Mad River

inside information on the case, she went back to the pool table. Virgil paid for Morton’s beer, walked back to the motel. An informal strategy meeting was going on in the breakfast area, a bunch of cops arguing about the best way to run down Sharp and Welsh. The wrangling was only semi-serious, fueled with alcohol. Virgil sat with Jenkins and Shrake, filled them in on his ideas about Dick Murphy, and told them about his conversation with Morton the defenestrator. They agreed to meet the next morning at eight o’clock.
    Duke had been sitting with a bunch of deputies, looking tired, and before he left he came over and said, “We’ve got a bunch of guys laying back in the weeds, to see if they try to sneak out of the search area.”
    “Let me know . . . and get some sleep.”
    “You, too.”
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL LEFT JENKINS and Shrake and went back to his room. He was sitting on the bed, setting the alarm, when a call came in from the BCA duty officer. “We got a call from somebody who says her name is Marjorie, and she says you’ve got to go back to Roseanne’s. She says she’s got a guy there who knows about Dick Murphy and Jim Sharp.”
    Something uncurled in Virgil’s stomach, a warm sense of satisfaction: in most cases, there was a moment when things started to work for him, when things started to get done. He’d taken his boots off, and he put them back on and went out and walked back to Roseanne’s.
    The upside: if the guy really knew about Murphy and Sharp, he might have enough, with his other evidence, to bust Murphy. Especially, he thought, if they could get that thousand dollars off Sharp, and find out where it came from.
    The downside: Marjorie . . . Kay? . . . that seemed right; Marjorie Kay was obviously blabbing about Virgil’s ideas about Murphy. That wasn’t all bad, but meant that he’d lost control of the rumor mill. Word would get back to Murphy, and he’d hunker down.
    •   •   •
    WHEN VIRGIL GOT back to Roseanne’s, there were two guys leaning on the front of a pickup right at the door, drinking out of beer bottles, their backs to him. One of them heard him coming, and they both dropped their hands out of sight. Virgil grinned: they were breaking the law, just as he had, a few nights before, drinking outside the Rooster Coop back in Mankato.
    He was going to say something as he went past, and was looking at the back of the closest one, and had just opened his mouth when the man turned and Virgil got a glimpse of a bandanna pulled over his face, like an old-timey bank robber, and behind that image was the image of an incoming fist and Virgil never had time to get a hand or anything else in the way, but he barely had the time to flinch away, and instead of connecting with the middle of his face, the fist connected with the side of his forehead and knocked him down in the dirt and a half second later he was rolling away, his hands up around his head, unable to get far enough away from them to get to his feet, as they kicked at his legs and ribs and face. . . .
    The gravel in the parking lot was cutting at him as he scrambled and went down, scrambled and went down, and he could feel the palms of his hands and his shoulders getting cut, but all he was thinking about was his head and his kidneys, protecting them from the boots.
    He never had the leisure to take a good look at them, but they were wearing boots and jeans and leather jackets and ball caps and the masks, and they weren’t yelling or really making any noise at all except occasional curses, and “Get him, get out of the way, get out of my way . . .”
    Whether they’d done this before, or not, he had no way of knowing, but they weren’t well coordinated. Virgil kept trying to move in ways that kept one of them eclipsed behind the other, as much as he could, and was succeeding at least some of the time, and managed to get partway to his feet before he stumbled and he called out, “Police officer. I’m . . .”
    They kept coming and Virgil figured they must already know that. They’d come for
him
, not for a fight. They’d either badly beat him, put him in the hospital for sure, or maybe kill him, because he just couldn’t get away from them, but then a truck pulled into the parking lot, splashing headlights across the three of them, and Virgil kept moving and he saw more figures spilling out of the truck, and he didn’t know if he was further screwed, or saved, when one of the