Mad River (15 page)

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?”

“Hung out, mostly. Didn’t have the money to do much. Shot some pool. Jimmy thought he was a pool shark. But he’s not. He looks like a pool shark, but he’s really bad at it.”

“Was Jimmy hanging with anybody in particular? Did he seem tight with anyone?”

McCall looked at Virgil for a long moment, then said, “You know, I got an answer to that, but I think I need to talk to a lawyer. Like you said, you’d get me a lawyer.”

Virgil thought,
Ah, shit.
He’d been so close, but with the tape running, he had no choice. “All right. We’ll stop right here, get you to Marshall, and hook you up with an attorney.”

He turned off the tape and said, “You motherfucker, you killed that cop. I hope you rot in hell.”

That put a further dent in the conversation. McCall cowered against the passenger-side door until they got to the law enforcement center in Marshall, and Virgil turned him over to the sheriff.

After spending a half hour on paperwork, he called Davenport and said, “One down. But somebody else is probably dead, unless Jim and Becky are out in another cornfield.”

“They can’t hide for long,” Virgil said. “The governor just put the National Guard on the roads—they’re deploying at every intersection out there. As soon as they’re in, they’ll organize teams of troops and cops and hit every house on the prairie.”

“How long will that take?”

“Probably be in place by tomorrow morning, and the search’ll start by tomorrow afternoon.”

“That means that they’ll probably kill them,” Virgil said. “I need Jimmy alive long enough to get the guy who paid him to kill Ag Murphy.”

“Who’d that be?” Davenport asked.

“Ag Murphy’s husband.”

“Really? Well—good luck with that.”

13

VIRGIL FINISHED UP
with the sheriff’s department, copied the McCall interview to his laptop, and left the recorder in the LEC evidence room. He had a Diet Coke and a conversation with the sheriff and the Marshall police chief, then called Duke. Nobody had any idea where Sharp and Welsh had gone. Deputies were running all over Bare County, and the adjacent counties, looking for the Townes’ truck, but nobody had seen it.

“I fear for what we’re going to find when we catch up to them,” Duke said.

“So do I,” Virgil said. “I have no idea of whether they’re north, south, east, or west. I wish I knew, because I’d like to be there when we do find them.”

•   •   •

AFTER THAT,
Virgil was at loose ends. Since he was there in Marshall, anyway, and because everybody had his cell phone number and would be in touch if anything broke, he called Sally Long. She answered on the third ring and said, “Virgil Flowers: you
did
call.”

“If you’re not real busy, we could get dinner,” Virgil suggested. “Maybe go over to the Six and catch a movie.”

“Or maybe just find someplace to talk about our feelings,” she said. And, into the silence, “Just kiddin’, there, cowboy.”

“Jeez, you scared the heck out of me,” Virgil said. “Every time I do that, I get divorced.”

•   •   •

HE SPENT
the next three hours at his hotel, much of it on the phone or the computer, keeping up. There was a long story about the murders, out of the
Star-Tribune
website, with profiles of the suspects; and more stories from Omaha, Kansas City, and Fargo. Chicago, New York, and St. Louis had picked up AP stories, which were rewrites of the
Star-Tribune
, but Los Angeles had a columnist on the ground. And television from everywhere.

Channel Three out of the Cities had video from a National Guard MP detachment showing soldiers loading up a bunch of Humvees, and the reporter said that most of the MPs had gotten back from Iraq that past fall, and had serious experience running checkpoints and roadblocks.

Virgil was mentioned in the
Star-Tribune
as a “top BCA agent and troubleshooter,” which meant that Ignace was sucking up to him.

The last part of his motel time he spent making himself pretty and swell-smelling, buffing up his cowboy boots and shaving again. After a last check, he headed out the door, not feeling particularly guilty about it, either.

Sally was living in a small blue house not far from the university. A young blond woman, perhaps twenty years old, came to the door, crunching on a stalk of celery filled with orange pimento cheese spread. She said, “You must be Virgil. Sally’ll be right out.”

“Who’re you?” Virgil asked, as he stepped inside. The house was neatly kept, and sparsely furnished, like a bachelor woman might do it.

“Barbara,” the woman said. “I’m a student. I rent the garage loft from Sally.”

•   •   •

SALLY TOOK ANOTHER
five minutes and Virgil sat on the couch and watched Barbara munch through another two stalks of celery—Virgil turned down the offer of one, saying, “We’re going out to dinner”—and found out that Barbara was studying studio arts. “The problem is, I don’t have any talent,” she said.

“That’s a good thing to find out,” Virgil said.

“The other problem is, I’m not interested in anything else. So, what do
you
think I should do?”

“Why’d you italicize the
you
?”

“Because I’ve asked everybody else, and they all give me bullshit answers. So see, I’m relying on you to give me a non-bullshit answer.” She crossed her legs, and cocked her head, waiting for an answer.

“Well,” Virgil said, after a minute, “I never wanted to be a cop, but I just kind of got there. I didn’t plan it, but I found out that it’s pretty interesting. So, if I were you, I’d look around for something that seems like it might be an important job, and just
pick it
. Even if you’re not too interested in the general subject matter right now, if it’s really important, you’ll get interested in it later, when you start learning the details of it.”

She peered at him as she gnawed down the second of the two celery stalks, then said, “That sounded less bullshitty than most answers. Not entirely un-bullshitty, but mostly.”

“Well, good, then,” Virgil said. “I passed.”

•   •   •

“PASSED WHAT?”
Sally asked, as she came into the room from the back of the house. “Are we talking kidney stones?”

Virgil stood up and thought,
Ooo,
and pecked her on the cheek. She was wearing a silky black blouse and tight black jeans, tucked into cowboy boots with turquoise cutouts that looked like they were right off the prairies of New York’s Upper East Side.

“Talking about what Barbara should do in life,” Virgil said. And, “Great boots. You got horses?”

“Two,” she said. “The old man’s got a ranch west of town.”

•   •   •

THEY TALKED ABOUT
Barbara on the way out to the Blue Moon, a steak house that wasn’t terrible. And they talked about horses, which Virgil didn’t know much about, except that they sometimes bite people, and that the French sometimes ate them with both red and white sauces. Then they talked about Barbara’s problem.

“You know, when I was in high school, I was going to be a lawyer and do great things for the Indian people,” Sally said. “When I got to college and started talking to people, I found out that there are more lawyers helping the Indian people than the Indian people can really use. So then I didn’t know what to do, and when I got divorced, I called my dad, and he said, ‘Come back here and run the business.’ I couldn’t think of anything better at the moment—I figured I’d do it for a couple of years and then go back to school—but now, I find out that running the business is pretty interesting. And I have fourteen employees who depend on me to do good, and I kinda like that. The responsibility. It’s the first time I feel like I’m really doing something.”

“You
are
doing something,” Virgil said. “One of the problems with these kids I’m chasing is that they never did anything. I’m not sure how much of that is their fault, but if they’d had something to do, other than sit on their asses, or shoot pool . . . none of this would have happened. Maybe.”

“Everybody needs something,” she said. Then, “You know what? Everybody
deserves
something.”

They got to the steak house, were seated in a U-shaped booth, and ate salads and pork chops, and gravitated together until their thighs were touching under the table, and Virgil began to feel really warm.

When the waiter took away the main-course plates, Virgil asked, “You want some dessert?”

She put her hand around his wrist and said, “Sure. I’d like a little Flowers.”

•   •   •

HE GOT HER BACK
to the motel, and on the bed, and pulled off her boots one at a time and dropped them on the floor, then pulled off the tight jeans, stopped when the waistline got down to her knees, and turned his head up and laughed, and when she asked, “What?” he started pulling again and said, “I’ve been waiting to do this since eleventh grade.”

She surprised him and said, “So have I—been waiting for you to do it.”

The jeans came off, and so did everything else, and they got busy, and an hour later, she muttered into his shoulder, “Well, that was better than pumpkin pie. With whipped cream, even.”

“Far better?”

“Maybe not far better,” she said.

“Then we just gotta try harder.”

“I could do that.”

A while later, he said, “We should have done this a long time ago.”

She said, “I was too young. You weren’t, but I was. You were like a big goddamn dangerous thing, you had hormones coming out of your ears. You scared the heck out of me. In a good way, kinda—you’d get me so hot—but it just didn’t seem right. Then, of course, you jumped Linda Smith.”

That sat there for a minute, then Virgil, cornered, said, “True.”

“Was it worth it?”

He thought again, and then said, “Yes.”

That made her laugh, and she asked, “Whatever happened to Linda?”

“She married a rich farmer guy from over by Chamberlain. I think she works part-time for some kind of social services agency over there.”

“South Dakota?”

“Yeah. Jackie Bolt told me they’ve got a place that looks down on the Missouri. Supposed to be really pretty. I guess they spend their winters down in Panama. That’s what I heard. They go big-game fishing. They’ve got a sailfish in their farmhouse living room. In South Dakota.”

•   •   •

THEN,
since it was impossible to screw
all
the time, he told her about chasing Sharp and Welsh and McCall, the details of the various killings, and the problem of finding Sharp and Welsh; at the same time, stroking her nipples and other good parts.

“See, we know everything—we’ll convict them in one minute, when we get them to court. But we can’t
find
them. This country is too big.”

“But there are so many people looking for them.”

Virgil pushed himself up on an elbow, trailed a finger down to her navel, and said, “I was on another case that involved a guy out in the countryside. The thing is, he sold a bunch of dope to a dealer down in Worthington, and the Worthington cops got there about two minutes late, and this guy took off and the cops were chasing him. They chased him about fifty miles or so, before they caught him, and then he dumped his car and started running through the cornfields. This was at night, and they lost him.

“He was a Canadian guy, and what we found out later was, he decided to
walk
back to Canada. He broke into houses and a convenience store along the way, to get food. I got involved when he was somewhere up in Yellow Medicine. So I figured out, sitting in this motel, you could get about five hundred and eighty football fields, between the goal lines, not including the end zones, in a square mile. Yellow Medicine County, I happen to know, is about seven hundred and sixty square miles, because I looked it up. So that means you could have about thirty-five thousand football fields in Yellow Medicine. Could you hide in a football-field-sized patch of land out in farm country? Damn right you could. If the guy lay down in a ditch, you could walk right past him. You can’t even figure out how to find somebody who’s doing that. So we can’t find them. Becky and Jimmy. We don’t think they’re far away, especially with Jimmy being shot. But where?”

“What happened to the Canadian guy?”

“He got away,” Virgil said.

“Completely?”

“Completely. But he was a dope dealer, so he’s probably gotten to his use-by date.”

“You mean, he’s dead?” she asked.

“Or rich enough to have quit,” Virgil said. “A few of them manage to do that. You see them sitting on their yachts down in the Caribbean.”

“I don’t think of Canadians as being drug dealers,” she said.

“They are,” Virgil said. “Generally, as a nation, they’re pretty depraved. At least, that’s been my experience.”

“See, that’s another thing I didn’t know.”

Now she sat up and asked, “Why don’t you cops have experts on chasing people? I mean, you’ve got experts on everything else.”

“Never thought of that,” Virgil said, studying her parts in an academic way. They were very good. “I mean, how would they get to be experts? What would you study?”

“You know—how people think when they’re running. Where they’d run to. How they’d think about it. That kind of thing. You know, psychologists.”

“Well, maybe somebody should,” he said.

Then they got involved again, and then they went to sleep—Virgil liked sleeping with women (the sleeping part), and so it wasn’t until four o’clock in the morning that his eyelids popped open and he said, “Ah, man.”

She twitched, and he groped around on the nightstand and knocked his wallet on the floor, and she woke up and rolled toward him and asked, “What are you doing?”

“Calling Stillwater penitentiary,” he said. He found his cell phone.

“At four o’clock in the morning? What for?”

He told her, and she said, “I’m flattered, but if you’re going to do that, you’ll have to leave pretty soon.”

“Pretty soon,” he agreed.

“It’s been a while since I’ve done this,” she said. “You think . . . ?”

“I don’t have to leave
immediately
,” Virgil said.

•   •   •

STILLWATER WAS THE
biggest penitentiary in Minnesota, and though it wasn’t the only one, or the closest one, it was the one with most of the experts. Virgil talked to a skeptical duty officer who, in any case, said he’d pass along Virgil’s request.

“Just get the warden to call me on my cell. He knows me. I’m going to assume that he’ll cooperate, and start that way.”

“I dunno . . .”

“Get him to call me,” Virgil said.

•   •   •

AT FIVE O’CLOCK
in the morning, feeling fairly light in his boots, he and Sally shared a kiss in the cool morning air on the motel room’s doorstep, and he said, “I’ll try to get back tonight, but I don’t know how that’s going to work out.”

“Catch the kids. When you come back, I want your full attention,” she said.

•   •   •

FROM MARSHALL,
which was not all that far from South Dakota, to Stillwater, which was on the river that separated Minnesota from Wisconsin, was a three-and-a-half-hour drive, assuming no hang-ups in morning traffic. Virgil left Marshall at five o’clock, took six or seven phone calls from various prison officials, including the warden, over the next three hours, and finally the warden called at eight o’clock and said, “We’re ready to go when you get here.”

“I’m hung up in traffic on 494 headed toward the airport,” Virgil said. “It could be a while.”

“You got lights and a siren?”

“Yeah, but that’d get me there about one minute sooner, and the noise would drive me crazy. I’ll just coast,” Virgil said. “Hey—thanks for this. It’s goofy, but it’s all I got.”

“I think it’s kinda interesting,” the warden said. “I read about what you did up in Butternut Falls. This is sort of like that.”