Mad River (12 page)

Virgil said, “Not exactly.”

“Not exactly. We were a year out of high school, and we were drinking in my old man’s bar after hours, and Dicky kept pouring it down me . . . hell, it was free . . . and he is a good-looking thing . . . and, he just did it to me,” she said. “I kind of think I resisted, but I was no virgin, and I kind of think I led him on . . . but I think I tried to say no, and he did it anyway. The problem is, I’m not sure of any of that ’cause I was too damn drunk. But I’ll tell you what: I haven’t gotten drunk since then.”

“So it might have been a rape, and even if it wasn’t, he’s an asshole.”

“Yeah, that’d be fair,” she said. “So’s his old man. Anyway, he’s got this friend, Randy White . . .”

White was the only name she had, though, like Roberts, she said there were a few more dumbasses who’d probably agree to do a killing, but nobody that anyone would trust.

“You think Murphy would have trusted Jimmy Sharp?”

“Oh . . . yeah. They knew each other. I saw them shooting pool a couple of times, but what passed between them, I don’t know. Jimmy wasn’t book-learning smart, but when he decided to do something, he’d get it done, somehow. You ever know a guy like that? He’d come up with one bad idea after another, and then he’d execute them?”

Virgil thought of a couple cops he knew, and said, “Yeah, unfortunately.” Then, “But Dick would trust Jimmy.”

“Jimmy would not squeal on Dick, if that’s what you’re asking. He’s too proud to do that.”

“So Jimmy would have been a possibility. Along with this White,” Virgil said.

“I think Randy would have been the first choice, but yeah, Jimmy would have been a possibility.”

When they finished talking, he asked her about her businesses, and she said she currently ran the tattoo parlor, a billiards parlor and bar, a motel, and a tavern. “My business plan calls for me to take the supermarket in three years—it’s in trouble, but I think I could make a go of it. Then the bank. Once I got the bank . . .” She lifted a hand, then closed it into a fist. “I’ll have the whole town right here.”

“Jesus Christ, remind me not to move here,” Virgil said.

She laughed and asked, “You want a tattoo? I could give you a nice little BCA, with a dagger through it, and some drips of blood running down your arm.”

“But it’d hurt,” Virgil said.

“Just a little bit.”

“I try to avoid pain, in all its forms,” Virgil said.

•   •   •

RANDY WHITE.

He asked Bush where White might be found, and she said, “Probably down at the county garage, out on County Road 2. He doesn’t work real hard.”

Virgil went down to the county garage, which turned out to be a Korean War–era Quonset hut, where he found a supervisor named Stan. Stan said that White was probably out on County 4, down past Stillsville, throwing roadkill into the ditch. “He’s supposed to bury anything smaller than a deer, but it’d be a cold day in hell before you’d find him doing that. Just throw it in the weeds is good enough for him. That is, if he’s not sitting in a beer joint somewhere, sneaking a beer. . . . Uh, you’re not related, are you?”

“No, no, just want to talk to him.”

“About Jim Sharp?”

“You know Jim?”

“Know who he is,” Stan said. “Know he used to hang with Randy. Randy says this morning, when I asked him if he heard from his old friend Jimmy, he’d hit me upside the head with a shovel if I told anybody they was friends, which they were.”

“You don’t sound too worried about getting whacked,” Virgil said.

Stan hitched up his Fire Hose work pants: “I’d kick the sonofabitch’s ass, if he tried.”

“You don’t sound that close,” Virgil ventured.

“I’m just tired of doing all my job and half of his,” Stan said.

•   •   •

VIRGIL HEADED DOWN TO STILLSVILLE,
most of which could have been built under an apple tree. There was a combination gas station and grocery store, with a pale-eyed Weimaraner guarding the place. Virgil went in and bought two cold Schlitz longnecks, since they didn’t have any Leinies, put them in his truck cooler with a couple cold bottles of Diet Coke, got in the driver’s seat, gave the dog the finger, and took off. He found White leaning on his shovel a couple miles south of town, his head on his hands, staring across a vacant field.

Virgil pulled up behind the orange county truck. White roused himself to look at Virgil, and asked, “Who’re you?”

“Cop,” Virgil said. “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I need to talk to you about your friend Jimmy Sharp.”

“Stan tell you we were friends?” White asked. You could see the linebacker in him: the wide shoulders, the heavy hips. Virgil had some trouble with linebackers in high school, and wouldn’t have wanted to run into White. But now White had the beginning of a beer belly hanging over his belt, and his nose was already going red with alcohol.

“I never talked to a Stan, but just about everybody else in town told me,” Virgil said. “They said you were asshole buddies, you and Jimmy and Dick Murphy.”

White’s eyelids flickered, almost as if somebody had thrown a punch at him, and Virgil thought,
Uh-huh.
And he said, “So I brought along a couple of beers, and thought we could find a place to sit and talk.”

•   •   •

A PLACE CALLED
Shepard Creek was a few hundred yards down the road, and they went there, Virgil trailing along behind the orange truck. They parked on the gravel shoulder just north of the bridge, and Virgil got the cooler out of the truck and followed White down the bank.

The creek had decades earlier been dammed by local farmers to make a swimming hole. The swimming hole never quite worked out—it silted up over the years—but the remnant of the dam was still there, a pile of small gray granite boulders dug out of local farm fields. A few extra rocks had been left on the bank, to make seats around a fire hole.

Virgil handed White a beer and took a Coke for himself. They sat on a couple of the flatter rocks, and Virgil asked, “Any fish in here?”

“Bullheads, maybe,” White said. “Snakes. It’s about half mud.”

“Smells like bullheads,” Virgil said. They tipped up their bottles, and Virgil said, “So I’ve been told, on pretty good authority, that Dick Murphy paid Jimmy Sharp to kill Dick’s wife. That there was no robbery up at the O’Leary place: Jimmy went up there to kill.”

White shook his head. “I honest to God don’t know anything about that. I don’t want to go to prison, but I just don’t know anything about it.”

“I’ll tell you what, Randy. I’ve sent a lot of people up to Stillwater, but I never sent anybody that I didn’t think deserved it,” Virgil said. “And I did send up a lot of people who deserved it, but never thought I’d get them. Now: a number of people have told me that if Dick Murphy paid Jimmy Sharp to kill Ag Murphy, he probably would have asked you first.”

“He didn’t,” White said, and Virgil watched him take a long pull at the bottle, drinking about half of it down, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a yo-yo.

“But you know
something
,” Virgil said. “I can see it in your face. There are lots of people dead right now, and it all started with Ag Murphy. If you cover up even the slightest little thing, and I find out about it, you’ll go down as an accomplice to multiple murders. You’ll do thirty years.”

“Well, shit, man, I had nothing to do with Ag Murphy,” White said.

“But you know something.”

White tipped the bottle up and finished the beer, and threw the bottle into the creek. The bottle floated gently back past them, under the bridge and out of sight. Virgil said nothing at all, and after a minute, White asked, hoarsely, “You got another one of those?”

Virgil went up to the truck and got the second bottle of Schlitz, handed it to him. White said, “I was shooting pool with Dick, probably two weeks ago, and he says, ‘You know what that bitch did?’ He was talking about Ag. He said, ‘Bitch went up to the Cities and killed my baby boy. She and her lesbo girlfriend went up there and got an abortion.’”

Another minute of silence, then Virgil asked, “Was that true?”

“I think it was,” White said.

“But there was something else he asked,” Virgil said.

White took a sip of the beer, then held the bottle between his knees, looking down at the dirt of the fire hole. “He said Ag had a bunch of money. A whole lot, and if something happened to her, he’d get it. He said she deserved whatever she got. ’Cause of the abortion.”

“And what’d you say?”

White looked sideways at Virgil. “I said, ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’ And I didn’t. After a while, we were shooting pool, and Dick said, ‘I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.’ I said, ‘Good,’ and let it go. When I heard she’d been shot . . . I couldn’t believe it.”

“You should have gone to the sheriff,” Virgil said.

“Duke?” White made a half-choking sound, something like a laugh. “If I’d gone to Duke, he’d of slapped my ass in jail so fast . . . and I’d still be there. The likes of me, I’d never get a break from the likes of him. The thing is . . . Dick never asked me. Never came up again.”

“But you think he had Ag murdered. That’s what you really think,” Virgil said.

Another pull at the bottle. “Yeah. That’s what I think. But he never said anything direct.”

They sat looking at the creek for a minute, then Virgil stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants. “You take care,” he said.

“That’s it?” White asked. “Take care?”

“I might need you as a witness someday. If that happens, I’ll expect you to tell the same story you told here. But maybe it won’t happen. In that case . . .”

“He’ll get away with it.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Yeah, it does,” White said. “A lot. I don’t know why. I’ve always . . . kicked a little ass myself. Never ran from a fight. But Ag, she was a nice girl. She never needed no little cocksucker like Jimmy Sharp shooting her.”

Virgil squatted down, said, “I do have another question for you. I was talking to a guy who said that when you were linebacking, the coach would give you ten dollars every time you took out a starter for the other team.”

“Not true,” White said, but he smiled into his beer bottle.

“Then what was it?”

He looked up at Virgil, and the smile might have been pained. “It was five dollars, and only for running backs, quarterbacks, and receivers.”

“That’s one of the evilest goddamn things I ever heard of,” Virgil said. “In high school ball? It’s a fuckin’ game, man.”

“Not in our conference, and not for our coach. If that sonofabitch ever loses a game to Redwood Falls, he’s toast. He’s outa there. He’s gone. But you’re right. It’s evil, and I shouldn’t never have done it. But, you know . . .”

“What?”

“I needed the money.”

•   •   •

VIRGIL SIGHED
and gave up on football. He said, “Listen, Randy. You’re the only witness against Dick Murphy. Murphy may still be in touch with Jimmy. So you’ve got to take care. I’m serious. You stay away from Murphy, and might want to lock your doors at night—or maybe head out for a few days. We know Jimmy’s got himself some hunting rifles.”

White nodded, and said, “I got this supervisor. Stan. If you could fix it for me to get a couple days off, I could drive up to the Cities. I got a cousin there I can stay with.”

Virgil said, “I can fix that. It’ll be fixed when you get back.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“You have a little thing about Ag Murphy?” Virgil asked.

“No. Hardly even knew her. Didn’t really know her until she married Dick. That’s when I really got to know her,” he said. He stopped, and Virgil waited, because he wasn’t done. He said, “She was a nice girl. Friendly with everyone. I knew her in high school, and she was always nice to me, and then when, you know, she came back here with Dick, I’d see her around, and she’d always stop to talk. . . .”

“But there was really nothing there . . .”

White said, “Ah, Jesus,” and it came out like a sob.

10

INTERESTING.

Randy had a thing about Ag Murphy, and Dick Murphy was apparently so ignorant of that fact that he’d tried to recruit Randy to murder her. That was one semi-solid piece. Only semi-solid because Murphy hadn’t actually made the request; it had been
understood
, and juries wouldn’t always buy that. But if Tom McCall had another piece . . .

As he drove away from White’s truck, Virgil tried McCall’s phone again, and again was shuffled off to Nina Box’s voice mail.

Where the hell were they? What were they doing? They could be halfway to California, if nobody had been looking for them—but half the nation was looking for them, and there was no way they could have avoided that net.

Unless they’d killed somebody out on an isolated farmstead somewhere and were driving the victim’s car out across the prairie toward Los Angeles, or down to the Mexican border. . . .

•   •   •

THEY WEREN’T DOING
any of that; and McCall wasn’t answering the phone because he was too busy.

Jimmy Sharp had a weird feeling about Tom. Like Tom wasn’t with them anymore. His eyes just weren’t right. He’d always been a little slippery about eye contact, but now he could hardly look at Jimmy at all.

They got into Oxford early in the afternoon, working the back roads into Bare County, dodging down side lanes when they saw other cars coming. Oxford was no bigger than Shinder, but because it was tucked away in the far southeast corner of Bare County, with no other towns close by, it had something that Shinder didn’t: a branch of the Bare County Credit Union. Becky had once applied for a job there, but hadn’t gotten it.

And they needed the money now: they were bandits, and they were famous, and they were going to jail if they were caught, but first they’d make a run for it. Jimmy had a vague idea that they might find a way to get to Cuba, or some other place far south.

Becky had her doubts, but she was in for the ride.

Tom . . .

•   •   •

JIMMY DECIDED THAT
when they hit the credit union, he and Tom would go in together. Becky would drive and wait in the street outside. He didn’t trust Tom to wait, and didn’t want to come running out the door and see the getaway car disappearing over the horizon.

Though no place in Minnesota should be dusty in April, Oxford was. There hadn’t been any recent rain, and half the streets in the town were still unpaved, with gravel-and-oil surfaces. Six or eight blocks in the center of town had tar roads, including the single-street business district, which consisted of a Marathon gas station and convenience store, a bar named Josie’s, a barbeque restaurant with a cartoon pig cutout on the door, the credit union, and three empty buildings, one with a fading sign in the window that said: “Artist Lofts Available.”

When they came into town, Becky said, “There’s a chicken on the street.”

A white hen was pecking at gravel on the side of the road, and Jimmy sped up a little, tried to clip the chicken with the passenger side tires, but missed, and the indignant pullet scuttled back into the yard she’d come out of.

Tom was in the backseat again, 9mm handgun in his lap. He said, “They’ll have guns in the bank.”

“No, they don’t,” Becky said. “I went out with a guy once, Bill Hagen, who worked in a bank, and I asked him if he’d shoot a robber and he said they weren’t allowed to keep guns in the bank because the banks were afraid they’d shoot a customer and get sued. He said it was cheaper and safer to give up the money.”

Tom said, “Bill Hagen is only like seventeen years older than you are.”

“So what?” She added, “The thing is, they got money ready to give us—”

“Yeah, yeah, and it’s going to explode on us, you already told us,” Jimmy said. She’d seen it happen on one of the crime-scene shows. “So we’re not taking that money.”

Then Jimmy asked Tom, “Who’s Hagen?”

“Asshole up in Bigham. He’s gotta be like forty.”

Jimmy asked Becky, “You fuck him?”

Tom snorted in the backseat, and Becky said, “Shut up,” and to Jimmy, “What if I did?”

“Nothing. Just wondered.”

Tom asked, “What were you? Fourteen?”

“I was a senior in high school.”

“Everybody shut up,” Jimmy said. “Everybody get ready. We’re two blocks away. Get your hankies.”

They had handkerchiefs to cover their faces, and ball caps to cover the tops of their heads and their eyes. Tom had the handgun, and Jimmy had the pump-action .30-06 with an extra magazine in his pocket. The gunstock was made of a black synthetic, and was big and frightening.

“I bet they have guns,” Tom said.

“I told you, they don’t,” Becky said.

“We got no choice,” Jimmy said. “The cops know about us. So we either get enough money to run, or we go to prison for life, if they don’t shoot us down like a bunch of dirty dogs. If we take a hundred grand outa here, we’re gone. We disappear like a fart in a cyclone. It’s the only chance we got.”

Tom thought,
No, it isn’t
.

Jimmy said to Becky, “When I get out, you slide over and get ready to roll. We’ll be inside one minute.” And to Tom, “Get your mask up.”

•   •   •

THEY’D GONE INTO THE BANK,
the guns out front, screaming at the three women inside, about the time that a Bare County deputy sheriff named Dan Card, alone in his patrol car, was turning the corner onto Main Street, six blocks out. Everybody in the world was looking for the Boxes’ Tahoe and Lexus, and as he rolled along the street, which he’d done probably three thousand times before, without ever having witnessed a single crime of any kind, he realized that one of the cars parked in front of the Oxford Credit Union looked right. It would only have been about the twentieth big SUV he’d looked at that day, but as he got closer, he realized it was the right color, and though he wasn’t much interested in cars, he knew enough to know, when he was a block out, that it sorta looked like a Tahoe. He couldn’t see the plates, but they looked like Minnesota plates, which was to be expected . . . but they were another point.

He picked up his microphone and said, “I have a Tahoe at the credit union in Oxford.”

The dispatcher came back with, “You got the plates?”

“Not yet. I’m just coming up.”

“Let us know,” she said, sounding bored. Probably the two-hundredth Tahoe call she’d taken that day.

As he got closer, he could see that the plates weren’t the ones he was looking for. He stopped, and said, “I got a plate for you. Could you run this?”

He read off the plate, and then got out of the patrol car. He could see somebody in the driver’s seat, sitting there, but looking at him in her mirror. That was nothing new; everybody did that; but the car’s engine was running. That wasn’t quite right, not when gas was $3.50 a gallon and rising.

Card left his door open so he could hear the dispatcher, and loosened the gun on his belt; the excited dispatcher came back, her voice urgent: “Dan, those plates go to a Ford F150 so there’s something wrong there—”

And at that moment Jimmy and Tom, with the masks on their faces, burst through the front door of the bank and out into the street, carrying grocery bags in which they’d put the stolen currency.

•   •   •

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.