Along, Little Dogies” came up.

“This is awful,” he said, and he pushed the skip button again.

A man’s voice. “Man, you can’t go ahead with this. It’s unethical at best, it’s dangerous at worse. You could kill him . . .”

Trane said, “Oh my God,” just like a Valley girl.

A second man on the recording, maybe Quill: “He’s going to die. And soon. Maybe he’s got a month. Probably less. Right now, he’s willing himself to die. He’s given permission—”

Third man: “His permission is worthless. The only time he can give permission is when he’s in extreme pain and he’ll do anything to stop it. If he gives you permission, he gets opiates. If he doesn’t give permission, you’ll argue some more, and that delays the dope. You can’t do that. You were essentially torturing him to get what you want.”

The second man again: “You guys have to sign off on this. There’s a good possibility that we’ll never encounter this situation again. If this works as it should, it’ll be a major breakthrough. We’re talking about tens of thousands of lives around the world.”

First man: “That you might not even be able to write about, to publish, because the ethical problems are so clear.”

Second man: “We can have that fight later. After it’s done. Maybe we could . . . obfuscate the precise circumstances to some degree.”

Third man: “Oh, bullshit. The committee’s not going to sign off on this. You go strutting in there like a peacock and expect them to fall over?”

Second man: “They’ll fall over if you recommend we go ahead. Listen, they’ll go ahead if your . . . if your, I have to say, inaccurate suggestion about his state of mind isn’t mentioned—”