Mad River

Oxford. Using the formula A = pi r squared, A being the area and r being the radius and pi being 3.14 (roughly), they could be almost anywhere in an area of 7,850 square miles, and the area was expanding rapidly, with every moment they went undiscovered.
    “I know the problem, but this is crazy, this is out of control.”
    “Everybody in the state is looking for them,” Virgil said. “What do you want me to do?”
    A minute after he got off the phone with Davenport, Duke called and said, “Dan Card is dead, but he shot one of the gang. We’ve got blood in the street, but we don’t know which one. The bank was robbed by two masked males, and one of them got hit.”
    Duke was going on when Tom McCall called.
    Virgil’s phone beeped with the incoming message, and he saw who it was, and he said to Duke, “I got McCall on the line. I’ll call you back.”
    Duke said, “Hey—” but Virgil clicked through to McCall and said, “Tom? Where are you?”
    •   •   •
    MCCALL SAID, “Virgil, I’m running. Jimmy’s been shot in the leg, Becky just killed some woman in some farmhouse, I’m on the highway, I stole a Jeep and ran away from Becky, I got no gun, but Jimmy shot a cop, I think, and those deputies are gonna kill me if they find me. I don’t know what to do—”
    “How bad is Jimmy?”
    “He’s hurting, he’s bleeding bad, but they made a bandage out of a shirt. But fuck a bunch of Jimmy, man, I’m out here, I’m all fucked up—”
    “I got you,” Virgil said. “You tell me where to go, and I’ll meet you there. Figure out the roads and an intersection, and I’ll take you in.”
    “I don’t know what road I’m on. I’m out in the sticks.”
    “Where’s the woman who got shot? Are you sure she’s dead? Where are they?”
    “On County 9, right straight out of town . . . out of Oxford. They pulled into a cornfield, an uncut cornfield. They’re hiding in the corn, must be eight or ten miles out of town.”
    “North, south . . . ?”
    “I don’t . . . north, I guess. Up toward town, toward Bigham.”
    Eight or ten miles north of Oxford on 9. Not that far from where he was. Virgil switched the cell phone to speaker, said, “You hang on here, I need to look at my map.”
    He got the atlas off the passenger seat, found 9 out of Oxford, realized he had to jog east to catch it. He hated to cut McCall off, but he had no choice. “Tom, you need to call me back in five minutes, and I’ll bring you in. But I gotta get an ambulance and some cops going to this woman you say got shot.”
    “You gotta help me, man. They had me held
prisoner
.”
    “Call me in five minutes,” Virgil said. “I’ll bring you in.”
    Virgil was still trailing the deputies’ cars, all rolling at eighty miles an hour or so, where they could, where the roads weren’t too bad, but they were coming up on an intersection that would take them over to 9 and the two sheriff’s cars went straight through, and without any way to talk to them directly, Virgil took the turn and called Duke and told him McCall’s story.
    Duke said, “I’m coming into Oxford now, but some of it is lies for sure, because we’re talking to the witness and he said one guy was shot, but it was the
other guy
who killed Dan. It was your boy McCall.”
    “He’s calling me and I’m gonna bring him in, but we’ve gotta find this house where the woman is down.”
    “Okay, those boys who were ahead of you are the closest. I’ll turn them around,” Duke said. “You know where you’re going? Exactly?”
    “Over to 9 and then south toward Oxford. McCall thinks they’re ditched in a cornfield, a standing cornfield about eight or ten miles north of town. There’s not that much standing corn this year.”
    “You see them, you wait until we get there with the artillery,” Duke said. “We don’t need you dead and them running.”
    “If I spot it, I’ll go on past to this farmhouse where McCall says the dead woman is. We can’t take a chance on that.”
    “Call me. I’m heading that way. I’ll get everybody heading that way, but you’ll get there first. Call me.”
    Virgil threw the phone on the passenger seat and put his foot down harder, both hands on the wheel. It was two miles on gravel over to 9, which was a good blacktop road. As he came up to it, he could see a cloud of gravel dust straight ahead, on the other side of the intersection, and thought about going after it but didn’t. The woman who’d been