Mad River

by John Sandford

  Nothing at all. “Motherfucker,” he groaned. The car started about half the time. Given a few minutes, he might have gotten it started. Now, half-panicked, he said, “Come on, come on . . .”

  At that moment, Emmett Williams walked out of the side door of the apartment complex and, absently whistling an unrecognizable tune, strolled down the side of the building to the street, where he’d parked his brother-in-law’s Dodge Charger.

  Tom said, “Somebody’s coming.”

  Jimmy tried the ignition again. Nothing. He’d put the gun back in his pocket, but now he pulled it out again, said, “Come on.”

  Williams was walking away from them. He pointed the ignition key at the Charger, pushed a button, and the car’s light flashed back at him; the last light he’d see. Jimmy was leading the line of runners, and he ran straight at Williams and when Williams looked up, the pistol flashed again, from six feet, and Williams went down, and Jimmy dragged him around the front of the car and dumped his body on the grass next to the sidewalk, turned toward the car, turned back, took Williams’s wallet out of his back pocket. Becky piled into the passenger seat and Tom in the back. Jimmy took the wheel, and five minutes later they were headed out of town.

  “Where’re we going?” Becky asked.

  “Get the fuck far away from here,” Jimmy said. “Rest up, figure out what to do. Maybe head for LA, if we can get a car.”

  “That girl back there, is she hurt bad?” Tom asked.

  “She’s dead,” Jimmy said. “She should be dead, anyway. If she ain’t dead, I’ll go back and shoot the bitch again.”

  Tom looked out the back window and said, “I think the black guy is dead too.”

  Jimmy said, “Yeah?” He reached out and turned on the radio, and the satellite came up, Outlaw Country, Travis Tritt singing “Modern Day Bonnie and Clyde.”

  “Ain’t this some fuckin’ car?” Jimmy asked. “Ain’t this a ride?”

  2

  VIRGIL FLOWERS WAS STANDING under a streetlight outside the Rooster Coop in Mankato, Minnesota, at the mouth of a long cobblestone alley that led down toward a curl in the Minnesota River. He was talking to Cornelius Cooper, the proprietor of the place, about who, exactly, was the best country singer in America, at that very moment.

  They agreed that while Ray Wylie Hubbard was a leading candidate, there was no question that it was not Ray Wylie but, in fact, Waylon Jennings, who wrote and sang the best song ever written, which was “Good Hearted Woman.” How could you be the best country singer if you weren’t responsible for the best country song?

  Waylon was at a disadvantage, though, being dead.

  And then there was always Willie, who was the best country singer in a lot of years when Waylon wasn’t, but at that very moment?

  Ray Wylie had been around a long time, too, long enough to write the National Anthem—known to downtown cowboys as “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” That was good, but not nearly enough to make him the best country singer, but he’d followed that up, many years later, with stuff like “Wanna Rock and Roll,” and “The Messenger,” and “Resurrection,” and “Snake Farm,” some genuine poetry, with a taste of blues and the salt of humor.

  “But in fact, it is not Ray Wylie who sings ‘Wanna Rock and Roll’ the best,” Cooper said, “but Cross Canadian Ragweed.”

  “That’s true,” Virgil said. “But what song, right at this moment, is as good as ‘Resurrection’?”

  “But he didn’t write ‘Resurrection.’”

  Virgil said, “No, but he sings it, and he did write . . .” He broke out in a gravelly baritone imitation of Ray Wylie’s “The Mission.”

  Cooper said, “Jesus Christ, keep it down. People will think you’re drunk. And what about Guy Clark?”

  Guy Clark. What could you say about “Rita Ballou” or “Homegrown Tomatoes” or “Texas 1947” or “Cold Dog Soup” or “L.A. Freeway”?

  But then, what about “Sunday Morning Coming Down”? And if “Sunday Morning” was that good, right up there at the top, and the same guy wrote “Me and Bobby McGee,” which actually was pretty good, despite being some sort of hippie shit, shouldn’t Kris Kristofferson be considered? They thought about that a minute, then simultaneously said, “No,” because, when everything was said and done, Kristofferson just wasn’t country enough, down in his heart.

  Billy Joe Shaver? Good, very good. There was a lot to be said for “Georgia on a Fast Train” and even, they agreed, “Wacko from Waco,” which testified to a certain genuineness of the lifestyle. Then there was “Old Five and Dimers Like Me,” covered by the likes of Bob Dylan, backed by Eric Clapton. What about that? What could you say about the second-best country song ever?

  They were still working through it, each with a Leinenkugel longneck in his right hand, and Cooper crowned with a black hundred-beaver cowboy hat from Santa Fe, New Mexico, when along came a Mankato cop named Bob Roberts, who everybody called Bob-Bob, and who said, “Hey there, Virg.”

  Virgil asked, “Is Ray Wylie the best living country singer?”

  Bob-Bob hitched up his duty belt and said, “Well, hell. Let me think. How about . . . Emmylou Harris? Or maybe Linda Ronstadt?”

  There was a moment of silence, then Virgil said to Cooper, “You miserable sexist piece of shit. You never even considered a woman.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cooper said. “I apologize to all women. For everything.”

  “I don’t think that’s good enough,” Bob-Bob said. “You’ll have to come down to the station for an application of pussywhip.”

  Virgil, trying to smooth over the awkwardness, said, “I think we can all agree that the Texas guys write very smooth stuff.”

  “In other words, not tin-eared Nashville whining violin Martha White Grand Ole Opry banjo bullshit,” Cooper said.

  “And at this very moment, I say Ray Wylie leads the pack—nothing against the women,” Virgil said. He held out his bottle, and Cooper hesitated only for a moment, then clinked his bottle against it, and they both said, “Ray Wylie.” Cooper tipped his bottle up, finishing the last of the brew, and then looked down the alley and said, “See that net?”

  They couldn’t, because there was no net. What there was, was a hoop, with a sixty-watt bulb flickering just beyond it, where the kitchen staff shot baskets on slow nights.

  “Sort of,” Virgil said.

  “One shot each, for five dollars.”

  “You got it,” Virgil said.

  Cornelius carefully gauged the distance—just about a free throw—then arced the bottle toward the hoop. The bottle clanged off the rim, ricocheted down the alley, and shattered on a cobblestone. “Shit,” he said.

  Virgil finished his beer, and Bob-Bob said, “I got two dollars says you don’t even hit the rim.”

  Virgil said, “You got that, too,” and lofted the bottle down the alley; it dropped gracefully through the hoop, the neck just ticking the steel as it went down, and then shattered on another cobblestone. “That’s what you get when you go head-to-head with a natural athlete, you ignorant small-town hicks,” Virgil said. “Pay me.”

  “I been set up,” Bob-Bob said, as he dug two dollars out of his pocket. “By the way, Virgie, this BCA guy, Davenport, is trying to find you. He said you don’t answer your phone, but he knows you’re around here. He called at the station house and Georgina said she’d seen you down here. She sent me down to tell you to call in.”

  “I told you, you shouldn’t have been hittin’ on her,” Cooper said.

  “I was just being social,” Virgil said. To Bob-Bob: “Did Davenport say what he wanted me for?”

  “Not to me,” Bob-Bob said. “But calling at this time of night . . .”

  They all reflexively looked up toward the moon: it was after midnight. A call after midnight meant there’d probably been a murder
somewhere. Virgil fished the cell phone out of his pocket, turned it on, found three messages from Davenport.

  “Goddamnit. I got home from vacation at six o’clock, and he’s already on my ass.”

  “You look like you’re tanned,” Bob-Bob said, squinting in the bad light. “You didn’t get that here. Where you been?”

  “Bahamas,” Virgil said. “Bone fishing.”

  “Bahamas,” Bob-Bob said with amazement, as though Virgil had said Shangri-la.

  Virgil pushed the button to call Davenport, who picked up on the first ring.

  “We got a bad one in Shinder,” Lucas Davenport said. He sounded sleepy, and maybe bored. “You better get over there.”

  “I’d blow about a ten-point-three right now,” Virgil said. “Can it wait until morning?”

  “They’re holding everything for you,” Davenport said. “Get some coffee, and when you’re down to a seven, take off. I’ll find out where the highway patrol is, and you can dodge them. I’m putting Crime Scene on the road, soon as I can.”

  “Still probably three hours before I can get there,” Virgil said.

  “Three hours is better than anybody else we got,” Davenport said. “And you know that country.”

  “How many dead?”

  “Two. Man and a wife, named, uh, let me look . . . uh, Welsh. Shot in their kitchen, probably last night or early this morning. The locals got nothing, except maybe their dicks in their hands.”

  “I’ll go,” Virgil said. “But I’ll be a little slow.”

  “You know about what happened Friday night?”

  “Friday night I was on Grand Bahama,” Virgil said, “fishing all day, and at night, playing beach volleyball with women wearing bikini bottoms.”

  There was a moment of silence, then Davenport said, “I might have to kill you. It was snowing up here.”

  “Yeah, well, what happened Friday?”

  “There was a double murder over in Bigham. I don’t know if these two are connected, but they’re over in the same corner of the state. Haven’t been four murders, that close, in that corner, in a hundred years.”

  “Who caught that?”

  “Ralph. But there wasn’t much to do after the crime-scene crew got finished. Nobody had any idea of what happened.”

  “Okay. Send me what Ralph got.”

  “I will,” Davenport said. “When you say they were wearing bikini bottoms, they were also, like, wearing the tops, right?”

  “Nope, just the bottoms,” Virgil said.

  “Fuck me,” Davenport said. “Anyway, you bring anything back home?”

  “Jesus, I hope not,” Virgil said.

  “I meant fish,” Davenport said.

  “Oh. No. No, I didn’t.”

  Cooper offered Virgil a ride home, but Bob-Bob said, doubtfully, “That don’t sound like a real good idea,” and Virgil said, “Thanks, anyway, Cornelius. I can use the walk.”

  • • •

  VIRGIL LIVED THE BEST part of a mile northeast of downtown, a cool walk in early April, but he was wearing an insulated Carhartt jean jacket over a black Wolfmother T-shirt, jeans, and boots, and was comfortable enough as he ambled along through the dark. He lived in a small two-bedroom frame house with a double garage. A fishing boat was usually parked in the driveway, in this case, an almost-new fishing boat, a Ranger. The boat had been purchased with some fear and trepidation about ethics, from a friend of the governor of the state of Minnesota.

  Virgil’s previous boat had been blown up by a mad bomber. Virgil had crawled away from the wreckage, unhurt, by the very skin of his teeth. The governor had offered to help out by locating the Ranger, two years old, but with only thirty hours on the motor. Virgil initially declined, because he thought that the boat broker might be doing a favor for the governor, some kind of political deal, and he didn’t want a part of that.

  But the governor had come back to him, said he appreciated Virgil’s ethical conundrum, and insisted that there was no deal, he’d only done it because he imagined that he and Virgil were friends and he felt bad about the bomb. No payback was expected or required from anyone. Virgil got a letter from the director of the BCA saying it was okay, and he bought the boat, because, the fact was:

  He hungered for it.

  It had been love at first sight. A Ranger Angler, red with black and gray trim, eighteen feet, six inches long with a ninety-eight-inch beam. There was a rod case under the front deck with space for six rods, plenty of storage in the side lockers, a Minn-Kota trolling motor on the bow, a 175 Merc on the back.

  Virgil had to put up the whole insurance payment on his old boat and motor, plus he’d financed twelve thousand dollars over four years through the state credit union. That was cheap, he thought, when it came to true love.

  And now, as the saying went, he could pad his ass with fiberglass, a big change from his old aluminum boat.

  • • •

  VIRGIL WAS A TALL MAN, an inch or two over six feet, slender, with blue eyes and blond hair worn long for a cop, but not too long for farm country, where he usually worked. Like country people, he had a tendency toward ball caps, barn jackets, and cowboy boots, especially in the spring, when he needed to be mud-resistant. He’d been born out on the prairie, in Marshall, Minnesota, where he’d lettered in football, basketball, and baseball. He still looked like a competent third baseman.

  He got back to the house around twelve-thirty, clear of mind if not fresh of breath. He patted the boat on the nose and said, “Hey, baby,” went in the house, started a pot of coffee, brushed his teeth, threw a few days’ worth of shirts, jeans, and underwear in a satchel, along with a dopp kit. He got his pistol and a shotgun out of the gun safe, and some ammo, took the whole pile of gear out to his truck, a Toyota 4Runner, and packed it away. That done, he hooked the truck up to the boat, backed the boat into the garage, unhooked it, and locked the garage door behind himself.

  Back inside the house, he poured a cup of coffee, put the rest in a thermos, sipped at the coffee, and went back to the second bedroom he used as a study and dug out his Minnesota atlas.

  Shinder was a small farm town of a few hundred people, ordinary enough, as far as he knew, out on the prairie in western Minnesota. It was only thirty miles from Virgil’s hometown of Marshall, and probably seventy-five or eighty from his current home in Mankato.

  Though he’d been past Shinder a hundred times, he’d never stopped, because there wasn’t anything to stop for. He wasn’t even exactly sure what county the town was in—it was right where Yellow Medicine, Lyon, Redwood, and Bare came together. He thumbed through the atlas and found that it was just inside Bare County, five miles from the Yellow Medicine line.

  Virgil said, aloud, to his empty house, “Ah, man.”

  Bare County was run by Sheriff Lewis Duke, known to other local sheriffs as the Duke of Hazard. He believed in Guns, Punishment, Low Taxes, and the American Constitution. If he wasn’t the source of all those things—the Almighty God was—he was at least the Big Guy’s representative in Bare County.

  Among other things, he’d tried to set up a concentration camp on the site of an old chicken farm, complete with barracks and barbed-wire fences, for minor criminals. He believed that an actual indoor Minnesota jail was simply pampering the miscreants. He figured to rent space in the concentration camp barracks to other counties that wanted to unload expensive prisoners, and even make a profit for his Bare County constituents. The state attorney general’s office, backed by a court order, stopped the concentration camp.

  But no court order could stop Lewis Duke from being an asshole.

  • • •

  AT TEN MINUTES after one o’clock in the morning, ninety-eight percent sober, Virgil pulled out on the street and rolled away in the dark toward Shinder. His phone rang on the seat beside him, and he pic
ked it up: Davenport, who always stayed up late.

  Davenport asked, “How’re you feeling?”

  “Stone-cold sober, if that’s what you mean,” Virgil said. “I just pulled out of my house—I’m on the way.”

  “Good. It’d be best if you were gunned down in the line of duty, and not killed in a drunk-driving accident.”

  “Anyhooo . . .”

  “The crime-scene truck is leaving town now,” Davenport said. “They’ll be an hour and a half or maybe two hours behind you. If you’re going over on 14, you don’t have to worry about the patrol, so you can let it roll. Watch out for town cops.”

  “I’ll do that,” Virgil said. “You think Ray Wylie Hubbard is better than Waylon Jennings?”

  “I don’t know, but they’re both better than any of the Beatles,” Davenport said. “I’m going to bed. Hesitate to call.”

  One good thing about a long drive in the dark, when you didn’t know anything about where you were going, or what you were going to do when you got there, was that you had lots of time to think.

  Virgil had for years worked a sideline as an outdoors writer, a freelancer for the diminishing number of magazines that were actually about the outdoors, as opposed to outdoors technology. He knew which brands of fishing rods he liked, and what reels, and he knew something about guns and bows and snowshoes and about boats and canoes, and not as much as he would have liked about dogs—his job made it almost impossible to keep a dog—but not much about technology.

  He wasn’t much interested in arguing whether a .308 was better or worse than a .30-06 on whitetail, or a Ranger a better boat than a Lund or a Tuffy, or a Mathews Solocam a better bow than a Hoyt or a PSE. He couldn’t have found his own ass with a GPS. He just did what most guys did, which was talk to his friends and try a few things out. The fact was, most of the known names worked pretty well, and you got used to what you had; you could punch all the half-inch holes in paper that you liked, but the fact is, when it came to hunting, anything in the bread box would do the job.