Mad River

by John Sandford

  Nothing else on the street. She got her guts up, did a U-turn into the station. Still nothing moving. She sat there for another minute, then got out with the pistol in her hand.

  The only sound was a faraway truck on the highway north of town. She walked past a flickering neon Bud Light beer sign to the front door, walked in with her head down, the bill of the ball cap covering her face. The counterman said, “Nice night.”

  She brought the gun up and pointed it at his chest, and she said, “Maybe not. Give me your cell phone.”

  He said, “You’re—”

  “That’s right. I’ll blow a hole clean through you if you look like you’re going for a gun or do anything I don’t tell you to do. Give me your cell phone.”

  The clerk was a tall thin boy with a prominent nose and a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down in fear. He said, “Don’t shoot me. Please don’t shoot me.”

  “Cell phone.”

  He dipped in his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. She handed him the slip of paper with the state cop’s number on it and said, “Call that number and tell them that you have to talk to Virgil Flowers. No, wait . . . first, get them grocery bags and fill them up with what I tell you.”

  She walked him through the store and got two plastic grocery bags full of candy bars and ice cream and Pepsi and corn chips and tortilla chips and salsa and dip and Hershey’s bars and Snickers and a carton of Marlboros.

  She had him put the sacks by the door and then waved the pistol at him and said, “Back to the counter. Call that number. Tell them your real name and tell them it’s an emergency and that you have to talk to Virgil Flowers. Got that? Virgil Flowers. Don’t tell them where you’re at, or I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out.”

  The kid was shaking like an aspen leaf, could barely punch in the numbers, but when it was answered, he said, “I gotta talk to Virgil Flowers. It’s an emergency.”

  Becky couldn’t hear the answer, but he looked at her and then blurted, “It’s an emergency. My name is Dale Jones, and I gotta talk to Virgil Flowers. . . . I can’t tell you that. No, I can’t tell you that. Listen, I gotta talk—”

  Becky lost her patience and said, “Give me the fuckin’ phone.”

  He handed her the phone and she snarled into it, “This is Becky Welsh. If you don’t put Virgil Flowers on this phone in fifteen seconds, I’m gonna kill this man.”

  The voice on the other end said, “I’m . . . Don’t do that, please don’t do that. I’m patching you through.”

  • • •

  AT THAT VERY MOMENT, Virgil was licking Sally’s nipples, and she was laughing at him because he was doing it, but he wasn’t inclined to stop, though he couldn’t have told anybody why. He’d been nursed by his mother when he was a child, so he probably wasn’t suffering from a lack of breast contact; but nevertheless, here he was, lapping like a yellow Lab, when the phone rang.

  He looked at the face of it, said, “Goddamnit, the most inconvenient . . . I gotta answer it.”

  He picked up the phone and the BCA duty officer said with a rush, “I’m patching through a woman who says she’s Becky Welsh and she says she’s going to kill a man if you don’t talk to her.”

  And he was gone and Virgil said, “Becky?”

  • • •

  BECKY SAID, “You sonofabitch, you said there was a sex encounter with Tom McCall, but there was no sex encounter—that motherfucker raped me.” She started crying again, and the muzzle of the gun was shaking, and the clerk backed up against the cigarette rack, his mouth hanging loose in white-faced fear.

  “Becky, Becky . . . I gotta know it’s really you and not a trick,” Virgil said. “Where’d he rape you? Where in the house?”

  “It was in that back room, down the hall to the left . . . no, to the right. It had a table with a big stack of magazines on it, and they had these pink shades on the bedside lamps.”

  She was exact. Virgil said, “Becky, don’t hurt anybody else. Tell me where you are and I’ll bring you and Jimmy in. The other cops around here, they want to kill you, because that police officer got killed in Oxford. They’ll do it, too: they’ll shoot you down like a couple of dogs, but I’ll bring you in, like I brought in Tom McCall.”

  “Fuck that, you’re gonna kill us anyway, one way or another,” she said. “But I want it straightened out, on TV. I didn’t have no sex encounter, he raped me . . . and I’ll tell you what, I’m so pissed off I might just kill this man here to prove to you how pissed I am—”

  “No, no, no, don’t do that. . . . Becky, I talked to some people who told me they thought you’d probably been raped. That a woman wouldn’t have voluntary sex under . . . those circumstances.”

  “That’s right, no way I was going to have a voluntary sex encounter,” Becky said.

  “This guy you’ve got, let him go, and I’ll fix you up to talk directly to the TV woman, so you can straighten her out,” Virgil said.

  “You straighten her out,” Becky said. “But I’ll tell you what, I’m going to kill somebody every day until this gets straightened out or you kill me. I’m gonna be watching.”

  “The man you’re with . . . what does he do?” Virgil asked. He could feel the desperation clutching at his throat. “What does he do?”

  “Runs a gas station store—”

  “Ah, for cryin’ out loud, Becky, you guys were trying to find jobs. Right? Weren’t you? Tom McCall said you were looking everywhere, this poor guy is just like you. Got a horseshit job and just trying to pull it together. Don’t shoot him, I’m beggin’ you.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she said. “But I will kill somebody every day until this sex encounter gets straightened out. Just pull up next to them in the truck and shoot them in the head.”

  “Becky . . . I’ll fix it. I’ll fix it.”

  • • •

  SHE WAS GONE. Virgil held on to the phone, said, “Becky? Becky? Becky?” and then a man said, “She’s gone, Virgil. I got the number. It’s a Verizon phone, and I got Verizon looking for the location, but it’ll be a few minutes—”

  Sally, at his shoulder, said, “Oh my God . . .”

  Virgil said to the duty officer, “Get it get it get it . . . see if they can track the phone with the GPS.”

  • • •

  BECKY TOLD THE CLERK to lie down on the floor, and said, “I’m parked right outside, and I’ll shoot you big-time if you move. You better be goddamn certain, when you move, that I’m gone or I’ll put a bullet right through your forehead.”

  She walked out to the truck carrying the grocery bags, threw them in the back, and took off. She was watching the counter where the clerk was, and saw no movement. She turned in the street and headed north, rolled out to the end of town, to a curl in the Mad River, and threw the cell out the window, into a ditch full of cattails. Then she reversed, went around the single block, away from the store, and turned south. A moment later she was heading out of town, and thirty seconds after that, she turned off on a side track and killed her lights again, to drive on in the dark.

  • • •

  THREE MINUTES AFTER Becky hung up, Virgil was pulling on his jeans, with the phone pressed to his ear, and the duty man said, “I got a call from the Bare County sheriff, says a gas station clerk just called them from the town of Arcadia, says he was held up by Becky Welsh. They’re rolling.”

  It took Verizon nine minutes before they found the cell where the phone call came in. Their phone did have GPS enabled, and a Verizon technician said that it wasn’t moving. It was near the bridge over the Mad River, north of Arcadia.

  Virgil punched off and called Duke, who snapped, “What?”

  “You’re headed down to Arcadia?” Virgil asked.

  “Fast as we can get there.”

  “Becky called me on a cell phone she
took off that clerk, and the phone has a GPS,” Virgil said. “The GPS shows it as being near a bridge on the Mad River, north of town. Right on the north edge.”

  “Bet they’re hiding there in the weeds, just like they did in that cornfield.”

  “Don’t kill them if you don’t have to,” Virgil said.

  “You coming?”

  “Fast as I can.”

  • • •

  VIRGIL RAN OUT to his truck, Sally chanting, “Go, go,” as he went out the door. Lights and siren all the way: and he punched up the number for Daisy Jones at Channel Three. It was nearly midnight, but she answered on the second ring and said, “Virgil.”

  “Off the record.”

  “Okay.”

  “Becky Welsh just called me,” he said. “The call came from a small town—”

  “So it worked.”

  “Yeah, but she says if we don’t retract that story about a sex encounter, she’ll kill somebody else every day,” Virgil said. “We need you to go on, with her claim: she says that Tom McCall raped her. I believe her. I’m afraid that we won’t get to her in time, and she’ll kill somebody tomorrow morning if you don’t do this story.”

  “I can do it,” Jones said. “I’ll call the station now. We’ll put it on every half hour.”

  “Good. Thank you.”

  “You know where she’s calling from?” Jones asked.

  “We know where she was a half hour ago. We know where the cell phone is. But I honest to God can’t believe that she’s that dumb. This isn’t quite right.”

  “What town?”

  “Arcadia,” Virgil said.

  “I’m coming as soon as I file. I’ll likely see you there.”

  “Don’t talk to me—talk to the sheriff.”

  • • •

  FOR A CERTAIN TYPE of personality, found mostly on the plains, in the South and the Southwest, there is a great sense of pleasure in going out on the rural roads at night and driving as far and fast as you can. When you come up to a high spot on an overcast night, you can see domes of light scattered around the landscape, reflected off the clouds, marking the towns, almost like illuminated chessmen scattered around a vast chessboard.

  Virgil was that kind of personality.

  When he was a teenager too young to drive, he’d occasionally hitchhike somewhere ridiculous, like up to the Twin Cities or over to Sioux Falls, to do something ridiculous, like buy an ice-cream cone, and scare the brains out of his parents. When he was old enough to have a car, he roamed hundreds of miles out across the prairie, listening to the FM stations come and go, with all the newest pop and rock, dodging oncoming lights that might be cop cars, seeing how long he could keep the speedometer needle over the eighty-miles-an-hour mark. He’d see how lost he could get.

  Part of it might even be genetic, he thought. One of his earliest memories, of men and cars, had been driving at night with his preacher father, riding shotgun in the old man’s bottle-green Pontiac Tempest, the car smelling of nicotine and oil, listening to the radio, to the Pentecostals and the psychics and, best of all, Wolfman Jack on that border blaster signal out of Rosarito Beach, Mexico. Sometimes Wolfman would play one of his father’s favorites, like the Stones singing “Faraway Eyes,” and the old man would sing along with it, nothing like the man who climbed that pulpit every Sunday morning. . . .

  The run to Arcadia held some of that, even as urgent as it was: running at high speed with lights, scaring himself when the wheels broke free at bridges and at unseen curves. He encountered four checkpoints; the word about Arcadia had gotten around, the MPs waved him through in a hurry, calling out encouragement as he barreled past the parked Humvees, in words he didn’t have time to understand.

  As fast as he moved, it took forty minutes to get to Arcadia, and when he got there, coming in from the south, he saw the sheriff’s truck sitting at the gas station, and swerved over to the station, parked, and hopped out.

  Duke was talking to a couple of his deputies, but turned to Virgil and said, “I been talking to your duty officer. He says the phone company says the GPS is right there by the river. There’s nothing there but a dry cattail swamp and a ditch. I think she threw the phone out the window as she was going out of town.”

  “Your guys didn’t run into anybody when they were coming down?”

  Duke shook his head. “And I had them spread out as they were coming down, taking the roads that didn’t have checkpoints. They didn’t see anybody moving. Which means, if she went north, she didn’t go north more than about, mmm, fifteen minutes, or we would have seen her. Probably—there were a few roads we couldn’t cover.”

  “The clerk is sure she went north?”

  “He’s sure. As soon as he heard her truck start, he peeked out the window and saw her go, and when she was gone, he stuck his head out and saw her heading fast down the street. Then he called us. Going north, there’s only one road, until you get a half mile out, then we start running into the farm-to-markets. I got the Guard and my guys setting up a perimeter. Starting tomorrow, we’re going to squeeze them.”

  Virgil talked to the clerk, as Duke listened, making sure that the woman was, in fact, Becky Welsh. He’d never doubted it, after talking to her on the phone, and the clerk said, “It was her. Man, she looks like a killer. She’s got those eyes. And somebody beat her up—her face had bruises up around her eyes, and her lip was cut.”

  “She was raped,” Virgil told Duke. “Another little gift from our friend McCall.”

  “Should have killed him in that ditch,” Duke said.

  “No, we shouldn’t have,” Virgil said.

  • • •

  DUKE LAID OUT the arrangement of his forces, including the Guard and the highway patrol. “We were mostly north of here—we didn’t think they’d be as far south as this. But we got here quick. They’re in the net.”

  Virgil went back to his truck and got out his Minnesota atlas, and spent a half hour looking at the maps.

  The Channel Three truck showed up a few minutes later, and Daisy Jones walked over and talked to the sheriff. Virgil went back to the maps.

  Duke might think that Welsh and Sharp were in the net, and while Arcadia was pretty far south of Bigham, it was actually on the northeast edge of where Virgil’s prison focus group thought they’d be. The heart of the search area, the focus group thought, should be south of Arcadia.

  • • •

  VIRGIL WATCHED as Daisy did a stand-up with the sheriff, and when she’d finished, he went over and said to Duke, “I’m going to get some sleep, but I’ll be out here tomorrow morning. Where’re you going to set up?”

  “Right here,” Duke said. “Don’t sleep late. You might not be in on the . . . capture.”

  17

  VIRGIL DROVE ALL THE WAY back to Marshall, still with the lights, running fast. Sally was gone, so he set the alarm on his phone, put it on the end table next to his ear, and was asleep when his head hit the pillow.

  Sunrise was right around six-thirty, and at seven o’clock, Virgil was back out the door, carrying his duffel bag. The search area would be moving east, he thought, and Sally aside, Marshall was just too far away.

  Jenkins and Shrake agreed to meet him at the Bigham Burger King, and from there, they’d head south toward the focus area; they said that a highway patrolman named Cletus Boykin was coming with them. “We can work in two-man teams that way,” Jenkins said. “Boykin’s an old friend of Shrake’s, and Shrake says he’s okay.”

  “What does that mean? He’ll kill on command?”

  “That, at least,” Jenkins said. “He’ll probably eat the dead, if you tell him to. See you in a half hour.”

  • • •

  IN A COLD DRY SPRING, before the trees bud out, the morning sun seems to shine white like a silver dime on the horizon
, and the clear air over the still-fallow ground gives the prairie a particular bleakness, if your mood is already bleak.

  Virgil had a feeling that there’d be shooting before the end of the day, that people who were alive and even feeling good right then, maybe asleep in their beds, would be bleeding into the dirt before the sun went down.

  Or maybe already: he called the Bare County sheriff’s department and was told nothing had happened yet, but that Duke’s forces were moving into position. Sometime in the middle of the night, the cell phone used by Becky Welsh had been found, and bagged, in case further proof was needed that she’d made the phone call.

  Forty minutes after he left Marshall, running hard again, Virgil arrived at the Burger King and found Jenkins, Shrake, and Boykin drinking coffee among the remains of a nasty breakfast. Boykin was a thin, athletic man with white hair and sun wrinkles; he was wearing his highway patrol uniform. Virgil left his Minnesota atlas with them, and since he suspected that he might not eat again, and since the place offered the full menu twenty-four hours a day, he ordered a Double Whopper with cheese, large fries, and a Diet Coke; the bloat alone would carry him through to the evening.

  When he was back at the booth, working on the Whopper and fries, Shrake, who had his face in a nutrition menu, said, “That’s sixteen hundred and fifty calories, right there, most of it grease.”

  “Tastes really fuckin’ good, though,” Virgil said. He dabbed at his face with a napkin, wiped his fingers, and opened the atlas. “Okay. Here’s the situation. The Bare County people think they’ve got Sharp and Welsh in a net that’s roughly like this.” He traced a circle on the map with a pencil. “My focus group thinks they’ll be a little further south of that—south of Arcadia—and a bit west. The feeling was that they’d drop out of Bare County around here, after robbing that bank and Sharp getting shot.”

  They talked about the search pattern and tactics, and Virgil made sure they’d all be wearing their vests, which Jenkins and Shrake didn’t like to do, and that the two teams would stay close, in case one of them needed support.