Shoot the Dog (Virgil Cain Mystery) by Brad Smith

Author:Brad Smith [Smith, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2013-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

Virgil got a call from Tommy Alamosa on Thursday night, asking him to bring the Percherons to a rural address a few miles west of Haleyville the next day.

“There’s a log cabin there up in the hills,” Tommy said. “It’s going to play the main homestead in the film. We start shooting there Monday but we thought we’d come up Friday afternoon and get some second-unit stuff. Exteriors, the cabin at dusk, the horses grazing in the field while the sun goes down, stuff like that.”

He asked Virgil if he could be there by noon and Virgil agreed. The cabin was in a broad meadow about five miles off the main road running into the little town, the meadow itself another mile or so behind an impressive fieldstone home of recent construction. The house was a massive A-frame, with a few acres of manicured lawn stretching out before it, and a detached garage large enough for a dozen vehicles. To the rear of the building was a large steel barn, red with a green roof, and a paddock where a half-dozen quarter horses grazed.

Using a map he’d drawn from the directions Tommy had given him, Virgil drove the truck and trailer past the mansion and onto a dirt road that led up into the hills to the cabin. He didn’t need the map; somebody, presumably from the production company, had planted signs reading FRONTIER WOMAN starting at the main road, showing the way.

The property looked authentic enough, with split-rail fences and a woodshed and a small barn and smokehouse. The meadow was open on three sides with what appeared to be deep hardwood forest to the north, which Virgil assumed served as a windbreak. The cabin itself was small, built of rough-hewn logs and chinked with what appeared to be real mud and grass. It was maybe thirty feet square, and featured a stone chimney off one end and a low porch across the front.

There was nobody there when Virgil arrived, so he parked in the meadow and unloaded Bob and Nelly into a small pasture field contained by the rail fencing. As the horses began to pick at the plush grass there, Virgil set out a couple buckets of water for them and sat down in the shade of the trailer to wait.

Tommy Alamosa showed up a little after two o’clock in a cube van with a cameraman and a couple of grips. Also with them was a woman Virgil recognized from the food trailer on the set back at Fairfield Village. She was a kid, tall and loose-limbed, with breasts like a centerfold’s and long, shapely legs. Her dark hair was pulled back in a French braid, revealing a number of piercings in each ear from the lobes to the tops. Her name was Nikki, Virgil knew; he’d talked to her a few times at the pioneer village. As he watched, she walked around to the back of the van, where the grips were unloading equipment, and pulled out a couple of stainless steel coolers, which she toted over to the shade of the little barn.

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