John Sandford - Mad River

“They couldn’t say that with straight faces.”

“But a lawyer could,” Davenport said. “The other thing is, you’re about to take on a clan of doctors. You know how hard it is to get doctors to practice in a place like Bigham? I bet that if you got a jury down there, even if they thought some O’Leary did it, they wouldn’t convict. They just wouldn’t do it.”

“Lucas. . you’re saying they’re going to get away with murder.”

“They will, if they did it. I’m not sure that they did it, and neither are you. You know your case against Murphy? That was ten times stronger than anything you’re likely to get against the O’Learys. You don’t even have a body. A jury won’t be sure, not given all the circumstances. You have one chance: that somebody confesses. What do you think the chance of that is?”

Virgil rubbed his forehead and admitted, “Slim and none.”

“And Slim is out of town,” Davenport said.

They ate for a while, and then Virgil said, “So you came down here to tell me to ditch the whole thing.”

“Nope. You have the best clearance record that anybody ever heard of, and I’d never tell you to stop,” Davenport said. “I just came down to tell you how it is. You won’t get them.”

Virgil: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Davenport looked around the cafe with its red leatherette counter stools, big men in coveralls, waitresses with beehive hairdos, then down at his plate of sliced turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing, and cranberry sauce, all covered with cream of mushroom gravy, and said, “No. It’s sure as shit not Chinatown, Virgil. It’s just life.”

They thought about that for a bit, then Davenport asked, “What’s going on with the guys who beat you up?”

Virgil shrugged. “Nobody’s wanted to go to trial. The state guys don’t want to resolve anything until we figure out what happened to Murphy, and McGuire and Atkins apparently think that the more confused things get, the more likely they are to get a better deal. So. . it’s still out there.”

“So everything’s settled except the O’Learys. . as much as it’s going to be, anyway,” Davenport said.

“Yeah.”

They ate some more, then Virgil said, “I’m going to Bigham tonight. I’m going to take a shot at them. Just see if anything falls out.”

“God bless you, man,” Davenport said.

Davenport dropped Virgil at his house and said, “Watch the weather service. There’s some bad shit coming in from Nebraska.” Then he was gone, moving fast in the 911.

Davenport was right. Bad shit coming down.

Virgil saw it on his computer, the weather radars all across the northern plains. A line of thunderstorms showed up in a crimson streak from western Kansas to eastern North Dakota, and the fattest part of the bowed-out line of supercells was aimed right at southwest Minnesota.

He called his father to tell him to keep an eye on it. “We’ve been watching it coming since yesterday,” his father said. “This is a nasty one.”

Virgil packed his Musto sailing suit in the back of the truck, just in case, and at three o’clock took off. Fifty miles east of Bigham, the sky turned cloudy, with the downward bumps of mammatus clouds; never a good sign. The wind picked up, and the clouds overhead were churning like whipped cream in a blender, but there was no rain. That would come, Virgil thought, but not yet.

He was dry all the way to Bigham. Beyond Bigham, though, the sky was a dark wall of cloud, and the cottonwood trees in City Park were whipping and twisting in the wind.

Virgil was early. He checked into the same hotel where he’d spent his time during the hunt for Sharp and Welsh, went up to his room, and turned on the television. The Sioux Falls weather radar showed the storm plowing toward Bigham: the leading edge of the heaviest band was ten miles to the west and the weatherman was screaming about wall clouds and the hook signature.

There’d been two confirmed tornadoes out of the system, and a third one was suspected. Virgil called his father: “What’s happening there?”

“It’s something else,” his father shouted into the phone. “It’s a hurricane out there, and a light show. No damage, though. We’ll be out of it in twenty minutes. There’s supposedly a tornado down south of us.”

“Call me if you have a problem. I’m in Bigham.”

“Bigham? Virgil, this baby is coming right at you.”

Virgil got off the phone and went and looked out the window. He couldn’t see much, but the window was rattling in its frame from the wind; then the rain came, a violent, pounding downpour that would last less than an hour, but might dump two or three inches of rain.

Virgil looked at his watch: six o’clock. He’d meet the O’Learys in an hour, but if there was a tornado out there. .

There was.

With the weatherman focusing on the hook at the southern trailing edge of the supercell, he watched it as it skimmed a few miles south of Bigham and continued to the northeast.

A tornado’s hard to track; an exact track usually can’t be done until the next day, when the tornado guys look down at the track from the air. But looking at the weather radar, the small oval area of the supposed tornado appeared to run right over the town of Victoria Plains, which was eight miles south of Bigham.

Virgil watched the radar, listened to the rain, heard an ambulance scream by, and then another, and then a couple of cop cars. The weatherman had no specific information, so Virgil called the Bare County sheriff’s office, identified himself, and asked the dispatcher if there was a problem.

“There is,” she said. “VP took a direct hit, and it’s a big storm. They’re saying the whole town is torn apart.”

“I’ve got lights, siren, and a 4Runner. You think I should get up there?”

“You probably should,” she said. “We’re calling everybody for help. There’s some farms got hit, too, but we don’t have any direct reports yet. Throw everything out of the truck except the first aid kit. You might be needed to transport people back to the hospital.”

Virgil was on his way in five minutes; he’d taken thirty seconds to pull on the Musto pants and jacket, and another two minutes to haul his gear out of the truck and up to the hotel room.

He couldn’t see it, but the sun was low in the sky, and it should have still been broad daylight. As it was, it looked like three o’clock on a cloudy winter day, not quite dark, but not quite light, either; the rain was coming so hard that in places, the water ran over the curbs of the street and down the sidewalks. The truck shuddered with the impact. There were trees down in City Park, and a power company truck headed fast to somewhere-no lights on the north side of town-and then Virgil cleared the town and headed south, following the nav system through the pounding rain.

Victoria Plains-VP-was an ordinary farm town of a thousand people or so, implement dealers and grain silos on the outskirts, with a compact little business district, now half emptied by the two big-box stores in Bigham. There were rows of small prairie houses spreading in uneven blocks out from the central district, with an orange-brick elementary school just off Main Street.

Quite ordinary an hour earlier; now it looked as though a giant had stepped on it.

Virgil passed an ambulance coming out of town, running with lights and siren. A few minutes later, another went by.

The first houses Virgil saw were half-wrecked, and he realized, looking out in the dimming light, that all around them were foundations from houses that simply were no longer there. A man was running down the street through the rain, waving his arms. When Virgil stopped, the man looked at Virgil and said, “You’re not an ambulance.”