Mad River

floor, and she loaded two of them, fumbling a third onto the floor, jacked one into the chamber. When a tall man in a Twins ball cap pushed through from the mudroom, she was right there in the middle of the kitchen, still bleeding from cuts on her forehead and from her nose. He said, “What?” and she shot him.
    Thirty seconds later she was in the truck, backing out of the driveway. A minute after that, she was pulling up next to the Tahoe in the cornfield.
    Jimmy looked at her bloody face and said, “What?” and Becky said, “He raped me.”
    Jimmy said, “What?”
    And she said, “C’mon, we gotta go. We gotta run.” She began weeping, and she led Jimmy hobbling to the new truck, and pushed two OxyContins into his mouth and asked, “Where’re we going, Jimmy? Where’re we going?”
    •   •   •
    TOM HADN’T THOUGHT out all the necessary strategies for surrender, but was pretty sure that he didn’t want to let the Duke’s deputies get their hands on him first. He wasn’t entirely sure that he could blame the cop shooting on Jimmy, but there were no witnesses, and he thought he probably could. Still, the sheriff’s deputies were bound to be pissed, and so he thought he’d better call Flowers first.
    But even that frightened him. Should he keep on running? He had forty dollars, which would get him halfway across South Dakota, and Becky and Jimmy sure as hell weren’t going to be talking about this Jeep.
    On the other hand, the woman’s husband would be coming home, and they’d be looking for the Jeep anytime now. . . .
    On balance, he thought, he’d be better off with Flowers. It took him a while to get his guts up—and he stopped once, at a turnout, to take a leak, and to throw the .44 into a culvert. Becky had scratched his back, which had kept him going at the time but now hurt like hell.
    Becky.
    He thought about it, and then felt himself smile. Whatever else that had been, it’d been worth it. If he lived through the rest of the day, his half hour with Becky would take care of his dreams for ten thousand nights. He’d never before just taken
anything
.
But he’d taken her: she wouldn’t soon forget Tom McCall.
    But that was then.
    He said to the sky, “Gonna take some shit now,” but he finally pulled the cell phone out of his pocket and turned it on and punched up Flowers’s return number. Flowers came right up and said, “Tom? Where are you?”

11
    VIRGIL TALKED TO THE county administrator and fixed Randy White’s paid leave, without giving up the exact reason. “We think that these killers might be a danger to him, and he’s a witness on some relevant matters that I can’t talk about, so we want to get him out of sight for everybody’s good.”
    The county administrator, a short, stocky, gray-haired man with a buzz cut, who almost had to be a former Marine, said, “God bless you. Take him.”
    Randy, Virgil thought as he walked back to the truck, was not universally respected as a hard worker. He got Randy on his cell phone and said, “It’s done. You’ll be paid and it won’t count against vacation. Get up to the Cities, but you stay in touch. I don’t want to have to go looking for you.”
    He was thinking about getting another bite to eat when Duke called, screaming, “They hit the credit union in Oxford. There’s a possibility that one of our deputies got shot, Dan Card maybe got shot, a guy’s running him into Marshall in his truck. That’s what we hear, we don’t know anything.”
    Virgil found Oxford in his truck atlas. It was about as far away from him as it could be, and still be in Bare County. As he pulled out into the street, he saw two sheriff’s cars bust a red light a couple of blocks away, and he hit his own flashers and took off after them, headed south out of town at high speed.
    •   •   •
    THE ROADS WERE CLEAR and dry and they were all running with lights and sirens. On the way, Virgil called Davenport and told him about it, and that there might be a cop down. Seven or eight minutes later, Davenport called back and said, “Card is dead. I just talked to Marshall. They had an ambulance run out to meet the guy bringing him in, but they say he’s gone. You gotta get these guys, Virgil.”
    “You know the problem,” Virgil said.
    The problem was, they knew who the killers were, but they couldn’t find them. If they’d fled Oxford an hour earlier, they could be anywhere in a circle maybe fifty miles in radius from