Mad River

did, which was talk to his friends and try a few things out. The fact was, most of the known names worked pretty well, and you got used to what you had; you could punch all the half-inch holes in paper that you liked, but the fact is, when it came to hunting, anything in the bread box would do the job.
    So when he wrote, he looked for
stories
instead of technology. He usually sold them. He’d even sold a two-part crime story to
The New York Times Magazine
. Now he was stepping up. Maybe.
    A few months earlier, Davenport’s daughter had been shot in the arm, and he’d gone to see her in the hospital, and had seen her afterward at Davenport’s home. Her name was Letty, and she had been adopted by the Davenports after her alcoholic mother was killed on a case that Lucas Davenport had worked in northwestern Minnesota.
    Virgil had known that she had been a dirt-poor country girl, but he hadn’t quite understood how bad it had been, and what she’d actually done to survive. One thing she’d done was wander around the countryside with a bunch of leghold traps and a .22, trapping raccoon, mink, and muskrats—mostly rats. She’d sold them to a local fur buyer for enough money to keep the family’s head above water. Had done this when she was ten years old . . .
    He’d gotten pieces of the story when she was recovering from the wound, and somewhere along the line, it occurred to him that it was a terrific story. Here was what appeared to be a stylish young high-school girl, who’d shot a cop—the same crooked cop—on two different occasions, and recently survived a shoot-out with two Mexican narcos, leaving the narcos dead. He talked to Davenport about it, and then Letty, and wound up doing five long interviews, on five consecutive weekends, during the fall, as well as some research up in the Red River Valley.
    He’d spent the next two months writing a girl’s short memoir of a nightmarish rural life—though she hadn’t at the time thought it particularly nightmarish, it just
was
—and sent it off to
The New York Times
Magazine
, to the editor who’d bought his earlier pieces.
    The editor had gotten right back and said that while the
Times
wouldn’t buy it—it was simply too long—he’d sent it to a friend over at
Vanity Fair
, and they were definitely interested.
    The problem was,
Vanity Fair
wanted to send Annie Leibovitz out to the Red River Valley with a ton of photo equipment to shoot Letty and Lucas Davenport, as part of a major editorial package. Both Letty and Davenport had the faces for it, and Letty loved the idea of meeting Leibovitz, who was one of her media heroines, but the Davenports had gotten their knickers in a psychological twist about what the attention would do to their daughter, about the whole gestalt of
Vanity Fair
, about how Letty had already had way too much attention from the press, and blah blah blah . . .
    That all had to be worked through. Virgil didn’t want to piss anybody off, and the Davenports were good friends of his, but he really wanted the piece in
Vanity Fair
.
Really
wanted it. Maybe not as much as he’d wanted the Ranger, but it was like that, the same order of magnitude: about an 8.4 on the Richter scale.
    Something else. He suspected that
Vanity Fair
liked the idea of having a gun-toting shit-kicking cop as a roving reporter. If he could nail down that job . . .
    •   •   •
    DURING THE DRIVE OUT to Shinder, he considered a half dozen calming approaches he might take with the Davenports; he thought he might point out that all of the stories about Letty had been sensationalized TV trash, while his work was a sensitive retelling of the girl’s actual history. . . .
    And when he was done thinking about the Davenports, he thought a bit about God, and whether He might be some kind of universal digital computer, subject to the occasional bug or hack. Was it possible that politicians and hedge-fund operators were some kind of garbled cosmic computer code? That the Opponent, instead of having horns and a forked tail, was a fat bearded guy drinking Big Gulps and eating anchovy pizzas and writing viruses down in a hellish basement? That prayers weren’t answered because Satan was running denial-of-service attacks?
    •   •   •
    HE WAS STILL THINKING about that when he came up to Shinder, running fast, and west, on State Highway 68. The Welshes, if that was actually the victims’ name, lived in the northeast part of town. Virgil