Bad Blood

then somebody moaned. Virgil, moving slow again, walked down the side of a shed and found a man on the ground, his face and neck a mass of blood; he’d been hit in the face with a shotgun, Virgil thought, and if he didn’t die, he’d be blind.
    The man had been firing a hunting rifle into the house, and the rifle lay on the ground next to him. Virgil kicked it away, and the man heard him and tried to say something, but was so badly hurt that he mostly swallowed blood: but he might have said, “Help me.”
    Virgil got down behind a tractor wheel on an old John Deere parked next to the shed, and called, loud as he could, “Jenkins!”
    A moment later, “Here.”
    “You okay?”
    “Okay. I’ll meet you back where we started.”
     
     
    VIRGIL MOVED SLOWLY to the back of the house. He got to Coakley, Dunn, and the girl just before Jenkins came in. Virgil was on the phone, calling the highway patrol guys and the local cops off the watch at the Einstadt meeting, and to warn them about men with guns.
    “We need you here, but stay clear of any big bunch of cars—they may be coming your way. We’ve got one dead cop and one wounded. We’re gonna need a fast run into town. . . . We need a fire truck. . . .”
    “We’re coming.”
    Coakley asked, “Are we clear?”
    “I think so,” Jenkins said. “There may be some wounded who still want to fight. Gotta be careful.”
    “Bob’s dead,” Coakley said. “Ah, God, what am I gonna tell Jenny? Ah, God . . .”
    Virgil ignored that and asked Dunn, “How bad’s the bleeding?”
    “I tied a couple strips of towel around it,” he groaned. “They’re soaked, but I don’t think I’ll die from it. My foot’s a mess. . . . I can feel the bones moving around. Man, it hurts. It really hurts.”
    “You warm?” Virgil asked.
    “Huh? Yeah, warm enough.”
    The fire was really blowing up now, had climbed the stairs as though it were a chimney and was spreading into the second floor. Coakley stood up and said, “I’ve got to run around to the other side. Right now. Somebody needs to cover me.”
    She started moving and Virgil said, “I’ll take it,” and followed as she dashed around the back of the house, and then down the far side. Virgil kept the rifle up, now on its third magazine, looking for movement. Heavy black smoke was boiling out of the house now, and glass was beginning to break, and Virgil could smell burning meat.
    Two bodies, at least. Could have been Coakley and Dunn and the girl, as well.
    Coakley went to the side of the house, knelt, then stood, staggering a little, carrying a computer. She got back to Virgil and said, “I threw it out the window. Eight thousand pictures. I couldn’t let it burn. I hope the hard drive’s okay.”
    Jenkins said, “Our guys are coming in,” and Virgil looked out of the woodlot down the road and saw a car coming fast, light bar on the roof, and, at right angles to it, on another road, another car with a light bar. The highway patrolmen. The first car pulled into the driveway and Virgil’s phone rang: “Everything clear?”
    “I don’t know. We’ve got at least two wounded, one of us and one of them. I don’t think anybody’s holding out to ambush us, but take it easy. Wait for your other guy, check the truck across the road, and we’ll start clearing out the buildings here. Watch your gun, careful not to shoot each other—”
    “Okay. Every ambulance in three counties is on the way. It looks like a fuckin’ war, man.”
    “It was a fuckin’ war,” Virgil said, and clicked off.
    He said to Jenkins, “Let’s clear the outbuildings, and the trucks.”
    Four trucks were sitting empty in front of the house and along the sides, all pocked with bullet holes. Jenkins said, “I was doing everything I could to scare the shit out of them, get them running. Nothing scares a shitkicker like somebody shooting up his truck.”
    Virgil might have laughed but Jenkins sounded so intent that he didn’t; instead he said, “Let’s clear them.”
    They went off together, using Coakley’s flashlight, cleared the first, small shed, a repair shop smelling of gasoline; and in the second, large shed, which was full of farm machinery, they moved the light around and a man’s voice said, “Don’t kill me.”
    “Come out of there,” Virgil said. He came out with his hands over his head, a tall, rawboned man maybe twenty years old, with long hair, in a camo jacket. In the dark, and in the military jacket, he