Mad River vf-6

by John Sandford

  “Fuck ’em,” Jimmy said. “They got nothing to go on. And fuck those O’Leary assholes. Kill them again, if I could.”

  Becky patted his arm and said, “It just makes me so fuckin’ hot.”

  Jimmy glanced at her. Made her so fuckin’ hot: yeah, well, that was a problem he didn’t want to talk about.

  And Tom didn’t want to think about it. He’d been hanging around the edges of the Becky-Jimmy relationship for a while, and he knew something wasn’t quite right, but he didn’t know what it was. What he knew for sure was, he’d been hot for Becky since he’d first laid eyes on her in the ninth grade. After he left school, he hadn’t seen her for a while, but when he ran into the two of them in the Cities, it all came back.

  Tom had never slept with a pretty woman. Those he’d gone with had been the leftovers, and he was the best they could do. Every time he’d touched Becky-taking her arm, touching her shoulder to direct her at something-she’d flinched away, as though he were diseased.

  Why was that? Why did pretty women treat him like shit? Why did Becky look right through him as though he weren’t there? The longer it had gone on, the more his fantasy/dream sex had become mixed up with violence. He’d show them who the strong one was; he’d show them Tom the Barbarian. .

  Tom didn’t know what to think about the killing of Ag O’Leary or the black guy. He did know that he had nothing to do with it. He was just walking along and Jimmy suddenly went crazy and killed them. He was clean.

  Would he stay clean if he hung around with Jimmy? If Jimmy went down for a couple of murders, where would that leave him and Becky? With Jimmy out of the picture. .

  After he got kicked out of the navy, Tom had gone to work for a desperate home security agency, which mostly meant he drove around dark suburban neighborhoods looking for false alarms. He never did find a house that had been broken into-in fact, he’d found a fairly small percentage of the houses he’d been sent to, because he got lost easily. That shortcoming got him fired-or laid off, as his supervisor put it.

  When the unemployment ran out, he had a two-week job as a pizza delivery man, but had the same problem as he did with home security. When he got fired by the pizza joint, he landed a job as a door-puller for another security company. Door-pulling was exactly what it sounded like: he spent the evening driving around to suburban office complexes pulling on doors to make sure they were locked. He got fired from that one when a late-working accountant found him sitting on a step smoking a joint.

  After that, things got tough. He tried sitting at an interstate off-ramp with a cardboard sign that said: “Homeless Navy Vet, Please Help,” but on an average six-hour day, pulled in only twelve dollars. On the other hand, the work wasn’t onerous, and he might have stuck with it, if he hadn’t met Jimmy and Becky at a Taco Bell.

  They knew each other from the countryside. Tom had been born on a farm five miles east of Bigham, and met Becky and Jimmy in high school. They’d run into each other again in the Twin Cities, where Jimmy and Becky had gone looking for work. Six weeks after their reunion in the Twin Cities, here they were, cutting cross-country in the dark, and Tom, in his own dim way, was thinking over the possibilities.

  A cold cloudy April night in the Minnesota countryside is darker than the inside of a coal sack. They sped along through the night, right on the edge of outrunning their headlights, missing a coon running down the road, the animal glancing back at them with amber eyes.

  They got to Shinder in the middle of the night, pulled into the yard. The old man’s truck was sitting there, and Jimmy pulled around it and said, “Tom, get out and open the garage doors. Let’s get this thing out of sight.”

  Tom got out in the headlights and pulled open the garage doors; a snowblower was blocking the entrance, and he jacked it around until Jimmy could squeeze by. They were pulling the doors shut behind the Charger when the old man hollered down from an upstairs window, “Who the hell is that?”

  Jimmy called back, “It’s me.”

  “What the hell do you want?”

  “Need to come in for a while. We could use some breakfast.”

  “Get the hell out of here, you little fart. I don’t have anything for the likes of you. Now, scat.”

  “Scat, my ass,” Jimmy shouted. He turned to the other two and said, “C’mon. Door’s never locked.”

  “Get the fuck away from my house.”

  Jimmy went through the back door, Becky behind him, Tom holding back. In the kitchen, Jimmy flipped on the light, went to the refrigerator, pulled it open, took out a plastic bottle of milk, and said to Becky, “There should be some oatmeal there in the bottom cupboard, next to the sink.”

  She pulled open the cupboard door, and there was a cylindrical box of Quaker Oats on the shelf. She took it out and was holding it in her hands when the old man came storming down the stairs and into the kitchen.

  “You fuckers get out of here,” he said. He waved his hand at Jimmy, a dismissive gesture. “You got no rights here no more. Give me that oatmeal.”

  “Stay away from her,” Jimmy said.

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “No, you shut the fuck up. I’m tired, and we got some trouble over in Bigham, and I’m not putting up with any shit anymore. We’re gonna have breakfast and figure out-”

  “I’m gonna throw your ass out,” the old man said. He took two steps toward Jimmy, and Jimmy pulled out the gun and pointed it at his forehead. The old man stopped, and sneered at him and said, “You got a gun? You think that makes you a man?”

  “Don’t know about that, but I know that there’re some dead folks who don’t worry about that no more,” Jimmy said.

  “Dead folks, you ain’t got the guts.” Then a wrinkle appeared in the old man’s forehead and he asked, “What the fuck you done?”

  “Killed a white girl and this black dude over in Bigham,” Jimmy said. “I hate your old ass and I got half a mind to kill you, too.”

  “Gimme that fuckin’ gun,” the old man said. He made the mistake of taking a step toward his son, and Jimmy shot him in the forehead.

  Though the old man must’ve been dead instantly, his body apparently didn’t know that, and he took four quick backward steps on his heels, then fell in the doorway to the living room. Becky looked at Jimmy and said, “Crazy old fuck.”

  Tom came in, looked at the body, and said, “Jeez, you killed your pa.”

  “And it felt pretty fuckin’ good,” Jimmy said. “Help me drag his ass into the living room. I want to eat some oatmeal, and I don’t want to look at him while I’m doing it.” To Becky he said, “Go on. Cook us up some oatmeal.”

  The body downstairs did cause some unease, and Tom eventually got a blanket and went out and slept in the Charger. Jimmy and Becky went and slept in Jimmy’s old bed, which smelled of mold, but neither was about to sleep in the old man’s. Becky insisted on sex, whining until Jimmy gave in. They took a shower together, but Jimmy knew it wasn’t going to work-it just didn’t work for him-and they went in the bedroom and Becky went down on him, and it still didn’t work.

  Then he went down on her, after threatening to kill her if she told anyone, and she definitely believed that he would kill her, after what she’d seen that night, and with the body in the front room, but when she screamed down five or six or eight orgasms, she couldn’t have cared less about the body.

  Maybe nothing else worked, but Jimmy was good with his hands and mouth.

  They got a restless couple hours of sleep, and wound up back in the kitchen, eating more oatmeal. Jimmy said, “We need to get rolling, if we’re going to Hollywood. We get out there, we’ll be okay.”

  “What about your pa?” Tom asked. He glanced nervously at the kitchen doorway, where he could see a leg below the knee, a shoe, and a dirty white sock.

  “Fuck him. Who’s gonna know? Everybody in town hates his ass, nobody ever comes here,” Jimmy said. “We’ll take the Charger over to Marshall tonight and ditch it.”

  “No gas in the
Charger,” Tom said. “I tried to heat her up last night, when I was sleeping out there, and it ran for three minutes and died. No gas.”

  “You dumb shit,” Jimmy said.

  “Good thing I did it,” Tom said. “If we’d tried to go anywhere, we would of got about a mile, and then we would’ve been walking, where everybody could see us. Don’t got enough money between the three of us to buy a gallon of gas.”

  Jimmy said, “Well, we got a few bucks. When I shot that bitch last night, I saw a wad on the dresser and grabbed it.”

  Becky said, “Really? How much?”

  “Quite a bit,” Jimmy said. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a fold of cash. Becky reached out and said, “Let me see,” but he pulled it back and stuck it in his pocket.

  “None of your business,” he said. “But we need more. We need a clean car that will get us where we’re going, and we don’t have enough to get one.”

  Tom said, “We could just get bus tickets-”

  “Fuck a bunch of buses,” Jimmy said. “Let me check the old man.”

  They walked through the kitchen to the body, couldn’t look directly at him, but felt his pockets and came up empty. Jimmy said, “Must be upstairs.” He went up to the old man’s bedroom, came back down a minute later, and said, “Eighteen dollars and thirty cents. We got more off the black dude.”

  Becky said, “We might get a couple of bucks off my folks.”

  Jimmy said, “Good idea. We’ll take the old man’s truck.”

  Becky’s folks didn’t have any money, but they had the same attitude that James Sharp Senior had, and they didn’t like Jimmy at all. Old man Welsh was hungover, and not about to put up with any shit.

  “Do I look like I’m made of money? When I was your age, I’d been working for five years.”

  “That’s ’cause you could get a job way back then,” Becky said. “You can’t get one now, and I mean, you can’t get one now. How long you been eatin’ off Mom?”

  “You little fuckin’ brat, I raised you and fed you and now you come around with your peckerwood friends with your hands out-”

  “You just call me a peckerhead?” Jimmy asked, his voice quiet.

  “Peckerwood,” the old man said. “I said peckerwood. But you want me to call you a peckerhead? Okay, you’re a peckerhead.”

  Becky’s mother snorted at that: funny stuff. She stopped smiling when Jimmy took out the.38.

  “Now, we don’t need that,” Becky’s father said.

  “You think I’m a peckerhead now?” Jimmy asked. He pointed the gun at Welsh’s chest. “Come on, say it.”

  “You’re not one, you’re not one,” Ann Welsh said. She farted in fear, and the smell spread through the kitchen and Tom said, “Aw, Jesus. .” and waved his hand in front of his face.

  “Let’s just calm down.” Welsh lifted his hands, like cowboys used to do on TV when they were giving up.

  “No. I want to hear you call me a peckerhead again,” Jimmy said.

  Becky said, “Yeah, call him a peckerhead.”

  Welsh was sweating furiously now, and he said, “I don’t know what to do.”

  Jimmy said, “Easy. Just what I told you. Call me a peckerhead.”

  Welsh said, “Don’t point the gun-”

  “Call me a peckerhead, or goddamnit, I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out,” Jimmy said.

  Welsh whimpered, and Jimmy smiled at the sound, and Welsh licked his lips and muttered, “Peckerhead.”

  Jimmy shot him in the heart, and Ann Welsh turned on a dime and made for the back door, got three steps and Jimmy, stepping along behind her, shot her in the back of the head. He looked at them on the floor and turned to Becky and asked, “You hate me now?”

  Her eyes were steel gray and she shook her head once: “No. Fuck ’em. They ruined my life.”

  Tom said, “We better get out of here.”

  Becky said to Jimmy: “Let’s go to Marshall. I know where we can get it all-car, money, everything.”

  6

  Virgil spent a fruitless Sunday morning sitting in his truck, calling people on the telephone-people turned up by Davenport in the Twin Cities, people in Shinder who knew Becky Welsh or Jimmy Sharp, or any of the dead people, scratching for any connection.

  The most confounding thing, at least for the moment, was the disappearance of the elder Sharp’s truck. They had it on some authority that it wouldn’t make it fifty miles, but he couldn’t find it anywhere in Minnesota, Iowa, or North or South Dakota, and at this point there were several hundred cops looking for it.

  Duke asked, “Where do you think it is? Give me a guess.”

  “It’s down in a creek bed somewhere, where it can’t be seen from a road, and they’re camping out with it, or it’s in a garage or a barn and they’ve got new wheels.”

  At one o’clock, they had two nearly simultaneous breaks. Virgil had the crime-scene crew work over the Charger, and they’d found dozens of fingerprints, both in the front and back seats, and because of the extreme amount of plastic in the car, they got good ones. At one o’clock, they got a return on one set of them: Tom McCall, who had no criminal record, had been fingerprinted when he went into the navy, and his fingerprints were in the federal database.

  A few minutes later, Duke called to say that he’d found McCall’s mother, an elementary school teacher in Bigham. McCall’s father had gone out for a loaf of bread a few years earlier and hadn’t yet returned.

  “I want to talk to her,” Virgil said. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  He called Davenport and said, “Tom McCall was in the car, in the backseat. So I think I can call it: James Sharp, Becky Welsh, Tom McCall. I don’t know Sharp’s or Welsh’s status yet, but I’m assuming they’re all in on it.”

  “Good bet,” Davenport said. “You got a lot of media coming your way. It’s gone viral.”

  “That’s okay: it’s a snake hunt now,” Virgil said. “The more eyes, the better.”

  Virgil drove northeast to Bigham, watching the tattered spring earth roll by. The land was creased by creeks and drainage ditches, broad fields showing the remnants of last year’s corn and bean fields. Later in the spring, when the ground warmed up a bit more, and dried out, the farmers would get out and plow and plant and the fields would take on their customary neatness; but now, everything looked beat-up.

  Still cold.

  It wouldn’t be easy to conceal a big silver truck, though-even out on the prairie, sparsely populated as it was, people got around, looked at their fields and down their creeks, and a truck would be hard to hide at this time of year. In August or September, they could put it in the middle of a cornfield and it might not be found until the harvest. Not in April.

  He coasted into Bigham on that thought, and found the elementary school.

  The key thing about Virginia McCall, Virgil realized after talking to her for one minute, was that she never said her son didn’t do it.

  They spoke privately in the principal’s office, Duke leaning against one wall, chewing on a kitchen match, while Virgil sat across from McCall, their knees nearly touching. She was a tall, vague woman, thin, small-boned, her brown hair worn long. She had a sprinkling of small dark moles on her right cheek.

  “Nothing has ever worked right for him,” she said, her hands flopping restlessly in her lap. “He. . I don’t know. He was never assertive. He’s not stupid, not at all, but if somebody told him to jump off a roof, he’d do it. If you didn’t tell him what to do, he wouldn’t do anything. I don’t know how that happened. His father went away. .”

  “So. . what was his relationship with Jimmy Sharp?” Virgil asked.

  “I don’t know Jimmy very well. I know Becky better,” McCall said. “They both went to high school here, but I’m in the elementary school. They hung out together. Jimmy and Becky are. . you know. . not very bright. Becky was quite attractive. Blond, with a figure. How she got out of school without getting pregnant, I don’t know. The boys would cluster around her-I’m
sure she was giving it up. Most people thought she’d be homecoming queen in her senior year, but the girls all voted against her. Everybody knew it, but she never quite understood what happened.”

  She said Tom had been discharged from the navy because he suffered from psoriasis, which had also kept him off sports teams in school. “We’d tell everybody that it’s not contagious, but you know. . who wants to take a chance?” After the navy, he’d worked in Bigham stocking a grocery store, and then had gone off to the Twin Cities, where he’d gotten a job as a security guard.

  “I knew that he’d seen Becky,” she said. “He’s always been interested in her. He mentioned her, but he never mentioned Jim. I don’t know if they’re hanging out.”

  As far as she knew, he was still working as a security guard. She hadn’t heard from him in months, and didn’t know how to get in touch.

  When he’d wrung her out, Virgil walked over to the high school, where he talked with the assistant principal in charge of discipline, whose name was Robert Frett. All three had had some disciplinary problems; Jimmy Sharp had been close to expulsion a couple of times, suspected of providing marijuana to other students, but there’d been no proof. He’d also been in a few fights, but had been smart enough to keep them off school grounds. Becky Welsh had a tendency to skip school; McCall hadn’t skipped, but he could go weeks without doing mandatory homework.

  “They were just pains-in-the-behind,” Frett said, shaking his head. “I never suspected they’d get involved with anything like this. Never saw this coming. Though Jimmy was a mean kid.”

  When Virgil went back to his truck, he had a better picture of the trio, but nothing that would help him locate them. The Bare County courthouse was six or seven blocks down Main Street from the elementary school, and he parked out back, at the law enforcement annex, went inside and found Duke.

  “We got Jimmy Sharp’s car. No doubt now-it was behind the apartment house where that colored boy got killed,” Duke said. “They must’ve planned to rob the O’Learys and then run right down the hill to the car. I thought about that and it’s what I would have done.”