Mad River

note to Duke and said, “We’re looking for these vehicles. McCall is in the Jeep, Sharp and Welsh probably have the pickup. It’s possible they’re still up in the cornfield.”
    Duke issued orders that sent deputies to the corners of the cornfield, where they could see anybody trying to get out, and designated two other deputies to accompany himself and Virgil off the shoulder of the road into the cornfield.
    Virgil said, “I need as many of them alive as we can get. There’s another thing going on here—we need them alive if we can get them without taking too big a risk.”
    “No risk,” Duke said. “Alive if we can get them with no risk. I don’t want anybody else shot. You all know about Dan. . . . All right. Let’s go.”
    They took off, moving at speed, led by the deputies who would go past the cornfield and then post up on its corners. Virgil led the sheriff’s own truck, and two more, ten seconds behind the first two.
    As they went, he thought about the cloud of dust he’d seen disappearing down 10. Had that been them?
    A minute after they left the farmhouse, Virgil took his truck off-road, down into the ditch, plowing along through dead grass, then onto a track that led down to a dry creek. He could see where somebody had busted up the other side of the creek bed, running over small saplings, and he stopped and got his shotgun out, and the other cops stopped behind him and he waved for them to spread out.
    “Don’t anybody shoot anybody else,” he said. Every one of the deputies was carrying an M16, and they moved toward the corn in a skirmish line; and Virgil realized that with the limited visibility ahead, any hope of taking Sharp and Welsh alive was bound to be futile. There’d be no real chance of surrender, because they simply couldn’t be seen well enough, and nobody would take a chance that they were surrendering when they might just as well be ready to open fire.
    The best chance, he thought, was if they’d both been shot and were on the ground.
    “Got a truck here, got a Tahoe here,” one of the deputies screamed, and the line shifted in his direction, then stopped, then started forward again, collapsing on the target area. Virgil and Duke both jogged along the skirmish line, from opposite directions, and then Virgil saw the truck, but no sign of life around it.
    They moved up slowly, cops leapfrogging past each other, always one or two focused on the truck while the others covered, and when they got close enough, Virgil called, “Don’t shoot me,” and jogged up to the truck, stopped, listened, then peeked in the back window. The truck was empty.
    “Nobody,” he called. “Watch the corn, watch the corn.”
    “Another track going out this way. There was another truck here,” somebody called, and Virgil went that way and looked. The corn had been knocked down by another vehicle that had come in and stopped ten feet from where the first one was parked.
    “Reversed in here and backed out,” a deputy said. “They’re in that Ford.”
    Virgil stepped back to the Tahoe and Duke, who’d been looking in the passenger-side door, said, “Somebody got hit hard. Lotta blood.”
    Virgil looked in; there was a lot of blood, but not as much as there would be for somebody who was bleeding to death. McCall had been telling the truth: Jimmy had been hit, but not incapacitated. They’d be looking for a place to hide, where they could give the wound some attention, which meant somebody in an isolated farmhouse could get killed in the next little while.
    Virgil said all that to Duke, who had already put out a stop order on the Townes’ Jeep and pickup.
    “We’re gonna need the National Guard in here. We need to shut down every intersection for fifty miles around,” Duke said. “I’ll call the governor.” Then he asked, “What about McCall?”
    Virgil nodded and went to his phone and punched in the call-back number. McCall answered on the second ring and whined, “Where are you, man, where are you?”
    “I need to bring you in, Tommy. Where’re you at? You figured that out?”
    “I’m on 79, going up toward town. Going, ah, north, I guess. I’m driving slow. Man, don’t tell the Duke, those fuckers will kill me bigger’n shit.”
    “You pull over and wait. I’m coming,” Virgil said. “Just wait. These folks down here are madder’n hornets about the cop that Jimmy shot, and you really do want to wait for me.”
    “I’ll pull over, man.”
    “I’m