Mad River

see the roof of the bank. Virgil tapped the picture: “Here’s the bank. Here’s where the cop was. They came running out this way, to the waiting Tahoe—Becky Welsh was driving. After the shoot-out, they ran north.”
    Virgil traced the killers’ route out of town, to the cornfield where they hid, and touched the Townes’ farmhouse. “From here, McCall ran further north, then east, and then north again, and then east, and then north.”
    Polgar reduced the scale on the map, to include the entire route.
    “I picked McCall up right here,” Virgil said, tapping the map. “Now, Becky Welsh kills Edie Towne and shoots Clarence, and she drives back up the road to the cornfield where Sharp is waiting. They know that McCall has run off. They don’t know why, but they must know that there’s a chance he’ll turn them in, so they can’t go anyplace that he might know about. They’ve got to go to someplace new. They’ve just got to invent this place.”
    The problem had captured them.
    A short thin man in the back row called, “They can’t go back toward town, or any place in a circle around the town, because there’s gonna be cops coming in from all directions. Did you know what kind of truck they stole from this guy?”
    “Yeah, pretty quick,” Virgil said. “It hasn’t been seen since then.”
    Somebody else said, “So they got off the road. They couldn’t go north, toward Bigham, because they’d figure that’s where all the sheriffs would be coming from.”
    They all agreed that Sharp and Welsh would go sideways—east or west—out of the cornfield, probably turning at the first available road.
    Virgil asked, “If it were you, would you go back toward Marshall? Remember, they’ve always been talking about going west, toward Los Angeles, but they killed two people in Marshall.”
    “Didn’t you say that the ambulances and everybody were going to Marshall?”
    “I did say that,” Virgil said.
    “Wouldn’t they hear them?” the same guy asked.
    Virgil looked at the map and considered. “You know, they might. It’s quite a ways, but it was pretty quiet out there.”
    Somebody else said, “Nah. I had some cops coming after me one time, sirens and everything, and I never heard them until I saw the lights behind me.”
    “Yeah, but, they gotta know that Marshall was going to be a hornet’s nest.”
    After some more discussion, the inmates voted unanimously that Sharp and Welsh had gone east, toward the only country where they hadn’t yet done anything, or stirred anybody up. Since McCall might have betrayed them, they would have gotten off the big highway as soon as they could, and would have stayed off them: back roads only.
    “Remember, the cops know what car they’re driving and it’s on television everywhere. They can’t go through any towns where people might see them. . . . Jimmy’s in pain and maybe bleeding still. He might not be able to go too far. They come from around there, and they do know the countryside.”
    “So they go east, and never would jog north,” said a hulking blond in the front row. “They jog south.”
    “Why is that?” Virgil asked.
    “Look at the map. The Minnesota River comes slanting down across there, and they’d get pinned against the river. You can only cross it on main highways, and you said that they needed to stay away from where people could see them. Back roads only.”
    They all looked at the map, and then somebody said, “Bob’s right.”
    Somebody else said, “But they could be thinking of hiding out in the woods. Lots of woods around the river, all the rest is farmland.”
    “They need to eat, they need maybe to see some TV, see what the cops are doing,” said the blond man. “No. I believe they’d jog south, and keep jogging south to get past those little towns around there.”
    A very tall man with overgrown eyebrows said, “They gotta get off the road. I can feel that in my gut. Gotta get off the roads. Cops got helicopters, they’re looking everywhere. You could run for a while, but the longer you run, the more scared you’d get. Could you guys run for an hour? I don’t think I would.”
    They all thought about it, and Virgil said, “I want to hear everybody on that. Think about what this guy just said. How long could you stand to run?” He pointed at a road, and traced it going east. “From here to here is one minute. From here to here is four or five minutes. These are sections, so each one is about a