Bad Blood

looked like a surrendering German in old World War II books that Virgil had seen.
    “Move out into the light,” Virgil said. And, “I can’t fool around here. If you do anything quick, I’m gonna shoot you. Get down on the ground, flat on your face.”
    The man got down, and Jenkins came up and cuffed him, and then patted him down. The man said, “They left me. Ran like chickens.”
    “Don’t worry,” Virgil said, “You’re gonna have a lot of time to talk to them about it.”
     
     
    THEY CLEARED the trucks, found another wounded man, an older man, face wet with pain-sweat, going into shock, shot through both legs. He said, “Help me,” and they threw his gun into the snow and then hastily cut strips of cloth out of the back of his coat and put pressure pads on the leg wounds.
    They cuffed him to the steering wheel when they were done, and moved on, but found nobody else. Virgil said, “Jesus, Jenkins, you went through here like Mad Dog McGurk.”
    “I was feeling uncharitable,” Jenkins said. “And hell, I didn’t even see most of these guys. Once they got in the trucks, I just started unloading on the vehicles, to mark them.”
    Another car came steaming down the highway and up the drive: Brown and Schickel.
    Virgil met them at the top of the hill: the house was now fully aflame, and he could feel the heat on his back, and water from melting snow was starting to run down the driveway.
    “We need to get Dunn to the hospital like right now: can you take him?”
    Brown took him, and five minutes later the first of the ambulances arrived. They put the blind man in first, and then the man shot through the legs. The second ambulance arrived, and the highway patrol cops loaded a man from the ditched truck; he’d been hit in the back. One of the ambulance people said he thought that one of the men lying in front of the house was still alive. But maybe not.
    They took him.
    More cops started coming in, everybody from Warren, Martin, and Jackson counties, cars parking up and down the road, searchlights and flashlights looking behind trees, following tracks out across the fields.
    Coakley said to Virgil, “We need to get Kristy to town while she can still talk. We need a batch of warrants, and we need to get all these cops in there. We can leave three or four out here to watch the place until morning, but there’s not much left....”
    “You do it,” Virgil said. “You’re the sheriff. I just want to sit down for a couple of minutes.”
    So she did it, and he sat, looking at the shambles.
    Jenkins said, at one point, “Fifteen.”
    Virgil asked, “What?” and, “Oh, yeah.” The weird-shit-o-meter.
    Jenkins asked, “How you doing?”
    “Sorta freaked, ’cause you know what? I feel pretty fuckin’ good, like I could do it again,” Virgil said. “Man: what a fuckin’ rush.”
    Jenkins grinned at him in the firelight and said, “Shhh. We don’t tell anybody that.”

21
    C oakley was good at organization, and the shoot-out—with one of their own among the dead—galvanized what Virgil thought of as a “community reaction” among the arriving cops. He’d seen it often enough in small towns, usually after a tornado, where there wasn’t the infrastructure to deal with a major emergency, and so everybody pitched in simply because there wasn’t anybody else to do it.
    Warren County was twice the area of all of New York City, and Coakley had twelve deputies to cover all but the city of Homestead, and had to have at least one patrolman on, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. She also had two sergeants and an investigator, two part-time deputies, and fifteen corrections officers; plus twenty or so officers from adjoining counties.
    She rounded up all of them, matched cops who knew the county with those who didn’t, and sent a dozen teams to round up families whose children had been identified by Kristy in the photos from the closet. The rest she sent into the sheriff’s department in Homestead, where they’d meet in a courtroom and produce warrants for the next day, while the corrections officers would be processing those arrested into the jail. The other four would remain at the Rouse place overnight, guarding the scene.
    Kristy was sent to the sheriff’s department with a county child welfare worker, who was told to give her a bed in a jail cell, with the door unlocked. They wanted her secure, but not frightened.
    Two fire trucks had arrived from the local volunteer fire