Mad River vf-6

by John Sandford

  “I’m on 79, going up toward town. Going, ah, north, I guess. I’m driving slow. Man, don’t tell the Duke, those fuckers will kill me bigger’n shit.”

  “You pull over and wait. I’m coming,” Virgil said. “Just wait. These folks down here are madder’n hornets about the cop that Jimmy shot, and you really do want to wait for me.”

  “I’ll pull over, man.”

  “I’m coming,” Virgil said.

  They rang off and Duke said, “We’re coming with you.”

  “Behind me,” Virgil said. “I need this kid.”

  Duke bristled. “This kid is the one that shot Dan. This Jimmy business is all lies.”

  Virgil said, “Okay, I’ll buy that, but I don’t want to scare him any worse than he is. He doesn’t trust you, and I don’t want him to run off and hide and maybe kill somebody else. So you stay back.”

  Duke seemed about to say something else, but then he nodded and said, “I’ll give the order.”

  They rolled out of the ditch and onto the road, Virgil with Duke behind him, and another patrol car behind Duke, and Virgil thought it could be a close-run thing. Duke and his cops would kill McCall if they could get away with it; any excuse would do.

  12

  Virgil hadn’t told Duke exactly where McCall was, so Duke had little choice but to follow. A second patrol car fell in behind Duke. With everybody in several counties looking for McCall, there was a fair chance that some other cop would get to him before Virgil did, which would not be good. Virgil put his foot down, determined to get there first, pushing eighty miles an hour, and then ninety, which was about as fast as he could go on gravel roads without killing himself: the 4Runner was a decent truck, but it wasn’t a sports car.

  None of which was made easier by the fact that he had to read his map book as he went. If McCall was on Highway 79, Virgil would have to make several zigzags up the road grid to get to him, and make them as soon as he could, since he didn’t know exactly how far north McCall was.

  So they did that, going as far east as he could on each zig, before it ran out, finally getting onto a road that was big enough to take him all the way to 79. All three vehicles made a screaming turn on 79, and ran hard for ten minutes, and then Virgil saw the black Jeep on the side of the road, maybe three-quarters of a mile ahead.

  In his side mirror, Virgil saw the second patrol car pull out into the passing lane, and Virgil moved over until the center line was running down the middle of his hood. The deputy in the second car pushed him for a few seconds, then Virgil, his eyes flicking to the rearview mirror, saw Duke wave at the other cop, who backed off.

  Virgil slowed sharply, and Duke nearly rear-ended him, then Virgil floored it again, leaving Duke momentarily behind. A hundred yards ahead of the other two cars, and twenty-five yards short of the Jeep, Virgil stomped on the brakes and slewed sideway across the highway, felt the inside wheels lift off the road for a second, then slam back down.

  He jammed the truck into “Park,” jumped out, carrying the shotgun, and jogged down toward the Jeep. McCall got out of the truck with his hands in the air. Virgil shouted, “Put your hands on the truck. Put your hands on the truck.”

  McCall turned and put his hands on the truck roof, in sight, and Virgil ran closer, stopping twenty-five or thirty feet away, and shouted, “I’m going to come in close. If you move your hands, I’ll shoot you. If you move your hands-”

  “I won’t move, I won’t move,” McCall shouted back. He was looking over his shoulder, pale, frightened. Virgil took another step forward as a deputy caught up with him. The deputy had a handgun pointed at McCall and he screamed, “On your knees, on your knees-”

  Virgil shouted at him, “Put your gun down. Put your gun down-”

  The deputy was focused on McCall and shouted, “If you don’t go down on your knees, I will shoot you-”

  Virgil stepped next to the cop and pushed the handgun off line and said, “If you shoot him, I’ll arrest you for murder.”

  The cop flinched then, and looked at Virgil in disbelief. “What are you doing? What are you doing?”

  “Put the gun down,” Virgil said. “If you shoot him, I’ll send you to prison for murder. Put your gun down.”

  “He killed Dan-”

  “He’s quit. Put your fuckin’ gun down,” Virgil said.

  The cop looked back at McCall, and for a second Virgil thought he might fire; but then he looked back at Virgil and said, “This is bullshit.”

  Duke came up. Virgil had seen him moving slowly out of his car, and faster only when he saw Virgil pushing on the deputy, but never quite in a jog. He’d expected the deputy to kill McCall, and didn’t want to be right there. Now he called, “What’s going on here?”

  Virgil walked to McCall and said quietly, “I’m going to put some handcuffs on you. The safest thing you can do is cooperate, because these guys want to kill you. If you’ve got cuffs on, they can’t do that. Now, face the truck and put your first hand behind your back.”

  McCall did that, and said, “Virgil, honest to God, I never hurt anybody. I was a hostage. They took me as a prisoner.”

  “Other hand,” Virgil said.

  McCall put his other hand behind him and said, “Jimmy shot that officer. I yelled for the officer to get down, but Jimmy-”

  “You lying sack of shit,” the deputy shouted. “We got witnesses.” And to Virgil: “I ought to bust you for interfering with me. How would aggravated assault fill out your day?”

  Virgil said quietly, “You were looking for an excuse to murder this man. You were interfering with an arrest while you were doing it. I’m going to talk to the attorney general about it. We may have to consider charges even now. We don’t allow lynchings in Minnesota. And we don’t allow convicted felons to be lawmen.”

  “Bullshit-”

  Duke snapped at the deputy, “Watch your language.” To Virgil: “You’d have a heck of a time making that argument with any jury around here.”

  “There wouldn’t be a trial around here, it’d be up in the Cities,” Virgil said. Then he backed off: “But if you keep this fellow off me, we’ll just call it a bit of overenthusiasm, or excitement, and let it go at that.”

  Duke said, “You know he killed Dan.”

  “That’s what I heard,” Virgil said. “I’ll be happy to slap him in Stillwater just as fast as you would. But we’re gonna have a trial before we do that. We’re not going to shoot him down in a ditch.”

  McCall said, “I never-”

  Virgil said, “Shut up,” and, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you. You got all that?”

  McCall nodded dumbly, and just to be sure he understood it, Virgil said, “Listen, you don’t have to talk to us if you don’t want to, but if you do talk to us, it can be used against you when we get to a trial. We’ll provide an attorney to represent you. You sure you got that?”

  McCall said, “Yeah, I got it. But I didn’t do anything, I was kidnapped-”

  “We all just want to make sure you understand about the attorney,” Virgil said.

  “Okay.”

  Virgil said to Duke and the deputy, “You’re witnesses to the Miranda. He’s my prisoner. It’d be best for all of us if we put him in jail over in Marshall, because if anything happened to him in Bare County. . Well, the trouble would be so deep it’s unlikely that any of you would be working in law enforcement again. So I’m taking him.”

  The deputy looked at Duke and said, “Sheriff, you can’t-”

  Duke snapped, “Don’t tell me what I can do.” He nodded at Virgil. “Take him. But I want to know every word that comes out of his mouth.”

  “You’ll get it,” Virgil said. “Let’s get the crime-scene people over here to take this Jeep apart. We don’t want to miss a single thing. And don’t let anybody touch it-we don’t want any confusing DNA or fingerprin
ts.”

  And Virgil asked McCall, “Where’s your pistol? You were seen with one.”

  “I don’t got no gun. They wouldn’t let me have no gun with bullets in it, because they were afraid I’d shoot Jimmy. Becky’s got the gun. She used it to shoot some woman back there, in the farmhouse. Did you find the farmhouse?”

  “We found it,” Virgil said. “Who shot the man?”

  McCall looked confused. “Wasn’t no man when I went running out of there. Becky shot this woman, and then there’s some other stuff, and she went to look for medicine for Jimmy, and when she went up the stairs, I grabbed the woman’s keys off the kitchen counter and ran out to the driveway and jumped in the Jeep. I didn’t see no man anywhere.”

  Duke said, “This Clarence Towne is going to make it. Got word from the medics: he looks bad, but he’s got one good lung and no arteries hit, so we’ll find out if the boy is telling the truth on that. Not that it’ll make a hell of a lot of difference.”

  Virgil said, “It could make some. . Tom’s in a lot of trouble, but there are things that could count to his benefit, if we go to trial.”

  As he said it, he swiveled away from McCall so McCall couldn’t see his face, and winked at Duke and the deputy. Duke showed a tiny nod, and said, “So take him. I don’t want to look at him anymore.”

  “Crime Scene’ll be here pretty quick,” Virgil said. “Don’t let anybody touch that truck.”

  Virgil got McCall into the front seat and locked his handcuffed wrists to an eyebolt under the seat, using a chain that let McCall sit upright but not move much.

  “What happens if we roll the truck? I couldn’t get out,” McCall whined.

  “I know. You’d probably burn to death,” Virgil said. McCall blanched, and Virgil added, “Relax, Tom. You’re still alive, and you wouldn’t have been if anybody else had gotten to you first. And I’m not going to roll the truck. Probably.”

  Behind them, Duke had turned around, with the other patrol car behind him, and they headed back toward the farmhouse.

  It was a fifty-mile run into Marshall, and Virgil started by telling McCall that he was in desperate trouble, and almost certainly going to prison forever. “You can only help yourself by cooperating. If you’re convicted, maybe get early parole or something.”

  After ten minutes of bullshit, with McCall breaking down to weep, and to claim his status as a victim, not a killer, Virgil, feeling that he’d primed the pump, held up a small handheld digital recorder and said, “I want to make a record of our talk. You know, your lawyer can use it to prove you cooperated.”

  “I guess it’s okay,” McCall said.

  Virgil turned the recorder on and said, “I just want to make sure that you remember that Miranda warning. Remember when I told you that you’ve got a right to remain silent. .” He went through it again, and McCall said, “Yeah, yeah, I remember.”

  “Great,” Virgil said. “Listen, tell me about Jim Sharp and Becky Welsh. We gotta find them before they kill anybody else. You know where they’re at?”

  “In a cornfield, I think,” McCall said. He told Virgil about running out of Oxford, with Jimmy bleeding from the leg wound, about hiding in the cornfield, about walking back to the farmhouse to get medicine and a different car.

  As he told the story, he slowed, and his eyes caught Virgil’s, and Virgil realized that he was editing the story as he told it. Some of it, at least, was a lie. “We got down to this farmhouse, and there wasn’t anybody home. The back door was locked, but Becky knew how to get it open with a driver’s license. We, uh, we got inside. . uh, we were going to look for medicine, but, uh. .”

  “Yeah? What about Becky?”

  “She always wanted to fuck me. That’s the God’s truth. She’d play footsie with me under the dinner table, like she was daring Jimmy to catch us. Jimmy’d kill her if she did. But then, Jimmy was hurt so we got to this empty house and she said she wanted to fuck me and we went back into this bedroom and did it. She had this big gun-”

  “She had a big gun and made you take her back into the bedroom and f-” He remembered the recorder, and covered himself. “-have sex with her?” Virgil’s skepticism shone through.

  “No, no, not exactly that way. . I could take it or leave it, you know. She makes me nervous. She wants to be smacked around a little, which is weird. Anyhow, we were back there, just finished up and getting dressed, when we heard this Jeep come into the driveway. We didn’t know it was a Jeep, but it was. Anyway, she gets up with this gun, and this woman walks in through the kitchen and Becky goes around through the dining room and gets in behind her, and I hear the woman saying, like, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ and Boom. Becky shoots her. I go running through the dining room, and I say, ‘What’d you do? Oh, no, not another one,’ and Becky said, ‘Don’t tell Jimmy what we done, about fuckin’ me,’ just like the dead woman didn’t count for nothing. Then she said she was going to go upstairs and look for medicine, and I said I’d watch the road. Soon as I heard her upstairs, I grabbed the keys off the counter and ran out to the Jeep and took off.”

  “And you never saw a man. .”

  “No. Never did. I just took off and I didn’t stop running until I got you on the phone and you told me to stop. I was cooperating.”

  There was something screwed up about the story, Virgil thought, but he called Duke and told him about it. “Have somebody check that back bedroom, see if there might have been some sex going on there.”

  “I’m right outside. Just hang on,” Duke said. Virgil heard a screen door slam, and Duke saying something to somebody else, then Duke came up and said, “Well, something happened here. There’s some blood on a pillow. Not much. Like a cut or something. Looks like it’s been used, the blankets are all over the place.”

  “Get Crime Scene on it,” Virgil said. “Don’t let anybody else in there.”

  When he got off the phone, McCall said, “You believe me now?”

  Virgil said, “Maybe.”

  And after a minute, Virgil asked, “Tell me what happened at the O’Leary house.”

  “Okay. Okay. Jimmy didn’t have any money. Never did. Didn’t have a pot to piss in, nor a window to throw it out of. I had an apartment, up in the Cities, but lost my job, and was running out of rent, and Jimmy said if we could get to Bigham, he knew a guy who’d get us jobs. I had like eighteen dollars, for gas and some food. So we went there, in Jimmy’s old car-we actually spent a night living in the car, and it was colder ’n shit. The car was a piece of shit, and kept breaking down, the starter didn’t work, and the guy who was supposed to get us jobs didn’t know where we could get one. So then Jimmy said he knew this O’Leary guy, and me and Becky should come along with him. . and maybe get a loan. We started out late, and we didn’t know exactly where it was, and the car was giving us trouble, so we left it in this parking lot and walked. It was pitch-dark when we got there. We went down the side of the house, and I sez, ‘What the hell is this?’ and Jimmy pulls out this gun and puts it up against my chest, and he sez, ‘You’re gonna open a window, big guy, or I’m gonna shoot you in the heart.’ He’s a short guy, and I’m not, so we went to this window, and I lifted it up, and he pointed the gun and said, ‘Get in there,’ so I went in there.”

  McCall said the three of them crept through the house, McCall quaking in his shoes. Jimmy forced him to climb the stairs, then pointed him to the front of the house, where they woke up two girls in a bed. “One of the girls started screaming, and Jimmy shot her. And somebody started yelling from another part of the house, and I ran, and they all come behind me.”

  Out in the street, they ran down the hill to the car, but couldn’t get it started. Jimmy completely freaked out, McCall said, but then they saw a man come out of the apartment house and walk over to his car. Jimmy jumped out of the car and ran over and shot him. “Just like that. Not even a howdy-do.” A minute later, they were on the way to Shinder.

  “They kept telling me, ‘Tom, we’re gonna kill you, you motherfucker, if
you make one noise or try to get away.’”

  “But where did the money come in?” Virgil asked. “This money he had?”

  “Well, we got to Shinder, and we were going to hide in Jimmy’s house until things quieted down, but Jimmy, man, he was like, crazy, and he got in an argument with his old man and shot the old fucker down.

  “Jimmy said we’d have to run, sooner or later, and the old man’s truck was no good, we needed some money to get a better one, and I said, ‘Shit, where’ll we get any money?’ and Jimmy said, right out of the blue, ‘Well, I got a grand.’ And Becky and I both said, ‘What?’ and he pulled this roll of brand-new twenties out of his pocket. He said he took it off that girl he shot, but that’s bullshit. It was pitch-dark in there, and she was in bed. She had the money between her legs or something? I don’t think so.”

  “So where do you think he got it?”

  “That’s the thing. Becky kept giving him shit about it, so he whips out this old pistol and blows across the barrel, and sez, ‘Never thought you’d be fuckin’ a hit man, huh?’”

  “A hit man?”

  “That’s what he said. But that’s all I know about it. That he called himself a hit man,” McCall said.

  “If somebody paid him to kill the girl, who would that have been?” Virgil asked.

  McCall shrugged. “I got no idea.”

  “How long were you in Bigham?”

  “Three days. . well, we got there late one day, then overnight, then another day, then overnight, then another day, and that night was the, you know, thing at O’Leary’s.”

  “Okay. When you lifted the window, did you have to force a lock?”

  “Nope. Went right up. Zip. Like it was greased,” McCall said.

  “Did Jimmy pick it?”

  “Yeah. He went right to it. It was pretty high up, it was over a kitchen counter, so it was a little too high for him. That’s why he needed me. And I wasn’t going to say no, with a pistol pointed at my heart.”

  Virgil thought it over, and then said, “Those nights when you were in Bigham. . what’d you do?”