Mad River

was so far away now, all those times.
    She looked over at Jimmy as she pulled up to the intersection. Left or right? Left to drop him somewhere, left to run, or right into Arcadia, and chains and jail. Jail maybe forever.
    But hell, she thought, it couldn’t be any worse than Shinder, could it?
    She leaned across and kissed Jimmy again, but he made no sign that he even knew she was there. She turned right, for Arcadia.
    •   •   •
    DUKE ARRIVED, coming fast into town; he slowed, then stopped and backed up when he saw the patrol car parked on the side street. He didn’t get out, and Virgil could see him talking into his radio. After a few seconds, he came on. Virgil didn’t want the obvious cop car, with the lights, visible, and he gestured for him to pull in behind the gas pumps.
    Duke did, and climbed out and said, “No sign of them yet. It’s been forty minutes. Didn’t she say thirty minutes?”
    “She’s got my phone number, and she hasn’t called again,” Virgil said. “She didn’t know exactly where she was at, either. . . . And if she doesn’t come in, we should be able to get some idea about where she’s at from the cell towers . . . if there’s more than one.”
    “Probably only one out here. If he’s got a GPS chip, though, I think those go through satellites.” Duke stepped out to the street, looked south for a moment, then said, “I gotta listen in . . .”
    He went around and got into his car, and Virgil thought,
Listen to what?
    Jenkins said, “I thought there’d be more people here . . . more cars. There were all kinds of cars running around all night.”
    Then Duke called, through an open window, “They’re coming in.”
    Virgil looked at him, frowned, looked down the street. Nothing moving. He called back, “How do you know that?”
    Duke looked away for a moment, then said, “I thought it’d be best to have a couple cars down by the south bridge . . . just in case.”
    Virgil looked south again: nothing. He said, “You sonofabitch, that better not be an ambush. I need those two alive.”
    Duke said, “That might be . . . I’m not sure it’s possible.”
    Virgil screamed, “You fuck . . .”
    He jumped in his truck, and Jenkins clawed open the passenger door, and Shrake the back door, and they were all in and Virgil took off, and Jenkins said, “What do you think? Are they going to kill them?”
    “Unless we get there first,” Virgil said. “Ah, Jesus, these sonsofabitches . . .”
    •   •   •
    BECKY SAW THE Mad River bridge straight ahead, and steeled herself. Once across the bridge, in town, it was done. What should she say to the cop?
    She was thinking about that when she saw the wink of a windshield reflection by the bridge. They were supposed to meet by the gas station. What was this? She slowed down, and saw a quick motion by the bridge, like somebody ducking out of sight.
    Then, straight ahead, but a quarter mile away, she saw a truck coming toward her, moving fast, no red lights, didn’t look like a cop car, then another car behind that.
    She slowed more, looked to her left . . . saw a hat, then another hat, then a man down in the ditch, and he was pointing a gun at her.
    She shouted at the window glass, “We give up . . . we give up,” and fumbled for the window buttons, the truck coasting closer and closer to the bridge.
    She never felt the bullets: the first ones shattered her skull and she was gone; Jimmy was with her an instant later.
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL WAS NO MORE than a hundred yards away when he saw a deputy step into the road at the bridge, lift an automatic weapon to his shoulder, and open up on the truck. The truck was jumping and shaking, and he saw another man moving in the ditch to the left, and then a third, and they were firing and the truck was shaking and coasting and sliding off to the left. . . .
    Virgil was pounding on the steering wheel and screaming, “No . . .”
    The red pickup rolled off the road, lurched crazily down through the weeds and brush, and stopped with its front wheels in the Mad River.
    Becky and Jimmy didn’t know any of that; they’d been killed with the first volley, their bodies punctured forty and fifty times by the unending stream of .223 slugs.
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL JUMPED OUT of his truck and ran down the riverbank and looked in. The two lumps inside were a mass of blood and bone, hardly looked human; hardly even looked like