Mad River

by John Sandford

  “If you don’t wear the vests, I’ll shoot you myself, just to make the point,” Virgil said. Shrake would go with his friend Boykin, and Virgil would go with Jenkins. Shrake referred to Boykin as “Mad Dog” and “Pit Bull” and Virgil said, “You can call him anything you want, but I’m not gonna ask you why.”

  “Jesus, you’ve gotten pretty touchy,” Shrake said.

  “Lot of dead people,” Virgil muttered.

  “There are always a lot of dead people,” Shrake said. “You can see them on TV all day. Little children fucked and chopped to pieces by freaks. Every day, sure as the sun rises, somewhere in the world, a little child—”

  “Shut up,” Virgil said.

  “—will be slaughtered, and the TV people will find it and put it on your breakfast table. I’ve managed to handle that fact by deciding that I no longer give a shit.”

  Jenkins said to Virgil, “Don’t encourage him. He’s been on this rant for two weeks now.”

  “It’s not a rant. It’s my new meme,” Shrake said. “I’m passing it to others.”

  He pronounced it “mem,” and Jenkins said, “How many times do I have to tell you—”

  “Meem,” Shrake said. “It’s my new meem. Hey, and I’m thinking about going on a vegan diet—”

  “Ah, for Christ sakes, let me ride with Virgil,” Boykin said.

  “Let’s go,” Virgil said.

  • • •

  OUTSIDE, Shrake said to Virgil, “You have a tendency to try to do the right thing. If you have a chance, you’ll try to save these kids’ asses, and you could get shot doing that. Don’t be too softhearted. If you run into them, let the kids call the cards.”

  “You—wear your vest,” Virgil said.

  • • •

  THEY STARTED OUT in the middle of the focus area and spiraled outward. The farmhouses were generally a quarter to a half mile apart, usually not too far off the road, although some were set well back. They’d approach with the flashing lights, stop in the farmyard, and wait for somebody to come out of the house; occasionally, they’d find somebody already out working. The two teams leapfrogged each other, instead of going in opposite directions, so help would always be only a minute or two away.

  At the first house they came to, Virgil stayed in the truck while Jenkins got out on the side opposite the farmhouse. It couldn’t be seen from inside the house, but he was carrying an M14A1, a modified, fully automatic M14 military rifle that had been taken from a Canadian drug dealer a couple of years before. The rifle fired .308 rounds with better penetrating power than M16-based weapons, and would be useful for blowing holes through farmhouse walls.

  A minute after they showed up, a mixed-breed dog that looked like it might be mostly Aussie came running around from behind the barn and started barking at them, but stood off ten yards as it barked. Virgil decided he would not want to mess with it. A few seconds later, a farmer edged nervously out of the house, his hands in the air, and yelled, “Hey, Bob. Sit down. Sit down.” The dog sat down. Virgil shouted, “Sir, could you come all the way over here? We’re with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”

  When the farmer had come right up to him, Virgil confirmed in a low voice that he and his family were okay—“If your family is being held, we’ll go away, and we’ll be back with reinforcements and get you out.”

  “We’re okay. I’ve got my twelve-gauge handy, and if they show up here, they won’t be walking away.”

  “You take care,” Virgil said. “They might not come driving up and knock on the door—they might come sneaking out of a field and jump you when you’re walking out to the car. They’re killers.”

  “We’re all locked up tight and my cousin’s coming up from Worthington in a couple hours with his guns. And we’ve got the dog out in the yard. Not much gets by him.”

  “Don’t shoot each other,” Virgil said. “Or the dog.”

  Before they left, Virgil asked if the farmer had seen any unusual activity, or lack of activity, at local houses. He hadn’t, and said his neighbors were staying in touch, even people who didn’t like each other.

  • • •

  SHRAKE CALLED from down the road and said they’d cleared their first farmhouse.

  • • •

  IT WENT LIKE that all morning. In only two cases was there nobody home. In each case, they were able to locate the owners by phone and confirm that the house should be empty.

  In one case, a farm couple emerged from the house wearing gun belts with leg tie-downs. They competed in Western shooting competitions, they said, and were not too worried.

  At one o’clock in the afternoon, Duke called and said they had a possibility, and were setting up around the farmhouse. They knew there were people inside, because they’d been seen: but nobody had come out, and they’d ignored orders to come out.

  Virgil’s group broke off and drove north through Arcadia to join Duke’s people. When they got there, they found fifty cops around the farmhouse, and out on the lawn, which was dotted with metal windmills and whirligigs. A couple of horses watched from an adjacent pasture, where an Owens cabin cruiser sat on fifty-five-gallon drums, a long way from any water big enough to float it.

  “Can’t get an answer out of them,” Duke said.

  The media showed up, but were kept way back, except for a helicopter that buzzed over a couple of times. Duke went off to brief the TV people, who were getting impatient, pushing toward five o’clock deadlines. Another TV helicopter showed. Virgil saw a curtain moving in the front room window a couple of times, and once thought he saw the flash of a face.

  The scene began to take on the aspect of a carnival, as more and more cops and soldiers came in, but then, around four o’clock, a frightened farm couple showed up and said that the people inside were almost certainly their four foster children, all teenagers, and all of whom were mentally challenged.

  The farmer’s name was Arnie Schmidt, who told Duke, “They’re okay on their own, good with chores and so on, and wouldn’t hurt a flea, really good kids, but they’re probably scared to death. We told them today not to go out and not to let anybody in, because of these crazies. . . . I’m going to walk up there on the lawn and see if they’ll come out to me.”

  Schmidt had been at a co-op and heard about the ruckus from a neighbor, picked up his wife from her job at the phone company, and had driven out as quickly as they could.

  Duke told them he couldn’t be responsible if they got hurt, and told them to stay well back down the lawn until they determined that there was nobody in the house but the children.

  Schmidt immediately violated that, walking straight up to the front porch, while one of Duke’s deputies yelled at him not to go so far; Duke said, “All that media’s gonna be laughing at us, if all we’ve got is a house full of retards.”

  Virgil said, “You know what Ronald Reagan said about that.”

  Duke: “What’s that?”

  “Fuck ’em.”

  Duke disapproved. “I don’t allow my men to use that kind of language.”

  “Good thing I’m not one of your men,” Virgil said. “Look at that: they’re coming out.”

  Four kids came out of the house, all boys, maybe ten to fourteen, the two tallest ones trying to explain to Schmidt what they’d done, the smaller ones crying as they looked at the circle of cars and trucks around them. Schmidt and his wife tried to calm them down, and the carnival packed up and in a half hour had gone away.

  Shrake, sitting on the fender of Boykin’s patrol car, said, “Well, that was enlightening.”

  “Another day on the job,” Virgil said. “Let’s get going.”

  They stopped in Arcadia to pick up Cokes and went back to work; they quit at six o’clock, having cleared an area of about five miles by five. If they’d worked another couple of hours, the
y would have found Welsh and Sharp, huddled in the old dead man’s house at the top of the hill.

  But then, working in the dark, they might have gotten themselves killed.

  • • •

  BECKY AND JIMMY were still hiding in the farmhouse, working their way through the bags of junk food that Becky had brought back from the convenience store. The night had been rough, with Jimmy’s leg pulsing with pain. Becky rationed the pain pills, hoping to keep the pain at least bearable until they could get out of the area.

  Jimmy said he couldn’t move yet, and when he woke in the morning, and she washed his leg down, it seemed to her that the wound was starting to smell funny; and not in a ha-ha way. Some blood was still seeping into the bandage, but there was now a massive clot in place, and she was careful not to disturb it as she washed around the edges of it. The edges were yellow and puffy, but when she tentatively pried at them, she got blood instead of pus. She sprayed on a lot of the Band-Aid antiseptic, and re-bandaged it.

  Jimmy said, “You know, you would have made a good nurse.”

  She said, “Thanks,” and she really appreciated the thought.

  • • •

  THEY SPENT THE DAY in front of the television, watching the search. The TV people kept them up to date on the area where the hunt was going on, and while it wasn’t far away, it wasn’t close enough that they felt threatened. They had no hint of Virgil and his crew, who were much closer.

  They talked about what they were going to do. Jimmy thought when they got better, they’d get in the old man’s truck and head south. He’d once been to Missouri with his old man, and there was some rough country down there, where they might get lost for a while. He’d grow a beard and get some overalls so he’d look like a farmer, and when things had quieted down, they’d head farther south.

  He’d decided they wouldn’t go to Cuba or South America because the people there spoke Spanish. They’d go to Australia, he decided, because they spoke English there, and clicking around the TV channels, they came on a National Geographic special about Australia that made the whole place seem so neat that Becky got all excited and cried at the prospect. “Maybe I could be a nurse, in Australia,” she said.

  Jimmy hadn’t looked at any more of the pornos, maybe because of the pain, or maybe because he was embarrassed by them, and when Becky steered the conversation around to their future relationship, he seemed happy enough to talk about it.

  Becky asked, “You like me, right?”

  “Sure. I always liked you,” Jimmy said.

  “It’s just that, you know . . . we’ve only done it a couple times, and you always seemed to like that other thing better.”

  “All men like the other thing better,” Jimmy said. “But you know, doing it, we just haven’t had a lot of time. There didn’t seem to be a good place, either.”

  “That’s the only way you can have kids, though,” she observed.

  He was silent for a while after that, and finally she asked, “Don’t you want to have kids?”

  He said, “Don’t know. Maybe.” After a while, he said, “Tell you one thing, if we ever have kids, we won’t treat them like we was. I mean, we’d be strict, but no hitting in the head, or anything like that.”

  Another long silence, then she said, “Did your old man do that?”

  Jimmy showed some teeth in a grin and said, “One time, when I was about ten years old, I was sitting in the dinner chair and I said, ‘I really hate these peas, they’re all runny,’ and he whacked me with his hand right on the side of the head, and I flew into the wall, I think, and it was like an hour later when I woke up on the floor. My goddamn head hurt for, like, two weeks. Dizzy, throwing up. When I got better, I thought about sneaking into his bedroom at night and killing the old sonofabitch. I’m glad I got to do that, finally. Got to do it before I die.”

  “We aren’t gonna die,” Becky said.

  Jimmy said, “Yeah, well,” and gestured at the TV, which was showing an aerial shot of a cluster of cop cars and army Humvees at an intersection, and a long line of cars stopped behind them.

  “We’re going to Australia,” Becky said, trying to show some confidence.

  • • •

  THEY WATCHED FOR A WHILE, clicking around channels, and Jimmy said, “That beer sure was good. That hit the spot.”

  She helped him get into the bathroom and get his pants down so he could pee, and caught sight of herself in the bathroom mirror, and when he’d finished, and zipped up, she asked, “You think I’m pretty?”

  “You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever talked to,” he said. The truth was shining from his eyes, and she thought, it’d all been worth it, just to hear that.

  • • •

  LATER IN THE DAY, as the sun was going down, she made some Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup, but Jimmy had trouble hanging on to the spoon, so she fed him, and then he went to sleep on the couch. He was sleeping soundly when she started to get sleepy herself, so she put a blanket on him, and wrapped herself in a couple more blankets and a couple of sheets, and went to sleep on the floor next to the couch.

  At two o’clock in the morning, Jimmy moaned, a long, low, blood-curdling moan that sounded right up next to death.

  18

  VIRGIL GOT ONE of the last rooms at the Minnesota Valley Lodge, where it seemed that half the cops in Minnesota were camped out, many of whom he knew. Whatever else had happened with this rampage, it was good for the local motel and diner business, he thought.

  He ate with a couple of sheriffs and a couple of their deputies who’d come in on a mutual aid arrangement, talking about the state of the search, about the craziness of kids, about salaries and budgets and retirement plans, and one of the deputies wondered if there was any action in Bigham, and his boss said, “If you find any action, I’ll tell your wife.”

  “What’s the point in going out of town . . . ?”

  The sheriff said, “Doug, the fact is, if you found any action, you wouldn’t know what to do with it. I’d know what to do with it. Virgil would know what to do with it. You wouldn’t know. You’d just call up your old lady and say, ‘Marge, I found some action. What should I do with it?’”

  Doug said, “Well. You got me there. Maybe I’ll just have another beer.”

  “Attaboy,” said the sheriff.

  • • •

  AFTER DINNER, Virgil walked downtown to The Bush, where a half dozen younger guys were shooting pool while a couple of wives or girlfriends watched, everybody armed with bottles of beer; and some older guys watched from the bar or sat elbows-on-the-bar and talked. Roseanne Bush was working as the bartender and, when she came down to him, asked, “What can I do you for?”

  “You got a Leinie’s?”

  “Does a chicken have lips?” He didn’t know the answer to that, but she went down to a cooler and brought back a bottle of Leinenkugel’s, and popped the top off for him. He deliberately chose a stool at the end of the bar, away from the others, and he asked quietly, “Any of Jimmy Sharp’s friends in here? Guys he shot pool with?”

  She said, just as quietly, and with a friendly grin, “What the fuck are you doing coming in here and asking me that? I’m not supposed to know you.”

  Virgil, “Any of them?”

  She stopped in mid-sentence, then said, “The big guy in the turquoise T-shirt with the orange thing on it. Donny Morton. He’s the only one. And he wasn’t friends, they just shot pool together. Now, don’t ask me any more questions. Just git.”

  • • •

  VIRGIL NURSED THE BEER for a while, then looked around, picked out the guy in the turquoise shirt with the orange thing on it. He had no idea what the orange thing was, but it looked like some kind of Indian symbol. Morton was no Indian: he was maybe six-seven, with long blond hair and a chubby pink face. Under thirty, Virgil thought,
and maybe a biker; he had a wallet connected to his belt with a brass chain, wore heavy motorcycle boots, and put out a vibration.

  He looked sort of mean, but in a hygienic, Minnesota way.

  Virgil didn’t want to give Roseanne away, and since Morton hadn’t paid any attention to him, he finished the beer, laid five dollars on the bar, and headed for the door.

  Outside, under the entrance light, he took out his pocket notebook, a Moleskine, and paged through some brief notes, until he found the name “Laura Deren.” He’d been told by one of the O’Learys that Deren was the woman who’d accompanied Ag O’Leary to the Cities, where she’d either miscarried or had an abortion.

  Once he had her name, he checked her driver’s license at the DMV and got an address and ran the address through the smartphone’s map program, and found that Deren was a half mile away.

  With no traffic lights, wide streets, or even much traffic, Virgil walked to Deren’s place in nine minutes by his watch and found that it was a smaller, older apartment building, of brown brick, built in a residential area. The front door was locked, but he found Deren’s name on a doorbell and rang it. He got no answer, leaned on the bell for a while, still got no answer. As he turned to leave, a Toyota Camry pulled into the parking area on the side of the building. A line of single-car garages was built along the length of the parking area, and the car waited while the door to one of them rolled up. The DMV had listed Deren as the owner of a Camry, and when the car had parked, a woman stepped out of the garage, aimed a key-ring remote at it, and the door rolled down.

  Virgil stepped up and asked, “Miz Deren?”

  She was wearing high heels and a suit, and he startled her, speaking from the dark, and she said, “Uh . . .”

  Virgil said quickly, “I’m a police officer, with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I’m investigating the death of Ag O’Leary.”

  Still tentative, she asked, “You have identification?”

  “Sure.” He took his ID out of his jacket and handed it to her.