Page 117 of Deep Freeze

The dog was bouncing his forepaws off Virgil’s chest, and Virgil gave him a thorough scratch, and Frankie pointed Virgil at a chair and said, “Tell me every bit of it. From the time you left on Sunday.”

He did, and at the end she said, “You were crazy to go in thathouse without your gun in your hand. I don’t care if you had it in your pocket. You knew he was a psycho.”

“A mistake,” Virgil admitted. “Though if we’d gone in with guns, he might have lawyered up, and we wouldn’t have gotten our voice recordings.”

“All right. Does your busted nose hurt so much that you’re off kissing for a while?”

“I don’t believe so,” Virgil said.

—

So then they did all the things you do when you get home from a trip, all the dirty clothes wadded up and tossed in the washing machine, the bag put away. Virgil told Frankie about his three-week suspension, with pay, and she suggested that they take a trip somewhere.

“We could run back over to Trippton,” he said. “Ice fishing, snowmobile riding, we could shop for sex toys in Bernie’s Books...”

“I’m thinking Phoenix or Los Angeles. Someplace warm and dry.”

“We’ll talk about it...” he said. “Hell, let’s do it. We’ll call for tickets tonight.”

At three-thirty, just before dark, Virgil walked Honus through some of the neighboring streets. When he was sure that nobody was looking, he let Honus take an oversized dump on the lawn of a guy neither of them particularly liked. Virgil kicked some snow over it, and the two of them went on their way. A fine Minnesota tradition, he thought. There’d be layers of well-preserved dog poop in the guy’s yard come spring, and he’d be rolling along with his lawn mower andSKAT!Dog shit everywhere.

Honus looked up at him, and they both laughed at the thought.

—

That night, he and Frankie fooled around again, then read in bed, Honus curled up between their feet. They slept in the next morning, Virgil finally crawling out at nine o’clock, Frankie rolling over for another five minutes.

He was shaving when she came in, stared in the mirror for a minute, said to herself, “Hello, gorgeous. You seem to look better every day. How do you keep it up?”

“Gotta be the great sex,” Virgil said.

She said, “Huh,” opened the medicine cabinet, and fished out her birth control pills.

Virgil said, “Give me those.” He took them from her fingers, dropped them in the wastebasket, and continued shaving.

She blinked a few times and said, “No way.”

“Way,”Virgil said.