Mad River

Flowers.”
    •   •   •
    HE GOT HER BACK to the motel, and on the bed, and pulled off her boots one at a time and dropped them on the floor, then pulled off the tight jeans, stopped when the waistline got down to her knees, and turned his head up and laughed, and when she asked, “What?” he started pulling again and said, “I’ve been waiting to do this since eleventh grade.”
    She surprised him and said, “So have I—been waiting for you to do it.”
    The jeans came off, and so did everything else, and they got busy, and an hour later, she muttered into his shoulder, “Well, that was better than pumpkin pie. With whipped cream, even.”
    “Far better?”
    “Maybe not far better,” she said.
    “Then we just gotta try harder.”
    “I could do that.”
    A while later, he said, “We should have done this a long time ago.”
    She said, “I was too young. You weren’t, but I was. You were like a big goddamn dangerous thing, you had hormones coming out of your ears. You scared the heck out of me. In a good way, kinda—you’d get me so hot—but it just didn’t seem right. Then, of course, you jumped Linda Smith.”
    That sat there for a minute, then Virgil, cornered, said, “True.”
    “Was it worth it?”
    He thought again, and then said, “Yes.”
    That made her laugh, and she asked, “Whatever happened to Linda?”
    “She married a rich farmer guy from over by Chamberlain. I think she works part-time for some kind of social services agency over there.”
    “South Dakota?”
    “Yeah. Jackie Bolt told me they’ve got a place that looks down on the Missouri. Supposed to be really pretty. I guess they spend their winters down in Panama. That’s what I heard. They go big-game fishing. They’ve got a sailfish in their farmhouse living room. In South Dakota.”
    •   •   •
    THEN, since it was impossible to screw
all
the time, he told her about chasing Sharp and Welsh and McCall, the details of the various killings, and the problem of finding Sharp and Welsh; at the same time, stroking her nipples and other good parts.
    “See, we know everything—we’ll convict them in one minute, when we get them to court. But we can’t
find
them. This country is too big.”
    “But there are so many people looking for them.”
    Virgil pushed himself up on an elbow, trailed a finger down to her navel, and said, “I was on another case that involved a guy out in the countryside. The thing is, he sold a bunch of dope to a dealer down in Worthington, and the Worthington cops got there about two minutes late, and this guy took off and the cops were chasing him. They chased him about fifty miles or so, before they caught him, and then he dumped his car and started running through the cornfields. This was at night, and they lost him.
    “He was a Canadian guy, and what we found out later was, he decided to
walk
back to Canada. He broke into houses and a convenience store along the way, to get food. I got involved when he was somewhere up in Yellow Medicine. So I figured out, sitting in this motel, you could get about five hundred and eighty football fields, between the goal lines, not including the end zones, in a square mile. Yellow Medicine County, I happen to know, is about seven hundred and sixty square miles, because I looked it up. So that means you could have about thirty-five thousand football fields in Yellow Medicine. Could you hide in a football-field-sized patch of land out in farm country? Damn right you could. If the guy lay down in a ditch, you could walk right past him. You can’t even figure out how to find somebody who’s doing that. So we can’t find them. Becky and Jimmy. We don’t think they’re far away, especially with Jimmy being shot. But where?”
    “What happened to the Canadian guy?”
    “He got away,” Virgil said.
    “Completely?”
    “Completely. But he was a dope dealer, so he’s probably gotten to his use-by date.”
    “You mean, he’s dead?” she asked.
    “Or rich enough to have quit,” Virgil said. “A few of them manage to do that. You see them sitting on their yachts down in the Caribbean.”
    “I don’t think of Canadians as being drug dealers,” she said.
    “They are,” Virgil said. “Generally, as a nation, they’re pretty depraved. At least, that’s been my experience.”
    “See, that’s another thing I didn’t know.”
    Now she sat up and asked, “Why don’t you cops have experts on chasing people? I mean, you’ve got