John Sandford: Mad River

“Ralph. But there wasn’t much to do after the crime-scene crew got finished. Nobody had any idea of what happened.”

“Okay. Send me what Ralph got.”

“I will,” Davenport said. “When you say they were wearing bikini bottoms, they were also, like, wearing the tops, right?”

“Nope, just the bottoms,” Virgil said.

“Fuck me,” Davenport said. “Anyway, you bring anything back home?”

“Jesus, I hope not,” Virgil said.

“I meant fish,” Davenport said.

“Oh. No. No, I didn’t.”

Cooper offered Virgil a ride home, but Bob-Bob said, doubtfully, “That don’t sound like a real good idea,” and Virgil said, “Thanks, anyway, Cornelius. I can use the walk.”

Virgil lived the best part of a mile northeast of downtown, a cool walk in early April, but he was wearing an insulated Carhartt jean jacket over a black Wolfmother T-shirt, jeans, and boots, and was comfortable enough as he ambled along through the dark. He lived in a small two-bedroom frame house with a double garage. A fishing boat was usually parked in the driveway, in this case, an almost-new fishing boat, a Ranger. The boat had been purchased with some fear and trepidation about ethics, from a friend of the governor of the state of Minnesota.

Virgil’s previous boat had been blown up by a mad bomber. Virgil had crawled away from the wreckage, unhurt, by the very skin of his teeth. The governor had offered to help out by locating the Ranger, two years old, but with only thirty hours on the motor. Virgil initially declined, because he thought that the boat broker might be doing a favor for the governor, some kind of political deal, and he didn’t want a part of that.

But the governor had come back to him, said he appreciated Virgil’s ethical conundrum, and insisted that there was no deal, he’d only done it because he imagined that he and Virgil were friends and he felt bad about the bomb. No payback was expected or required from anyone. Virgil got a letter from the director of the BCA saying it was okay, and he bought the boat, because, the fact was:

He hungered for it.

It had been love at first sight. A Ranger Angler, red with black and gray trim, eighteen feet, six inches long with a ninety-eight-inch beam. There was a rod case under the front deck with space for six rods, plenty of storage in the side lockers, a Minn-Kota trolling motor on the bow, a 175 Merc on the back.

Virgil had to put up the whole insurance payment on his old boat and motor, plus he’d financed twelve thousand dollars over four years through the state credit union. That was cheap, he thought, when it came to true love.

And now, as the saying went, he could pad his ass with fiberglass, a big change from his old aluminum boat.

Virgil was a tall man, an inch or two over six feet, slender, with blue eyes and blond hair worn long for a cop, but not too long for farm country, where he usually worked. Like country people, he had a tendency toward ball caps, barn jackets, and cowboy boots, especially in the spring, when he needed to be mud-resistant. He’d been born out on the prairie, in Marshall, Minnesota, where he’d lettered in football, basketball, and baseball. He still looked like a competent third baseman.

He got back to the house around twelve-thirty, clear of mind if not fresh of breath. He patted the boat on the nose and said, “Hey, baby,” went in the house, started a pot of coffee, brushed his teeth, threw a few days’ worth of shirts, jeans, and underwear in a satchel, along with a dopp kit. He got his pistol and a shotgun out of the gun safe, and some ammo, took the whole pile of gear out to his truck, a Toyota 4Runner, and packed it away. That done, he hooked the truck up to the boat, backed the boat into the garage, unhooked it, and locked the garage door behind himself.

Back inside the house, he poured a cup of coffee, put the rest in a thermos, sipped at the coffee, and went back to the second bedroom he used as a study and dug out his Minnesota atlas.

Shinder was a small farm town of a few hundred people, ordinary enough, as far as he knew, out on the prairie in western Minnesota. It was only thirty miles from Virgil’s hometown of Marshall, and probably seventy-five or eighty from his current home in Mankato.

Though he’d been past Shinder a hundred times, he’d never stopped, because there wasn’t anything to stop for. He wasn’t even exactly sure what county the town was in-it was right where Yellow Medicine, Lyon, Redwood, and Bare came together. He thumbed through the atlas and found that it was just inside Bare County, five miles from the Yellow Medicine line.

Virgil said, aloud, to his empty house, “Ah, man.”

Bare County was run by Sheriff Lewis Duke, known to other local sheriffs as the Duke of Hazard. He believed in Guns, Punishment, Low Taxes, and the American Constitution. If he wasn’t the source of all those things-the Almighty God was-he was at least the Big Guy’s representative in Bare County.

Among other things, he’d tried to set up a concentration camp on the site of an old chicken farm, complete with barracks and barbed-wire fences, for minor criminals. He believed that an actual indoor Minnesota jail was simply pampering the miscreants. He figured to rent space in the concentration camp barracks to other counties that wanted to unload expensive prisoners, and even make a profit for his Bare County constituents. The state attorney general’s office, backed by a court order, stopped the concentration camp.

But no court order could stop Lewis Duke from being an asshole.

At ten minutes after one o’clock in the morning, ninety-eight percent sober, Virgil pulled out on the street and rolled away in the dark toward Shinder. His phone rang on the seat beside him, and he picked it up: Davenport, who always stayed up late.

Davenport asked, “How’re you feeling?”

“Stone-cold sober, if that’s what you mean,” Virgil said. “I just pulled out of my house-I’m on the way.”

“Good. It’d be best if you were gunned down in the line of duty, and not killed in a drunk-driving accident.”

“Anyhooo. .”

“The crime-scene truck is leaving town now,” Davenport said. “They’ll be an hour and a half or maybe two hours behind you. If you’re going over on 14, you don’t have to worry about the patrol, so you can let it roll. Watch out for town cops.”

“I’ll do that,” Virgil said. “You think Ray Wylie Hubbard is better than Waylon Jennings?”

“I don’t know, but they’re both better than any of the Beatles,” Davenport said. “I’m going to bed. Hesitate to call.”

One good thing about a long drive in the dark, when you didn’t know anything about where you were going, or what you were going to do when you got there, was that you had lots of time to think.

Virgil had for years worked a sideline as an outdoors writer, a freelancer for the diminishing number of magazines that were actually about the outdoors, as opposed to outdoors technology. He knew which brands of fishing rods he liked, and what reels, and he knew something about guns and bows and snowshoes and about boats and canoes, and not as much as he would have liked about dogs-his job made it almost impossible to keep a dog-but not much about technology.

He wasn’t much interested in arguing whether a.308 was better or worse than a.30–06 on whitetail, or a Ranger a better boat than a Lund or a Tuffy, or a Mathews Solocam a better bow than a Hoyt or a PSE. He couldn’t have found his own ass with a GPS. He just did what most guys did, which was talk to his friends and try a few things out. The fact was, most of the known names worked pretty well, and you got used to what you had; you could punch all the half-inch holes in paper that you liked, but the fact is, when it came to hunting, anything in the bread box would do the job.