Mad River

Murphy’s attention when he started interviewing people in the bar, and asked about Murphy. He’d gotten more of an answer than he expected, but more than good enough.
    At the jail, they did more paperwork, and then McGuire was taken back to a cell, the jail guard greeting McGuire with, “Hey, Duane, what you been up to?”
    “Same ol’ shit,” McGuire said. “Listen, I don’t have no drugs stuffed up my asshole. Do you think . . . ?”
    “Oh, I don’t think so,” the guard said.
    “Aw, man . . .”
    Outside, Shrake asked, “What’s next?”
    Virgil said, “Got to pick up Royce Atkins, and we’ve still got to find Sharp and Becky Welsh. That’s the main thing. Murphy, we’ll just leave him on the shelf for a few days.”
    By the time they got McGuire stashed, it was late in the day. Duke was still out on the hunt, and Virgil talked with the chief deputy, who said there had been no more hints that they might be on the fugitives’ trail. “The sheriff just reoriented everybody around that farm you found, and people are working out from that. We’re assuming that since they ditched the Townes’ truck, they’re running around in Gates’s truck. Old red Dodge. We’ve got two choppers running a search pattern around the house, trying to see if they can spot it. Nothing so far, and with dark coming on . . . probably not going to find it tonight.”
    •   •   •
    A HELICOPTER FLEW over Gates’s truck and the abandoned farmstead just after full dark. A searchlight poked through the woods, then spent a moment probing the old sheds, then moved on down the road. Becky held her breath as she heard it coming in, and let it out when it moved on.
    The beating blades woke Jimmy, who groaned and said, “This fuckin’ leg is killing me,” and, “What the fuck is going on?”
    He sounded clear-minded, and Becky said, “A helicopter. Jeez, Jimmy, they’re using everything. It’s going away now.”
    “Didn’t see us?”
    “No, I put some old tar paper over the truck. We look like a pile of dirt.”
    “Good. We got any more pills?”
    “One.”
    Jimmy took the pill and a long drink of water, and then asked, “What time is it?”
    She said, “After seven. We’ve been sitting here a long time.”
    “Gotta move before it gets light,” he said. “Get way south, toward . . . Ohio or . . . whatever.”
    “Iowa,” she said.
    “Farther than that. Ohio or . . . Kansas. Those helicopters . . . didn’t think they’d get no helicopters to chase us.”
    “Got searchlights on them, just like in the Cities.”
    “If we could get to the Cities, we could get lost,” he said.
    “I don’t think we’d get that far,” Becky said. “That’d be running toward them. We’ve got to run away.”
    “Okay.”
    She was a little surprised by his acquiescence; he usually wanted to be the boss. She asked, “You want a cigarette?”
    “Hell, yes.”
    She found a pack of Marlboros, shook one out for him, lit it with a paper match. The smoke smelled good, though she didn’t smoke herself.
    “I think I’m feeling better—my leg is better,” Jimmy said after a while. She thought he might be lying, but she nodded. He said, “All we need is one good break. Get out in the open country and run. Some of that country down there, it’s almost empty. That’s what my old man said. He drove down to Texas once, and he said it’s mostly empty. That’s what we need.”
    “Okay,” she said.
    “We’ll be set for life, starting with that money,” Jimmy said. “We might have to cross the border, you know, until this all blows over. Don’t think we could come back here.”
    “I don’t want to come back here,” she said. The bitterness of the place almost choked her. “Nothing ever good has happened here. If we get down south . . . get a place to live. You know, you could grow a beard, I could do up my hair different.”
    “You’re not gonna be able to make yourself less pretty,” Jimmy said.
    He startled her with that. She didn’t say anything right away, but then said, fishing for a little more, “Oh, I’m not really that pretty.”
    “Yeah, you are,” he said.
    They sat and he smoked and she eventually said, “I’d like a daughter. I mean, I’d like a couple of boys, for sure, but I’d like a daughter. I know a lot of shit that I could teach her. You could teach the boys.”
    “I’d do that. Teach them to hunt,” Jimmy said.
    “I could teach the girls how to