Mad River

shot . . .
    •   •   •
    IF HE HAD GONE after it, he’d have caught Becky and Jimmy in the black Ford. Jimmy was feeling better, with the pain pills in him. The pain wasn’t entirely gone, but it had eased, and his mind was clear, and he kept coming back to Tom McCall. Becky had told him about the rape, and she was still breaking down, weeping into her chest. “That sonofabitch, I should have shot him. He’s fuckin’ talking to the cops right now.”
    “He doesn’t know where we’re going.”
    “They’ll be all over this county in half an hour,” Jimmy said. “Becky, you gotta go faster. Faster, c’mon, it’s a good way yet, we gotta go faster, we got no time.”
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL SAW THE STANDING corn from a half mile out, a patch of tan on the otherwise dark earth. He slowed to a normal pickup speed, fifty miles an hour, and cruised on by it, checking it out. No sign of a truck, but if they were in deep enough . . . Then he crossed a culvert and saw tracks in the dirt and thought,
Yes.
    A moment later, he came up on a farmhouse that sat a hundred feet off the highway; the mailbox outside said “Towne.” The garage was open and empty, a nasty black rectangle like a missing tooth, and the openness of it caught him, and he said, “Oh, shit,” and he pulled into the driveway and called Duke, who answered instantly.
    “I’m three miles south of 10 on 9, pink house with a garage on the side standing open, no sign of a car, it’s maybe a half mile south of some standing corn and there were some tracks going off there. I think it’s them. I’m going in the house.”
    “You don’t go in that house, you stay right there,” Duke said. “That’s an order, mister. We’re not more than three or four minutes out.”
    “Fuck that,” said Virgil, and he rang off, got out of the truck, took the shotgun out of the back, pushed in four double-ought shells, and let the gun’s muzzle lead him down the driveway.
    As he went, he heard his phone ring. McCall, probably. He let it go.
    The back door was open and he stepped through, into the mudroom, saw a man’s body lying on the floor and beyond him a woman, and then the man groaned and one arm twitched and Virgil jumped across his body, charged through a dining room and then the living room and back around through the kitchen, over the woman’s body—her sightless eyes stared straight up at him, she was dead—and back to the man.
    He’d been shot with a shotgun, but much of the blast had apparently gone between his biceps and his chest, knocking a bloody patch in his rib cage and a piece out of his arm. He was lying in a pool of blood, but Virgil had seen bigger pools, and he put down his gun and called Duke and shouted, “We got two down, one dead, but one’s still alive. We need a medic here RIGHT NOW. Get somebody here RIGHT NOW.”
    Duke said, “Hold on,” and then came back. “We’ve got an ambulance rolling, but it’s gonna be a while. One of my guys got medical training, he’s right behind me . . . he’s got a medical kit . . . I’m coming up on you now.”
    Virgil looked down at the wounded man and couldn’t think of what to do: he was not a medic, and was afraid that anything he did would be worse than nothing. The man was oozing blood, but not pumping it. Then he thought of the empty garage, and the two bodies, and he slipped the man’s wallet from his pocket, opened it, found his driver’s license, and ran back out to his truck.
    As he was crossing the driveway, Duke swerved into it and came to a dusty screeching halt next to Virgil’s truck. Another sheriff’s car was right behind him, and Virgil shouted, “Inside.”
    Duke shouted back, “What’re you doing?”
    Virgil called, “I think they took their cars. I’m going to get an ID on their cars.”
    Duke ran up the driveway into the house, and a deputy from the second car unloaded a med pack from the trunk and ran toward the door, after Duke. Then two more sheriff’s cars arrived, coming from the same direction as Virgil had, the cops piling out into the yard.
    •   •   •
    DUKE WAS BACK OUT fifteen seconds later, as Virgil was waiting for a reading on the victim’s auto registrations. He had them thirty seconds later, writing the descriptions on a notepad: one black Jeep Cherokee, one black Ford F-150 pickup, registered to Clarence and Edie Towne. He got the tags for both of them, then climbed out of the truck and gave the