Mad River

to him, looked up at Jenkins and said, “Put the cuffs on him.” To McGuire he said, “You’re under arrest for accessory to first degree murder, aggravated assault on a police officer, and so on.”
    McGuire took his hands down and said, “What?” He was bleeding heavily from the nose, and at that moment, Martha came running out, carrying what appeared to be a very old .22-caliber revolver with a long thin barrel. She waved it awkwardly and said, “All—”
    Shrake hit her in the forehead and knocked her down, then stood on the gun until Jenkins rolled her over and put another pair of cuffs on her.
    “And Mom’s under arrest for aggravated assault on a police officer,” Virgil said to McGuire.
    Martha groaned and then screamed, “Police.”
    Shrake knelt next to her and said, “We are the police. We’re arresting your son for all these murders and shit you see on TV.”
    “What?”
    McGuire started babbling. “I had nothing to do with any murder, for Christ sakes. Did Royce tell you that? All we did was rough you up a little—hell, it was just a fight.”
    Martha started crying and said, “My head, my head.”
    “Probably ought to get her to the hospital,” Shrake said. “I didn’t have time to hit her easy.”
    Virgil said, “Okay, ma’am, just take it easy, sit there . . .”
    A Sleepy Eye patrol car rolled into the alley, and a cop got out, a hand on his pistol, and Jenkins said, “Shit,” and took out his ID and shouted, “BCA, BCA . . .”
    McGuire said, “My mom’s hurt.”
    Virgil: “I can’t feel too sorry about that. I’m still hurting from you trying to kick me to death.”
    “We weren’t gonna kill you, man. Just supposed to smack you around a little.”
    “I heard that Murphy wanted me dead,” Virgil said.
    “No, no, nobody wanted you dead.”
    Jenkins said, quietly, “Cop.”
    Virgil said to McGuire, “You’re under arrest for assault. You have a right to an attorney. . . .”
    The cop was talking to Shrake when Virgil finished, and he went over and said, “Sorry we didn’t have time to call you, but we were afraid he was running. We just heard where he was a few minutes ago. We were over in Bare County with the search.”
    The cop was a hefty man, with little hair on his head; he looked down at McGuire and said, “Duane, were you hooked up with all that?”
    “No, man, I just . . . Ah, shit.”
    “He and a pal beat me up, over in Bigham,” Virgil said. “He admitted it before we could Mirandize him, just blurted it out. So . . . we’re going to take him over to Bare County, drop him in jail.”
    “What’d Martha do?” the cop asked.
    “She saw us chasing her son and came running out with a gun. Probably . . . misunderstood what was going on.”
    “She under arrest?” the cop asked.
    “For now . . . we’ll get her over to the medical center. What we do after that depends a little on Duane, here. And, of course, what Martha has to say for herself.”
    •   •   •
    THERE’S A KIND of arrest that’s simply tedious, with paperwork to be done and forms to be filled out, and care taken, and the arrest of the McGuires was all of that. A doctor at the medical center determined that Martha was not badly injured, and Virgil cut her loose after she signed a piece of paper that said she would not hold the state liable for any damage done to her, or her shop, during the arrest. A lawyer might later argue that the paper was signed under duress, but only if he was dumb: she’d come through the door with a gun, and might have been shot.
    McGuire was cleaned up at the medical center, and got his nose taped and splinted, and they loaded him into the 4Runner and hauled his complaining ass back to the Bare County jail.
    He’d never said, or even hinted, that he wanted a lawyer, and Virgil had Mirandized him, and he said he understood all of that, and that he’d been Mirandized before. So Virgil was in the clear when he asked, “How much did Murphy give you to beat me up?”
    “Shit, I don’t know,” McGuire said. “He didn’t give it to me, he gave it to Royce. I just went along for the fun of it.”
    “I can understand that,” Shrake said. “Just a good-ol’-boy thing.”
    “That’s right.”
    “So you didn’t get anything?” Virgil asked.
    “Royce give me a hundred bucks afterward. I think he got more.”
    By the time they got him to the jail, they had the whole story: Virgil, as he’d intended, had attracted