Mad River vf-6

by John Sandford

  One of the cops, a heavyset balding man in his fifties, watched the kids go and then started to snuffle, and Virgil said, “Okay, okay, everybody. . We got a lot of work to do. Let’s hold it all together.”

  One of the drug cops said, “What if they’re coming back? Maybe we oughta get the kids out of here and set up an ambush.”

  “We can do that out a few blocks,” Virgil said. “If that’s the Boxes in there, we’ll have to assume that they’ve got the Boxes’ cars and they’ve still got the truck. We need tags for the Boxes’ cars-there could be two of them. . Set up a watch. .”

  One of the cops, a sergeant, said, “I’ll get that going,” and he jogged away, and another cop came from the back and said, “Cars isn’t all they got.”

  Virgil: “What?”

  The cop said, “There’s a gun safe back here. It’s open, but there aren’t any guns in it.”

  Virgil went to look. The gun safe was five feet tall, of a forest-green metal, had foam barrel slots for eight long guns, and five of the slots appeared to have been used. At the top of the safe were four foam-lined slots for handguns, and all four appeared used.

  On the floor of the safe, a couple of ordinary plastic bags showed a flash of brass, and Virgil picked them up. Inside the first was a variety of empty shells: 9mm, which would be a handgun; a couple of dozen.44 Magnum, which could be either a handgun or a carbine, but most likely a handgun; a dozen or so.308 rifle shells, and as many in.223, and a bunch of little.22s. The other bag was full of empty 12- and 20-gauge shotgun shells.

  “They got themselves an army,” one of the cops said.

  The Chief of police, who’d been out with his wife at her sister’s house, showed up, and he and Virgil and the sheriff got together in the driveway. Up and down the street, lights were going on, and Virgil sent a cop to tell people to turn them off. The chief, a burly man with heavy glasses, said, “We’ve got a perimeter set up. If they try to come back in, we’ll nail ’em.”

  The cars’ descriptions were going out to all agencies: a year-old Chevy Tahoe, a four-year-old Lexus RX 400h.

  Virgil asked, “What about the kids?”

  “Social Services lady has them-they heard the shots that killed their folks. They couldn’t get out of the basement, no windows. They’ve got relatives down in Windom. We’re looking for them.”

  The chief said, “Now what?”

  Everybody looked at Virgil.

  8

  When they left the Welsh house, after killing Becky’s parents, nobody said anything for a very long time-Jimmy smoked a cigarette and peered out the windshield like he expected Jesus Christ himself to pop out of the roadside weeds. Then Becky launched into a monologue about how her parents had never given her the things she needed to achieve her goals. Achieving goals had been the one constant refrain she’d taken out of high school, the one thing they drummed into you: about how if you didn’t do this, that, or the other thing-pay attention and learn algebra-you’d never achieve your goals.

  Like she was going to be a rocket scientist, or something.

  You had to be seriously dumb, she said, to believe that rocket science shit. Being a small country high school, classes were less age-segregated than they might be in big-city schools. By the end of the year, most ninth-graders knew most of the upperclassmen and you knew what happened to them when they got out of school.

  A few of the lucky ones, the rich ones, mostly teachers’ kids, went to a state university somewhere. More went out to a two-year college, which was like going to another level of high school, where you learned auto mechanics or how to fix the big windmills that were sprouting all over the place. But most of the kids struggled around to get jobs and five years later they had two kids and the parents were working separate shifts at a Lowe’s or a Home Depot somewhere, making just about enough to stay off food stamps.

  Wasn’t any of them going to become rocket scientists.

  Algebra. Fuck algebra.

  If she were going to avoid Home Depot, Becky had a pretty good idea of what she had to do, and none of it involved algebra. She was pretty, and had the tits and ass to go with it. Those were her assets; algebra wouldn’t help.

  But she had no tools. The tools just weren’t available in Shinder, or in Bigham, either. You didn’t get to the top, like the Kardashians, living out in the sticks. She begged her folks to take her to Los Angeles, or even the Cities, or even over to Marshall.

  But they were afraid. They were small-town people-small-time people. They couldn’t even imagine other possibilities. They sat stupidly on the couch and drank their beer and watched the bright life on cable and told her to get a job.

  So they died, and she felt nothing for them.

  All that came out of her in the thirty minutes it took to drive to the Boxes’ house in Marshall. While she was talking, Tom, in the window seat, his thigh pressing against Becky’s, peered out at the passing farm fields and thought about how crazy it all was. There’d been a logic to the death of the girl in Bigham, and then the black guy. The first was a robbery gone bad, which can happen when a gun is involved. The black guy had to die so they could make their getaway. He understood that.

  But old man Sharp, the Welshes. . Jimmy and Becky had gone over the edge. This was just nuts. Tom wasn’t the brightest bulb in the marquee, but he was smart enough to know that he was in the darkest kind of trouble, and there wasn’t going to be any Los Angeles, any Hollywood, not anymore.

  The only reason he’d stuck with them, hadn’t tried to walk away yet, was Becky. He could see her watch the violence, and eat it up. She liked it. And Tom found himself drawn to it, as well. He’d kill somebody, if it would get him Becky, with the provision that nobody would find out. He was not so much of a dead-ender that he didn’t care about prison, or about getting shot to death by the cops. Jimmy could sneer at such things, but Tom couldn’t. He would have walked away, if it hadn’t been for Becky. He didn’t want to protect her, he didn’t want to romance, he just wanted her. Wanted to bang her brains loose. Wanted to show her just how strong he was. .

  Marshall turned out to be even crazier. They didn’t even know the Boxes. Becky had worked for Box for a few months, had taken stuff to his house a few times, deliveries, knew that their names were Rick and Nina, and, she said, that they were assholes, but they didn’t really know them.

  When they arrived, the Boxes’ garage door was going up, and when Jimmy pulled the beat-up old truck into the driveway, Rick Box had come out of the garage to see what was up.

  Jimmy got out of the car with one hand behind himself, like he was hitching up his jeans, and when he got close enough, he pulled the gun and pressed it against Box’s chest and said, “This is a stickup,” and Box said, “What? What?”

  Jimmy backed him into the garage, then through the door and into the kitchen. As they were walking him backward, he looked over Jimmy’s shoulder at Becky and said, “I know you. You worked the counter.”

  Becky said, “No, you don’t.” She was no counter girl; she was a star.

  Box’s wife, Nina, was cleaning up the kitchen when they came through, and they could hear the kids yelling at each other, and Becky said to Jimmy, “I didn’t know they had kids.”

  Nina saw the gun and said, “Don’t hurt us, don’t hurt us,” and Jimmy said, “All we want is some money and a car. Get in there on the rug and sit down.”

  Becky said, “I’m gonna put the kids in the basement.”

  Jimmy said, “Do that,” and Nina cried, “Don’t hurt us,” and Jimmy said, “Shut up,” and to Becky, “Get the kids.”

  She got the kids, the little boy brave and solemn as he marched through the living room, the girl saying, “Daddy, Daddy,” and crying, and Becky took them down the stairs. She was back a moment later and said, “No windows. No way out.”

  Jimmy said, “Maybe find a hammer and nail the door shut.”

  “We can just push a couch over there,” Tom said. “Here.” He pushed a short two-cushion couc
h out of the living room and between the basement door and a hallway wall, so the door couldn’t be opened.

  Nina Box said, “We’ll give you anything you want.”

  She was a little heavy, but not bad-looking, and Jimmy asked Tom, “You want to fuck her?”

  Rick Box said, “Hey,” and started to get to his feet, and Jimmy shot him in the heart, and he fell down and curled himself like a snail.

  Nina began screaming, and Jimmy said to Tom, “Well, you wanna?” When Tom said, “No, I guess not,” Jimmy said, “Okay,” and aimed the pistol at her head and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell on an empty cylinder, and Jimmy said, “Shit,” and then he grinned at Tom and said, “Goddamn good thing that didn’t happen with him. He would have kicked my ass.”

  Nina started to get up and Jimmy hit her in the face with the gun and she went down, and Jimmy said, “Let’s look around. There’ll be a gun around here somewhere.”

  They found the gun safe, in an extra-deep closet in the main bedroom; the key was hanging from a hook, and when they opened the safe, Jimmy found four handguns and some long guns, including a black rifle. He said, “Oh, boy, I always wanted me one of these.”

  But he left the rifle on the bed, loaded the nine-millimeter, figured out how it worked. Guns are wonderful machines: simple, precise, efficient. Anyone can use them-they don’t discriminate between high and low, smart or stupid. To a gun, everybody’s equal. Jimmy prodded Nina Box back into the living room, looked at her, then at Tom, and said, “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  Nina looked at her dead husband and began to shake with fear and regret and said, “Please don’t,” but Jimmy shot her in the head and she fell beside her husband and, like him, curled herself into a snail shape.

  Jimmy, Becky, and Tom spent the rest of the day eating, watching television, and ransacking the house. They got two hundred dollars in cash, which Jimmy added to the stash. Becky said, “Tell me how much we’ve got.” Jimmy smiled, uncurled the sheath of bills, licked a finger, and counted it out: a little over twelve hundred dollars.

  Tom said, “Holy shit. You must’ve took a thousand dollars off that girl.”

  “Not exactly,” Jimmy said, but he wouldn’t say anything more, even after Becky started picking at him. Finally, she asked, “Did you get that money for killing her?”

  Jimmy said, “Shut up.”

  Tom thought, Jeez. He did. He got the money for killing her.

  They watched television, but it was all cable stuff, and they didn’t know that they were being hunted until late in the afternoon, a “Five dead in Minnesota” news flash.

  The next thing they knew, they were looking at photos of themselves; and the sheriff-Duke, they all knew who he was-said that they were looking for a silver Chevy truck, and he said the numbers on the plate.

  Tom rocked back and said, “We’re cooked, goddamnit, I knew it, we’re cooked.”

  Jimmy asked, “How could they know all that? How could they know it?”

  Tom said, “Fingerprints. Witnesses. Somebody saw us, that’s how. Everybody in town knew us.”

  “Gotta think, gotta think,” Jimmy said.

  “You don’t gotta think at this very minute. What you gotta do is get that truck out of the driveway,” Tom said.

  They didn’t know it, because they weren’t smart enough, but they were cruising purely on luck when Jimmy and Tom took the truck out of town, sticking to back streets, out into the countryside, with Becky driving the Boxes’ Tahoe behind them.

  Jimmy had figured out that as long as the cops were looking for the silver truck, they wouldn’t be looking for anything else. He didn’t know the land west of Marshall very well, but he knew what he was looking for, and he found it eight or ten miles out of town, a long snaky creek with a low bank. He drove the truck off the road and across the corner of a cornfield, then into the trees next to the creek, running over saplings and small stuff until he was stopped by a fallen log.

  By that time, he was far enough back that the truck couldn’t be seen from the road. The farmer would find it when he started plowing, but that’d be a while yet.

  When they were all back in the Tahoe, Jimmy said, “Let’s get back to the house. Sit and figure out what to do. We got to get out of here. Maybe. . Florida. Or Alaska. We need a map.”

  At the Boxes’, they ate Cheetos and watched more television, switching around local channels, and Becky found herself to be a star. The TV people had gotten her yearbook photo, which looked pretty damn good, she thought.

  “You’re famous now,” Jimmy said.

  At the end of the broadcast, the news channel put up two telephone numbers, one for the sheriff’s office and one for the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, “Ask for Agent Virgil Flowers,” and Jimmy laughed at Flowers’s name and said, “If I was going to give myself up, it’d be to somebody named Flowers. I sure as shit wouldn’t give up to that fuckin’ Duke. He’s crazier than we are.”

  The phone numbers got Tom thinking. When the other two were in the kitchen, he went through Rick Box’s pockets and, sure enough, found a cell phone. Later, when he had a chance, he went through Nina Box’s purse and found another one. He made sure they were turned off, and put them in his inside jacket pocket.

  The next time Flowers’s number came up, he wrote it in the palm of his hand. He went in the kitchen a minute later, wrote the number on a piece of notepaper, and put it in his back pocket, and scrubbed off his hand.

  He was still in the kitchen, drinking a Pepsi, when Jimmy wandered in, looked at him. He said, “I think we got something. Got an idea.”

  Late that night, they went on a scouting trip to a town called Oxford, fifteen miles out of Marshall. They took both of the Boxes’ vehicles, and left the Lexus at the Walmart Supercenter on Highway 59, before they left town. If they needed to switch vehicles, it’d be there, Jimmy said.

  So they scouted Oxford, but there wasn’t much to see. When they came back, they couldn’t get through to the house. There were cops all over the streets-they were clustering around the Boxes’ place. Becky was driving, and took a left as soon as she saw them.

  “Goddamn, that was close,” Jimmy said, looking back. “Somebody must’ve seen that truck this morning.”

  “Now what?” Becky asked.

  9

  Virgil worked into the night: called the crime-scene crew out of Bigham, where they’d checked into a local motel for the night. Virgil listened while the Lyon County sheriff and a social worker talked to the two kids, and then got Duke out of bed and told him about it.

  “You think they’re gone from my county?”

  “I don’t know where they are, Lewis. They might be running for the West Coast. But they might be coming back to you, since that’s the country they know best. I just got no idea.”

  They learned that the Boxes had two cars, and that both were missing. Whether one might be in a shop somewhere, they didn’t know, but the killers now had access to either two or three vehicles, and they put out stop orders on all three.

  A bit before three o’clock in the morning, Virgil got back to the motel, beat, and had just taken his boots off when he took a call from the BCA duty officer in St. Paul, who said, “We’ve got an incoming call from somebody who says it’s an emergency, about those guys you’re chasing. He wants your number.”

  “Did he say where he’s calling from?”

  “He said he’s traveling, but he needs to call you right quick, or he’s got to turn his phone off.”

  “Is there an ID on the phone?”

  “Yeah, it’s a guy calling, but it’s a woman’s phone. A Nina Box.”

  “Give him my number,” Virgil said. “Jesus, give him my number. Then see if you can track the call, get all over the call. . that’s one of the guys we’re chasing.”

  The duty officer went away, and fifteen seconds later Virgil’s phone rang. He said, “Yeah. Virgil Flowers.”

  “This is Tom McCall.”

 
“How do I know that?” Virgil asked. He needed to keep McCall talking.

  “Jimmy shot the Boxes. He shot Mr. Box in the heart with one gun and then shot Mrs. Box in the head with another gun that he got out of the Boxes’ gun safe in the bedroom. That good enough?”

  “Tom, you’ve got to come see me,” Virgil said. “You are in deep, big trouble, but if you’re calling, I can probably help you out.”

  “Listen, I got nothing to do with this,” McCall said. “I was hanging with Becky and Jimmy in Bigham-we are friends, I admit that, or anyway, we were friends. Jimmy and Becky said they were going over to a guy’s house in Bigham because the guy owed Jimmy some money for dope, and they’d come back and pick me up. When they came back, they were driving this other car, and, man, I didn’t know what they done until the next day when Jimmy shot his old man.”

  “It’s all Jimmy?”

  “It’s all Jimmy. . but Becky is his girlfriend, and they’re gonna kill me. I can’t get away from them. I know they’re gonna kill me. I got the Box kids down the basement, I think they’re all right, Jimmy wanted to kill them, too.”

  The Box kids remembered Becky pushing them down the stairs, so McCall was probably lying about that.

  “Where are you?” Virgil asked.

  “I don’t know. Becky was driving when we left the Boxes’, and they made me sit in the backseat. Becky’s in a Shell station, we’re getting gas and groceries. I’m sitting low in the seat, but Jimmy’s out walking around, smoking. . They think I’m sleeping, but they don’t know I got this phone. I’m scared to run. You gotta get me out, man. They’re both crazier than bug shit. You gotta get me out.”

  “You’re in a Shell station. Are they gonna hold it up?”

  “No, no. I don’t think so. We’re in some town, but not Marshall. I don’t know my way around so good. . But listen, I’m innocent. I didn’t do any of this shit. I can tell you something that nobody knows. When we were in Bigham, we had NO money. NO money. So Jimmy went over to this girl’s house in Bigham, and when he came back, he had a thousand dollars in cold cash. He didn’t say so exactly, and I’m afraid to ask, but I think he was paid to kill her. He and Becky talk- I think Jimmy’s coming back. Get me out, man, get me out.”