Mad River

before,” Duke said.
    “Just don’t shoot anybody,” Virgil said.
    For the first time since Virgil met him in Shinder, to look at the Welshes’ bodies, Duke cracked what might have been a smile; but not a pleasant one. He seemed to be fantasizing about the possibility of blowing up the media. “I can’t make no rash promises,” he said.
    “Ah, man,” Virgil said.
    •   •   •
    ONE OF THE GUARD people had created a large dry-erase schematic map of southwest Minnesota, and she put it up on the stage, with a red dry-erase pen. Duke climbed on the stage a moment later, along with a National Guard lieutenant colonel whom Virgil didn’t know. With the media people pressing into the tent, Duke introduced the colonel, who pissed everybody off by citing his authority going back to Abraham, by giving the Guard credit for providing vehicles, sandwiches, and water, and by concluding with a confession that nobody had seen anything.
    Duke then described the ongoing search of local farmhouses, using the red pen and the map to locate the tightening search—information that everybody already had.
    A reporter called, “Bottom line—you haven’t found anything, and as far as you know, they could be in Quartzsite, Arizona.”
    “Not at all,” Duke said. “We’ve got very good reason to believe that they’re contained.”
    “Then how come the state agents are looking for them way down south of here? Who’s stupid?”
    “Nobody’s stupid. The state officers are working with a different set of parameters.”
    “How many more will die before they’re caught? I’m not asking for an exact number, but how about an estimate?”
    Shrake turned to Virgil and said, “Uh-oh.”
    The question was followed by laughter, which irritated Duke more than the question had, and he said, “I’m glad somebody can laugh at this tragedy. I assume you’ll be showing that on your news shows tonight.”
    Somebody said, “Fuck you,” just loud enough to be heard, but not loud enough for anybody to identify the source; Virgil thought it might be one of the cameramen. Duke said, “What was that?” and a senior reporter for one of the more dignified news channels said, “That was disgraceful,” and there was a muffled “Suck-up,” followed by more laughter, and then a man whom Virgil recognized as the second-string anchor for Channel Three stood and raised a hand, and Duke poked a finger at him.
    “Sheriff Duke, everybody here has heard rumors that James Sharp and Becky Welsh won’t be given a chance to surrender—that you’ve put out a shoot-to-kill order on them, a shoot-on-sight. Is that correct? Are you going to kill them? Or are you going to give them a chance to give themselves up?”
    “I’ll take them any way I can get them,” Duke said. “If they turn themselves in, they’ll be protected.”
    “I was told by a very reliable source in your department that one of your men would have shot Tom McCall except for the intervention of a state agent.”
    “I know that’s a lie because my people don’t talk out of school,” Duke said.
    Virgil put his hands over his ears as the anchor said, “You’re calling me a liar? Wait a minute—did you just call me a liar?”
    “I’m saying that none of my men—”
    “Well, one of them did.”
    Another reporter: “I talked to the same guy, and he told me the same thing.”
    “Well, if you’d give me that man’s name—”
    “You’d fire him.”
    Duke’s mouth flapped a few times, and then he said, “Damn right I would. There’s nothing more important in law enforcement than loyalty, and you can’t have every Tom, Dick, and Harry shooting off their mouths to a bunch of media whores who don’t want to do nothing more than splash blood all over their TV screens.”
    Almost everybody—almost
everybody
—was delighted. Virgil turned to Shrake, Jenkins, and Boykin and said, “Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”
    As Virgil and Jenkins got in Virgil’s truck, Virgil could hear Duke screaming into the microphone.
    Something about . . . “pissants.”

20
    BECKY WAS WORRIED about Jimmy. He was getting hotter all the time, his face red, his eyes glazed. He’d stopped complaining about the pain in his leg, and about most everything else.
    They were still holed up in the old dead man’s house, had eaten their way through a good part of the old man’s food supply—bacon and eggs and bread and oatmeal—and most of their own junk food. The beer was