Mad River

“Here.” He pushed a short two-cushion couch out of the living room and between the basement door and a hallway wall, so the door couldn’t be opened.
    Nina Box said, “We’ll give you anything you want.”
    She was a little heavy, but not bad-looking, and Jimmy asked Tom, “You want to fuck her?”
    Rick Box said, “Hey,” and started to get to his feet, and Jimmy shot him in the heart, and he fell down and curled himself like a snail.
    Nina began screaming, and Jimmy said to Tom, “Well, you wanna?” When Tom said, “No, I guess not,” Jimmy said, “Okay,” and aimed the pistol at her head and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell on an empty cylinder, and Jimmy said, “Shit,” and then he grinned at Tom and said, “Goddamn good thing that didn’t happen with
him
. He would have kicked my ass.”
    Nina started to get up and Jimmy hit her in the face with the gun and she went down, and Jimmy said, “Let’s look around. There’ll be a gun around here somewhere.”
    They found the gun safe, in an extra-deep closet in the main bedroom; the key was hanging from a hook, and when they opened the safe, Jimmy found four handguns and some long guns, including a black rifle. He said, “Oh, boy, I always wanted me one of these.”
    But he left the rifle on the bed, loaded the nine-millimeter, figured out how it worked. Guns are wonderful machines: simple, precise, efficient. Anyone can use them—they don’t discriminate between high and low, smart or stupid. To a gun, everybody’s equal. Jimmy prodded Nina Box back into the living room, looked at her, then at Tom, and said, “You’re sure?”
    “Yeah.”
    Nina looked at her dead husband and began to shake with fear and regret and said, “Please don’t,” but Jimmy shot her in the head and she fell beside her husband and, like him, curled herself into a snail shape.
    •   •   •
    JIMMY, BECKY, and Tom spent the rest of the day eating, watching television, and ransacking the house. They got two hundred dollars in cash, which Jimmy added to the stash. Becky said, “Tell me how much we’ve got.” Jimmy smiled, uncurled the sheath of bills, licked a finger, and counted it out: a little over twelve hundred dollars.
    Tom said, “Holy shit. You must’ve took a thousand dollars off that girl.”
    “Not exactly,” Jimmy said, but he wouldn’t say anything more, even after Becky started picking at him. Finally, she asked, “Did you get that money for killing her?”
    Jimmy said, “Shut up.”
    Tom thought,
Jeez. He did. He got the money for killing her.
    •   •   •
    THEY WATCHED TELEVISION, but it was all cable stuff, and they didn’t know that they were being hunted until late in the afternoon, a “Five dead in Minnesota” news flash.
    The next thing they knew, they were looking at photos of themselves; and the sheriff—Duke, they all knew who he was—said that they were looking for a silver Chevy truck, and he said the numbers on the plate.
    Tom rocked back and said, “We’re cooked, goddamnit, I knew it, we’re cooked.”
    Jimmy asked, “How could they know all that? How could they know it?”
    Tom said, “Fingerprints. Witnesses. Somebody saw us, that’s how. Everybody in town knew us.”
    “Gotta think, gotta think,” Jimmy said.
    “You don’t gotta think at this very minute. What you gotta do is get that truck out of the driveway,” Tom said.
    •   •   •
    THEY DIDN’T KNOW IT, because they weren’t smart enough, but they were cruising purely on luck when Jimmy and Tom took the truck out of town, sticking to back streets, out into the countryside, with Becky driving the Boxes’ Tahoe behind them.
    Jimmy had figured out that as long as the cops were looking for the silver truck, they wouldn’t be looking for anything else. He didn’t know the land west of Marshall very well, but he knew what he was looking for, and he found it eight or ten miles out of town, a long snaky creek with a low bank. He drove the truck off the road and across the corner of a cornfield, then into the trees next to the creek, running over saplings and small stuff until he was stopped by a fallen log.
    By that time, he was far enough back that the truck couldn’t be seen from the road. The farmer would find it when he started plowing, but that’d be a while yet.
    When they were all back in the Tahoe, Jimmy said, “Let’s get back to the house. Sit and figure out what to do. We got to get out of here. Maybe . . .