Mad River (17 page)

14

BECKY WELSH HAD SPENT
a lot of time around rough guys, and had slept with a few, but had never before experienced anything like a rape. After loading Jimmy into the truck, and they got back on the road, Becky began to weep again. Jimmy’s pain had diminished, but he was confused, partly by shock and partly by the drugs, and he asked, “What the fuck’s wrong with you, anyway?”

She looked over at him and said, “I told you. Tom raped me.”

“What the fuck?”

“He raped me,” Becky said. “He pushed me down on the bed and raped me and beat me up. Then he did it again and then he took off. Then the guy came and I shot him and I’m just, I’m just, I’m just . . .”

Jimmy seemed to think about that for a while, or maybe his mind just wandered, but finally he said, “I’ll kill the motherfucker. Where is he?”

“He took off. I don’t know where he went,” Becky said. She looked over at Jimmy. “You gotta promise me.”

“What?”

“If we catch him, I get to kill him. I’m gonna cut his balls off, and then I’m gonna shoot him in the stomach and watch him die.”

“Deal,” Jimmy said. And, “Where’d you get this truck?”

•   •   •

BECKY TOLD HIM
the whole story, from the time they left him in the cornfield until she loaded him into the truck; he remembered everything after that. “We gotta get your leg bandaged up better and I got some stuff we can put on it.”

“We need to get as far away as we can,” Jimmy said. “They’ll be tearing up the countryside. Did Tom get all our money?”

“No, no, we got the money, it’s behind the seat,” Becky said.

“See if you can reach it,” Tom said.

Becky fished around behind the seats and got the handles of the two grocery bags and pulled them over the seat and put them in Jimmy’s lap. She said, “You know what I think? I think he’s gonna turn himself in and blame everything on us.”

Jimmy nodded, but didn’t seem to be tracking very well; his eyes were bright, either because he was reviving, or because he was feverish. She reached out and put her hand on his forehead and thought he felt warm. Not real warm, but pretty warm.

“You might be getting an infection,” she said. “We need to get some medicine on there.”

“Need some pills, penicillin or something,” Jimmy said.

Becky sobbed again, then wiped the tears out of her eyes, steadied her voice, and said, “You’re sounding a lot better, honey.”

“Feeling better,” he said. Then, “We better cut on south. We don’t want to meet any more cars than we have to. Stay on the gravel. If you see any gravel dust, try to find a place to turn off.”

They went south, and she said, “What are we going to do? Everybody in the world is looking for us.”

Jimmy said, “We need to get down south of Arcadia. There’s this old guy down there, he lives alone, off the road. You can hardly see his house. My old man and I ground up his stumps one year. Mean old motherfucker, wouldn’t let me in the house to take a shit. I had to go out in the field.”

“What’s his name?”

“Joe something. I don’t know. But I’ll remember the house. He’s got an army tank out behind the house. All fuckin’ rusty, but it’s a real tank.” He was quiet for a moment, then added, “I’ll remember the turnoff. We’ll get the truck out of sight and lay up there for a day or two, until I’m better.” He weighed the two bags, bouncing one in his left hand, one in his right, chose the heavier of the two and counted the money.

“Thirteen thousand,” he said, when he finished.

“Oh my God,” Becky said.

He counted the other bag and said, “Nine thousand. Holy shit, we got twenty-two thousand dollars. We can go anywhere we want.”

“If we don’t get caught first,” Becky said. “How far is this old man’s house?”

“Twenty minutes, half hour. I’m not exactly sure. But I know how to get there from here.”

And he did, but it was more like forty minutes, snaking around on back roads every time Jimmy got a bad feeling about the road they were on. By the time they got there, he was fighting to stay awake. “Fuckin’ dope’s all over me,” he said. “But we’re close. See them silos?”

A big farm on the north side of the road showed five huge blue metal silos, standing shoulder to shoulder, in three different heights, like brothers.

“Is that it?”

“No, but he’s down this road. Maybe a mile.” A minute later he said, “There. Up that hill.”

Becky looked up a long, low hill, under some power lines that had small black birds sitting on them, looking down at her. She could see the roof of a house, but nothing else, set behind a woodlot of winter-gray trees. A dirt track went up the hill from a mailbox on the road.

She turned past the mailbox and started up the hill. A line of barren apple trees edged the driveway on the left, and a patch of dirt with the remnants of last year’s vegetable garden trailed away on the right, at a flat spot halfway up the hill. The track was rutted in places, and Becky steered around the ruts, and when they came to the crest of the hill they saw an old man in overalls standing next to an older red Ford pickup, about to get into it.

“Pull up there next to him, like we want to ask a question. Run my window down and put your fingers in your ears,” Jimmy said. He had the pistol in his hand, between his legs.

Becky did what he said, pushed the button to roll the window down, and stopped next to the mean-faced old man, who asked, “Who are you?”

“Just us,” Jimmy said, and he stuck the gun out the window and shot the old man in the chest. The man reeled backward, then fell on his hands and knees, and then, improbably, got to his feet and staggered toward the house.

Jimmy got out of the truck, but his leg gave way and he fell down. He used the running board and then the fender to pull himself back up, and then hobbled after the old man, feeling not much pain but weak and unsteady, limping so hard that he could barely lift his hand up.

He chased the old man that way, the two of them barely making headway, the old man looking fearfully over his shoulder while holding his hand over the hole in his chest. Jimmy fired another shot and missed, and then another one, and missed again, but hit the house. Then Becky was there and said, “Give me the gun.”

The old man was almost to the side door of the house, and she ran after him and she aimed the gun at the old man’s back and pulled the trigger and the old man went down again, but was still alive, groaning, and Becky saw that she’d shot him in the shoulder.

“Go ahead and kill me, bitch, you got me,” the old man said, rolling over and trying to stand again. He had blood on his mouth. Becky pointed the gun at his face and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened, and she saw it was locked open: out of ammo.

“Fuck this,” Jimmy said. He limped back to the truck and the old man tried again to get into the house, and Becky kicked his legs out from under him, and he went down, flat, and she saw the big growing patch of blood below the straps on the overalls. She stepped to the door and pulled it open, and saw what he was going after. An old pump .22 was standing in the corner of the mudroom. She picked it up and stepped back outside.

Jimmy was digging in the truck for another gun, but Becky was figuring out the safety on the .22, clicked it off, pointed the gun at the old man, who moaned, “I give up.”

She shot him in the head, and he shook, and tried to push himself up again, so she pumped the gun and shot him again, and he shuddered, and this time got to his hands and knees, and she pumped again, and the third time shot him behind the ear and he went down hard.

Jimmy called, “He dead?”

“I think so,” she said. She prodded the old man’s face with the muzzle of the gun, and he didn’t flinch or move or tremble.

Jimmy came limping back with a pistol and pointed it at the old man’s temple and fired. The old man’s head bumped up, and this time, there wasn’t any doubt.

“Okay. Let’s get him out of sight,” Jimmy said.

Becky dragged the body away from the house, toward a tumbledown wooden shed that stowed a couple of rusty pieces of farm equipment, a grain drill, and an ancient disk. The old man was amazingly light, and she had no trouble at all: she hid the body behind the shed door.

When she turned around, she saw the tank. No question about what it was, a real tank, but the front end had sunk deep into the turf, and its barrel seemed to slump with age, like it needed some kind of military Viagra to get it going again.

She shook her head, puzzled by it, then turned back to the house. There were two scuff lines in the dirt of the driveway that looked exactly like the heels of somebody who’d been dragged to the shed. She thought about kicking some dirt over the scuff marks, and over a couple patches of blood, but then thought, if the cops get that close, they were done anyway. She followed Jimmy inside.

•   •   •

ABOUT HALF THE LIGHTS
in the house worked; and it smelled like a hundred years of chicken noodle soup,
Life
magazines, and
National Geographic
s, and cigarettes. But there was a big flat-screen television in the front room, with a La-Z-Boy and a couch and a satellite connection, and a DVD player, and a stereo system with hundreds of CDs.

“I’ll check the bathroom and the bedroom and see if the old fuck had some medicine,” Becky said.

The old fuck did. The medicine cabinet was a gold mine. He’d apparently had tooth problems, and had yellow plastic tubes half-filled with more OxyContin and a couple of dozen penicillin tabs. Some of them were outdated, but they’d be better than nothing, she thought. She also found a plastic box with a red cross on it, and a label that said: “Farm Family First Aid Kit.”

She took them downstairs and found Jimmy figuring out the TV. “I looked at the CDs, just a bunch of shit,” Jimmy said.

She picked one of them up and it said:
Goldberg Variations
. She’d seen some stuff in
Cosmo
about variations, but that didn’t seem like this. She tossed it on the floor and said, “Lay back on the couch. I need to look at your leg.”

“Let me get the TV on,” he said. His eyelids were drooping again.

He got the TV on, to a replay of
Dancing with the Stars
, and lay back and closed his eyes. Becky decided not to try to get his pants off, so she got a knife from the kitchen and cut through the denim. There was an entry wound at the back, and then a blown-out channel in the flesh along the outside of Jimmy’s thigh. Another two inches to the left, and the bullet would have missed completely. On the other hand, two inches to the right, and it would have blown the bone out of his leg.

It looked bad, she thought, but not
that
bad.

She said to Jimmy, “I can fix this.”

“That’s good,” he said, distantly, and then apparently went to sleep. She got to work, cut off the pant leg and pulled it down, went into the kitchen and got some paper towels, wiped off the wound with hot water. When it was clean, it looked worse, like raw meat. She sprayed it with some Band-Aid disinfectant, then covered it with two four-by-four-inch sterile bandages from the first aid kit, one for the entry wound, the other for the exit.

When everything was covered and looking neat, she woke up Jimmy and made him eat four of the penicillin tabs. “You’re gonna be okay,” she said.

“That’s good,” he said, and he went back to sleep. She covered him with a blanket from the bedroom, then went back to the bathroom, stripped off her clothes, and stood in the shower and washed away every bit of Tom McCall.

That done, she went back out to the living room, wrapped in a towel, and found Jimmy snoring on the couch. She left him there, went back to the bedroom, and fell on the bed. In two minutes, she was asleep.

Five hours later, she woke up and heard music. Strange music, like something from a nightclub. What
was
that?

Holding the bed blanket over her shoulders, she went back to the living room and found Jimmy watching television. She looked at the screen, which showed a half dozen men having sex with one another in an improbable oral-anal chain. Jimmy cackled and said, “The old fuck was queer as a three-dollar bill. He’s got, like, a hundred of these things.”

She looked at the screen and said, “Jeez. That’s nasty.”

“Look at that guy,” Jimmy said. “He’s got a cock like a fuckin’ horse.”

Jimmy, Becky thought, looked wide-awake; more than this, he looked
excited
.

And she looked at the screen again and back to Jimmy, and suddenly understood a lot. She thought,
Oh, no.

15

VIRGIL AND DAVENPORT
hooked up at a restaurant across from St. Kate’s, a Catholic girls’ college where Virgil had done some of his best work in chasing women, when he was a student at the University of Minnesota. The thing about Catholic girls was, they had a deep feeling for sin, which made catching them a lot more satisfying than it might have been otherwise.

Davenport was waiting in a back booth, chatting with a woman sitting at an adjacent table; he was wearing one of his two-million-dollar suits, but was tie-less.

Virgil nodded at the woman, who looked mildly put-out by his arrival, and slid into the booth opposite Davenport. He said, “How y’ doin’?”

“Only fair,” Davenport said. “The governor says that if we don’t catch these kids in the next couple of days, it’ll knock two points off his popularity. He cut funding for the highway patrol, and the union’s been looking for something to stick up his ass.”

“He didn’t actually cut funding, he cut the funding request,” Virgil said. “The actual funding went up.”

“A technicality,” Davenport said. “Also, you’re starting to sound like a Republican.”

“Sorry.”

“So . . .”

“Can’t go much longer,” Virgil said.

“But they could kill a lot more people.”

“I know, everybody knows. It’s a goddamn disaster, Lucas.”

•   •   •

THEY ATE REUBENS,
and Davenport said, “We’re getting a lot of credit for you arresting McCall, so anything you want . . .”

“I’m heading back down as soon as I get out of here,” Virgil said. “I’ve got a few places to look now. If you could send me a couple guys, and we find them . . .”

“What about the Murphy thing?”

“That’s why I want to find them. Because of the Murphy thing. I’m buying the idea that Murphy paid to have Ag murdered. I’d like to keep either Jimmy or Becky alive—both of them, if it’s possible—and get them to talk about Murphy.”

“Might not be possible,” Davenport said. “A couple of deputies down there more or less told the TV people that it’s a duck hunt. It’s shoot on sight.”

“They were going to kill McCall, too, but I got to him first,” Virgil said. “But if they get to Jimmy and Becky, it could be that Murphy walks on a murder.”

“I’ll send you Jenkins and Shrake. I’ll have them on the road in an hour, in separate vehicles. You need to turn over every rock you can find. Then, when it comes to
our
funding . . .”

“See, that’s what we
really
needed,” Virgil said. “A good reason to catch them. Like funding.”

“You know what your problem is?” Davenport asked, jabbing a french fry at Virgil.

“I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”

“Yeah. You only think of one thing at a time. See, a smart guy, like myself, we know it’s important that we catch these kids, but we also know funding is important. There’s no conflict there.”

“I feel chastened,” Virgil said.

•   •   •

VIRGIL GOT OUT
of the Cities, heading straight west, then cutting southwest. Davenport called as he was clearing 494 and said that Jenkins and Shrake would take a couple hours longer than he’d thought, but would definitely be in Bigham that night.

On the way west, it occurred to Virgil that if Sharp and Welsh were hiding in a farmhouse somewhere, they were probably watching television—and that he might be able to communicate with them.

He was working through that idea when he ran into his first National Guard patrol, twenty miles north of Bigham. Traffic was jammed for a half mile back from the checkpoint, and he used his lights to jump the line, driving along the shoulder. Two Humvees were working the checkpoint, with an M16-armed MP behind each vehicle, as a third MP checked the cars and waved them through.

When Virgil came up, the first MP stopped him, checked the truck, and then waved him through.

And this, he thought, was well out of the search area.

He was stopped three more times before he got to Bigham. At the last stop, he showed the MP his identification and asked, “Are you guys set up here permanently? Or are you roaming around?”

“We move around. Headquarters is set up in Bigham, and they move us.”

“Good.”

Virgil got to Bigham a few minutes after three o’clock in the afternoon. The Guard was working out of a field tent set up in the parking lot of the law enforcement center, and Virgil checked in with a red-faced major who was running the operation. The major, who was a lawyer from Moorhead in civilian life, showed him a map of the covered area, which included Bare and all the adjacent counties, with a bias to the west, to take in Marshall.

In addition, there were either Guard or sheriff’s deputies on the north side of every exit onto I-90, which was well to the south, to prevent Sharp and Welsh from crossing the highway and heading south into Iowa. There were also patrols at every bridge over the Minnesota River, which would keep them from going north. Mutual aid agreements had brought in other sheriffs’ deputies, highway patrolmen, and even town cops to patrol east- and west-bound roads out of the area.

The prison focus group had suggested a bias to the southeast. Virgil told the major about the group, but the major said they didn’t have enough patrols to extend very far to the southeast, unless they broke off patrols to the west. “I’d like to cover you, but we’ve got certain realities to deal with.”

Those realities, the major suggested, included the fact that two people had been executed in Marshall, and that the Guard needed to cover the areas where the politicians were screaming the loudest.

The major added, “The way we’re set up, they’ll hit some kind of patrol if they try to move, unless they’ve already gotten outside the interdiction area. Then, you know, all bets are off.”

•   •   •

VIRGIL STOPPED AND SAW DUKE,
who had nothing much to say except that everybody was working, and it was killing his overtime budget. When he walked out of the office he glanced across the street where a number of television trucks were parked, and at that moment, Daisy Jones came around the back of the truck, saw him, did a double take, and raised a hand. Virgil went that way.

Jones was thin, blond, and fortyish, or maybe forty-five-ish, and to Virgil’s knowledge had a fondness for little white truck-driver pills, which she bought from little white truck drivers. She was also one of the smarter on-camera people he’d met; a fairly good reporter, all told.

She met Virgil in the middle of the street and took his hand and said, “Have I mentioned recently just how attractive you are?”

“No, and I can use all of the flattery you’ve got. I’m feeling pretty ragged,” Virgil said.

“I might have a few teeny, tiny questions about this murder rampage, as well,” she said. “For the Twin Cities’ most important news outlet.”

“And I might have a few teeny, tiny answers for you, if you’re willing to deal.”

“If you want to meet back at your motel, I’m sure we can work something out.”

“I’m not strong enough for that,” Virgil said. “I was thinking more in terms of you putting up the BCA phone number when I tell you how Tom McCall and Becky Welsh had sex after killing one of their victims.”

“Oh, Jesus, that’s a deal,” she said. “As long as you don’t lie too much.”

“I’ll lie hardly at all,” Virgil said. “The other thing is, you have to make it look like you spontaneously caught me in the street.”

“Not a problem,” she said. “You go back in the sheriff’s office and look out the window, and when you see me doing a stand-up, you walk out and I’ll run over and grab you.”

“Two minutes,” Virgil said.

“Make it five minutes,” she said. “I’ve got to powder my nose and fix my lipstick—we’re also shooting for network.”

•   •   •

VIRGIL WENT BACK
across the street to the LEC, down in the basement canteen where he spent a few minutes in the men’s room sprucing himself up, then got a Rice Krispies marshmallow bar from a vending machine, and a Diet Coke. He went back upstairs and ate the marshmallow bar and watched as Jones set up in the street, and started doing the stand-up. Virgil took a swig of the Coke, ran his tongue over his teeth to make sure no marshmallow was stuck between them, and walked outside.

Jones was looking at the camera, then half-turned to gesture toward the LEC, did another double take when she saw Virgil walking down the sidewalk, and called, “Virgil Flowers, Virgil Flowers.” She led the cameraman over, at the same time saying into the microphone, “This is Virgil Flowers, the unconventional Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agent who brought in Thomas McCall yesterday. Virgil, could you answer a question for our audience?”

“The, uh, media relationship is being handled through Sheriff Duke’s office.”

“Just one question,” Daisy urged. “There is a very strong rumor going around that Becky Welsh and Tom McCall may have had a sexual encounter in the bed of one of their victims, moments after shooting that victim. Is that true? Can you tell us if that’s true?”

Virgil seemed to consider for a moment, then said, “Uh, I had a conversation with Mr. McCall as we were driving to the Marshall law enforcement center yesterday, and he indicated that Becky Welsh had initiated a sexual encounter with him at one of the victims’ houses, shortly after shooting the victim. We do have some physical evidence for such an encounter, but I, uh, well, that’s all I’d prefer to say at the moment.”

“So you confirm that.”

“I’ll just stick with what I said. Nice to see you, Daisy.”

“Nice to see you, Virg.”

•   •   •

VIRGIL WALKED AWAY
and heard her pumping excitement into her voice as she recapped the interview. He was back in his truck, getting ready to pull out, when she rattled up next to the driver’s-side window in her high heels and said, “Thanks. I owe you. And thanks for using my name.”

“Remember to put the BCA phone number up,” Virgil said.

“Would you tell me why you’re doing that?”

“No.”

“You’re trying to get Becky to call you, aren’t you?” she said. “You’re trying to get her to call, because . . . because you can track the cell phone tower, and then . . . Oh, my God! You’re so . . . manipulative.”

“If you put that on the air, I’ll strangle you and throw your body in the Minnesota River,” Virgil said.

“I won’t say a word, until you catch her,” Jones said. “Then I’ll say a lot of words.”

•   •   •

THE DAYS WERE GROWING
longer as they moved deeper into April, but it was late enough in the afternoon that Virgil wasn’t inclined to start the road search he’d plotted out with the prison inmates. With Jenkins and Shrake running late, it’d be nearly dark before they arrived.

And then, since every farmer within two hundred miles was now guarding his property with a shotgun in his hand, approaching lonely houses in the dark did not seem like a good idea. And if you weren’t killed by a farmer, you just might find Sharp and Welsh, who’d light you up before you knew what was happening.

Virgil called Jenkins and told him to call Shrake, and that both of them should check into a motel somewhere close by. “Call me tonight and let me know where you are. We’ll head out on the road early tomorrow.”

“How early?”

“Right after it gets light.”

Virgil looked at his phone for a minute, then dialed. He got John O’Leary on the second ring. “This is Virgil Flowers, with the BCA.”

“You got the rest of ’em?”

“Not yet. I’m glad I caught you. I need to talk to you.”

“Come on over. We’re all here—the funeral’s tomorrow morning.”

“I don’t want to intrude.”

“Come on over, Virgil. I wanted to thank you anyway, for catching the first one of those little vermin.”

•   •   •

ON HIS WAY OVER,
he called the Lyon County sheriff, in Marshall, and asked if McCall had gotten representation.

“Yeah, he’s signed up with one of our public defenders, Mickey Burden. You need to talk to her?”

“Yeah, and maybe the county attorney. Got the numbers?”

He called the county attorney first, a Josh Meadows. “I talked to Mickey an hour ago. She’s a little pissed about that interview you did with Channel Three, and about the questioning of McCall, when you were driving him in.”

“It was all aboveboard,” Virgil said.

“That’s one of the things she’s pissed about. It’s all right there on the tape,” Meadows said.

“You gave her the tape?”

“No, but we described it to her, as a courtesy. We’re going to have to give it up pretty quick, though. She’s going for a court order right now.”

“As a personal favor to me, and since she’s going to get it anyway, could you give her a copy now? Or let her listen to it?” Virgil asked.

“I could, if you tell me why,” Meadows said.

“Because I want her to hear that McCall was holding out a critical piece of information—and that if I don’t get it, that’s another strike against him. I’ve got another thing going here, which I will tell you about when I see you, but it’s complicated. I need McCall to talk to me.”

“All right. I’ll talk to her, see what she says,” Meadows said.

“I’m going to call her and make an appeal. Maybe it’ll help,” Virgil said.

“Fine. Tell her to call me, then.”

•   •   •

HE CALLED BURDEN
as he pulled up outside the O’Leary house, and sat in the street and talked to her.

“You poisoned the whole jury pool when you said they’d had a sexual encounter,” Burden said, when she came up on the phone.

Virgil said, “No I didn’t. He was bragging to me about it. What can I tell you?”

“You should have kept your mouth shut,” she said.

“I’ve got reasons for doing what I did, and if I were to tell you about them, which I won’t, I think you might approve,” Virgil said. “Anyhow, I’ve called to tell you that I asked Josh Meadows to release the interview tape to you, and he agreed. You can get it right now.”

There was a moment of silence, and then she said, “I wonder why I’m so suspicious?”

“Because I want something,” Virgil said.

“Ah,” she said. “That’s why.”