Mad River

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.

8

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.

Like she was going to be a rocket scientist, or something.

You had to be seriously dumb, she said, to believe that rocket science shit. Being a small country high school, classes were less age-segregated than they might be in big-city schools. By the end of the year, most ninth-graders knew most of the upperclassmen and you knew what happened to them when they got out of school.

A few of the lucky ones, the rich ones, mostly teachers’ kids, went to a state university somewhere. More went out to a two-year college, which was like going to another level of high school, where you learned auto mechanics or how to fix the big windmills that were sprouting all over the place. But most of the kids struggled around to get jobs and five years later they had two kids and the parents were working separate shifts at a Lowe’s or a Home Depot somewhere, making just about enough to stay off food stamps.

Wasn’t any of them going to become rocket scientists.

Algebra. Fuck algebra.

If she were going to avoid Home Depot, Becky had a pretty good idea of what she had to do, and none of it involved algebra. She was pretty, and had the tits and ass to go with it. Those were her assets; algebra wouldn’t help.

But she had no tools. The tools just weren’t available in Shinder, or in Bigham, either. You didn’t get to the top, like the Kardashians, living out in the sticks. She begged her folks to take her to Los Angeles, or even the Cities, or even over to Marshall.

But they were afraid. They were small-town people-small-time people. They couldn’t even imagine other possibilities. They sat stupidly on the couch and drank their beer and watched the bright life on cable and told her to get a job.

So they died, and she felt nothing for them.

All that came out of her in the thirty minutes it took to drive to the Boxes’ house in Marshall. While she was talking, Tom, in the window seat, his thigh pressing against Becky’s, peered out at the passing farm fields and thought about how crazy it all was. There’d been a logic to the death of the girl in Bigham, and then the black guy. The first was a robbery gone bad, which can happen when a gun is involved. The black guy had to die so they could make their getaway. He understood that.

But old man Sharp, the Welshes. . Jimmy and Becky had gone over the edge. This was just nuts. Tom wasn’t the brightest bulb in the marquee, but he was smart enough to know that he was in the darkest kind of trouble, and there wasn’t going to be any Los Angeles, any Hollywood, not anymore.

The only reason he’d stuck with them, hadn’t tried to walk away yet, was Becky. He could see her watch the violence, and eat it up. She liked it. And Tom found himself drawn to it, as well. He’d kill somebody, if it would get him Becky, with the provision that nobody would find out. He was not so much of a dead-ender that he didn’t care about prison, or about getting shot to death by the cops. Jimmy could sneer at such things, but Tom couldn’t. He would have walked away, if it hadn’t been for Becky. He didn’t want to protect her, he didn’t want to romance, he just wanted her. Wanted to bang her brains loose. Wanted to show her just how strong he was. .

Marshall turned out to be even crazier. They didn’t even know the Boxes. Becky had worked for Box for a few months, had taken stuff to his house a few times, deliveries, knew that their names were Rick and Nina, and, she said, that they were assholes, but they didn’t really know them.

When they arrived, the Boxes’ garage door was going up, and when Jimmy pulled the beat-up old truck into the driveway, Rick Box had come out of the garage to see what was up.

Jimmy got out of the car with one hand behind himself, like he was hitching up his jeans, and when he got close enough, he pulled the gun and pressed it against Box’s chest and said, “This is a stickup,” and Box said, “What? What?”