Mad River

thing she’d ever learned from her father that was probably right: money talked.
    She got back in the truck, touched Jimmy on the forehead, then pushed his head back and kissed him on the lips. A minute later she’d threaded her way back through the trees and out to the road. The sun was still below the horizon, but was close—she could see the sparkle that comes just before the rim lifts itself above the earth.
    Going to be a nice day,
she thought.
    She looked both ways at the road, which was empty, and turned the red truck left toward Arcadia.
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL WAS MOVING FAST, but somebody was moving faster, and a few minutes out of Arcadia, a sheriff’s car caught up with him, then fell in behind, and they ran the last few miles together. The sun was up now, a shiny silver half-dime on the horizon, too white to look at, throwing long shadows across the road and kicking up dew-sparkles on the grassy shoulders.
    They crossed the Mad River bridge going into town, slowed down, then slowed more as they came into the gas station. The station was closed, but that didn’t matter: they weren’t there for the doughnuts.
    Virgil got out of the truck and noticed for the first time that the morning was cold and a little damp. A deputy got out of the car behind him and said, “The sheriff is on his way. He’ll be here in seven or eight minutes.”
    Virgil nodded and said, “I want you around behind that house over there . . . in that side street where they won’t see you until they’re past it. I don’t want you lurching out at them, but when they go by—you know it’s a red Dodge pickup?—I want you ready to come in behind them, if necessary. Don’t crowd them.”
    The deputy’s eyes shifted away as he nodded and said, “Okay.”
    Then his eyes came creeping back and Virgil caught them and said, “And don’t go shooting them. You just let them through. I know everybody’s pissed, but Jimmy’s apparently unconscious, so there won’t be any resistance. And I need them. I need their testimony.”
    The deputy asked, “Does the sheriff know that?”
    “Yeah. He knows.”
    Another car showed at the north end of the street, with headlights, and then the headlights died, and Shrake and Jenkins pulled in, in Jenkins’s Crown Vic. Virgil said to the deputy, “If they’re coming, they’ll be here soon. So you go on, like I told you.”
    The deputy got in his car and pulled around the corner. Another patrol car came in from the north, as Jenkins and Shrake parked. Virgil said, “I want you guys with me, sitting on the cars, looking casual. Not too casual, but not like Airborne Rangers, either.”
    They got that, and he went to the second car and told them he wanted them on the north end of town, out of sight, so when the truck came in, he could block off the street that way. The deputy nodded, did a U-turn, and went that way.
    A moment later, Shrake looked down the empty street and said, “It’s like that cowboy movie
High Noon
. Everybody waiting for the shit to hit the fan.”
    The town was very still, Virgil thought.
    •   •   •
    BECKY WELSH’S HEART was pounding like a mill. Like going to the dentist, but a thousand times worse, she thought. You were in your car and nothing hurt and the sun was shining, but you knew you were heading for something that was going to be bad, that was going to be painful; but instead of getting a tooth pulled, they were going to chain you up and treat you like an animal. . . . She’d seen it all on TV, the orange suits, the women who looked like witches—they didn’t even give them their makeup, she thought—and she started to cry.
    For a moment, as she came over a hump in the road and saw the intersection ahead, the intersection where she’d turn toward Arcadia, and set everything going . . . she thought about leaving Jimmy somewhere, on somebody’s doorstep, and calling the cops and then running back to the hole she’d just left. She fantasized about that for a moment: a good-looking woman wearing expensive sunglasses, walking down a beach somewhere, like she’d seen on TV, like Kim Kardashian or somebody, these colored waiters watching her strut . . . No, erase that, some hot Mexican guys with loose white shirts.
    She thought about it, but in her heart she knew she couldn’t do it. She’d never been outside of Minnesota, except those few times when she and some friends went to Hudson, Wisconsin, to drink and hang out.
    That