Mad River

by John Sandford

  The gravel in the parking lot was cutting at him as he scrambled and went down, scrambled and went down, and he could feel the palms of his hands and his shoulders getting cut, but all he was thinking about was his head and his kidneys, protecting them from the boots.

  He never had the leisure to take a good look at them, but they were wearing boots and jeans and leather jackets and ball caps and the masks, and they weren’t yelling or really making any noise at all except occasional curses, and “Get him, get out of the way, get out of my way . . .”

  Whether they’d done this before, or not, he had no way of knowing, but they weren’t well coordinated. Virgil kept trying to move in ways that kept one of them eclipsed behind the other, as much as he could, and was succeeding at least some of the time, and managed to get partway to his feet before he stumbled and he called out, “Police officer. I’m . . .”

  They kept coming and Virgil figured they must already know that. They’d come for him, not for a fight. They’d either badly beat him, put him in the hospital for sure, or maybe kill him, because he just couldn’t get away from them, but then a truck pulled into the parking lot, splashing headlights across the three of them, and Virgil kept moving and he saw more figures spilling out of the truck, and he didn’t know if he was further screwed, or saved, when one of the new people called, “Hey! Hey, what the hell . . .”

  Virgil shouted, “Police officer! Help me . . .”

  One of the new people yelled, “He’s a cop, let’s get them. . . .” There was some running and scuffling, and then the two men who’d jumped him ran, down toward the end of the bar and around behind it and out of sight.

  His rescuers didn’t go after them. Instead, they squatted around him, four young men, two in sport coats, two in casual jackets, and one of them asked, “You all right?”

  “I’m pretty scuffed up,” Virgil managed. He pushed himself into a sitting position, but every time he moved, something hurt. “I think maybe . . . I ought to go to an emergency room.”

  One of the men said to another, “Go on in the bar and call the cops. And an ambulance.”

  Virgil said, “Thanks.”

  One of the men, whose faces he couldn’t see very clearly, said, “Man, you are bleeding to beat the band.”

  Virgil said, “Artery?”

  “No, I don’t think so. You look like you fell off your Harley. Like seriously bad road rash. You really a cop?”

  Virgil said, “Yeah.” He still couldn’t see them clearly, and began to suspect that one of the kicks had connected with his head; things weren’t quite right. He asked, “Who are you guys?”

  One of them, exactly who was unclear, said, “Pi Kappa Alpha.”

  Virgil thought he’d misheard. “What?”

  “We’re fraternity brothers . . . from the U . . . down here with a friend on spring break.”

  “Ah . . .”

  The guy who’d gone inside came running back out and said, “I called nine-one-one. Everybody’s coming.”

  More people came out of the bar to look, and Virgil tried to get to his feet, got halfway up with one of the frat boys holding his arm, and then fell back on his butt. The kid said, “Just wait. Somebody’ll be here in a minute.”

  Virgil did not feel good.

  • • •

  THE COPS GOT THERE FIRST, and one of them looked at Virgil and said, “Criminy! It’s the state cop, Flowers.”

  Virgil said, “Hi.”

  The cop said, “Set right there,” and to somebody else, “You better call Duke.”

  A minute later, an ambulance arrived, and when Virgil couldn’t make it to his feet, they locked up his neck and head, put him on a gurney, and loaded him aboard. His eyes still weren’t quite focusing; he said to the ambulance attendant, “I’m a cop, and I’ve got to call somebody. Get my cell phone out of my pocket, will you?”

  “We’re not supposed to—”

  “Just do it,” Virgil said.

  A minute later, Davenport came up and said, “Yo. You get them?”

  “Not exactly,” Virgil said. “I’m in an ambulance headed for the hospital. I just got the shit beat out of me.”

  • • •

  VIRGIL WENT INTO the emergency room, where a nurse helped him take his clothes off, and a doc came and looked at him, and did some simple focusing tests, and recall tests, then said, “You’ve got a concussion. And you look pretty roughed up. We’ll do some X-rays.”

  “The guys at the bar said I’m bleeding.”

  “Not enough blood to worry about. It’s what’s going on inside that worries me,” the doc said.

  He used his hands to probe at Virgil’s chest and kidneys, while questioning him, and Virgil couldn’t remember any particularly hard blows to the body. “I was trying to keep them on my arms and legs. . . . I was on my back most of the time.”

  The hospital staff drew what seemed like a lot of blood, and wheeled him around for the X-rays, and at some point Shrake and Jenkins showed up, and Virgil told them what happened, and realized that he could now focus on their faces. But he was very tired, and began to shake.

  The doc, called by Shrake, came back and said that he might be suffering some post-combat shock, that the adrenaline overload was catching up to him, and that it should wear off fairly quickly. When Virgil told him he could focus, the doc said, “Excellent, that’s a very positive sign,” and went away again.

  Shrake and Jenkins had disappeared, probably shooed away by the nurse, Virgil thought. He was alone for a while and may have slept, then the doc came back and said, “Good news: there’s no sign of a skull fracture or any spinal problems. As far as I can tell, you don’t have any broken bones. You may have some pulled muscles or some other soft tissue injuries. We won’t know for sure until tomorrow. But you are seriously bruised up and you are going to hurt for a week. And you’re still concussed. We’re going to keep you for a while—overnight, anyway—to make sure that the concussion isn’t too bad. We’ll give you something to help you sleep.”

  • • •

  THEY DID THAT.

  When Virgil woke in the morning, Davenport was sitting next to the bed, tapping on an iPad, looking grim. Virgil cleared his throat, and Davenport looked up and said, “Well, you’re still alive.”

  “That’s the good part,” Virgil said. “But I need a drink, and I’ve got to pee.”

  “I can get you some water, but you’ll have to pee on your own,” Davenport said. “I’ll call the nurse.”

  With the nurse helping, Virgil got out of bed and walked to the bathroom, hurting every step of the way, peed—happy to see no blood—and when he came back out, Davenport handed him a glass of water and Virgil said to the nurse, “I’m okay. I’ll use the chair.”

  He sat down—and it hurt to sit down—and Davenport said, “Tell me.”

  Virgil told him, and Davenport said, “We’ll talk to this Marjorie, but five’ll get you ten that whoever called Richards saw her talking to you, and used that to pull you back to the bar.” Richards was the BCA duty officer who’d called Virgil the night before.

  “That sounds right,” Virgil said. “I really had my head up my ass: I bit on it like a hungry trout.”

  “Gotta rework your metaphors,” Davenport said. And, “Duke was here. He said he’d see you this afternoon, but they’re out running the search again.”

  “Wrong spot, I think,” Virgil said.

  Davenport continued, “Jenkins and Shrake are out tearing up the countryside, looking for the two guys who jumped you. Those frat boys showed up at the right time, but they didn’t get a license plate, and we can’t find anybody at the bar who knows who they are. But we’ll find them.”

  “Couple of assholes, not important,” Virgil said. “They weren’t very good at it, either. Probably friends of Dick Murph
y. Maybe even Dick Murphy, for all I know. But: I think I worried Murphy enough for him to do this. That’s the only reason I can think of that somebody’d jump me. If I could find those guys . . . maybe they’d talk.”

  “What do you have on Murphy?”

  Virgil laid it out, and when he was finished, Davenport said, “I agree with you that he probably paid Sharp. We need Sharp to say so. Or Welsh to say that Sharp told her that.”

  “So we need to keep at least one of them alive,” Virgil said.

  Davenport stood up and said, “You take it easy. I think they’re going to let you out this afternoon, but I already told the doc that if he thinks you ought to stay, that they ought to make you stay. Not to take any bullshit from you.”

  “All right. But I really do need to get out of here. This whole thing is probably going to end today.”

  “Can’t go much longer,” Davenport agreed. He stepped toward the door, then said, “You notice I didn’t say a single fuckin’ thing about you going up to that bar without a gun.”

  “I appreciate that,” Virgil said.

  “But if you had a gun with you, like you should have, as soon as you were hit, you could have rolled and come up with the weapon and just squeezed off a couple of rounds . . . even if you didn’t hit anything, that would have ended it. They’d have run, and you wouldn’t be in here. And if you’d hit one of them, we could talk to the guy about Murphy.”

  “No. That’s what would have happened if you had a gun,” Virgil said. “You can do that, because that’s the way you think. If I’d had a gun, and even remembered it, I probably would have dropped it trying to get it out. Then I’d have really been up shit creek, with a gun floating around. I’m just no damn good with pistols, Lucas.”

  Davenport looked at him for a moment, then shook his head and said, “Take it easy, man. We’ll find these guys. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they resist arrest.”

  Virgil said, “Take care,” and Davenport was gone.

  • • •

  HE STILL HAD a residual headache, but he’d had worse; and he’d hurt worse, like the time he got thrown off an ex–rodeo horse and pulled a groin muscle. He remembered the wrangler looking down at him and saying, “You take good dirt.”

  Maybe he did, he thought as he hobbled around the hospital room, because even though he hurt all over, he would have given a hundred American dollars to get five minutes alone with either of the guys who’d jumped him. “But not both at the same time,” he said aloud, grinning at himself in the bathroom mirror. He had a bad scrape on the left side of his forehead, on his left cheek, and below that, on the left side of his jaw. He had a bruise the size of a Kennedy half-dollar on the right side of his forehead, and he could feel dried blood in his hair, right at the crown of his head.

  He was wearing a hospital gown. He pulled the bathroom door closed, peeled off the gown, and took a look at himself. He had a half dozen big boot-shaped bruises on each arm, more on his butt and thighs, and one on his shin. He was scraped mostly on his forearms and hands, where skin had been exposed to gravel, and on his knees.

  He put the gown back on, went out and checked his clothes. The jeans were ripped at the knees, and would have to be tossed, and his jacket was a wreck. He thought about getting dressed, but instead, turned around, got on the bed, and went back to sleep.

  • • •

  THE NURSE WOKE him at ten o’clock, said that Dr. Rogers was about to look at him. Rogers, who was not the same doc he’d talked to the night before, took a long look at him and said, “All right. I’ll give you a couple things that’ll make you feel better . . . or hurt less . . . but I want you to stay away from aspirin and alcohol.”

  After telling Virgil what he could and couldn’t do, he said that another doc, named Wu, would be in to see him in a few minutes, and if Wu signed off, he could leave: “But take it easy for a few days.”

  The next doc to show up wasn’t Wu, but John O’Leary, who was wearing a short white staff doctor’s coat. “I just heard what happened. Does this have something to do with Dick Murphy?”

  “Maybe,” Virgil said. “Maybe. Probably. I can’t think of anyone else who’d want to put me in the hospital for a while.”

  “I don’t get that,” O’Leary said. “I’d think the last thing he’d want to do is get your dander up.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Virgil said. “The people around here, they’ve had a lot of people killed by Sharp and Welsh. Your daughter and Emmett Williams here in Bigham, three people in Shinder, two in Marshall, two more out in the country, and a cop . . . that we know of.”

  “You think there are more?”

  “We’ll find out when we locate them,” Virgil said. “Anyway, the feeling here is that the local folks are going to kill them when they find them. It’s absolutely turned into a duck hunt. But, when I got the chance to take in McCall, I got him to Marshall alive. I don’t think Murphy would want me to get Jim or Becky to jail alive. Jimmy could turn on them.”

  “And you need their testimony.”

  “That’s about it. . . . Uh, I thought you’d be at the funeral.”

  “I will be, but I have patients,” O’Leary said. “Anyway, good luck with getting Sharp and Welsh. Truth is, I believe you’re right about what’s going to happen. I haven’t talked to a single person here who thinks they’ll be taken alive. Their best chance would be to drive down to Iowa and turn themselves in to the Des Moines cops. Some big-city police station, someplace far away from here.”

  “They’re not smart enough,” Virgil said. “Anyway, as soon as this Wu gets here, I’m gone.”

  An Asian man stuck his head around the corner of the open door. “Wu you looking for?”

  • • •

  WU TURNED OUT to have a good sense of humor and strong hands, and he only hurt Virgil a little. An hour later, Virgil was back on the street, still feeling creaky. He called what he suspected was the town’s only cab, was told that in fact there were two, and rode back to the motel. Moving around helped; either that, or it was the pills that Rogers had prescribed, of which he had taken three.

  Shrake and Jenkins were walking out as Virgil walked in, and Shrake said, “We’ve got a few names. We’re going to go talk to them now. You think you scuffed them up at all?”

  “Only their legs,” Virgil said. “I was on the ground with the first punch, and after that, I was just trying to stay alive. I kicked one guy in the shins a few times, but that’s about it. He’ll have some bruises.”

  “One of those frat boys, a big guy, said he caught one of the guys a pretty good lick in an eye, and the side of a nose. Says the guy’ll have a shiner.”

  “These names . . . are they tied to Murphy?” Virgil asked.

  “A couple of them,” Jenkins said. “The rest are from Davenport’s network—local guys who might do something like this.”

  “Well, take it easy,” Virgil said. “I need these guys scared and willing to talk to me. I don’t need them all beat up and pissed off.”

  Jenkins patted him on the shoulder. “You’re a fuckin’ saint, Virgil,” he said. “But I gotta tell you—I can’t guarantee these guys’ll be in pristine condition. I can guarantee that they’ll be scared.”

  19

  VIRGIL HAD A CHEESEBURGER and fries with catsup in the lodge’s restaurant, feeling a little guilty about it—shouldn’t you eat something healthy after checking out of a hospital? Lettuce, or something? He chewed carefully, because his jaw hurt, and then, though his headache had eased, he decided to go take a nap: he was still feeling a little shaky. Just a couple of hours, he thought, which would have him back on his feet by early afternoon. If Shrake and Jenkins were back by then, they could resume the search south of Arcadia.

  He was sound asleep when his subconscious gave him a prod, and he opened his eyes. What
? Somebody at the door. Just feet? Then, tentatively, a knock. He had the “Do Not Disturb” sign hung on the doorknob, so it wasn’t the motel staff.

  He rolled out of bed, jolted by a half dozen minor lightning bolts of pain in his arms, ribs, butt, and legs, called, “Just a minute,” reached into his duffel and pulled out his 9-millimeter, and eased up to the peephole.

  From a foot back, and a bit off to the side, he could see nobody; he put his eye to the peephole and then jerked back, and thought about what he hadn’t seen. He hadn’t seen anybody.

  He called, “Who is it?”

  A woman’s voice, deliberately quiet: “Me. Roseanne.”

  A woman had called the duty officer the night before, to pull him up to the bar . . . but then, this did sound like Roseanne Bush. He said, “Stand back from the door. So I can see you.”

  She said, “Okay.”

  He risked another quick peep, thinking about the possibility of a whole bunch of slugs ripping through the door, and saw Bush backed against the far wall. He undid the chain, turned the knob, and pointed the gun at the space where somebody might come through. Nobody came through. He opened the door, and found Bush standing by herself in the hallway.

  She said, “Don’t shoot me.”

  Virgil said, “Come on in,” and when she was inside, relocked and chained the door, and put the pistol away.

  “God, I’m freaked out about last night,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Not your fault. I was talking to people about Dick Murphy. I’m thinking the word got back to him.” Virgil eased back on the bed, and Roseanne sat in the corner chair.

  “Lucas called me last night, and gave me a hard time about who it might have been,” Roseanne said. “I’ll tell you what: you would not want to go up against him, on some dark night. Lucas, I mean.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Virgil agreed. They sat for a minute in silence, then Virgil asked, “So what’s up?”