Mad River

you been eatin’ off Mom?”
    “You little fuckin’ brat, I raised you and fed you and now you come around with your peckerwood friends with your hands out—”
    “You just call me a peckerhead?” Jimmy asked, his voice quiet.
    “Peckerwood,” the old man said. “I said peckerwood. But you want me to call you a peckerhead? Okay, you’re a peckerhead.”
    Becky’s mother snorted at that: funny stuff. She stopped smiling when Jimmy took out the .38.
    “Now, we don’t need that,” Becky’s father said.
    “You think I’m a peckerhead now?” Jimmy asked. He pointed the gun at Welsh’s chest. “Come on, say it.”
    “You’re not one, you’re not one,” Ann Welsh said. She farted in fear, and the smell spread through the kitchen and Tom said, “Aw, Jesus . . .” and waved his hand in front of his face.
    “Let’s just calm down.” Welsh lifted his hands, like cowboys used to do on TV when they were giving up.
    “No. I want to hear you call me a peckerhead again,” Jimmy said.
    Becky said, “Yeah, call him a peckerhead.”
    Welsh was sweating furiously now, and he said, “I don’t know what to do.”
    Jimmy said, “Easy. Just what I told you. Call me a peckerhead.”
    Welsh said, “Don’t point the gun—”
    “Call me a peckerhead, or goddamnit, I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out,” Jimmy said.
    Welsh whimpered, and Jimmy smiled at the sound, and Welsh licked his lips and muttered, “Peckerhead.”
    Jimmy shot him in the heart, and Ann Welsh turned on a dime and made for the back door, got three steps and Jimmy, stepping along behind her, shot her in the back of the head. He looked at them on the floor and turned to Becky and asked, “You hate me now?”
    Her eyes were steel gray and she shook her head once: “No. Fuck ’em. They ruined my life.”
    Tom said, “We better get out of here.”
    Becky said to Jimmy: “Let’s go to Marshall. I know where we can get it all—car, money, everything.”

6
    VIRGIL SPENT A FRUITLESS Sunday morning sitting in his truck, calling people on the telephone—people turned up by Davenport in the Twin Cities, people in Shinder who knew Becky Welsh or Jimmy Sharp, or any of the dead people, scratching for any connection.
    The most confounding thing, at least for the moment, was the disappearance of the elder Sharp’s truck. They had it on some authority that it wouldn’t make it fifty miles, but he couldn’t find it anywhere in Minnesota, Iowa, or North or South Dakota, and at this point there were several hundred cops looking for it.
    Duke asked, “Where do you think it is? Give me a guess.”
    “It’s down in a creek bed somewhere, where it can’t be seen from a road, and they’re camping out with it, or it’s in a garage or a barn and they’ve got new wheels.”
    At one o’clock, they had two nearly simultaneous breaks. Virgil had the crime-scene crew work over the Charger, and they’d found dozens of fingerprints, both in the front and back seats, and because of the extreme amount of plastic in the car, they got good ones. At one o’clock, they got a return on one set of them: Tom McCall, who had no criminal record, had been fingerprinted when he went into the navy, and his fingerprints were in the federal database.
    A few minutes later, Duke called to say that he’d found McCall’s mother, an elementary school teacher in Bigham. McCall’s father had gone out for a loaf of bread a few years earlier and hadn’t yet returned.
    “I want to talk to her,” Virgil said. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”
    He called Davenport and said, “Tom McCall was in the car, in the backseat. So I think I can call it: James Sharp, Becky Welsh, Tom McCall. I don’t know Sharp’s or Welsh’s status yet, but I’m assuming they’re all in on it.”
    “Good bet,” Davenport said. “You got a lot of media coming your way. It’s gone viral.”
    “That’s okay: it’s a snake hunt now,” Virgil said. “The more eyes, the better.”
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL DROVE NORTHEAST TO BIGHAM, watching the tattered spring earth roll by. The land was creased by creeks and drainage ditches, broad fields showing the remnants of last year’s corn and bean fields. Later in the spring, when the ground warmed up a bit more, and dried out, the farmers would get out and plow and plant and the fields would take on their customary neatness; but now, everything looked beat-up.
    Still cold.
    It wouldn’t be easy to conceal a big silver truck,