Mad River

shoulder, said, “Oh my God . . .”
    Virgil said to the duty officer, “Get it get it get it . . . see if they can track the phone with the GPS.”
    •   •   •
    BECKY TOLD THE CLERK to lie down on the floor, and said, “I’m parked right outside, and I’ll shoot you big-time if you move. You better be goddamn certain, when you move, that I’m gone or I’ll put a bullet right through your forehead.”
    She walked out to the truck carrying the grocery bags, threw them in the back, and took off. She was watching the counter where the clerk was, and saw no movement. She turned in the street and headed north, rolled out to the end of town, to a curl in the Mad River, and threw the cell out the window, into a ditch full of cattails. Then she reversed, went around the single block, away from the store, and turned south. A moment later she was heading out of town, and thirty seconds after that, she turned off on a side track and killed her lights again, to drive on in the dark.
    •   •   •
    THREE MINUTES AFTER Becky hung up, Virgil was pulling on his jeans, with the phone pressed to his ear, and the duty man said, “I got a call from the Bare County sheriff, says a gas station clerk just called them from the town of Arcadia, says he was held up by Becky Welsh. They’re rolling.”
    It took Verizon nine minutes before they found the cell where the phone call came in. Their phone did have GPS enabled, and a Verizon technician said that it wasn’t moving. It was near the bridge over the Mad River, north of Arcadia.
    Virgil punched off and called Duke, who snapped, “What?”
    “You’re headed down to Arcadia?” Virgil asked.
    “Fast as we can get there.”
    “Becky called me on a cell phone she took off that clerk, and the phone has a GPS,” Virgil said. “The GPS shows it as being near a bridge on the Mad River, north of town. Right on the north edge.”
    “Bet they’re hiding there in the weeds, just like they did in that cornfield.”
    “Don’t kill them if you don’t have to,” Virgil said.
    “You coming?”
    “Fast as I can.”
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL RAN OUT to his truck, Sally chanting, “Go, go,” as he went out the door. Lights and siren all the way: and he punched up the number for Daisy Jones at Channel Three. It was nearly midnight, but she answered on the second ring and said, “Virgil.”
    “Off the record.”
    “Okay.”
    “Becky Welsh just called me,” he said. “The call came from a small town—”
    “So it worked.”
    “Yeah, but she says if we don’t retract that story about a sex encounter, she’ll kill somebody else every day,” Virgil said. “We need you to go on, with her claim: she says that Tom McCall raped her. I believe her. I’m afraid that we won’t get to her in time, and she’ll kill somebody tomorrow morning if you don’t do this story.”
    “I can do it,” Jones said. “I’ll call the station now. We’ll put it on every half hour.”
    “Good. Thank you.”
    “You know where she’s calling from?” Jones asked.
    “We know where she was a half hour ago. We know where the cell phone is. But I honest to God can’t believe that she’s that dumb. This isn’t quite right.”
    “What town?”
    “Arcadia,” Virgil said.
    “I’m coming as soon as I file. I’ll likely see you there.”
    “Don’t talk to me—talk to the sheriff.”
    •   •   •
    FOR A CERTAIN TYPE of personality, found mostly on the plains, in the South and the Southwest, there is a great sense of pleasure in going out on the rural roads at night and driving as far and fast as you can. When you come up to a high spot on an overcast night, you can see domes of light scattered around the landscape, reflected off the clouds, marking the towns, almost like illuminated chessmen scattered around a vast chessboard.
    Virgil was that kind of personality.
    When he was a teenager too young to drive, he’d occasionally hitchhike somewhere ridiculous, like up to the Twin Cities or over to Sioux Falls, to do something ridiculous, like buy an ice-cream cone, and scare the brains out of his parents. When he was old enough to have a car, he roamed hundreds of miles out across the prairie, listening to the FM stations come and go, with all the newest pop and rock, dodging oncoming lights that might be cop cars, seeing how long he could keep the speedometer needle over the eighty-miles-an-hour mark. He’d see how lost he could get.
    Part of it