Bad Blood

don’t fire at us.”
    “Hurry,” she said. “We’ve only got a minute or two before they get us. You gotta hurry, Virgil.”
    “We’re running in,” he said. “We’re running.”

20
    V irgil had sent the two highway patrolmen and the two local cops on their way north to watch the meeting at Einstadt’s, and turned south off the highway to go on down to the Rouse place.
    “This goes to about eleven on the weird-shit-o-meter,” Jenkins said. He’d pushed his seat all the way back and had one foot up on the dash. “I gotta admit, Virgil, this country makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m not really that much of a country guy. I’ll take an alley.”
    Virgil asked, “What happened to that bag of Cheetos?”
    “Ah, I think they’re right behind your elbow. Let me see . . .” Jenkins fished the bag out, held it while Virgil took a handful of Cheetos, getting sticky orange cheese goop all over his fingers.
    Virgil said, between chews, “As far as your weird-shit-o-meter goes . . . give me one of those little hand wipes, will you? . . . it would be very hard to find anything a lot weirder than that case you and Shrake had out in Lake Elmo. The mummy.”
    Jenkins considered for a moment, put a finger in his ear to wiggle out an itch, then said, “Yeah, well. All right, that was probably a nine.”
    “Nine, my ass,” Virgil said. “You’re giving child abuse an eleven—” His phone rang, and he one-handed it out of the equipment bin. “And you’re saying the mummy was only a nine? Lots of child abuse around. How many mummies have you run into?”
    He put the phone to his ear, and Coakley was shouting at him, and when she slowed down enough to make herself understood, Virgil said, “Hold on, five minutes. Five minutes. Listen for your phone,” and she was gone.
    They’d been ambling along on the back highway, and Virgil floored it and said, “Get the fuckin’ rifles loaded up, man. They’ve got some kind of lynch mob out there, shooting the place up. There’re a lot of guys, they’ve already got a dead cop. . . .”
    “Told you it was weird out here.” Jenkins unsnapped his safety belt as they rocketed along the road and pulled up one of the rifles and slapped a magazine in it and jacked a shell into the chamber, put the rifle beside his leg, picked up the other one, did the same, then struggled into his vest and dragged Virgil’s vest out of the back. They went through a long sweeping curve and he asked, “What’re we doing? Are we going straight in?”
    “I don’t think so. She said there were a lot of them. And they’re all farm guys and they’ll have hunting rifles.”
    “These vests won’t stop a .30-06,” Jenkins said.
    “Gotta try,” Virgil said. “They might blow up hollow point, I don’t know.”
    “Lift your arm up.” Virgil lifted his arm, and Jenkins said, “I’m putting four mags in your pocket. We got five apiece, thirty rounds each.”
    “There they are,” Virgil said. The house, bathed in car headlights, looked like a white lighthouse, sitting on a hill on the prairie. Virgil reached under the dash and threw a switch that killed his lights: the switch was normally used on surveillance operations, so a person being followed wouldn’t see a car pulling away from a curb.
    The sudden darkness didn’t quite blind them—he could see the dark ribbon of road between the snow-mounded shoulders on either side, but he had to slow down. The last half-mile took a full minute, and he hoped it wasn’t too long; at the end of it, he took an even narrower lane that ran off the main road, parallel to the side of the Rouse place, and stopped.
    They piled out, and Virgil pulled on his vest and put his coat back on, made sure the extra mags were safely snapped inside his pocket, took out his phone, and called Coakley.
     
     
    “THERE ARE too many of them, we can’t come straight in,” he said. “There are a dozen shooters around the place. . . . We’re coming across the field in the back. If you see people coming in the back, don’t fire at us.”
    “Hurry,” she said. “We’ve only got a minute or two before they get us. You gotta hurry, Virgil.”
    “We’re running in,” he said, as he and Jenkins crossed the ditch to the first fence, snow up to their shins. “We’re running.”
    “Oh, my God, listen to that,” Jenkins said. “It’s a war. They’re shooting the place to pieces.”
    And it sounded like a war, like a battle, a spaced