Rough Country

by John Sandford

  “Ah, man . . .” Virgil didn’t feel like waiting. He thought about Sig, sitting home alone, still unfulfilled. Looked at his watch. A half-hour passed, and then forty minutes, and Virgil decided if the pilot hadn’t arrived by the end of an hour, he’d bail. He’d feel guilty about it, but he would.

  The pilot, whose name was Hank Underwood, walked in five minutes later and said, “Sorry.”

  “Broken?” Harris asked.

  “Yeah. Worse than we thought,” Underwood said. He was a short, dark man about Virgil’s age. “Not his arm, it’s a wrist bone, the navicular. He could be in a cast for five months. He was supposed to start football practice in three weeks.”

  They were talking about it, walking out to Underwood’s single-engine Cessna, and Virgil said the broken arm might be a blessing in disguise. “Maybe he’ll turn out to be great at math and become a scientist.”

  “Rather play football,” Underwood said. “All his pals will be . . . but you could be right.” He sounded doubtful.

  Underwood put Harris in the back, because he was shorter than Virgil, and as they took off into the darkness, the plane smelling of warm oil and cold air, said, “When we get up there, I’ll roll a bit, to give you a view. We’ll go up one side and down the other, using Deer River as our guide.”

  “How’re we going to mark him?” Virgil asked.

  “GPS,” Underwood said. “We’ll circle until we can get an azimuth that runs through him and some point in Deer River, and mark ourselves, and then do it again, from another angle. Won’t be exact, but it’ll be pretty damn close.”

  “As long as we’ve only got one fire,” Harris said.

  Underwood said, “Not many people camping in a swamp. It’s usually dark as a coal sack along there. Our biggest problem will be if he’s sleeping in his boat, and isn’t cooking at all.”

  “Don’t want to spook him,” Virgil said.

  “We’ll be well off. We’ll go up one side of the river, fool around for a while, then come back down the other,” Underwood said. “If he’s close enough to the highway, he might not even hear us.”

  THEY COULD SEE Deer River within a couple of minutes of taking off. “The place he’s supposed to be is right down this way from the lights,” Underwood said, gesturing. “See the line of lights? Now, ninety degrees towards us.”

  The river plain was pitch-black. They flew up the side, past the town, did a wide circle to the west, slowly, scanning the terrain, then came right back down the highway. On the second pass, Harris said, suddenly, “Got a fire.”

  “Where?” Virgil asked.

  “About two-thirty . . . coming up on three . . . It flickers . . . lost it, goddamnit, got it, got it again . . .”

  “Brush between us and it,” Underwood said.

  Virgil scanned down at the same angle as Harris, at three o’clock. “Got it,” Virgil said. “I got it. It’s small.”

  “No point in a barn fire to cook a weenie,” Harris said.

  UNDERWOOD TOOK THEM around the town, and they put azimuth lines from GPS markers through intersections of the highway, crossing at the fire. “Don’t see another damn thing out there,” Virgil said, scanning the darkness.

  “There isn’t anything else out there,” Harris said. “You couldn’t pay me five hundred dollars to camp out in there. No telling what you’d run into.”

  “Maybe even a crazy killer,” Underwood said. “Friday the 13th, huh?”

  “Never saw it,” Harris said. “But that’s the general idea.”

  THEY WERE ALL CRANKED when they landed. Virgil and Harris left Underwood to put the plane away, and after warning the pilot to keep his mouth shut, went roaring off to the sheriff ’s office. The sheriff and a couple of deputies were waiting for them, with a USGS topo map, and Virgil and Harris used a yardstick to draw out their lines.

  “Not bad,” the sheriff said, his finger on the map where the lines crossed. “Man, that’s not more’n a mile from where the kids thought they saw him. Gotta be him.”

  “What time are you putting the chopper up?” Virgil asked.

  “Sunrise is just about six o’clock—so, about six o’clock.” Sanders looked at his watch. “Seven hours. You’ll want to be on the ground, up in Deer River, by five at the latest. We’ll put you in a boat.”

  “Who’s in the helicopter?” Virgil asked.

  “Me and the pilot,” the sheriff said. “I’m paying for it, so I get the ride.”

  “He’ll probably shoot you down,” Virgil said.

  “You just want the ride,” Sanders said; and he was right. And he clapped his hands, once, and said, “Hot damn. This is something. I mean, I hate to say it, but I’m having a pretty good time right now. Wasn’t having a good time this morning.” He turned to one of the deputies. “I’ll call you up if we spot him, and you get on to Jim Young, get his ass up to Deer River. I’ll put down on the track up there, and I want a picture of me getting out of the helicopter.”

  And he said to Virgil: “Politics. He’s the local newspaper guy.”

  “Gotcha,” Virgil said.

  THAT NIGHT VIRGIL THOUGHT about God some more, and about the Deuce, that lonely spark of fire out in the middle of a swamp, a single twisted soul believing itself safely wrapped in nature, with no idea of what was coming in the morning.

  23

  VIRGIL WENT BACK to the truck and got a black nylon emergency jacket. August in Minnesota—chilly in the morning this far north, and this early in the day.

  A river rat named Earl, drafted by Sanders, had just backed his eighteen-foot Alumacraft jon boat down the boat ramp into the water. Virgil would be riding with him, and with a cop named Rod. Rod was messing nervously with his AR-15, and kept looking downriver, where they expected the helicopter to show up. Two more jon boats were already in the water, and there were more both upriver and down.

  “You going with your handgun?” Rod asked Virgil.

  “Haven’t decided,” Virgil said.

  Rod asked because he could see Virgil didn’t have a long gun, and assumed his pistol was under his jacket; actually, it was under the front seat of the truck. All the guns were making Virgil nervous: they were heading into a swamp, without much visibility in some places, and six boats full of cops with rifles, converging on a central point from three different directions. Sanders’s chief deputy was as nervous as Virgil, and worked back and forth through the deputies, talking about fire discipline.

  Virgil went back to the truck again, looked back down the ramp, at all the deputies, at four cop cars and three trucks with trailers, watched Earl park his trailer, and thought that maybe the best idea would be to lie low in the boat; though lying low in a jon boat would shake your bones to pieces. The low, flat-bottom craft were fine when moving slow in flat water, but were no damn good in heavy chop; or in a heavy firefight, for that matter.

  He thought about it some more, and finally pulled out his pump twelve-gauge, loaded three shells, and put seven more in his jacket pocket. If that wasn’t enough, fuck him.

  WAITED SOME MORE, in the mild stink of mud and rotting fish. One of the deputies borrowed a paddle and fished a plastic bag out of the water and threw it in a trash can. Somebody looked south and asked, “Wonder what they’re doing down there?”

  Then the chief deputy called, “Saddle up. Sheriff’s on the way.”

  They all bustled down to the boats, climbed aboard, and the guys on the motors fired them up, quiet four-strokes, and eased out onto the lake, looking south. A minute later they heard the chopper, and then saw it, fairly high, coming fast, then slowing. And the shoulder radios went off and Rod said, “They got him! He’s right under the chopper.”

  THEY ALL TOOK OFF, three boats carving long wakes in the smooth water, Rod holding his rifle straight up like a movie-poster commando, while Virgil sat on a cushion in the bow, back to the incoming wind. Rod, his fair face reddening with the cold wind, listened to his radio, and then shouted, “He’s running for the trees, he’s running for the
trees.”

  The swamp was actually the remnants of a series of Mississippi oxbows, some of which could still be seen from the air, as long, curling cutoff lakes, separated from one another by wild rice flats, cattails, and brush. There was one big hunk of trees south of the flats. If the Deuce got into them, he’d be hard to dig out, especially if people were shooting at one another.

  That had to be a ten- or fifteen-minute paddle, though, if he was still where he had been the night before. Sanders’s flotilla was no more than two or three minutes away. . . .

  They crossed the lake, running hard—hard for a jon boat, anyway—and cut into a channel that wrapped around in a hard curve. Earl stayed with the speed, though, familiar with the territory, juked once for a snag, and blew into an intersecting channel that Virgil thought might be the river, though it was only forty or fifty feet wide.

  The chopper was drifting south, away from them, but they were coming up quickly. Virgil risked standing up for just a second, couldn’t see much—but could just see the tops of trees to the south.

  Rod shouted, “He’s cutting through the grass, he’s back in the weeds. . . .”

  More noise, and Virgil looked back, saw the downriver boats coming up on them; now five boats running along, over a few hundred yards.

  “Gotta be close,” Rod shouted.

  Another fifteen seconds and Rod shouted at Earl, and pointed, “Right there, right there . . .”

  The chopper was probably no more than fifty or sixty yards ahead of them, and Virgil could hear a loudspeaker, but couldn’t hear what was being said over the chop of the helicopter. Two more boats came in from the north, and Earl put them up against a bank of cattails; they drifted for a minute, then Virgil saw a small channel with flowing water, opening through the cattails. It wasn’t more than eighteen inches wide.

  “Can we push through there?” Rod asked.

  “Tough,” Earl said. He killed the motor, popped a pole mounted in brackets under the left gunwale, stood up, and pushed the boat back into the weeds. They got thirty feet, and that was it. “Too much drag,” Earl said.

  “Could we walk through it?” Rod asked.

  “Nope. You might find shallow spots, but you’d be up to your neck every two minutes,” Earl said. He started poling them back out, and Rod talked into his radio, and then said, “Back north—there’s an open channel north. Shit, some guys are already going in, we’re gonna miss it.”

  They got back out, and Earl fired up the motor, and they started north up the channel, and another boat backed out of the weeds and fell in behind them; Virgil could see more boats up ahead that had gone on while they tried to push into the cattails.

  “He’s at the trees,” Rod shouted, and then, “They see him, they see him.”

  There were five fast pops, gunfire, and Rod shouted, “Holy cow, what was that?” and sat down, suddenly, and Virgil said, “Easy, easy, everybody, stay low . . .”

  The helicopter was maneuvering overhead, and then they heard a long string of shots, semiauto fire, from two or three guns, and Rod shouted, “He’s down, he’s down, they got him,” and Virgil thought: Shit.

  THE HELICOPTER WAS RIGHT there, so close they couldn’t hear themselves think, but they couldn’t get into the shooting scene without threading through a quarter mile of beaten-down grasses and cattails, and finally they turned a last curve and saw the flotilla pulled up on a muddy bank tangled with brushy trees, and a cluster of cops by an aluminum canoe another fifty yards down the bank.

  They had to get out in the water and stumble along the shore, up to their knees, before they got there, and Virgil pushed through the circle of cops to find two guys tying compression bandages on the Deuce’s thighs and lower leg, and then one of the cops said, “Get him on the tarp, get him on the tarp,” and four guys lifted him, and he groaned, and they put him on a blue plastic tarp and he began leaking blood across it, lots of blood.

  Five other cops and Virgil got pieces of tarp and lifted him, and staggered back through the water to the first of the jon boats, the Deuce crying in pain, his eyes liquid and flashing white, and he asked, two or three or four times, “Why did you shoot me? Why did you shoot me?” They put him on the bottom of the boat, and the boatman fired it up and nosed the boat down the channel, and then, out of sight, Virgil heard the engine open up.

  “Where’re they going?” he asked a cop.

  “Got an ambulance coming to the landing,” he said. He looked haggard, though it was early.

  “What happened?” Virgil asked.

  “He tried to make it into the trees,” the guy said. “I was in the third or fourth boat, and somebody in the lead boat took him out.”

  “Was he . . . did he have his gun?”

  The guy cleared his throat and his eyes slid away. “His gun, uh, his gun’s still tied in the canoe. I don’t know, I think he was trying to pull the canoe up on the bank and make a run for it. . . . I don’t know.”

  “How bad’s he hit?” Virgil asked.

  “His legs are all busted up, and he got one in the butt. Sideways in the butt. He’s got some big holes.”

  Virgil looked around, lots of deputies standing back, now, talking in low voices.

  Could be trouble, he thought.

  THE DEPUTIES SAT on the scene, waiting for the BCA crime-scene people to show up. Mapes had had more business in Grand Rapids in a week than he’d had in the rest of his career, Virgil thought.

  He moved around, talking to the deputies: two of them had fired their weapons. The first deputy had fired into the brush ahead of the Deuce to slow him down, to push him away from the trees. The second deputy thought the Deuce had opened fire, and fired at him, and as the Deuce had moved behind a tree from his point of view, then the first deputy fired again, confused about where the second burst had come from.

  Virgil talked to a couple more deputies, then had Earl run him back to the boat ramp.

  On the way, Earl said, “Don’t think they shoulda shot that boy.”

  “If he’d gotten back in the trees with a rifle, could have got some people killed, digging him out,” Virgil said, without much conviction.

  Earl spit over the side. “He had plenty of chances to shoot somebody if he wanted to. Never untied that rifle.”

  “Not everything is simple to figure out,” Virgil said. “Not everything is easy.”

  “That’s the goldurned truth,” Earl said. They were cutting through the channel with the early morning light coming on, throwing pale shadows on the water off the walls of wild rice, and Earl said, “God’s country.”

  Virgil thought about Johnson Johnson saying the same thing, on Vermilion, and said, “Yes it is.”

  SANDERS WAS ALREADY AT THE HOSPITAL when Virgil arrived. He saw Virgil coming and walked toward him and asked, “Were you there?”

  “Yeah, but I was the last boat in. I didn’t see what happened. How’s he doing?”

  “He’s hurt bad, they’ve got him in surgery, they’re trying to control the bleeding. They’re putting blood in him. I talked to one of the technicians, he’s type O. You know, just remembering . . .”

  “Yeah. That’s gonna be important,” Virgil said.

  “I couldn’t tell whether there was an exchange of gunfire down there.”

  Sanders used the exchange of gunfire cliché in a hopeful way, but Virgil was shaking his head. “He had a .22. It was still tied into the canoe when he was hit.”

  “Damnit. He didn’t have a handgun or anything?”

  “There was some confusion at the scene, but it was all complicated,” Virgil said. “If he’d gotten back into the trees, with a gun, it would have been hell getting him out of there. Don’t know what to tell you, Bob—but this might’ve been for the best. Nobody else got hurt.”

  “Tell that to Channel Three,” Sanders said.

  “They up here?”

  “They called. I don’t know if they’re coming or not,” he said. “How about your pal from the Star Tribune?”

>   “I don’t know where he is; he’s not exactly a pal—”

  “Bullshit,” Sanders said, showing a thin grin. “You must not have seen this morning’s paper.”

  “Aw . . .”

  “Smiling face right out there, on the front page,” Sanders said. “Cracked the case.”

  “Aw, man.”

  SANDERS SAID THEY WOULDN’T know anything for certain until the surgeons came out to talk, and he thought that would be a while; an hour or two. “They gotta do a lot of work,” he said.

  He was going to wait. Virgil walked down to the front entrance and found a copy of the Star Tribune, paid for it, and looked at himself, standing, arms crossed, talking to Slibe. Not a bad shot; and he’d never seen Ignace shoot it, didn’t even know that he carried a camera.

  He looked pretty good, he thought. He was still thinking that when his cell phone rang. He pulled it out: Davenport.

  “Yeah.”

  “You see the Star Tribune this morning?” Davenport asked.

  “I’m looking at it right now. Let me tell you a few things; we had some trouble this morning. . . .”

  When he finished, there was a moment of silence, and Davenport asked, “How strong’s the case?”

  “We’re doing DNA on the blood on the sleeve, and we can get DNA on Windrow from his house . . . get the Iowa guys to do it. If we get a match, and with the credit card, we’ll put him away.”

  “So, we’re happy, right?”

  “Not happy. The kid could have done it, but I went out there looking at his old man. His old man feels right for it, but I don’t know about the kid. The kid doesn’t seem like a planner, to tell you the truth. I don’t know . . .”

  “So you won’t be back tonight.”