Mad River

lettered in football, basketball, and baseball. He still looked like a competent third baseman.
    He got back to the house around twelve-thirty, clear of mind if not fresh of breath. He patted the boat on the nose and said, “Hey, baby,” went in the house, started a pot of coffee, brushed his teeth, threw a few days’ worth of shirts, jeans, and underwear in a satchel, along with a dopp kit. He got his pistol and a shotgun out of the gun safe, and some ammo, took the whole pile of gear out to his truck, a Toyota 4Runner, and packed it away. That done, he hooked the truck up to the boat, backed the boat into the garage, unhooked it, and locked the garage door behind himself.
    Back inside the house, he poured a cup of coffee, put the rest in a thermos, sipped at the coffee, and went back to the second bedroom he used as a study and dug out his Minnesota atlas.
    Shinder was a small farm town of a few hundred people, ordinary enough, as far as he knew, out on the prairie in western Minnesota. It was only thirty miles from Virgil’s hometown of Marshall, and probably seventy-five or eighty from his current home in Mankato.
    Though he’d been past Shinder a hundred times, he’d never stopped, because there wasn’t anything to stop for. He wasn’t even exactly sure what county the town was in—it was right where Yellow Medicine, Lyon, Redwood, and Bare came together. He thumbed through the atlas and found that it was just inside Bare County, five miles from the Yellow Medicine line.
    Virgil said, aloud, to his empty house, “Ah, man.”
    Bare County was run by Sheriff Lewis Duke, known to other local sheriffs as the Duke of Hazard. He believed in Guns, Punishment, Low Taxes, and the American Constitution. If he wasn’t the source of all those things—the Almighty God was—he was at least the Big Guy’s representative in Bare County.
    Among other things, he’d tried to set up a concentration camp on the site of an old chicken farm, complete with barracks and barbed-wire fences, for minor criminals. He believed that an actual indoor Minnesota jail was simply pampering the miscreants. He figured to rent space in the concentration camp barracks to other counties that wanted to unload expensive prisoners, and even make a profit for his Bare County constituents. The state attorney general’s office, backed by a court order, stopped the concentration camp.
    But no court order could stop Lewis Duke from being an asshole.
    •   •   •
    AT TEN MINUTES after one o’clock in the morning, ninety-eight percent sober, Virgil pulled out on the street and rolled away in the dark toward Shinder. His phone rang on the seat beside him, and he picked it up: Davenport, who always stayed up late.
    Davenport asked, “How’re you feeling?”
    “Stone-cold sober, if that’s what you mean,” Virgil said. “I just pulled out of my house—I’m on the way.”
    “Good. It’d be best if you were gunned down in the line of duty, and not killed in a drunk-driving accident.”
    “Anyhooo . . .”
    “The crime-scene truck is leaving town now,” Davenport said. “They’ll be an hour and a half or maybe two hours behind you. If you’re going over on 14, you don’t have to worry about the patrol, so you can let it roll. Watch out for town cops.”
    “I’ll do that,” Virgil said. “You think Ray Wylie Hubbard is better than Waylon Jennings?”
    “I don’t know, but they’re both better than any of the Beatles,” Davenport said. “I’m going to bed. Hesitate to call.”
    One good thing about a long drive in the dark, when you didn’t know anything about where you were going, or what you were going to do when you got there, was that you had lots of time to think.
    Virgil had for years worked a sideline as an outdoors writer, a freelancer for the diminishing number of magazines that were actually about the outdoors, as opposed to outdoors technology. He knew which brands of fishing rods he liked, and what reels, and he knew something about guns and bows and snowshoes and about boats and canoes, and not as much as he would have liked about dogs—his job made it almost impossible to keep a dog—but not much about technology.
    He wasn’t much interested in arguing whether a .308 was better or worse than a .30-06 on whitetail, or a Ranger a better boat than a Lund or a Tuffy, or a Mathews Solocam a better bow than a Hoyt or a PSE. He couldn’t have found his own ass with a GPS. He just did what most guys