John Sandford - Mad River

Jimmy didn’t respond for a moment, then said, “Fuckin’ helicopter can see us.”

“Not very well.”

But she worried about it, and when Jimmy seemed to have dozed off again, she covered him with a blanket, got out of the truck, and looked around the abandoned farmstead.

Anything of value had been stripped off the place, but behind one of the outbuildings she found three old rolls of tar paper, the kind you put under shingles. The stuff was so old that it broke more easily than it unrolled, but eventually, with patience, she pulled off several long strips of it and draped it over the pickup.

When she was finished, the truck looked like a lump of raw dirt; from the air, she thought comfortably, it should be invisible.

She climbed back in the truck; Jimmy was snoring.

She sat and tried to think, but nothing came to her.

Wished she had the old man’s television. That had been pretty nice.

A while later, it got dark.

And cold.

An hour after Welsh and Sharp had fled, Shrake and Boykin drove up the long hill toward the old man’s house. Boykin, who was at the wheel, said, “If I was hiding, I’d take this place.”

“You said that back at the Jenks’ place.”

“Well, that one, too,” Boykin said. They came over the top of the hill into the farmyard and Boykin said, “Really looks deserted.”

“This is David S. Gates,” Shrake said, reading from his list. He picked up his phone, which had been in a cup holder, and poked in Gates’s phone number. He was kicked over to the answering service.

“Give him a couple of honks,” Shrake said. Boykin leaned on the horn for a minute, and they waited a minute, then tried the horn again.

“Nobody home,” Boykin said.

“We’ll come back. We got three more places,” Shrake said.

Boykin did half a U-turn in the dirt driveway, then had to back up to make the rest of it, and Shrake said, “Pull over. Let me out.”

“Why?” Boykin pulled over as he asked.

“Because I’m a detective, and you’re not,” Shrake said. “Get your rifle out of the back, get back behind the car, and cover the windows.”

Boykin did as he was told, but after he was braced up behind the car, watching the windows in the house, he asked, “What?”

Shrake had his pistol out. “Look right there, those scuffs. . what does that look like?”

Boykin looked; the driveway was a mixture of rock and dirt, and not far from the side door, he could see a scuff line that led toward a shed. “Like somebody dragged something, something like a body,” Boykin said. He lifted the M16 toward the windows and clicked it over to full-auto. “You gonna look?”

“Don’t let them shoot me,” Shrake said. “And keep one eye on the barn.”

“Shrake? Don’t be an asshole. Call Virgil-at least get him leaning this way.”

Shrake paused, then nodded and called Virgil. Virgil said, “We were just turning into the Roses’ place. We’ll be there in two minutes.”

“Might be nothing,” Shrake said.

“But it might not be nothing.”

Shrake put the phone away and walked slowly sideways, watching the house, then the barn, looking for any sign of movement-but the place felt dead to him, and that particular feeling had never let him down. If somebody was breathing inside a building, he could usually feel it-a lot of cops could.

Boykin called, “Man, take it easy. .”

Shrake had gotten past the house and was now halfway to the shed. A new line of windows, on the back of the house, now opened to him, and he called, “Watch the barn,” and he watched the house windows as he followed the scuff line into the shed.

Where he found the body of David S. Gates.

Gates’s hand was frozen in a tight position that Shrake recognized as late-stage rigor mortis, with the body starting to relax. So he’d been dead for a while.

From the car, Boykin shouted, “What?”

Shrake called back, “Got a body.”

Then he saw the tank and yelled, “And we got a tank.”

“What?”

When Virgil arrived, Shrake was still in the shed, and Boykin had moved from the car to a large oak tree in the front yard, from which he could see the front and far side of the house, while Shrake watched the back and near side. Virgil was on the phone and Shrake said, “All the windows are closed. No runners. No sign of life at all.”

“Okay. Jenkins and I are going through the side door. Stay with us.”

They went in with shotguns. The side door was unlocked. Jenkins led the way; just inside, they found one stairway going up four steps into the house, and another going down to a basement. Virgil stepped down to a lower landing, looked at the dark, cluttered cellar; he could smell old coal, dirt, and potatoes.

“What do you think?” Virgil asked.

“I can hold the stairway if you want to clear the basement.”

Virgil dropped down the stairs, carefully, leading with the muzzle of his shotgun. At the foot of the stairs, he found a bare lightbulb operated with a pull string; he pulled on the string and got some light. The basement had a workbench against one wall, with a disorderly pile of tools and boxes of nails and screws and bolts; the other walls were lined with shelves filled with all manner of junk-broken hoes and rakes, snow shovels, gas cans. One set of shelves was filled with old Ball jars, all empty.

There was a closed door off to his right, and he pushed it open with a foot, still leading with the muzzle of the gun, and found more junk, including some antiques that his mother would have liked-crocks and creamers, an old chicken-watering can, a couple of battered-looking hoses, coils of outdoor extension cords. No living thing, other than a lot of insects and arachnids.

A mousetrap, snapped shut, was visible under a shelf.

He called, “Clear.”

They spent ten minutes clearing the rest of the house, then Virgil called Duke, who asked without preamble, “Find anything?”

“Yeah, we did,” Virgil said.

Boykin stayed outside, to direct traffic, while Jenkins, Shrake, and Virgil looked at the living room. They found bandages soaked with blood and pus, a couple of empty pill bottles, a lot of beer bottles, wrappers from various kinds of junk food, and a pile of gay porn movies. The television was still on, and showed an aerial shot of a line of police and military vehicles churning down a gravel road, throwing up a cloud of dust. An excited reporter was saying, “. . hasn’t been confirmed but we’ve been told that it’s possible that state agents have cornered Welsh and Sharp in a house south of the tiny town of Arcadia.”

Virgil said, “Ah, man.”

While they waited for the carnival to arrive, Virgil checked the barn, where he found the Townes’ pickup.

“They’ve got Gates’s truck. And they’ve had a lot of time,” Virgil said.

Ten minutes later, Duke and the Guard lieutenant colonel looked at the body in the shed, and then the living room-everybody else was kept outside-and then the colonel asked Virgil, “Using very short words, and speaking slowly, tell me what it all means.”

“Shrake has more experience with this than I have, and he says that it appears that Mr. Gates’s body is in a later stage of rigor mortis,” Virgil said. “Rigor sets in three or four hours after death and can last two days, or a bit more, especially if it’s cold, and the body has apparently been outside since Mr. Gates was killed. If he’s in the later stages, then he was probably killed right after they killed the Townes and left the cornfield. They probably came right here.”

Duke looked around, puzzled, and then, “But. . that doesn’t help. The question is, when did they leave? If he’s been dead ever since they killed the Townes. . they could be in Mexico.”