Rough Country

wide.
    The chopper was drifting south, away from them, but they were coming up quickly. Virgil risked standing up for just a second, couldn’t see much—but could just see the tops of trees to the south.
    Rod shouted, “He’s cutting through the grass, he’s back in the weeds. . . .”
    More noise, and Virgil looked back, saw the downriver boats coming up on them; now five boats running along, over a few hundred yards.
    “Gotta be close,” Rod shouted.
    Another fifteen seconds and Rod shouted at Earl, and pointed, “Right there, right there . . .”
    The chopper was probably no more than fifty or sixty yards ahead of them, and Virgil could hear a loudspeaker, but couldn’t hear what was being said over the chop of the helicopter. Two more boats came in from the north, and Earl put them up against a bank of cattails; they drifted for a minute, then Virgil saw a small channel with flowing water, opening through the cattails. It wasn’t more than eighteen inches wide.
    “Can we push through there?” Rod asked.
    “Tough,” Earl said. He killed the motor, popped a pole mounted in brackets under the left gunwale, stood up, and pushed the boat back into the weeds. They got thirty feet, and that was it. “Too much drag,” Earl said.
    “Could we walk through it?” Rod asked.
    “Nope. You might find shallow spots, but you’d be up to your neck every two minutes,” Earl said. He started poling them back out, and Rod talked into his radio, and then said, “Back north—there’s an open channel north. Shit, some guys are already going in, we’re gonna miss it.”
    They got back out, and Earl fired up the motor, and they started north up the channel, and another boat backed out of the weeds and fell in behind them; Virgil could see more boats up ahead that had gone on while they tried to push into the cattails.
    “He’s at the trees,” Rod shouted, and then, “They see him, they see him.”
    There were five fast pops, gunfire, and Rod shouted, “Holy cow, what was that?” and sat down, suddenly, and Virgil said, “Easy, easy, everybody, stay low . . .”
    The helicopter was maneuvering overhead, and then they heard a long string of shots, semiauto fire, from two or three guns, and Rod shouted, “He’s down, he’s down, they got him,” and Virgil thought: Shit .
     
     
     
    THE HELICOPTER WAS RIGHT there, so close they couldn’t hear themselves think, but they couldn’t get into the shooting scene without threading through a quarter mile of beaten-down grasses and cattails, and finally they turned a last curve and saw the flotilla pulled up on a muddy bank tangled with brushy trees, and a cluster of cops by an aluminum canoe another fifty yards down the bank.
    They had to get out in the water and stumble along the shore, up to their knees, before they got there, and Virgil pushed through the circle of cops to find two guys tying compression bandages on the Deuce’s thighs and lower leg, and then one of the cops said, “Get him on the tarp, get him on the tarp,” and four guys lifted him, and he groaned, and they put him on a blue plastic tarp and he began leaking blood across it, lots of blood.
    Five other cops and Virgil got pieces of tarp and lifted him, and staggered back through the water to the first of the jon boats, the Deuce crying in pain, his eyes liquid and flashing white, and he asked, two or three or four times, “Why did you shoot me? Why did you shoot me?” They put him on the bottom of the boat, and the boatman fired it up and nosed the boat down the channel, and then, out of sight, Virgil heard the engine open up.
    “Where’re they going?” he asked a cop.
    “Got an ambulance coming to the landing,” he said. He looked haggard, though it was early.
    “What happened?” Virgil asked.
    “He tried to make it into the trees,” the guy said. “I was in the third or fourth boat, and somebody in the lead boat took him out.”
    “Was he . . . did he have his gun?”
    The guy cleared his throat and his eyes slid away. “His gun, uh, his gun’s still tied in the canoe. I don’t know, I think he was trying to pull the canoe up on the bank and make a run for it. . . . I don’t know.”
    “How bad’s he hit?” Virgil asked.
    “His legs are all busted up, and he got one in the butt. Sideways in the butt. He’s got some big holes.”
    Virgil looked around, lots of deputies standing back, now, talking in low voices.
    Could be trouble , he thought.
     
     
     
    THE