The town was very still, Virgil thought.
• • •
BECKY WELSH’S HEART was pounding like a mill. Like going to the dentist, but a thousand times worse, she thought. You were in your car and nothing hurt and the sun was shining, but you knew you were heading for something that was going to be bad, that was going to be painful; but instead of getting a tooth pulled, they were going to chain you up and treat you like an animal. . . . She’d seen it all on TV, the orange suits, the women who looked like witches—they didn’t even give them their makeup, she thought—and she started to cry.
For a moment, as she came over a hump in the road and saw the intersection ahead, the intersection where she’d turn toward Arcadia, and set everything going . . . she thought about leaving Jimmy somewhere, on somebody’s doorstep, and calling the cops and then running back to the hole she’d just left. She fantasized about that for a moment: a good-looking woman wearing expensive sunglasses, walking down a beach somewhere, like she’d seen on TV, like Kim Kardashian or somebody, these colored waiters watching her strut . . . No, erase that, some hot Mexican guys with loose white shirts.
She thought about it, but in her heart she knew she couldn’t do it. She’d never been outside of Minnesota, except those few times when she and some friends went to Hudson, Wisconsin, to drink and hang out.
That was so far away now, all those times.
She looked over at Jimmy as she pulled up to the intersection. Left or right? Left to drop him somewhere, left to run, or right into Arcadia, and chains and jail. Jail maybe forever.
But hell, she thought, it couldn’t be any worse than Shinder, could it?
She leaned across and kissed Jimmy again, but he made no sign that he even knew she was there. She turned right, for Arcadia.
• • •
DUKE ARRIVED, coming fast into town; he slowed, then stopped and backed up when he saw the patrol car parked on the side street. He didn’t get out, and Virgil could see him talking into his radio. After a few seconds, he came on. Virgil didn’t want the obvious cop car, with the lights, visible, and he gestured for him to pull in behind the gas pumps.
Duke did, and climbed out and said, “No sign of them yet. It’s been forty minutes. Didn’t she say thirty minutes?”
“She’s got my phone number, and she hasn’t called again,” Virgil said. “She didn’t know exactly where she was at, either. . . . And if she doesn’t come in, we should be able to get some idea about where she’s at from the cell towers . . . if there’s more than one.”
“Probably only one out here. If he’s got a GPS chip, though, I think those go through satellites.” Duke stepped out to the street, looked south for a moment, then said, “I gotta listen in . . .”
He went around and got into his car, and Virgil thought, Listen to what?
Jenkins said, “I thought there’d be more people here . . . more cars. There were all kinds of cars running around all night.”
Then Duke called, through an open window, “They’re coming in.”
Virgil looked at him, frowned, looked down the street. Nothing moving. He called back, “How do you know that?”
Duke looked away for a moment, then said, “I thought it’d be best to have a couple cars down by the south bridge . . . just in case.”
Virgil looked south again: nothing. He said, “You sonofabitch, that better not be an ambush. I need those two alive.”
Duke said, “That might be . . . I’m not sure it’s possible.”
Virgil screamed, “You fuck . . .”
He jumped in his truck, and Jenkins clawed open the passenger door, and Shrake the back door, and they were all in and Virgil took off, and Jenkins said, “What do you think? Are they going to kill them?”
“Unless we get there first,” Virgil said. “Ah, Jesus, these sonsofabitches . . .”
• • •
BECKY SAW THE Mad River bridge straight ahead, and steeled herself. Once across the bridge, in town, it was done. What should she say to the cop?
She was thinking about that when she saw the wink of a windshield reflection by the bridge. They were supposed to meet by the gas station. What was this? She slowed down, and saw a quick motion by the bridge, like somebody ducking out of sight.
Then, straight ahead, but a quarter mile away, she saw a truck coming toward her, moving fast, no red lights, didn’t look like a cop car, then another car behind that.
She slowed more, looked to her left . . . saw a hat, then another hat, then a man down in the ditch, and he was pointing a gun at her.
She shouted at the window glass, “We give up . . . we give up,” and fumbled for the window buttons, the truck coasting closer and closer to the bridge.
She never felt the bullets: the first ones shattered her skull and she was gone; Jimmy was with her an instant later.
• • •
VIRGIL WAS NO MORE than a hundred yards away when he saw a deputy step into the road at the bridge, lift an automatic weapon to his shoulder, and open up on the truck. The truck was jumping and shaking, and he saw another man moving in the ditch to the left, and then a third, and they were firing and the truck was shaking and coasting and sliding off to the left. . . .
Virgil was pounding on the steering wheel and screaming, “No . . .”
The red pickup rolled off the road, lurched crazily down through the weeds and brush, and stopped with its front wheels in the Mad River.
Becky and Jimmy didn’t know any of that; they’d been killed with the first volley, their bodies punctured forty and fifty times by the unending stream of .223 slugs.
• • •
VIRGIL JUMPED OUT of his truck and ran down the riverbank and looked in. The two lumps inside were a mass of blood and bone, hardly looked human; hardly even looked like remnants of humans.
Shrake and Jenkins were with him, and he turned and climbed back up the bank and brushed by Duke, who put up a hand to say something, but Virgil ignored him, and said to Jenkins and Shrake, “Get in the truck.”
Jenkins asked, “You okay?”
Virgil said, “I’ve never seen that. I’ve never seen a cold-blooded murder, firsthand.”
Duke said, “Hey, now.”
Virgil said, “Fuck you.”
23
VIRGIL WAS SO GODDAMNED mad he couldn’t spit. He called Davenport and launched into a tirade and when he finally slowed down, Davenport interrupted and said, “The circumstances here—”
“The circumstances are cold-blooded murder, planned out ahead of time. There was no call to surrender. The truck was slowing down, almost stopped when they opened up. I looked at the bodies. They must’ve been shot a hundred times.”
“Well, not a hundred times,” Lucas said, trying to be reasonable.
Virgil: “I’m not exaggerating. There were four guys with M16s and thirty-shot mags. I think every one of them emptied their mags into the truck. That’d be what, a hundred and twenty rounds?”
“Jesus Christ,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. I don’t know what we do here. Do we charge Duke? Do we go after the shooters first . . . what?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down. We don’t go after anybody,” Davenport said. “If we do anything, we get the attorney general in there, let him send down a couple of his harder-nosed assistants. They already hate Duke. Get the bodies up here for autopsy, build some kind of a case. . . . But I’ll tell you, I think it’s futile, Virgil. They killed two people that everybody in Minnesota wanted dead. It’s politically impossible.”
“And Murphy walks. The guy who hired all this done, walks because of that fuckin’ Duke.”
“Not necessarily. You’ve still got a case on Murphy,” Davenport said.
“Ah, it’s weak, Lucas. If he gets a decent attorney, they’ll shred us
. I got a multiple murderer and a moron as witnesses.”
“What about the money that Sharp supposedly got? Where’s that?”
“Probably shot to shit, if it was in his pocket,” Virgil said. “He looks like a slab of hamburger.”
“So you recover that money, check Murphy’s bank account . . . that’d help.”
“We don’t even know that he took it out of the bank. He’s a gambler, he might have had it in cash.”
“So investigate, Virgil.”
After a long silence, Virgil said, “Lucas, I gotta warn you, because you’re a friend. Not just my boss. But I’m going on TV here, and I’m gonna say what I think.”
“Ah, Jesus, Virgil, it’s never a good idea to say what you think, on television.” Virgil could hear Davenport exhale, and then he said, “All right. Do it. Fuck him. But don’t do it cold. Don’t sound like an attorney. Get mad and let it show—you’ll get it out there, and then, if we really gotta cover your ass, we’ll say you were pissed . . . you were traumatized, you lost your case. We can cover you.”
Virgil thought about that for a few seconds, then said, “I won’t have any trouble letting it show. But I’ll tell you what, man . . .”
“What?”
“I think you’ve been hanging around the capitol too much, that kind of thinking.”
• • •
VIRGIL GOT OFF the phone and walked back toward the truck and saw Shrake and Jenkins coming up out of the ditch. They walked over and Shrake shook his head and said, “There could be some trouble. No gun in the truck.”
“They deserve all the trouble they get,” Virgil said.
Shrake said, “Yeah, but Duke’s boys had their heads together, and I’m afraid they’re gonna, you know . . .”
“Throw one down? I don’t think so. Where’s Duke?”
Virgil looked around, spotted Duke sitting in his truck talking on the radio. He marched over, Shrake and Jenkins trailing nervously behind, and when Duke looked up from the radio, he said, “No gun in the truck. If one of your assistant assholes throws one down, I’ll bust him and put him on trial up in the Cities. It’d be about four felonies at this point. So you tell them to keep their hands off my crime scene.”
“It’s not your—”
“Fuck you,” Virgil said. He turned and headed back toward the death truck. On the way, he said to Jenkins and Shrake, “I want one of you sitting on this truck until the crime-scene people get here.”
“What’re we getting into here, Virg?” Shrake asked.
“I just don’t want anybody messing with the scene,” Virgil said. “This was murder. I suspect they’ll get away with it, the way the politics run, but I’m not going to make it any easier than I have to.”
“It’s not like Welsh and Sharp didn’t have it coming—”
“That’s not for Duke to decide,” Virgil said. “And they murdered my case against Murphy, right along with Jimmy and Becky. Goddamn them. Goddamn them.”
So they sat on the truck for an hour and a half, the Bare County deputies tiptoeing around them; every lawman and soldier in Minnesota wanted to look at the bodies, and Virgil chased them all off, until the crime-scene people showed up. Virgil briefed them on the possibility that somebody might try to mess with the scene; they said that wouldn’t happen.
Virgil, Shrake, and Jenkins walked past a line of sheriff’s cars on the way back to Virgil’s truck, and when they passed Duke, who was standing with a Guard officer and a couple of deputies, Duke said, “You’re starting to seriously piss me off.”
Virgil said, “You think so? Wait about an hour.” And he continued down the road.
Duke called after him, “What’re you going to do?”
Virgil called back, “Fuck you.”
• • •
BY THE TIME the crime-scene crew arrived, the town was full of cop cars, but no media trucks, because the media had been blocked out, not allowed across the Mad River bridge at the north end of town, and kept a half mile back from the road leading in from the south.
When it became clear that the cops weren’t going to allow them in—at least not right away—they’d gathered by the north bridge, and that’s where Virgil went, with Shrake and Jenkins trailing behind in Jenkins’s car. The bridge was blocked by a deputy in a Bare County sheriff’s car, and Virgil waved him out of the road. He backed up, and Virgil and Jenkins went on through, to the cluster of media vans and cars that backed up down the road.
Virgil pulled over and got out, and reporters hurried down toward him, and Shrake stepped close and said, “Bad idea, dude.”
Virgil said, “I know. I’m gonna do it anyway.”
The first reporters came up and Virgil said, “I’ve got a statement. I’ve got a statement as soon as you guys are ready.”
A newspaper guy yelled, “What happened down there?”
Virgil: “Wait for the cameras.”
They were all set up and spaced out in five minutes, and Virgil said, “Okay,” and stepped out in the middle of the road, and he said, “This is going to be a very short statement, and doesn’t represent any state authority at all. It’s just me.”
Everything had gone absolutely quiet, except for a couple of whirring machine sounds coming from a truck. Virgil went on.
“Becky Welsh and Jimmy Sharp were just ambushed and killed by Bare County sheriff’s deputies, at the Mad River bridge on the south end of Arcadia. Welsh had contacted me by phone and offered to surrender. I called Sheriff Lewis Duke for backup, and arranged to meet Welsh and Jimmy Sharp at the convenience store in Arcadia, along with sheriff’s deputies. This was the store that Becky Welsh held up a couple days ago.
“While we were waiting there, Sheriff Duke, without informing me or the other state agents, set up an ambush at the Mad River bridge on the south end of town. When Welsh and Sharp appeared, sheriff’s deputies opened fire with automatic weapons and killed both of them, without warning. We have not at this point found any guns in the truck, nor did Welsh or Sharp offer any sign of resistance: I was there to see it. It’s possible, from what Welsh told me on the telephone, that Sharp was unconscious when he was killed. Sheriff’s deputies fired what I believe to have been at least a hundred rounds through the truck. Welsh and Sharp were torn to bits by the heavy volume of gunfire.
“In my opinion, this was a carefully planned execution that was tantamount to murder. If it were up to me, I would arrest Sheriff Duke and his deputies for murder, but that won’t be up to me. I also believe that there was another person involved in all these killings over the last few days, and Welsh and Sharp would have been critical witnesses to that. Because of Duke’s actions, a cold-blooded killer here in Bare County may very well go untouched by the law.”
He stopped talking for a moment, and was met by total silence.
Then he said, “That’s all I’ve got to say,” and the screaming started.
• • •
WITH THE REPORTERS screaming at him, and as Virgil turned away, he thought the noise was probably audible all the way to the other end of town, where Duke sat in his car, looking down at the death truck.
Virgil walked back to his 4Runner. Jenkins was leaning against the door, grinned at him, and said, “Good show. But better you than me.”
Shrake said, “You got some balls, buddy.”
Virgil said, “Let’s go get a cheeseburger. I’m gonna need my strength.”
24
THE SATELLITE UPLINKS put the news of the shooting into the Cities within ten minutes, and every station in the state broke into their early-morning broadcasts to relay it. The video of Virgil was right behind that, and further video of Duke was ten minutes behind that.
Duke was uncharacteristically somber at the beginning of the press conference, and he lied like a motherfucker: “Gave us no
alternatives . . . turned the truck at deputies on the side of the road, accelerated toward them . . . we weren’t planning to ambush them. We wanted to make sure we closed the gate behind them, so whatever happened in town, they wouldn’t get away to kill more people. . . . We’ll cooperate with any investigation . . . proud of my men and what they accomplished today.”
Ruffe Ignace yelled, “What’d they accomplish? The state agents arrested McCall, and they would have arrested Sharp and Welsh if you hadn’t killed them.”
Duke raised his voice to say, “Unless they opened up on the people waiting in town . . .”
“With what? They didn’t have any guns.”
“We didn’t know that,” Duke said. “They sure had enough guns during the last week. What were we supposed to do, wait until they opened fire on my men? Get some more people killed?”
It went rapidly downhill from there. Virgil, Shrake, and Jenkins watched reruns on the television in the motel lobby, along with a bunch of other guests who’d gathered around the television.
“You know what bothers me?” Shrake asked.
“Nothing,” Virgil said.
“That’s not true. I’m a very sensitive individual. What bothers me is, you could see the TV people pulling for a shoot-out. If you’d just arrested them and slapped them in jail . . . what fun is that? They were a hundred percent in favor of a shoot-out. So then they got it, exactly what they wanted, and then they turn on the sheriff like a bunch of wolves. Now they’re like, ‘Oh, we’re all protecty about, you know, the right to a trial and innocent until proved guilty, blah blah blah.’”
“The sheriff deserves a bunch of wolves,” Virgil said.
“We’re gonna have to agree to disagree about that,” Shrake said. “I think those kids got pretty much what they deserved.”
“It’s not about the kids,” Virgil said. “It’s about us.”
“Aw,” Shrake said. “Poor little kids.”
Virgil said, “So you would have gunned them down.”