Mad River

by John Sandford

  Eight or ten miles north of Oxford on 9. Not that far from where he was. Virgil switched the cell phone to speaker, said, “You hang on here, I need to look at my map.”

  He got the atlas off the passenger seat, found 9 out of Oxford, realized he had to jog east to catch it. He hated to cut McCall off, but he had no choice. “Tom, you need to call me back in five minutes, and I’ll bring you in. But I gotta get an ambulance and some cops going to this woman you say got shot.”

  “You gotta help me, man. They had me held prisoner.”

  “Call me in five minutes,” Virgil said. “I’ll bring you in.”

  Virgil was still trailing the deputies’ cars, all rolling at eighty miles an hour or so, where they could, where the roads weren’t too bad, but they were coming up on an intersection that would take them over to 9 and the two sheriff’s cars went straight through, and without any way to talk to them directly, Virgil took the turn and called Duke and told him McCall’s story.

  Duke said, “I’m coming into Oxford now, but some of it is lies for sure, because we’re talking to the witness and he said one guy was shot, but it was the other guy who killed Dan. It was your boy McCall.”

  “He’s calling me and I’m gonna bring him in, but we’ve gotta find this house where the woman is down.”

  “Okay, those boys who were ahead of you are the closest. I’ll turn them around,” Duke said. “You know where you’re going? Exactly?”

  “Over to 9 and then south toward Oxford. McCall thinks they’re ditched in a cornfield, a standing cornfield about eight or ten miles north of town. There’s not that much standing corn this year.”

  “You see them, you wait until we get there with the artillery,” Duke said. “We don’t need you dead and them running.”

  “If I spot it, I’ll go on past to this farmhouse where McCall says the dead woman is. We can’t take a chance on that.”

  “Call me. I’m heading that way. I’ll get everybody heading that way, but you’ll get there first. Call me.”

  Virgil threw the phone on the passenger seat and put his foot down harder, both hands on the wheel. It was two miles on gravel over to 9, which was a good blacktop road. As he came up to it, he could see a cloud of gravel dust straight ahead, on the other side of the intersection, and thought about going after it but didn’t. The woman who’d been shot . . .

  • • •

  IF HE HAD GONE after it, he’d have caught Becky and Jimmy in the black Ford. Jimmy was feeling better, with the pain pills in him. The pain wasn’t entirely gone, but it had eased, and his mind was clear, and he kept coming back to Tom McCall. Becky had told him about the rape, and she was still breaking down, weeping into her chest. “That sonofabitch, I should have shot him. He’s fuckin’ talking to the cops right now.”

  “He doesn’t know where we’re going.”

  “They’ll be all over this county in half an hour,” Jimmy said. “Becky, you gotta go faster. Faster, c’mon, it’s a good way yet, we gotta go faster, we got no time.”

  • • •

  VIRGIL SAW THE STANDING corn from a half mile out, a patch of tan on the otherwise dark earth. He slowed to a normal pickup speed, fifty miles an hour, and cruised on by it, checking it out. No sign of a truck, but if they were in deep enough . . . Then he crossed a culvert and saw tracks in the dirt and thought, Yes.

  A moment later, he came up on a farmhouse that sat a hundred feet off the highway; the mailbox outside said “Towne.” The garage was open and empty, a nasty black rectangle like a missing tooth, and the openness of it caught him, and he said, “Oh, shit,” and he pulled into the driveway and called Duke, who answered instantly.

  “I’m three miles south of 10 on 9, pink house with a garage on the side standing open, no sign of a car, it’s maybe a half mile south of some standing corn and there were some tracks going off there. I think it’s them. I’m going in the house.”

  “You don’t go in that house, you stay right there,” Duke said. “That’s an order, mister. We’re not more than three or four minutes out.”

  “Fuck that,” said Virgil, and he rang off, got out of the truck, took the shotgun out of the back, pushed in four double-ought shells, and let the gun’s muzzle lead him down the driveway.

  As he went, he heard his phone ring. McCall, probably. He let it go.

  The back door was open and he stepped through, into the mudroom, saw a man’s body lying on the floor and beyond him a woman, and then the man groaned and one arm twitched and Virgil jumped across his body, charged through a dining room and then the living room and back around through the kitchen, over the woman’s body—her sightless eyes stared straight up at him, she was dead—and back to the man.

  He’d been shot with a shotgun, but much of the blast had apparently gone between his biceps and his chest, knocking a bloody patch in his rib cage and a piece out of his arm. He was lying in a pool of blood, but Virgil had seen bigger pools, and he put down his gun and called Duke and shouted, “We got two down, one dead, but one’s still alive. We need a medic here RIGHT NOW. Get somebody here RIGHT NOW.”

  Duke said, “Hold on,” and then came back. “We’ve got an ambulance rolling, but it’s gonna be a while. One of my guys got medical training, he’s right behind me . . . he’s got a medical kit . . . I’m coming up on you now.”

  Virgil looked down at the wounded man and couldn’t think of what to do: he was not a medic, and was afraid that anything he did would be worse than nothing. The man was oozing blood, but not pumping it. Then he thought of the empty garage, and the two bodies, and he slipped the man’s wallet from his pocket, opened it, found his driver’s license, and ran back out to his truck.

  As he was crossing the driveway, Duke swerved into it and came to a dusty screeching halt next to Virgil’s truck. Another sheriff’s car was right behind him, and Virgil shouted, “Inside.”

  Duke shouted back, “What’re you doing?”

  Virgil called, “I think they took their cars. I’m going to get an ID on their cars.”

  Duke ran up the driveway into the house, and a deputy from the second car unloaded a med pack from the trunk and ran toward the door, after Duke. Then two more sheriff’s cars arrived, coming from the same direction as Virgil had, the cops piling out into the yard.

  • • •

  DUKE WAS BACK OUT fifteen seconds later, as Virgil was waiting for a reading on the victim’s auto registrations. He had them thirty seconds later, writing the descriptions on a notepad: one black Jeep Cherokee, one black Ford F-150 pickup, registered to Clarence and Edie Towne. He got the tags for both of them, then climbed out of the truck and gave the note to Duke and said, “We’re looking for these vehicles. McCall is in the Jeep, Sharp and Welsh probably have the pickup. It’s possible they’re still up in the cornfield.”

  Duke issued orders that sent deputies to the corners of the cornfield, where they could see anybody trying to get out, and designated two other deputies to accompany himself and Virgil off the shoulder of the road into the cornfield.

  Virgil said, “I need as many of them alive as we can get. There’s another thing going on here—we need them alive if we can get them without taking too big a risk.”

  “No risk,” Duke said. “Alive if we can get them with no risk. I don’t want anybody else shot. You all know about Dan. . . . All right. Let’s go.”

  They took off, moving at speed, led by the deputies who would go past the cornfield and then post up on its corners. Virgil led the sheriff’s own truck, and two more, ten seconds behind the first two.

  As they went, he thought about the cloud of dust he’d seen disappearing down 10. Had that been them?

  A minute after they left the farmhouse, Virgil took his truck off-road, down into the ditch, plowing along through dead grass, then onto a track that led down to a dry creek. He could see whe
re somebody had busted up the other side of the creek bed, running over small saplings, and he stopped and got his shotgun out, and the other cops stopped behind him and he waved for them to spread out.

  “Don’t anybody shoot anybody else,” he said. Every one of the deputies was carrying an M16, and they moved toward the corn in a skirmish line; and Virgil realized that with the limited visibility ahead, any hope of taking Sharp and Welsh alive was bound to be futile. There’d be no real chance of surrender, because they simply couldn’t be seen well enough, and nobody would take a chance that they were surrendering when they might just as well be ready to open fire.

  The best chance, he thought, was if they’d both been shot and were on the ground.

  “Got a truck here, got a Tahoe here,” one of the deputies screamed, and the line shifted in his direction, then stopped, then started forward again, collapsing on the target area. Virgil and Duke both jogged along the skirmish line, from opposite directions, and then Virgil saw the truck, but no sign of life around it.

  They moved up slowly, cops leapfrogging past each other, always one or two focused on the truck while the others covered, and when they got close enough, Virgil called, “Don’t shoot me,” and jogged up to the truck, stopped, listened, then peeked in the back window. The truck was empty.

  “Nobody,” he called. “Watch the corn, watch the corn.”

  “Another track going out this way. There was another truck here,” somebody called, and Virgil went that way and looked. The corn had been knocked down by another vehicle that had come in and stopped ten feet from where the first one was parked.

  “Reversed in here and backed out,” a deputy said. “They’re in that Ford.”

  Virgil stepped back to the Tahoe and Duke, who’d been looking in the passenger-side door, said, “Somebody got hit hard. Lotta blood.”

  Virgil looked in; there was a lot of blood, but not as much as there would be for somebody who was bleeding to death. McCall had been telling the truth: Jimmy had been hit, but not incapacitated. They’d be looking for a place to hide, where they could give the wound some attention, which meant somebody in an isolated farmhouse could get killed in the next little while.

  Virgil said all that to Duke, who had already put out a stop order on the Townes’ Jeep and pickup.

  “We’re gonna need the National Guard in here. We need to shut down every intersection for fifty miles around,” Duke said. “I’ll call the governor.” Then he asked, “What about McCall?”

  Virgil nodded and went to his phone and punched in the call-back number. McCall answered on the second ring and whined, “Where are you, man, where are you?”

  “I need to bring you in, Tommy. Where’re you at? You figured that out?”

  “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—”