Mad River

by John Sandford

  • • •

  MARSHALL DIDN’T HAVE a whole lot of cops, but more than enough—maybe eighteen or twenty city officers, and ten or twelve sheriff’s deputies. Virgil walked back to his car, after warning the Carews to stay inside, called the law enforcement center, got the duty officer, and filled him in as he drove over.

  When he got there, a city patrol car was pulling into the parking lot, just behind a sheriff’s deputy’s car. Virgil got out, said hello to the two cops, realized that he vaguely knew one of them, who said, “I’ve read about you in the newspapers, Virg. Goddamn, can I get a job like yours?”

  “You’d have to fuck up first,” Virgil said, and they all went inside, where they were joined by the duty officer, who said, “I called everybody. We’ll have ten people here in a couple of minutes.”

  • • •

  THE TEN MINUTES seemed to take forever, but in something like six or seven minutes, the sheriff walked in, and Virgil decided to start: they all gathered around a computer and Virgil pulled up Google Maps and got an aerial view of the Box house; all of the city cops and all but two of the sheriff’s deputies knew the street pretty well. Virgil said, “We need to block it off.”

  As he detailed the blocking action on the computer monitor, two more officers showed up; they were members of the drug task force, trained in SWAT-type entries, and the sheriff designated them to enter the house, with Virgil. Virgil didn’t have full SWAT equipment, so he’d go in last.

  Virgil finished and said, “We need more planning, but we just don’t have the time. If they’re in there, and they don’t know we’re around, they could kill the Boxes anytime.”

  “If they haven’t already done it,” the sheriff said.

  “That’s right,” Virgil said. “We’ll block the place, then we’ll call. If they answer, I’ll take it from there. If there’s no answer, then we’ll approach the front door, and if we still get nothing, we’ll enter.”

  “Better not have messed with my cheeseburger man,” one of the drug guys said, as he slapped the Velcros on his vest.

  “You know him?” Virgil asked.

  The drug guy said, “Sort of. By sight.”

  “Anybody know him well?” Virgil asked. “Anybody know any of their relatives?”

  “I don’t think they went to school here,” somebody said. “When they opened the other McDonald’s, I think I heard they came up from Worthington.”

  “All right . . . so we’ll have to do it cold,” Virgil said. He told the duty officer to hold any late arrivals at the law enforcement center. “We don’t know how it’s going to break. We might possibly need people with cars. So keep them loose.”

  Half the cars went to an elementary school south of the Box house, and the rest went to Horizon, north of Parkside. They coordinated with handsets and cell phones, crossing backyards in the dark, until they had the target house surrounded.

  Virgil called from his cell phone. The Box phone rang four times, then kicked over to an answering machine—but they’d gotten lucky: an answering machine, and not the phone company answering service. He said, “Mr. Box, this is the Marshall Fire Department. We’ve got a major problem at the McDonald’s. If you’re there, could you pick up, please? We need to talk with you immediately. Please pick up.”

  No answer, no lights, no movement.

  Virgil called on his handset, “Everybody stay in place, we’re going to make an approach.”

  They came in from the garage corner, a blank windowless wall where they couldn’t be seen. Virgil and the two drug cops stopped there, and Virgil whispered, “Give me a flashlight.” One of the men handed him a Maglite, and he stepped around to the back of the garage, eased up to a back window. The inside of the garage was dark. He risked a peek, and could see almost nothing; he looked longer, couldn’t see anything that looked like movement. He risked the flashlight, and found himself looking into an empty garage.

  Had the Boxes gone somewhere as well? But the silver truck had been there in the morning. . . .

  He crept back to the two drug cops. “Nothing in the garage. Maybe they’re gone.”

  “So now what?” one of them whispered.

  “I want to look at the front door.” They moved to the front corner of the garage, then Virgil got on his hands and knees and crawled alone along the sidewalk, under a picture window and past a thawing flower bed, to the front door. He checked the door with the flash. No damage.

  All right. One of the drug cops crawled up with what looked like a stethoscope, and put the sensor against the door. They sat for one minute, two minutes, then the cop said, “Nothing at all.”

  Virgil said, “So let’s go in.”

  The first cop continued to listen while Virgil crawled back to the second cop, alerted everyone to the entry, and brought the second cop back to the porch. The first cop, still listening, shook his head. “I don’t think there’s anybody in there. Not alive, anyway.”

  Virgil eased the storm door open, tried the knob. Locked. Backed off. The second cop whispered, “Looks like a pretty good door. Metal.” He meant, hard to take down.

  Virgil nodded. “Let’s take a look at the garage.”

  They crawled back down the sidewalk, updated everybody on what was happening, tried the garage overhead door, which was locked down, and the side door, which was also locked, but had a six-pane window. Virgil used the stock of his pistol to silently pressure-crack the glass in the lowest pane, then picked out the pieces and tossed them in the flower bed. When he could reach through without cutting himself, he did, and turned the doorknob and the three of them eased into the garage. The connecting door to the house was locked, but was a hollow-core door, much flimsier than the front door.

  “We can get a hammer in here,” one of the cops whispered.

  “Let’s do it,” Virgil said.

  The cop made a call, and two minutes later another cop snuck around the corner of the garage carrying a twelve-pound maul.

  Virgil said to the maul-carrier, “I’ll turn on the flash, you hit it.” And to the two drug cops, “You get in line and go on in. There should be lights right next to the door. Go all the way to the back before you stop.”

  When everybody was on the same page, Virgil lifted the flash and said, “On three,” and counted. On two, he switched the light on, and on three, the hammer smashed the door open. The first cop hit the lights with his hand, and stopped dead in the doorway.

  Virgil said, “Go,” and the cop said, “Can’t.”

  Virgil looked around him at two bodies in the living room, both facedown on the carpet.

  The lead cop said, “Boyoboyoboy . . .” and it flashed through Virgil’s mind that the bodies looked like cows lying in a pasture. He said, urgently, “Go on to the back. Step around them, go on to the back, make sure there’s nobody can get out in the hallway.”

  The cop did that, following the muzzle of his shotgun down a hallway toward what looked like a bedroom wing until Virgil said, “Okay, hold it there. Watch the doors.”

  He motioned the second drug cop to the kitchen, and the second cop cleared it and said, “There’s a couch here. They’ve barricaded a door.”

  Virgil went that way and found a couch jammed end-wise between a hallway wall and a door that apparently led to the basement. “Why?”

  Then a boy’s voice called, “Mom? Mom? Dad?”

  • • •

  VIRGIL GOT FOUR MORE COPS in the house. He said, “Those are kids down there. I don’t want them to see their parents. You guys make a barrier, and we’ll take them straight to the front door so they never see them. Okay? Everybody.”

  Everybody nodded, then they lifted the couch away from the door. Virgil looked down the stairs at two children, a boy perhaps six, who was holding the hand of a girl who was maybe four. The sheriff was at his shoulder an
d he said, “Oh, no, no, no.” He went down the stairs and said, “Kids, come on up here. Come on with me. Come on with me, honey.”

  He picked up the girl, and the boy took his hand, and Virgil said, “Out the front.” The sheriff took the kids outside, carrying the girl, towing the boy with his hand; the boy looked back at Virgil, and Virgil saw the truth in his eyes: the kid knew, at some level.

  One of the cops, a heavyset balding man in his fifties, watched the kids go and then started to snuffle, and Virgil said, “Okay, okay, everybody . . . We got a lot of work to do. Let’s hold it all together.”

  One of the drug cops said, “What if they’re coming back? Maybe we oughta get the kids out of here and set up an ambush.”

  “We can do that out a few blocks,” Virgil said. “If that’s the Boxes in there, we’ll have to assume that they’ve got the Boxes’ cars and they’ve still got the truck. We need tags for the Boxes’ cars—there could be two of them. . . . Set up a watch . . .”

  One of the cops, a sergeant, said, “I’ll get that going,” and he jogged away, and another cop came from the back and said, “Cars isn’t all they got.”

  Virgil: “What?”

  The cop said, “There’s a gun safe back here. It’s open, but there aren’t any guns in it.”

  Virgil went to look. The gun safe was five feet tall, of a forest-green metal, had foam barrel slots for eight long guns, and five of the slots appeared to have been used. At the top of the safe were four foam-lined slots for handguns, and all four appeared used.

  On the floor of the safe, a couple of ordinary plastic bags showed a flash of brass, and Virgil picked them up. Inside the first was a variety of empty shells: 9mm, which would be a handgun; a couple of dozen .44 Magnum, which could be either a handgun or a carbine, but most likely a handgun; a dozen or so .308 rifle shells, and as many in .223, and a bunch of little .22s. The other bag was full of empty 12- and 20-gauge shotgun shells.

  “They got themselves an army,” one of the cops said.

  • • •

  THE CHIEF OF POLICE, who’d been out with his wife at her sister’s house, showed up, and he and Virgil and the sheriff got together in the driveway. Up and down the street, lights were going on, and Virgil sent a cop to tell people to turn them off. The chief, a burly man with heavy glasses, said, “We’ve got a perimeter set up. If they try to come back in, we’ll nail ’em.”

  The cars’ descriptions were going out to all agencies: a year-old Chevy Tahoe, a four-year-old Lexus RX 400h.

  Virgil asked, “What about the kids?”

  “Social Services lady has them—they heard the shots that killed their folks. They couldn’t get out of the basement, no windows. They’ve got relatives down in Windom. We’re looking for them.”

  The chief said, “Now what?”

  Everybody looked at Virgil.

  8

  WHEN THEY LEFT the Welsh house, after killing Becky’s parents, nobody said anything for a very long time—Jimmy smoked a cigarette and peered out the windshield like he expected Jesus Christ himself to pop out of the roadside weeds. Then Becky launched into a monologue about how her parents had never given her the things she needed to achieve her goals. Achieving goals had been the one constant refrain she’d taken out of high school, the one thing they drummed into you: about how if you didn’t do this, that, or the other thing—pay attention and learn algebra—you’d never achieve your goals.

  Like she was going to be a rocket scientist, or something.

  You had to be seriously dumb, she said, to believe that rocket science shit. Being a small country high school, classes were less age-segregated than they might be in big-city schools. By the end of the year, most ninth-graders knew most of the upperclassmen and you knew what happened to them when they got out of school.

  A few of the lucky ones, the rich ones, mostly teachers’ kids, went to a state university somewhere. More went out to a two-year college, which was like going to another level of high school, where you learned auto mechanics or how to fix the big windmills that were sprouting all over the place. But most of the kids struggled around to get jobs and five years later they had two kids and the parents were working separate shifts at a Lowe’s or a Home Depot somewhere, making just about enough to stay off food stamps.

  Wasn’t any of them going to become rocket scientists.

  Algebra. Fuck algebra.

  If she were going to avoid Home Depot, Becky had a pretty good idea of what she had to do, and none of it involved algebra. She was pretty, and had the tits and ass to go with it. Those were her assets; algebra wouldn’t help.

  But she had no tools. The tools just weren’t available in Shinder, or in Bigham, either. You didn’t get to the top, like the Kardashians, living out in the sticks. She begged her folks to take her to Los Angeles, or even the Cities, or even over to Marshall.

  But they were afraid. They were small-town people—small-time people. They couldn’t even imagine other possibilities. They sat stupidly on the couch and drank their beer and watched the bright life on cable and told her to get a job.

  So they died, and she felt nothing for them.

  All that came out of her in the thirty minutes it took to drive to the Boxes’ house in Marshall. While she was talking, Tom, in the window seat, his thigh pressing against Becky’s, peered out at the passing farm fields and thought about how crazy it all was. There’d been a logic to the death of the girl in Bigham, and then the black guy. The first was a robbery gone bad, which can happen when a gun is involved. The black guy had to die so they could make their getaway. He understood that.

  But old man Sharp, the Welshes . . . Jimmy and Becky had gone over the edge. This was just nuts. Tom wasn’t the brightest bulb in the marquee, but he was smart enough to know that he was in the darkest kind of trouble, and there wasn’t going to be any Los Angeles, any Hollywood, not anymore.

  The only reason he’d stuck with them, hadn’t tried to walk away yet, was Becky. He could see her watch the violence, and eat it up. She liked it. And Tom found himself drawn to it, as well. He’d kill somebody, if it would get him Becky, with the provision that nobody would find out. He was not so much of a dead-ender that he didn’t care about prison, or about getting shot to death by the cops. Jimmy could sneer at such things, but Tom couldn’t. He would have walked away, if it hadn’t been for Becky. He didn’t want to protect her, he didn’t want to romance, he just wanted her. Wanted to bang her brains loose. Wanted to show her just how strong he was . . .

  Marshall turned out to be even crazier. They didn’t even know the Boxes. Becky had worked for Box for a few months, had taken stuff to his house a few times, deliveries, knew that their names were Rick and Nina, and, she said, that they were assholes, but they didn’t really know them.

  When they arrived, the Boxes’ garage door was going up, and when Jimmy pulled the beat-up old truck into the driveway, Rick Box had come out of the garage to see what was up.

  Jimmy got out of the car with one hand behind himself, like he was hitching up his jeans, and when he got close enough, he pulled the gun and pressed it against Box’s chest and said, “This is a stickup,” and Box said, “What? What?”

  Jimmy backed him into the garage, then through the door and into the kitchen. As they were walking him backward, he looked over Jimmy’s shoulder at Becky and said, “I know you. You worked the counter.”

  Becky said, “No, you don’t.” She was no counter girl; she was a star.

  Box’s wife, Nina, was cleaning up the kitchen when they came through, and they could hear the kids yelling at each other, and Becky said to Jimmy, “I didn’t know they had kids.”

  Nina saw the gun and said, “Don’t hurt us, don’t hurt us,” and Jimmy said, “All we want is some money and a car. Get in there on the rug and sit down.”

  Becky said, “I’m
gonna put the kids in the basement.”

  Jimmy said, “Do that,” and Nina cried, “Don’t hurt us,” and Jimmy said, “Shut up,” and to Becky, “Get the kids.”

  She got the kids, the little boy brave and solemn as he marched through the living room, the girl saying, “Daddy, Daddy,” and crying, and Becky took them down the stairs. She was back a moment later and said, “No windows. No way out.”

  Jimmy said, “Maybe find a hammer and nail the door shut.”

  “We can just push a couch over there,” Tom said. “Here.” He pushed a short two-cushion couch out of the living room and between the basement door and a hallway wall, so the door couldn’t be opened.

  Nina Box said, “We’ll give you anything you want.”

  She was a little heavy, but not bad-looking, and Jimmy asked Tom, “You want to fuck her?”

  Rick Box said, “Hey,” and started to get to his feet, and Jimmy shot him in the heart, and he fell down and curled himself like a snail.

  Nina began screaming, and Jimmy said to Tom, “Well, you wanna?” When Tom said, “No, I guess not,” Jimmy said, “Okay,” and aimed the pistol at her head and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell on an empty cylinder, and Jimmy said, “Shit,” and then he grinned at Tom and said, “Goddamn good thing that didn’t happen with him. He would have kicked my ass.”

  Nina started to get up and Jimmy hit her in the face with the gun and she went down, and Jimmy said, “Let’s look around. There’ll be a gun around here somewhere.”

  They found the gun safe, in an extra-deep closet in the main bedroom; the key was hanging from a hook, and when they opened the safe, Jimmy found four handguns and some long guns, including a black rifle. He said, “Oh, boy, I always wanted me one of these.”

  But he left the rifle on the bed, loaded the nine-millimeter, figured out how it worked. Guns are wonderful machines: simple, precise, efficient. Anyone can use them—they don’t discriminate between high and low, smart or stupid. To a gun, everybody’s equal. Jimmy prodded Nina Box back into the living room, looked at her, then at Tom, and said, “You’re sure?”