John Sandford - Mad River

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.”

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.