Authors: John Sandford
“Probably somebody home,” Becky whispered.
She looked down at her handgun, a revolver, not yet used. Jimmy had loaded it for her, said, “There’s no safety, so it’s simple. Just pull the trigger.”
“Don’t shoot anybody if you don’t have to,” Tom said.
She nodded and said, “We gotta hurry. We’ll try the back door. If it’s locked, you gotta kick it in.”
The door wasn’t locked. They went through into the mud-room, and then into the kitchen, the floorboards creaking below their feet, and a woman called, “Will? Will?”
Becky was leading with the muzzle of the gun and she and the woman got to the door between the living room and the kitchen at the same time. The woman was maybe thirty-five and blond and thin, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing a white blouse and blue jeans and soft slippers and every single detail of that crystallized in Tom’s eye as the woman blurted, “Who are—”
Becky pushed the gun toward the woman’s heart from two feet and pulled the trigger. The trigger blast from the .44 Magnum was violent and deafening, and the woman toppled backward and died.
Becky said, “Jesus, I did it.” And she said to Tom, “We gotta find the medicine and get out of here.”
But then they both stopped and looked down at the dead woman’s face, and Becky said, “She was pretty,” and they both looked for a few more seconds, and the silence in the house was deep and pale, as though the sunshine were pulling back.
Becky was trembling, and her face was flushed; she was hot. Power of the pistol. Tom looked at her, and at the woman’s body, then said, “Give me the gun.”
Becky handed it to him, almost absentmindedly, still focused on the dead woman. Tom took the gun, then ventured, “Listen . . . you wanna do it?”
Becky was puzzled. “What?”
“We’ve got a little time. You want to go back in the bedroom?”
Her mouth dropped open, and the disbelief was right there on her face, quickly followed by scorn. “Are you crazy? You geek, I’d never . . . jeez, you sick fuck.”
She started to turn away, and never saw Tom’s hand coming.
Tom was tall and thin, but he had a bit of muscle and a little reach. The palm of his hand hit her square in the face, like a tennis racket hitting a ball, and Becky flew backward onto the kitchen floor. Tom put the gun on the kitchen counter and grabbed Becky by the neck and dragged her screaming and sputtering blood from her nose, back through the house to a bedroom, where he threw her on the bed. She rolled facedown and tried to crawl away from him, but he crawled on top of her and started pulling her clothes off.
She fought, but he raped her; and he enjoyed it. A lot. He enjoyed the sex, and he enjoyed the open-handed beating he gave her before and after. After he did it once, he had an impulse to apologize, but felt the sex coming back up, and remembered the way she’d whimpered, and sitting astride her hips, looking down at her, how wonderful she looked, all naked, and that got him going again, and he beat her again and raped her again, and finally he was done.
He pulled on his shirt and pants and said, “Don’t tell nobody about this,” and left her there. On his way out, he stepped over the dead woman’s body, picked up the pistol, got the dead woman’s purse off the cupboard, found her car keys, and went out to the Jeep.
• • •
BECKY HEARD HIM GO.
Pushed herself up, staggered into the bathroom, looked at herself in the mirror. Her face was a mask of blood. She washed it off as well as she could, remembered to look in the medicine chest, got lucky, found a half-used bottle of OxyContin prescribed by a dentist, took it, along with a tube of Mycitracin, took some clean sheets from a linen closet, thinking to make bandages, and was walking to the door when she heard the vehicle pulling into the driveway.
She looked out and saw a black Ford F-150 coming in.
Nearly panicked, she looked around, then ran into the bedroom, opened the bedroom closet, saw the 12-gauge pump shotgun. She knew shotguns—most males out on the prairie, including her father, had one. A box of shells was right there on the floor, and she loaded two of them, fumbling a third onto the floor, jacked one into the chamber. When a tall man in a Twins ball cap pushed through from the mudroom, she was right there in the middle of the kitchen, still bleeding from cuts on her forehead and from her nose. He said, “What?” and she shot him.
Thirty seconds later she was in the truck, backing out of the driveway. A minute after that, she was pulling up next to the Tahoe in the cornfield.
Jimmy looked at her bloody face and said, “What?” and Becky said, “He raped me.”
Jimmy said, “What?”
And she said, “C’mon, we gotta go. We gotta run.” She began weeping, and she led Jimmy hobbling to the new truck, and pushed two OxyContins into his mouth and asked, “Where’re we going, Jimmy? Where’re we going?”
• • •
TOM HADN’T THOUGHT
out all the necessary strategies for surrender, but was pretty sure that he didn’t want to let the Duke’s deputies get their hands on him first. He wasn’t entirely sure that he could blame the cop shooting on Jimmy, but there were no witnesses, and he thought he probably could. Still, the sheriff’s deputies were bound to be pissed, and so he thought he’d better call Flowers first.
But even that frightened him. Should he keep on running? He had forty dollars, which would get him halfway across South Dakota, and Becky and Jimmy sure as hell weren’t going to be talking about this Jeep.
On the other hand, the woman’s husband would be coming home, and they’d be looking for the Jeep anytime now. . . .
On balance, he thought, he’d be better off with Flowers. It took him a while to get his guts up—and he stopped once, at a turnout, to take a leak, and to throw the .44 into a culvert. Becky had scratched his back, which had kept him going at the time but now hurt like hell.
Becky.
He thought about it, and then felt himself smile. Whatever else that had been, it’d been worth it. If he lived through the rest of the day, his half hour with Becky would take care of his dreams for ten thousand nights. He’d never before just taken
anything
. But he’d taken her: she wouldn’t soon forget Tom McCall.
But that was then.
He said to the sky, “Gonna take some shit now,” but he finally pulled the cell phone out of his pocket and turned it on and punched up Flowers’s return number. Flowers came right up and said, “Tom? Where are you?”
VIRGIL TALKED TO THE
county administrator and fixed Randy White’s paid leave, without giving up the exact reason. “We think that these killers might be a danger to him, and he’s a witness on some relevant matters that I can’t talk about, so we want to get him out of sight for everybody’s good.”
The county administrator, a short, stocky, gray-haired man with a buzz cut, who almost had to be a former Marine, said, “God bless you. Take him.”
Randy, Virgil thought as he walked back to the truck, was not universally respected as a hard worker. He got Randy on his cell phone and said, “It’s done. You’ll be paid and it won’t count against vacation. Get up to the Cities, but you stay in touch. I don’t want to have to go looking for you.”
He was thinking about getting another bite to eat when Duke called, screaming, “They hit the credit union in Oxford. There’s a possibility that one of our deputies got shot, Dan Card maybe got shot, a guy’s running him into Marshall in his truck. That’s what we hear, we don’t know anything.”
Virgil found Oxford in his truck atlas. It was about as far away from him as it could be, and still be in Bare County. As he pulled out into the street, he saw two sheriff’s cars bust a red light a couple of blocks away, and he hit his own flashers and took off after them, headed south out of town at high speed.
• • •
THE ROADS WERE CLEAR
and dry and they were all running with lights and sirens. On the way, Virgil called Davenport and told him about it, and that there might be a cop down. Seven or eight minutes later, Davenport called back and said, “Card is dead. I just talked to Marshall. They had an ambulance run out to meet the guy bringing him in, but they say he’s gone. You gotta get these guys, Virgil.”
“You know the problem,” Virgil said.
The problem was, they knew who the killers were, but they couldn’t find them. If they’d fled Oxford an hour earlier, they could be anywhere in a circle maybe fifty miles in radius from Oxford. Using the formula A = pi r squared, A being the area and r being the radius and pi being 3.14 (roughly), they could be almost anywhere in an area of 7,850 square miles, and the area was expanding rapidly, with every moment they went undiscovered.
“I know the problem, but this is crazy, this is out of control.”
“Everybody in the state is looking for them,” Virgil said. “What do you want me to do?”
A minute after he got off the phone with Davenport, Duke called and said, “Dan Card is dead, but he shot one of the gang. We’ve got blood in the street, but we don’t know which one. The bank was robbed by two masked males, and one of them got hit.”
Duke was going on when Tom McCall called.
Virgil’s phone beeped with the incoming message, and he saw who it was, and he said to Duke, “I got McCall on the line. I’ll call you back.”
Duke said, “Hey—” but Virgil clicked through to McCall and said, “Tom? Where are you?”
• • •
MCCALL SAID,
“Virgil, I’m running. Jimmy’s been shot in the leg, Becky just killed some woman in some farmhouse, I’m on the highway, I stole a Jeep and ran away from Becky, I got no gun, but Jimmy shot a cop, I think, and those deputies are gonna kill me if they find me. I don’t know what to do—”
“How bad is Jimmy?”
“He’s hurting, he’s bleeding bad, but they made a bandage out of a shirt. But fuck a bunch of Jimmy, man, I’m out here, I’m all fucked up—”
“I got you,” Virgil said. “You tell me where to go, and I’ll meet you there. Figure out the roads and an intersection, and I’ll take you in.”
“I don’t know what road I’m on. I’m out in the sticks.”
“Where’s the woman who got shot? Are you sure she’s dead? Where are they?”
“On County 9, right straight out of town . . . out of Oxford. They pulled into a cornfield, an uncut cornfield. They’re hiding in the corn, must be eight or ten miles out of town.”
“North, south . . . ?”
“I don’t . . . north, I guess. Up toward town, toward Bigham.”
Eight or ten miles north of Oxford on 9. Not that far from where he was. Virgil switched the cell phone to speaker, said, “You hang on here, I need to look at my map.”
He got the atlas off the passenger seat, found 9 out of Oxford, realized he had to jog east to catch it. He hated to cut McCall off, but he had no choice. “Tom, you need to call me back in five minutes, and I’ll bring you in. But I gotta get an ambulance and some cops going to this woman you say got shot.”
“You gotta help me, man. They had me held
prisoner
.”
“Call me in five minutes,” Virgil said. “I’ll bring you in.”
Virgil was still trailing the deputies’ cars, all rolling at eighty miles an hour or so, where they could, where the roads weren’t too bad, but they were coming up on an intersection that would take them over to 9 and the two sheriff’s cars went straight through, and without any way to talk to them directly, Virgil took the turn and called Duke and told him McCall’s story.
Duke said, “I’m coming into Oxford now, but some of it is lies for sure, because we’re talking to the witness and he said one guy was shot, but it was the
other guy
who killed Dan. It was your boy McCall.”
“He’s calling me and I’m gonna bring him in, but we’ve gotta find this house where the woman is down.”
“Okay, those boys who were ahead of you are the closest. I’ll turn them around,” Duke said. “You know where you’re going? Exactly?”
“Over to 9 and then south toward Oxford. McCall thinks they’re ditched in a cornfield, a standing cornfield about eight or ten miles north of town. There’s not that much standing corn this year.”
“You see them, you wait until we get there with the artillery,” Duke said. “We don’t need you dead and them running.”
“If I spot it, I’ll go on past to this farmhouse where McCall says the dead woman is. We can’t take a chance on that.”
“Call me. I’m heading that way. I’ll get everybody heading that way, but you’ll get there first. Call me.”
Virgil threw the phone on the passenger seat and put his foot down harder, both hands on the wheel. It was two miles on gravel over to 9, which was a good blacktop road. As he came up to it, he could see a cloud of gravel dust straight ahead, on the other side of the intersection, and thought about going after it but didn’t. The woman who’d been shot . . .
• • •
IF HE HAD GONE
after it, he’d have caught Becky and Jimmy in the black Ford. Jimmy was feeling better, with the pain pills in him. The pain wasn’t entirely gone, but it had eased, and his mind was clear, and he kept coming back to Tom McCall. Becky had told him about the rape, and she was still breaking down, weeping into her chest. “That sonofabitch, I should have shot him. He’s fuckin’ talking to the cops right now.”
“He doesn’t know where we’re going.”
“They’ll be all over this county in half an hour,” Jimmy said. “Becky, you gotta go faster. Faster, c’mon, it’s a good way yet, we gotta go faster, we got no time.”
• • •
VIRGIL SAW THE STANDING
corn from a half mile out, a patch of tan on the otherwise dark earth. He slowed to a normal pickup speed, fifty miles an hour, and cruised on by it, checking it out. No sign of a truck, but if they were in deep enough . . . Then he crossed a culvert and saw tracks in the dirt and thought,
Yes.
A moment later, he came up on a farmhouse that sat a hundred feet off the highway; the mailbox outside said “Towne.” The garage was open and empty, a nasty black rectangle like a missing tooth, and the openness of it caught him, and he said, “Oh, shit,” and he pulled into the driveway and called Duke, who answered instantly.
“I’m three miles south of 10 on 9, pink house with a garage on the side standing open, no sign of a car, it’s maybe a half mile south of some standing corn and there were some tracks going off there. I think it’s them. I’m going in the house.”
“You don’t go in that house, you stay right there,” Duke said. “That’s an order, mister. We’re not more than three or four minutes out.”
“Fuck that,” said Virgil, and he rang off, got out of the truck, took the shotgun out of the back, pushed in four double-ought shells, and let the gun’s muzzle lead him down the driveway.
As he went, he heard his phone ring. McCall, probably. He let it go.
The back door was open and he stepped through, into the mudroom, saw a man’s body lying on the floor and beyond him a woman, and then the man groaned and one arm twitched and Virgil jumped across his body, charged through a dining room and then the living room and back around through the kitchen, over the woman’s body—her sightless eyes stared straight up at him, she was dead—and back to the man.
He’d been shot with a shotgun, but much of the blast had apparently gone between his biceps and his chest, knocking a bloody patch in his rib cage and a piece out of his arm. He was lying in a pool of blood, but Virgil had seen bigger pools, and he put down his gun and called Duke and shouted, “We got two down, one dead, but one’s still alive. We need a medic here RIGHT NOW. Get somebody here RIGHT NOW.”
Duke said, “Hold on,” and then came back. “We’ve got an ambulance rolling, but it’s gonna be a while. One of my guys got medical training, he’s right behind me . . . he’s got a medical kit . . . I’m coming up on you now.”
Virgil looked down at the wounded man and couldn’t think of what to do: he was not a medic, and was afraid that anything he did would be worse than nothing. The man was oozing blood, but not pumping it. Then he thought of the empty garage, and the two bodies, and he slipped the man’s wallet from his pocket, opened it, found his driver’s license, and ran back out to his truck.
As he was crossing the driveway, Duke swerved into it and came to a dusty screeching halt next to Virgil’s truck. Another sheriff’s car was right behind him, and Virgil shouted, “Inside.”
Duke shouted back, “What’re you doing?”
Virgil called, “I think they took their cars. I’m going to get an ID on their cars.”
Duke ran up the driveway into the house, and a deputy from the second car unloaded a med pack from the trunk and ran toward the door, after Duke. Then two more sheriff’s cars arrived, coming from the same direction as Virgil had, the cops piling out into the yard.
• • •
DUKE WAS BACK OUT
fifteen seconds later, as Virgil was waiting for a reading on the victim’s auto registrations. He had them thirty seconds later, writing the descriptions on a notepad: one black Jeep Cherokee, one black Ford F-150 pickup, registered to Clarence and Edie Towne. He got the tags for both of them, then climbed out of the truck and gave the note to Duke and said, “We’re looking for these vehicles. McCall is in the Jeep, Sharp and Welsh probably have the pickup. It’s possible they’re still up in the cornfield.”
Duke issued orders that sent deputies to the corners of the cornfield, where they could see anybody trying to get out, and designated two other deputies to accompany himself and Virgil off the shoulder of the road into the cornfield.
Virgil said, “I need as many of them alive as we can get. There’s another thing going on here—we need them alive if we can get them without taking too big a risk.”
“No risk,” Duke said. “Alive if we can get them with no risk. I don’t want anybody else shot. You all know about Dan. . . . All right. Let’s go.”
They took off, moving at speed, led by the deputies who would go past the cornfield and then post up on its corners. Virgil led the sheriff’s own truck, and two more, ten seconds behind the first two.
As they went, he thought about the cloud of dust he’d seen disappearing down 10. Had that been them?
A minute after they left the farmhouse, Virgil took his truck off-road, down into the ditch, plowing along through dead grass, then onto a track that led down to a dry creek. He could see where somebody had busted up the other side of the creek bed, running over small saplings, and he stopped and got his shotgun out, and the other cops stopped behind him and he waved for them to spread out.
“Don’t anybody shoot anybody else,” he said. Every one of the deputies was carrying an M16, and they moved toward the corn in a skirmish line; and Virgil realized that with the limited visibility ahead, any hope of taking Sharp and Welsh alive was bound to be futile. There’d be no real chance of surrender, because they simply couldn’t be seen well enough, and nobody would take a chance that they were surrendering when they might just as well be ready to open fire.
The best chance, he thought, was if they’d both been shot and were on the ground.
“Got a truck here, got a Tahoe here,” one of the deputies screamed, and the line shifted in his direction, then stopped, then started forward again, collapsing on the target area. Virgil and Duke both jogged along the skirmish line, from opposite directions, and then Virgil saw the truck, but no sign of life around it.
They moved up slowly, cops leapfrogging past each other, always one or two focused on the truck while the others covered, and when they got close enough, Virgil called, “Don’t shoot me,” and jogged up to the truck, stopped, listened, then peeked in the back window. The truck was empty.
“Nobody,” he called. “Watch the corn, watch the corn.”
“Another track going out this way. There was another truck here,” somebody called, and Virgil went that way and looked. The corn had been knocked down by another vehicle that had come in and stopped ten feet from where the first one was parked.
“Reversed in here and backed out,” a deputy said. “They’re in that Ford.”
Virgil stepped back to the Tahoe and Duke, who’d been looking in the passenger-side door, said, “Somebody got hit hard. Lotta blood.”
Virgil looked in; there was a lot of blood, but not as much as there would be for somebody who was bleeding to death. McCall had been telling the truth: Jimmy had been hit, but not incapacitated. They’d be looking for a place to hide, where they could give the wound some attention, which meant somebody in an isolated farmhouse could get killed in the next little while.
Virgil said all that to Duke, who had already put out a stop order on the Townes’ Jeep and pickup.