Mad River

by John Sandford

  • • •

  THE FIRST PART of the robbery had gone just fine. They’d crashed through the front door, found three women inside, one behind the counter and two more in a side office, gossiping; there were no customers. Jimmy pulled down the women in the office while Tom pointed his gun around aimlessly and thought about shooting Jimmy in the back, but Jimmy was so on top of everything, so manic, that Tom chickened out and wound up waving his pistol at the mousy-looking woman behind the counter.

  Jimmy shouted, “Get the money, get the money, get the money . . .”

  They’d both brought paper grocery sacks inside with them, and Tom ran around behind the counter and started scooping money out of the cash drawers and into his sack, and Jimmy shouted at the boss woman in the office, “Open the safe, open the safe”—he pointed the rifle at the other woman’s head—“or I’ll shoot this woman right here, right now.”

  The boss woman scurried into a back room that had a two-foot-by-two-foot safe built into a concrete wall. She fumbled with the combination a couple of times, then got it. There were stacks of money on small shelves inside. Jimmy, though disappointed by the small size of the safe, scraped the money into his bag and then shouted at Tom, “Let’s go. Let’s go.”

  He didn’t shoot anybody, because this was a robbery, not a killing. The two lines didn’t cross in his mind. Jimmy held the gun on the women until Tom got to the lobby, and they both burst into the sunshine at the same instant.

  The cop was a complete surprise.

  • • •

  THE COP WAS STANDING THERE, just down the street, and was pulling his pistol from his holster. Jimmy and Tom burst through the door and, when they saw him, came to a stumbling halt, and then Jimmy shouted at Tom, “Go,” and he fired a shot at the cop, missing, and they both ran. The cop started shooting at them, missing three times, and then just as Jimmy got to the car, fired a fourth shot that hit Jimmy on the back of the thigh and knocked him down.

  Tom went down at the same time, frightened by the gunfire, did a squirming turn on his stomach, and started pulling the trigger on his 9-millimeter. He was firing purely out of panic, hardly knowing where the cop was. Card had ducked behind his car door and, as luck would have it, raised his head behind the window glass just in time to catch one of Tom’s panicky 9-millimeters.

  The slug punched through the glass and then through the frontal bone of Card’s forehead, through his brain, to the parietal bone at the back of his head. By the time it got to the parietal bone it had shed so much mass that instead of punching through, it deflected and spent a few hundredths of a second rattling around inside Card’s brain, which Card didn’t know because he was already dead.

  He fell in the street, on his back, and in a last dead reflex motion, threw his arms out to his sides, so that he looked like a picture of a dead man.

  Jimmy dragged himself to the car and crawled in, and bleated, “I’m hit bad. Man, I’m hit bad.” He’d brought the guns and money with him.

  Tom was in the back, with his bag of money, and he shouted, “Go, go,” and Becky put her foot down and cried, “How bad are you? How bad?”

  “It’s pretty fuckin’ bad,” Jimmy cried. “Jesus, it hurts so bad.”

  • • •

  JIMMY HAD PLANNED to go fourteen miles straight up County 9, then left on 99, a side trail, then up a jigsaw path of back roads to the house of an old man who’d once hired Jimmy’s father to cut a bunch of dead trees and grind out the stumps. Jimmy had been made to go along and help, and he’d remembered two things: that the old man was an asshole, and that he was isolated. He lived alone in an old farmhouse with a garage on the side, farming a half-section, making just enough, in a good year, to keep himself in a decent truck and a winter vacation on the Gulf Coast.

  Jimmy figured to kill the old man and take his truck. They’d lock the Boxes’ car in the old man’s garage, and since nobody liked the old fucker, it could be weeks before anybody went looking for him. Probably not until it became obvious that he wasn’t doing his spring plowing. By that time, they’d be . . . somewhere else.

  He hadn’t told Tom where he was planning to go, because Tom . . .

  He no longer trusted Tom. Truth to tell, Tom’s days on earth were numbered, and truth to tell, that number was One.

  • • •

  BUT THEY DIDN’T go to the old man’s place, not then. They wound up in a cornfield. Sometimes, the corn didn’t get harvested before the snow fell, and wound up standing through the winter. Eight miles out of town, down a narrow side road, they saw a field like that, and Jimmy, screaming with the pain of the rough roads, pointed them down into a dry ditch, then sideways to the field. They didn’t care about the car, and drove it right over the fence and into the cornfield. They could be seen from the air, but not from the road.

  Jimmy was hurt bad, but not as bad as he might have been. The cop’s bullet had blown open a wound along the outside of his thigh, almost like the flesh had been gouged out with an ice-cream scoop. There was blood everywhere. Becky got a blouse out of her bag and made a bandage and tied it tight around the wound, knotting the bandage with the arms of the blouse.

  Blood began soaking through, but it didn’t seem uncontrolled.

  Becky said, “We gotta get some medicine. Some pain medicine.”

  “Where we gonna do that?” Jimmy groaned. His face was white as a dead man’s, his teeth showing yellow against his white skin.

  “They’re gonna be all over this place,” Becky said. “Tom shot that cop, and he wasn’t moving. He might be dead. In an hour, we won’t be able to move. Not until night.”

  “Well, what’re we gonna do?” Tom asked. “He’s hurt too bad.”

  “I’m getting better since we stopped,” Jimmy said, but then he groaned again.

  “We passed that little house, not more than a half mile back there,” Becky said. “We could go back, see if they got any medicine.”

  Jimmy said, “You’re just going to say, ‘Can we borrow some medicine?’”

  “I’ll take a gun,” Becky said.

  “You think you can pull a trigger?”

  “As good as you. I’ll come back, fix your leg as good as we can, then we’ll . . . go on.”

  Jimmy groaned and finally said, “I can’t think of anything else.”

  “We’ll leave you in the car. You can run it if you get cold,” Becky said. “I don’t think it’s even a half mile back there, we’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Back in a half hour.”

  Jimmy looked at Tom: “What do you think?”

  “I think you need that medicine,” Tom said. “If we’re lucky, we could get something to kill the pain.”

  “Okay,” Jimmy said, and after a minute, “Don’t leave me. Becky, don’t leave me.”

  • • •

  NEITHER BECKY NOR TOM was in very good cardiovascular shape. They jogged and walked when they ran out of breath, then jogged some more; the house was actually only six hundred yards back down the road, and they were there in less than ten minutes. When they got close, they swerved off into a field so they could come up to the house on the far side of the detached garage. At the garage, they peeked in a window and saw a black Jeep; the other space was empty.

  “Probably somebody home,” Becky whispered.

  She looked down at her handgun, a revolver, not yet used. Jimmy had loaded it for her, said, “There’s no safety, so it’s simple. Just pull the trigger.”

  “Don’t shoot anybody if you don’t have to,” Tom said.

  She nodded and said, “We gotta hurry. We’ll try the back door. If it’s locked, you gotta kick it in.”

  The door wasn’t locked. They went through into the mud-room, and then into the kitchen, the floorboards creaking below their feet, and a woman called, “Will? Will?”

  Becky was l
eading with the muzzle of the gun and she and the woman got to the door between the living room and the kitchen at the same time. The woman was maybe thirty-five and blond and thin, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing a white blouse and blue jeans and soft slippers and every single detail of that crystallized in Tom’s eye as the woman blurted, “Who are—”

  Becky pushed the gun toward the woman’s heart from two feet and pulled the trigger. The trigger blast from the .44 Magnum was violent and deafening, and the woman toppled backward and died.

  Becky said, “Jesus, I did it.” And she said to Tom, “We gotta find the medicine and get out of here.”

  But then they both stopped and looked down at the dead woman’s face, and Becky said, “She was pretty,” and they both looked for a few more seconds, and the silence in the house was deep and pale, as though the sunshine were pulling back.

  Becky was trembling, and her face was flushed; she was hot. Power of the pistol. Tom looked at her, and at the woman’s body, then said, “Give me the gun.”

  Becky handed it to him, almost absentmindedly, still focused on the dead woman. Tom took the gun, then ventured, “Listen . . . you wanna do it?”

  Becky was puzzled. “What?”

  “We’ve got a little time. You want to go back in the bedroom?”

  Her mouth dropped open, and the disbelief was right there on her face, quickly followed by scorn. “Are you crazy? You geek, I’d never . . . jeez, you sick fuck.”

  She started to turn away, and never saw Tom’s hand coming.

  Tom was tall and thin, but he had a bit of muscle and a little reach. The palm of his hand hit her square in the face, like a tennis racket hitting a ball, and Becky flew backward onto the kitchen floor. Tom put the gun on the kitchen counter and grabbed Becky by the neck and dragged her screaming and sputtering blood from her nose, back through the house to a bedroom, where he threw her on the bed. She rolled facedown and tried to crawl away from him, but he crawled on top of her and started pulling her clothes off.

  She fought, but he raped her; and he enjoyed it. A lot. He enjoyed the sex, and he enjoyed the open-handed beating he gave her before and after. After he did it once, he had an impulse to apologize, but felt the sex coming back up, and remembered the way she’d whimpered, and sitting astride her hips, looking down at her, how wonderful she looked, all naked, and that got him going again, and he beat her again and raped her again, and finally he was done.

  He pulled on his shirt and pants and said, “Don’t tell nobody about this,” and left her there. On his way out, he stepped over the dead woman’s body, picked up the pistol, got the dead woman’s purse off the cupboard, found her car keys, and went out to the Jeep.

  • • •

  BECKY HEARD HIM GO. Pushed herself up, staggered into the bathroom, looked at herself in the mirror. Her face was a mask of blood. She washed it off as well as she could, remembered to look in the medicine chest, got lucky, found a half-used bottle of OxyContin prescribed by a dentist, took it, along with a tube of Mycitracin, took some clean sheets from a linen closet, thinking to make bandages, and was walking to the door when she heard the vehicle pulling into the driveway.

  She looked out and saw a black Ford F-150 coming in.

  Nearly panicked, she looked around, then ran into the bedroom, opened the bedroom closet, saw the 12-gauge pump shotgun. She knew shotguns—most males out on the prairie, including her father, had one. A box of shells was right there on the floor, and she loaded two of them, fumbling a third onto the floor, jacked one into the chamber. When a tall man in a Twins ball cap pushed through from the mudroom, she was right there in the middle of the kitchen, still bleeding from cuts on her forehead and from her nose. He said, “What?” and she shot him.

  Thirty seconds later she was in the truck, backing out of the driveway. A minute after that, she was pulling up next to the Tahoe in the cornfield.

  Jimmy looked at her bloody face and said, “What?” and Becky said, “He raped me.”

  Jimmy said, “What?”

  And she said, “C’mon, we gotta go. We gotta run.” She began weeping, and she led Jimmy hobbling to the new truck, and pushed two OxyContins into his mouth and asked, “Where’re we going, Jimmy? Where’re we going?”

  • • •

  TOM HADN’T THOUGHT out all the necessary strategies for surrender, but was pretty sure that he didn’t want to let the Duke’s deputies get their hands on him first. He wasn’t entirely sure that he could blame the cop shooting on Jimmy, but there were no witnesses, and he thought he probably could. Still, the sheriff’s deputies were bound to be pissed, and so he thought he’d better call Flowers first.

  But even that frightened him. Should he keep on running? He had forty dollars, which would get him halfway across South Dakota, and Becky and Jimmy sure as hell weren’t going to be talking about this Jeep.

  On the other hand, the woman’s husband would be coming home, and they’d be looking for the Jeep anytime now. . . .

  On balance, he thought, he’d be better off with Flowers. It took him a while to get his guts up—and he stopped once, at a turnout, to take a leak, and to throw the .44 into a culvert. Becky had scratched his back, which had kept him going at the time but now hurt like hell.

  Becky.

  He thought about it, and then felt himself smile. Whatever else that had been, it’d been worth it. If he lived through the rest of the day, his half hour with Becky would take care of his dreams for ten thousand nights. He’d never before just taken anything. But he’d taken her: she wouldn’t soon forget Tom McCall.

  But that was then.

  He said to the sky, “Gonna take some shit now,” but he finally pulled the cell phone out of his pocket and turned it on and punched up Flowers’s return number. Flowers came right up and said, “Tom? Where are you?”

  11

  VIRGIL TALKED TO THE county administrator and fixed Randy White’s paid leave, without giving up the exact reason. “We think that these killers might be a danger to him, and he’s a witness on some relevant matters that I can’t talk about, so we want to get him out of sight for everybody’s good.”

  The county administrator, a short, stocky, gray-haired man with a buzz cut, who almost had to be a former Marine, said, “God bless you. Take him.”

  Randy, Virgil thought as he walked back to the truck, was not universally respected as a hard worker. He got Randy on his cell phone and said, “It’s done. You’ll be paid and it won’t count against vacation. Get up to the Cities, but you stay in touch. I don’t want to have to go looking for you.”

  He was thinking about getting another bite to eat when Duke called, screaming, “They hit the credit union in Oxford. There’s a possibility that one of our deputies got shot, Dan Card maybe got shot, a guy’s running him into Marshall in his truck. That’s what we hear, we don’t know anything.”

  Virgil found Oxford in his truck atlas. It was about as far away from him as it could be, and still be in Bare County. As he pulled out into the street, he saw two sheriff’s cars bust a red light a couple of blocks away, and he hit his own flashers and took off after them, headed south out of town at high speed.

  • • •

  THE ROADS WERE CLEAR and dry and they were all running with lights and sirens. On the way, Virgil called Davenport and told him about it, and that there might be a cop down. Seven or eight minutes later, Davenport called back and said, “Card is dead. I just talked to Marshall. They had an ambulance run out to meet the guy bringing him in, but they say he’s gone. You gotta get these guys, Virgil.”

  “You know the problem,” Virgil said.

  The problem was, they knew who the killers were, but they couldn’t find them. If they’d fled Oxford an hour earlier, they could be anywhere in a circle maybe fifty miles in radius from Oxford. Using the formula
A = pi r squared, A being the area and r being the radius and pi being 3.14 (roughly), they could be almost anywhere in an area of 7,850 square miles, and the area was expanding rapidly, with every moment they went undiscovered.

  “I know the problem, but this is crazy, this is out of control.”

  “Everybody in the state is looking for them,” Virgil said. “What do you want me to do?”

  A minute after he got off the phone with Davenport, Duke called and said, “Dan Card is dead, but he shot one of the gang. We’ve got blood in the street, but we don’t know which one. The bank was robbed by two masked males, and one of them got hit.”

  Duke was going on when Tom McCall called.

  Virgil’s phone beeped with the incoming message, and he saw who it was, and he said to Duke, “I got McCall on the line. I’ll call you back.”

  Duke said, “Hey—” but Virgil clicked through to McCall and said, “Tom? Where are you?”

  • • •

  MCCALL SAID, “Virgil, I’m running. Jimmy’s been shot in the leg, Becky just killed some woman in some farmhouse, I’m on the highway, I stole a Jeep and ran away from Becky, I got no gun, but Jimmy shot a cop, I think, and those deputies are gonna kill me if they find me. I don’t know what to do—”

  “How bad is Jimmy?”

  “He’s hurting, he’s bleeding bad, but they made a bandage out of a shirt. But fuck a bunch of Jimmy, man, I’m out here, I’m all fucked up—”

  “I got you,” Virgil said. “You tell me where to go, and I’ll meet you there. Figure out the roads and an intersection, and I’ll take you in.”

  “I don’t know what road I’m on. I’m out in the sticks.”

  “Where’s the woman who got shot? Are you sure she’s dead? Where are they?”

  “On County 9, right straight out of town . . . out of Oxford. They pulled into a cornfield, an uncut cornfield. They’re hiding in the corn, must be eight or ten miles out of town.”

  “North, south . . . ?”

  “I don’t . . . north, I guess. Up toward town, toward Bigham.”