Mad River

by John Sandford

  “Well, one of them did.”

  Another reporter: “I talked to the same guy, and he told me the same thing.”

  “Well, if you’d give me that man’s name—”

  “You’d fire him.”

  Duke’s mouth flapped a few times, and then he said, “Damn right I would. There’s nothing more important in law enforcement than loyalty, and you can’t have every Tom, Dick, and Harry shooting off their mouths to a bunch of media whores who don’t want to do nothing more than splash blood all over their TV screens.”

  Almost everybody—almost everybody—was delighted. Virgil turned to Shrake, Jenkins, and Boykin and said, “Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”

  As Virgil and Jenkins got in Virgil’s truck, Virgil could hear Duke screaming into the microphone.

  Something about . . . “pissants.”

  20

  BECKY WAS WORRIED about Jimmy. He was getting hotter all the time, his face red, his eyes glazed. He’d stopped complaining about the pain in his leg, and about most everything else.

  They were still holed up in the old dead man’s house, had eaten their way through a good part of the old man’s food supply—bacon and eggs and bread and oatmeal—and most of their own junk food. The beer was gone.

  Becky tried to keep Jimmy awake because she was terribly afraid that if he went to sleep, he’d die. She didn’t know why she thought that, but she did.

  Early in the afternoon, she helped him into the bathroom, and then back to the couch; she almost lost him on the way back, when he lost his balance, and they began to reel out of control. She managed to steer him onto the couch, and he screamed when his leg hit the leather.

  Ten minutes later, despite her chatter, he went to sleep. She sat with him, watching his breathing, like a new mother with her first baby; and she kept one eye on the television, where she saw Duke’s temper tantrum. From that, she took away one thing: if Duke’s men caught them, they’d be killed.

  She tried to wake Jimmy, gently rocking his shoulder, to tell him about it. He barely responded, cracking his eyes open, and then he was gone again.

  She didn’t know what Becky Welsh would do, so she thought about what a nurse would do, and on the basis of more than twenty years’ sitting in front of TVs, she decided to look at the wound.

  Jimmy was wearing nothing but his undershorts, and was asleep on his back, which made it easier to do. He was still wearing the big first-aid bandage, which was white on the outside, but as soon as you looked deeper, she could see that it had soaked up quite a bit of blood.

  When she decided to look at the wound, she first went to the old man’s linen closet and found his cleanest sheet. Pretty sure that wasn’t good enough, she hand-washed it with a lot of dish soap, then tossed it in the clothes dryer and went and watched more TV while it dried.

  And when it was dry, she made a new bandage pad by folding over the biggest part of it, and made ties by ripping off the ends. All, she thought, pretty professional.

  Jimmy was deep in sleep. She tried to gently wake him, but this time he didn’t open his eyes. Just as well, she thought. She used a pair of scissors to cut off the ties on the first-aid bandage, and then carefully peeled it off. The wound looked like a really bad, overcooked personal pizza, the kind with too much tomato sauce and islands of runny yellow cheese; the surface at the center was damp with blood, but it dried out toward the edges. The edge of the wound, where the leg was trying to heal itself, looked a bit like pizza crust, as well.

  She didn’t know it, but the deputy that McCall had shot had been using police hollow points on a .40-caliber handgun, and the bullet had done its work. The entrance wound was no bigger than Becky’s little finger, but the exit wound was half the size of a dollar bill.

  She still had some small bandages from the first aid kit, and she smeared some antiseptic ointment on one of them and brushed it across the top of the wound. Jimmy made a low throat sound, not quite a moan, and she stopped, and then started again. She was almost done, working from the middle to an outside edge, when she pushed too hard. The scab at the edge of the wound broke open, and a thumb-sized curl of yellow pus squirted out, almost like shaving cream from a can.

  And it smelled, something of the stink of an animal dead on a hot summer highway.

  She said, aloud, “Oh, no,” and ran to the bathroom and got some toilet paper and came back and mopped it up, but then, feeling that the corruption should be removed, pushed on the wound, and more pus came out, and finally, some purple blood.

  She looked at the wound for a moment, then went into the kitchen and got a fork from the silverware drawer, brought it back, smeared it with antiseptic, and used one of the tangs to pick and press another edge of the wound. And when it cracked, more pus bled out. She was ready for it this time, and the smell, and she worked methodically around the wound, picking at the parts that looked yellow or swollen. When she was done, she’d taken out enough pus to fill a small jelly jar.

  A lot of pus.

  When all she got was blood, she went back to work with the antiseptic, wiping the wound again, then binding it with the clean sheets. She threw all the dirty bandages and toilet paper in the trash, and came back and looked at Jimmy.

  He was still sleeping, but the sleep looked easier, somehow.

  • • •

  A HALF HOUR LATER she was clicking through the relevant TV channels and found a helicopter shot; the shot was following a truck as it climbed a hill toward a farmhouse, part of the search. She was shocked when the camera pulled back a bit, to include the farmhouse in the shot, and she saw the line of distinctive blue silos they’d passed at a farmhouse down the road, a mile or so away. From left to right, there was a short one, then two very tall ones, then another short one, and one that was middle-sized.

  The cops were on the other side of the silos, but were coming their way.

  She said, “Jimmy. Jimmy, you gotta wake up.”

  Jimmy opened his eyes and groaned and said, “Man, I hurt.”

  “You’re better, though. You passed out for a while, and I cleaned up your leg. Cleaned it out. I think you’re healing up now.”

  “Jesus, it hurts,” he said. “How many pills we got left?”

  She crawled across the living room floor to the pill bottles, looked at the OxyContin bottle, and said, “Three.”

  “Gimme two.”

  “I think one would be better.”

  “Need two,” he said. “Gotta find someplace . . .” His tongue flicked out, skittering over his dry lips. “. . . find someplace to get more.”

  She gave him two with a glass of water and said, “Jimmy, they’re searching everywhere, and there was a helicopter, and, shit, Jimmy, they’re right next door. They’re gonna find us. We gotta go.”

  He looked at her for a moment, and she thought he didn’t understand, then he said, simply, “Okay.”

  She took all the food and some blankets and a water jug out to the old man’s truck, which was an old red Dodge. She put the passenger seat down as far as it would go, then helped Jimmy pull on a pair of the old man’s pants, and helped him out the door. The stairs down through the mudroom were the worst part, but once he was outside, he hopped along fairly well.

  “You’re looking a lot better, honey,” Becky said.

  “Hurt like a motherfucker, though,” Jimmy said. His face was so pale it was nearly green.

  She had to help him into the truck, and when he was inside, asked, “Should I take anything else?”

  He thought for a minute, then said, “Move the other truck into the barn and lock it up. Maybe, if they come up here, they’ll decide he ain’t home, and they won’t come looking for this truck.”

  She nodded and ran to the Townes’ black truck and drove it to the barn, hopped out, pulled open the barn door, and drov
e the truck inside. She closed the door, and ran back to the old man’s truck.

  “What do you think?” she asked. “Go for it? Head south? Hide?”

  “Hide until tonight. Find a place, then we get the fuck out of here. You bring the money?”

  “Yeah, I got all the money.”

  • • •

  SHE TURNED THE TRUCK around and they rattled back down the hill. Off to the northwest, she could see a helicopter circling over the countryside. Hoped it wouldn’t come after them . . .

  She drove away from the farmhouse with the silos, staying on the smallest roads and the narrowest tracks. Every time she hit a bump, Jimmy groaned, and she said, “Sorry,” and he said, “Keep going.”

  They’d gone maybe three miles when, as they were crossing the crest of a hill, Becky saw the remnants of an old farm on the hillside, the house burned to its foundations, and the outbuildings caved in. The driveway was covered with grass.

  But the thing was, the woodlot was still standing on the north side of the house. She said, “I think I found a place.”

  Jimmy, who’d been slumping in the seat, pushed himself up and asked, “Where?”

  “Go back through here, and hide in the back of the woods. Unless you go back and look, you’d never see us.”

  “Only got to last a few hours,” Jimmy said. “Let’s do it. I can’t take much more of this fuckin’ road, until the pills kick in better.”

  She turned into the driveway, threaded past the remnants of the ruined buildings, down an alleylike depression that led to the woodlot, and then found an even deeper hole in the woodlot itself. She drove carefully into it, and there, couldn’t see out. She worried about getting stuck, but what was done, was done. She killed the engine and said, “I think we’re okay.”

  Jimmy didn’t respond for a moment, then said, “Fuckin’ helicopter can see us.”

  “Not very well.”

  • • •

  BUT SHE WORRIED ABOUT IT, and when Jimmy seemed to have dozed off again, she covered him with a blanket, got out of the truck, and looked around the abandoned farmstead.

  Anything of value had been stripped off the place, but behind one of the outbuildings she found three old rolls of tar paper, the kind you put under shingles. The stuff was so old that it broke more easily than it unrolled, but eventually, with patience, she pulled off several long strips of it and draped it over the pickup.

  When she was finished, the truck looked like a lump of raw dirt; from the air, she thought comfortably, it should be invisible.

  She climbed back in the truck; Jimmy was snoring.

  She sat and tried to think, but nothing came to her.

  Wished she had the old man’s television. That had been pretty nice.

  A while later, it got dark.

  And cold.

  • • •

  AN HOUR AFTER Welsh and Sharp had fled, Shrake and Boykin drove up the long hill toward the old man’s house. Boykin, who was at the wheel, said, “If I was hiding, I’d take this place.”

  “You said that back at the Jenks’ place.”

  “Well, that one, too,” Boykin said. They came over the top of the hill into the farmyard and Boykin said, “Really looks deserted.”

  “This is David S. Gates,” Shrake said, reading from his list. He picked up his phone, which had been in a cup holder, and poked in Gates’s phone number. He was kicked over to the answering service.

  “Give him a couple of honks,” Shrake said. Boykin leaned on the horn for a minute, and they waited a minute, then tried the horn again.

  “Nobody home,” Boykin said.

  “We’ll come back. We got three more places,” Shrake said.

  Boykin did half a U-turn in the dirt driveway, then had to back up to make the rest of it, and Shrake said, “Pull over. Let me out.”

  “Why?” Boykin pulled over as he asked.

  “Because I’m a detective, and you’re not,” Shrake said. “Get your rifle out of the back, get back behind the car, and cover the windows.”

  Boykin did as he was told, but after he was braced up behind the car, watching the windows in the house, he asked, “What?”

  Shrake had his pistol out. “Look right there, those scuffs . . . what does that look like?”

  Boykin looked; the driveway was a mixture of rock and dirt, and not far from the side door, he could see a scuff line that led toward a shed. “Like somebody dragged something, something like a body,” Boykin said. He lifted the M16 toward the windows and clicked it over to full-auto. “You gonna look?”

  “Don’t let them shoot me,” Shrake said. “And keep one eye on the barn.”

  “Shrake? Don’t be an asshole. Call Virgil—at least get him leaning this way.”

  Shrake paused, then nodded and called Virgil. Virgil said, “We were just turning into the Roses’ place. We’ll be there in two minutes.”

  “Might be nothing,” Shrake said.

  “But it might not be nothing.”

  Shrake put the phone away and walked slowly sideways, watching the house, then the barn, looking for any sign of movement—but the place felt dead to him, and that particular feeling had never let him down. If somebody was breathing inside a building, he could usually feel it—a lot of cops could.

  Boykin called, “Man, take it easy . . .”

  Shrake had gotten past the house and was now halfway to the shed. A new line of windows, on the back of the house, now opened to him, and he called, “Watch the barn,” and he watched the house windows as he followed the scuff line into the shed.

  Where he found the body of David S. Gates.

  Gates’s hand was frozen in a tight position that Shrake recognized as late-stage rigor mortis, with the body starting to relax. So he’d been dead for a while.

  From the car, Boykin shouted, “What?”

  Shrake called back, “Got a body.”

  Then he saw the tank and yelled, “And we got a tank.”

  “What?”

  • • •

  WHEN VIRGIL ARRIVED, Shrake was still in the shed, and Boykin had moved from the car to a large oak tree in the front yard, from which he could see the front and far side of the house, while Shrake watched the back and near side. Virgil was on the phone and Shrake said, “All the windows are closed. No runners. No sign of life at all.”

  “Okay. Jenkins and I are going through the side door. Stay with us.”

  They went in with shotguns. The side door was unlocked. Jenkins led the way; just inside, they found one stairway going up four steps into the house, and another going down to a basement. Virgil stepped down to a lower landing, looked at the dark, cluttered cellar; he could smell old coal, dirt, and potatoes.

  “What do you think?” Virgil asked.

  “I can hold the stairway if you want to clear the basement.”

  Virgil dropped down the stairs, carefully, leading with the muzzle of his shotgun. At the foot of the stairs, he found a bare lightbulb operated with a pull string; he pulled on the string and got some light. The basement had a workbench against one wall, with a disorderly pile of tools and boxes of nails and screws and bolts; the other walls were lined with shelves filled with all manner of junk—broken hoes and rakes, snow shovels, gas cans. One set of shelves was filled with old Ball jars, all empty.

  There was a closed door off to his right, and he pushed it open with a foot, still leading with the muzzle of the gun, and found more junk, including some antiques that his mother would have liked—crocks and creamers, an old chicken-watering can, a couple of battered-looking hoses, coils of outdoor extension cords. No living thing, other than a lot of insects and arachnids.

  A mousetrap, snapped shut, was visible under a shelf.

  He called, “Clear.”

  • •
•

  THEY SPENT TEN MINUTES clearing the rest of the house, then Virgil called Duke, who asked without preamble, “Find anything?”

  “Yeah, we did,” Virgil said.

  • • •

  BOYKIN STAYED OUTSIDE, to direct traffic, while Jenkins, Shrake, and Virgil looked at the living room. They found bandages soaked with blood and pus, a couple of empty pill bottles, a lot of beer bottles, wrappers from various kinds of junk food, and a pile of gay porn movies. The television was still on, and showed an aerial shot of a line of police and military vehicles churning down a gravel road, throwing up a cloud of dust. An excited reporter was saying, “. . . hasn’t been confirmed but we’ve been told that it’s possible that state agents have cornered Welsh and Sharp in a house south of the tiny town of Arcadia.”

  Virgil said, “Ah, man.”

  While they waited for the carnival to arrive, Virgil checked the barn, where he found the Townes’ pickup.

  “They’ve got Gates’s truck. And they’ve had a lot of time,” Virgil said.

  • • •

  TEN MINUTES LATER, Duke and the Guard lieutenant colonel looked at the body in the shed, and then the living room—everybody else was kept outside—and then the colonel asked Virgil, “Using very short words, and speaking slowly, tell me what it all means.”

  “Shrake has more experience with this than I have, and he says that it appears that Mr. Gates’s body is in a later stage of rigor mortis,” Virgil said. “Rigor sets in three or four hours after death and can last two days, or a bit more, especially if it’s cold, and the body has apparently been outside since Mr. Gates was killed. If he’s in the later stages, then he was probably killed right after they killed the Townes and left the cornfield. They probably came right here.”

  Duke looked around, puzzled, and then, “But . . . that doesn’t help. The question is, when did they leave? If he’s been dead ever since they killed the Townes . . . they could be in Mexico.”

  “I don’t think so,” Virgil said. “These bandages . . . Jimmy was hit pretty hard. There’s a lot of blood and he’s got a bad infection. I think they’re not long gone—maybe chased out when they saw the search going on. I think Jimmy is in big trouble.”