Mad River

exactly.”
    “Not exactly. We were a year out of high school, and we were drinking in my old man’s bar after hours, and Dicky kept pouring it down me . . . hell, it was free . . . and he is a good-looking thing . . . and, he just did it to me,” she said. “I kind of think I resisted, but I was no virgin, and I kind of think I led him on . . . but I think I tried to say no, and he did it anyway. The problem is, I’m not sure of any of that ’cause I was too damn drunk. But I’ll tell you what: I haven’t gotten drunk since then.”
    “So it might have been a rape, and even if it wasn’t, he’s an asshole.”
    “Yeah, that’d be fair,” she said. “So’s his old man. Anyway, he’s got this friend, Randy White . . .”
    White was the only name she had, though, like Roberts, she said there were a few more dumbasses who’d probably agree to do a killing, but nobody that anyone would trust.
    “You think Murphy would have trusted Jimmy Sharp?”
    “Oh . . . yeah. They knew each other. I saw them shooting pool a couple of times, but what passed between them, I don’t know. Jimmy wasn’t book-learning smart, but when he decided to do something, he’d get it done, somehow. You ever know a guy like that? He’d come up with one bad idea after another, and then he’d execute them?”
    Virgil thought of a couple cops he knew, and said, “Yeah, unfortunately.” Then, “But Dick would trust Jimmy.”
    “Jimmy would not squeal on Dick, if that’s what you’re asking. He’s too proud to do that.”
    “So Jimmy would have been a possibility. Along with this White,” Virgil said.
    “I think Randy would have been the first choice, but yeah, Jimmy would have been a possibility.”
    When they finished talking, he asked her about her businesses, and she said she currently ran the tattoo parlor, a billiards parlor and bar, a motel, and a tavern. “My business plan calls for me to take the supermarket in three years—it’s in trouble, but I think I could make a go of it. Then the bank. Once I got the bank . . .” She lifted a hand, then closed it into a fist. “I’ll have the whole town right here.”
    “Jesus Christ, remind me not to move here,” Virgil said.
    She laughed and asked, “You want a tattoo? I could give you a nice little BCA, with a dagger through it, and some drips of blood running down your arm.”
    “But it’d hurt,” Virgil said.
    “Just a little bit.”
    “I try to avoid pain, in all its forms,” Virgil said.
    •   •   •
    RANDY WHITE.
    He asked Bush where White might be found, and she said, “Probably down at the county garage, out on County Road 2. He doesn’t work real hard.”
    Virgil went down to the county garage, which turned out to be a Korean War–era Quonset hut, where he found a supervisor named Stan. Stan said that White was probably out on County 4, down past Stillsville, throwing roadkill into the ditch. “He’s supposed to bury anything smaller than a deer, but it’d be a cold day in hell before you’d find him doing that. Just throw it in the weeds is good enough for him. That is, if he’s not sitting in a beer joint somewhere, sneaking a beer. . . . Uh, you’re not related, are you?”
    “No, no, just want to talk to him.”
    “About Jim Sharp?”
    “You know Jim?”
    “Know who he is,” Stan said. “Know he used to hang with Randy. Randy says this morning, when I asked him if he heard from his old friend Jimmy, he’d hit me upside the head with a shovel if I told anybody they was friends, which they were.”
    “You don’t sound too worried about getting whacked,” Virgil said.
    Stan hitched up his Fire Hose work pants: “I’d kick the sonofabitch’s ass, if he tried.”
    “You don’t sound that close,” Virgil ventured.
    “I’m just tired of doing all my job and half of his,” Stan said.
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL HEADED DOWN TO STILLSVILLE, most of which could have been built under an apple tree. There was a combination gas station and grocery store, with a pale-eyed Weimaraner guarding the place. Virgil went in and bought two cold Schlitz longnecks, since they didn’t have any Leinies, put them in his truck cooler with a couple cold bottles of Diet Coke, got in the driver’s seat, gave the dog the finger, and took off. He found White leaning on his shovel a couple miles south of town, his head on his hands, staring across a vacant field.
    Virgil pulled up behind the orange county