“Something like that,” I said.

Jackie cleared his throat. “On a good day. When there’s no snow.”

Vargas didn’t even hear him. “You go right through Brimley, right? Where they’re building that new golf course?”

“Yes.”

“What’s land going for out your way? On the coast, say out by Whitefish Point?”

“Well…” I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to say anything at all. I wanted to hit him over the head with something.

“Because I’m thinking,” he said, “maybe we should be looking out that way instead. Here we were thinking it’s nice to already have some infrastructure in place. Some good roads and services and all, not to mention the golf course, which needs a little work, I admit. But maybe we’re thinking too small. If we got something going out on your side of the bay, we’d have a lot more land to work with. Plus we’d actually be on the lake itself. Here we’re on the river.”

Kill him now, I was thinking. Kill him now, cut up his body into little pieces and throw them to the fish.

“You don’t want to be on the lake,” Bennett said. He said this calmly, like he didn’t want to kill the man at all. “The lake will wreck everything eventually. Here you’ve got some protection at least.”

“Yeah, the weather,” Jackie said. “It’s even worse over there, believe me. I can’t imagine trying to build anything over there.”

“How are your black flies out there?” Gill said. “They can get pretty bad here in town. I’m imagining out there in the woods…”

“Oh God,” Jackie said. “The black flies. Every June. Tell him about the black flies, Alex.”

“Horrible,” I said, which was a lie. The black fly season hadn’t been that bad this year. Not bad at all. Especially when you got close to the water and the breeze helped keep them down. “People talk about mosquitoes eating you alive, they don’t know about black flies.”

“Mosquitoes are like surgeons,” Bennett said. “They got those little needles, in and out. But black flies, those goddamned things just gnaw on your flesh like blood-thirsty little zombies.”