Mad River

them straight to the front door so they never see them. Okay? Everybody.”
    Everybody nodded, then they lifted the couch away from the door. Virgil looked down the stairs at two children, a boy perhaps six, who was holding the hand of a girl who was maybe four. The sheriff was at his shoulder and he said, “Oh, no, no, no.” He went down the stairs and said, “Kids, come on up here. Come on with me. Come on with me, honey.”
    He picked up the girl, and the boy took his hand, and Virgil said, “Out the front.” The sheriff took the kids outside, carrying the girl, towing the boy with his hand; the boy looked back at Virgil, and Virgil saw the truth in his eyes: the kid knew, at some level.
    One of the cops, a heavyset balding man in his fifties, watched the kids go and then started to snuffle, and Virgil said, “Okay, okay, everybody . . . We got a lot of work to do. Let’s hold it all together.”
    One of the drug cops said, “What if they’re coming back? Maybe we oughta get the kids out of here and set up an ambush.”
    “We can do that out a few blocks,” Virgil said. “If that’s the Boxes in there, we’ll have to assume that they’ve got the Boxes’ cars and they’ve still got the truck. We need tags for the Boxes’ cars—there could be two of them. . . . Set up a watch . . .”
    One of the cops, a sergeant, said, “I’ll get that going,” and he jogged away, and another cop came from the back and said, “Cars isn’t all they got.”
    Virgil: “What?”
    The cop said, “There’s a gun safe back here. It’s open, but there aren’t any guns in it.”
    Virgil went to look. The gun safe was five feet tall, of a forest-green metal, had foam barrel slots for eight long guns, and five of the slots appeared to have been used. At the top of the safe were four foam-lined slots for handguns, and all four appeared used.
    On the floor of the safe, a couple of ordinary plastic bags showed a flash of brass, and Virgil picked them up. Inside the first was a variety of empty shells: 9mm, which would be a handgun; a couple of dozen .44 Magnum, which could be either a handgun or a carbine, but most likely a handgun; a dozen or so .308 rifle shells, and as many in .223, and a bunch of little .22s. The other bag was full of empty 12- and 20-gauge shotgun shells.
    “They got themselves an army,” one of the cops said.
    •   •   •
    THE CHIEF OF POLICE, who’d been out with his wife at her sister’s house, showed up, and he and Virgil and the sheriff got together in the driveway. Up and down the street, lights were going on, and Virgil sent a cop to tell people to turn them off. The chief, a burly man with heavy glasses, said, “We’ve got a perimeter set up. If they try to come back in, we’ll nail ’em.”
    The cars’ descriptions were going out to all agencies: a year-old Chevy Tahoe, a four-year-old Lexus RX 400h.
    Virgil asked, “What about the kids?”
    “Social Services lady has them—they heard the shots that killed their folks. They couldn’t get out of the basement, no windows. They’ve got relatives down in Windom. We’re looking for them.”
    The chief said, “Now what?”
    Everybody looked at Virgil.

8
    WHEN THEY LEFT the Welsh house, after killing Becky’s parents, nobody said anything for a very long time—Jimmy smoked a cigarette and peered out the windshield like he expected Jesus Christ himself to pop out of the roadside weeds. Then Becky launched into a monologue about how her parents had never given her the things she needed to achieve her goals. Achieving goals had been the one constant refrain she’d taken out of high school, the one thing they drummed into you: about how if you didn’t do this, that, or the other thing—pay attention and learn algebra—you’d never achieve your goals.
    Like she was going to be a rocket scientist, or something.
    You had to be seriously dumb, she said, to believe that rocket science shit. Being a small country high school, classes were less age-segregated than they might be in big-city schools. By the end of the year, most ninth-graders knew most of the upperclassmen and you knew what happened to them when they got out of school.
    A few of the lucky ones, the rich ones, mostly teachers’ kids, went to a state university somewhere. More went out to a two-year college, which was like going to another level of high school, where you learned auto mechanics or how to fix the big windmills that were sprouting