John Sandford - Mad River

No answer, no lights, no movement.

Virgil called on his handset, “Everybody stay in place, we’re going to make an approach.”

They came in from the garage corner, a blank windowless wall where they couldn’t be seen. Virgil and the two drug cops stopped there, and Virgil whispered, “Give me a flashlight.” One of the men handed him a Maglite, and he stepped around to the back of the garage, eased up to a back window. The inside of the garage was dark. He risked a peek, and could see almost nothing; he looked longer, couldn’t see anything that looked like movement. He risked the flashlight, and found himself looking into an empty garage.

Had the Boxes gone somewhere as well? But the silver truck had been there in the morning. .

He crept back to the two drug cops. “Nothing in the garage. Maybe they’re gone.”

“So now what?” one of them whispered.

“I want to look at the front door.” They moved to the front corner of the garage, then Virgil got on his hands and knees and crawled alone along the sidewalk, under a picture window and past a thawing flower bed, to the front door. He checked the door with the flash. No damage.

All right. One of the drug cops crawled up with what looked like a stethoscope, and put the sensor against the door. They sat for one minute, two minutes, then the cop said, “Nothing at all.”

Virgil said, “So let’s go in.”

The first cop continued to listen while Virgil crawled back to the second cop, alerted everyone to the entry, and brought the second cop back to the porch. The first cop, still listening, shook his head. “I don’t think there’s anybody in there. Not alive, anyway.”

Virgil eased the storm door open, tried the knob. Locked. Backed off. The second cop whispered, “Looks like a pretty good door. Metal.” He meant, hard to take down.

Virgil nodded. “Let’s take a look at the garage.”

They crawled back down the sidewalk, updated everybody on what was happening, tried the garage overhead door, which was locked down, and the side door, which was also locked, but had a six-pane window. Virgil used the stock of his pistol to silently pressure-crack the glass in the lowest pane, then picked out the pieces and tossed them in the flower bed. When he could reach through without cutting himself, he did, and turned the doorknob and the three of them eased into the garage. The connecting door to the house was locked, but was a hollow-core door, much flimsier than the front door.

“We can get a hammer in here,” one of the cops whispered.

“Let’s do it,” Virgil said.

The cop made a call, and two minutes later another cop snuck around the corner of the garage carrying a twelve-pound maul.

Virgil said to the maul-carrier, “I’ll turn on the flash, you hit it.” And to the two drug cops, “You get in line and go on in. There should be lights right next to the door. Go all the way to the back before you stop.”

When everybody was on the same page, Virgil lifted the flash and said, “On three,” and counted. On two, he switched the light on, and on three, the hammer smashed the door open. The first cop hit the lights with his hand, and stopped dead in the doorway.

Virgil said, “Go,” and the cop said, “Can’t.”

Virgil looked around him at two bodies in the living room, both facedown on the carpet.

The lead cop said, “Boyoboyoboy. .” and it flashed through Virgil’s mind that the bodies looked like cows lying in a pasture. He said, urgently, “Go on to the back. Step around them, go on to the back, make sure there’s nobody can get out in the hallway.”

The cop did that, following the muzzle of his shotgun down a hallway toward what looked like a bedroom wing until Virgil said, “Okay, hold it there. Watch the doors.”

He motioned the second drug cop to the kitchen, and the second cop cleared it and said, “There’s a couch here. They’ve barricaded a door.”

Virgil went that way and found a couch jammed end-wise between a hallway wall and a door that apparently led to the basement. “Why?”

Then a boy’s voice called, “Mom? Mom? Dad?”

Virgil got four more cops in the house. He said, “Those are kids down there. I don’t want them to see their parents. You guys make a barrier, and we’ll take them straight to the front door so they never see them. Okay? Everybody.”

Everybody nodded, then they lifted the couch away from the door. Virgil looked down the stairs at two children, a boy perhaps six, who was holding the hand of a girl who was maybe four. The sheriff was at his shoulder and he said, “Oh, no, no, no.” He went down the stairs and said, “Kids, come on up here. Come on with me. Come on with me, honey.”

He picked up the girl, and the boy took his hand, and Virgil said, “Out the front.” The sheriff took the kids outside, carrying the girl, towing the boy with his hand; the boy looked back at Virgil, and Virgil saw the truth in his eyes: the kid knew, at some level.

One of the cops, a heavyset balding man in his fifties, watched the kids go and then started to snuffle, and Virgil said, “Okay, okay, everybody. . We got a lot of work to do. Let’s hold it all together.”

One of the drug cops said, “What if they’re coming back? Maybe we oughta get the kids out of here and set up an ambush.”

“We can do that out a few blocks,” Virgil said. “If that’s the Boxes in there, we’ll have to assume that they’ve got the Boxes’ cars and they’ve still got the truck. We need tags for the Boxes’ cars-there could be two of them. . Set up a watch. .”

One of the cops, a sergeant, said, “I’ll get that going,” and he jogged away, and another cop came from the back and said, “Cars isn’t all they got.”

Virgil: “What?”

The cop said, “There’s a gun safe back here. It’s open, but there aren’t any guns in it.”

Virgil went to look. The gun safe was five feet tall, of a forest-green metal, had foam barrel slots for eight long guns, and five of the slots appeared to have been used. At the top of the safe were four foam-lined slots for handguns, and all four appeared used.

On the floor of the safe, a couple of ordinary plastic bags showed a flash of brass, and Virgil picked them up. Inside the first was a variety of empty shells: 9mm, which would be a handgun; a couple of dozen.44 Magnum, which could be either a handgun or a carbine, but most likely a handgun; a dozen or so.308 rifle shells, and as many in.223, and a bunch of little.22s. The other bag was full of empty 12- and 20-gauge shotgun shells.

“They got themselves an army,” one of the cops said.

The Chief of police, who’d been out with his wife at her sister’s house, showed up, and he and Virgil and the sheriff got together in the driveway. Up and down the street, lights were going on, and Virgil sent a cop to tell people to turn them off. The chief, a burly man with heavy glasses, said, “We’ve got a perimeter set up. If they try to come back in, we’ll nail ’em.”

The cars’ descriptions were going out to all agencies: a year-old Chevy Tahoe, a four-year-old Lexus RX 400h.

Virgil asked, “What about the kids?”

“Social Services lady has them-they heard the shots that killed their folks. They couldn’t get out of the basement, no windows. They’ve got relatives down in Windom. We’re looking for them.”

The chief said, “Now what?”

Everybody looked at Virgil.

When they left the Welsh house, after killing Becky’s parents, nobody said anything for a very long time-Jimmy smoked a cigarette and peered out the windshield like he expected Jesus Christ himself to pop out of the roadside weeds. Then Becky launched into a monologue about how her parents had never given her the things she needed to achieve her goals. Achieving goals had been the one constant refrain she’d taken out of high school, the one thing they drummed into you: about how if you didn’t do this, that, or the other thing-pay attention and learn algebra-you’d never achieve your goals.