“What?”
“I needed the money.”
Virgil sighed and gave up on football. He said, “Listen, Randy. You’re the only witness against Dick Murphy. Murphy may still be in touch with Jimmy. So you’ve got to take care. I’m serious. You stay away from Murphy, and might want to lock your doors at night-or maybe head out for a few days. We know Jimmy’s got himself some hunting rifles.”
White nodded, and said, “I got this supervisor. Stan. If you could fix it for me to get a couple days off, I could drive up to the Cities. I got a cousin there I can stay with.”
Virgil said, “I can fix that. It’ll be fixed when you get back.”
“Okay. Okay.”
“You have a little thing about Ag Murphy?” Virgil asked.
“No. Hardly even knew her. Didn’t really know her until she married Dick. That’s when I really got to know her,” he said. He stopped, and Virgil waited, because he wasn’t done. He said, “She was a nice girl. Friendly with everyone. I knew her in high school, and she was always nice to me, and then when, you know, she came back here with Dick, I’d see her around, and she’d always stop to talk. . ”
“But there was really nothing there. .”
White said, “Ah, Jesus,” and it came out like a sob.
10
Interesting.
Randy had a thing about Ag Murphy, and Dick Murphy was apparently so ignorant of that fact that he’d tried to recruit Randy to murder her. That was one semi-solid piece. Only semi-solid because Murphy hadn’t actually made the request; it had been
As he drove away from White’s truck, Virgil tried McCall’s phone again, and again was shuffled off to Nina Box’s voice mail.
Where the hell were they? What were they doing? They could be halfway to California, if nobody had been looking for them-but half the nation was looking for them, and there was no way they could have avoided that net.
Unless they’d killed somebody out on an isolated farmstead somewhere and were driving the victim’s car out across the prairie toward Los Angeles, or down to the Mexican border. .
They weren’t doing any of that; and McCall wasn’t answering the phone because he was too busy.
Jimmy Sharp had a weird feeling about Tom. Like Tom wasn’t with them anymore. His eyes just weren’t right. He’d always been a little slippery about eye contact, but now he could hardly look at Jimmy at all.
They got into Oxford early in the afternoon, working the back roads into Bare County, dodging down side lanes when they saw other cars coming. Oxford was no bigger than Shinder, but because it was tucked away in the far southeast corner of Bare County, with no other towns close by, it had something that Shinder didn’t: a branch of the Bare County Credit Union. Becky had once applied for a job there, but hadn’t gotten it.
And they needed the money now: they were bandits, and they were famous, and they were going to jail if they were caught, but first they’d make a run for it. Jimmy had a vague idea that they might find a way to get to Cuba, or some other place far south.
Becky had her doubts, but she was in for the ride.
Tom. .
Jimmy decided that when they hit the credit union, he and Tom would go in together. Becky would drive and wait in the street outside. He didn’t trust Tom to wait, and didn’t want to come running out the door and see the getaway car disappearing over the horizon.
Though no place in Minnesota should be dusty in April, Oxford was. There hadn’t been any recent rain, and half the streets in the town were still unpaved, with gravel-and-oil surfaces. Six or eight blocks in the center of town had tar roads, including the single-street business district, which consisted of a Marathon gas station and convenience store, a bar named Josie’s, a barbeque restaurant with a cartoon pig cutout on the door, the credit union, and three empty buildings, one with a fading sign in the window that said: “Artist Lofts Available.”
When they came into town, Becky said, “There’s a chicken on the street.”
A white hen was pecking at gravel on the side of the road, and Jimmy sped up a little, tried to clip the chicken with the passenger side tires, but missed, and the indignant pullet scuttled back into the yard she’d come out of.
Tom was in the backseat again, 9mm handgun in his lap. He said, “They’ll have guns in the bank.”
“No, they don’t,” Becky said. “I went out with a guy once, Bill Hagen, who worked in a bank, and I asked him if he’d shoot a robber and he said they weren’t allowed to keep guns in the bank because the banks were afraid they’d shoot a customer and get sued. He said it was cheaper and safer to give up the money.”
Tom said, “Bill Hagen is only like seventeen years older than you are.”
“So what?” She added, “The thing is, they got money ready to give us-”
“Yeah, yeah, and it’s going to explode on us, you already told us,” Jimmy said. She’d seen it happen on one of the crime-scene shows. “So we’re not taking that money.”
Then Jimmy asked Tom, “Who’s Hagen?”
“Asshole up in Bigham. He’s gotta be like forty.”
Jimmy asked Becky, “You fuck him?”
Tom snorted in the backseat, and Becky said, “Shut up,” and to Jimmy, “What if I did?”
“Nothing. Just wondered.”
Tom asked, “What were you? Fourteen?”
“I was a senior in high school.”
“Everybody shut up,” Jimmy said. “Everybody get ready. We’re two blocks away. Get your hankies.”
They had handkerchiefs to cover their faces, and ball caps to cover the tops of their heads and their eyes. Tom had the handgun, and Jimmy had the pump-action.30–06 with an extra magazine in his pocket. The gunstock was made of a black synthetic, and was big and frightening.
“I bet they have guns,” Tom said.
“I told you, they don’t,” Becky said.
“We got no choice,” Jimmy said. “The cops know about us. So we either get enough money to run, or we go to prison for life, if they don’t shoot us down like a bunch of dirty dogs. If we take a hundred grand outa here, we’re gone. We disappear like a fart in a cyclone. It’s the only chance we got.”
Tom thought,
Jimmy said to Becky, “When I get out, you slide over and get ready to roll. We’ll be inside one minute.” And to Tom, “Get your mask up.”
They’d gone into the bank, the guns out front, screaming at the three women inside, about the time that a Bare County deputy sheriff named Dan Card, alone in his patrol car, was turning the corner onto Main Street, six blocks out. Everybody in the world was looking for the Boxes’ Tahoe and Lexus, and as he rolled along the street, which he’d done probably three thousand times before, without ever having witnessed a single crime of any kind, he realized that one of the cars parked in front of the Oxford Credit Union looked right. It would only have been about the twentieth big SUV he’d looked at that day, but as he got closer, he realized it was the right color, and though he wasn’t much interested in cars, he knew enough to know, when he was a block out, that it sorta looked like a Tahoe. He couldn’t see the plates, but they looked like Minnesota plates, which was to be expected. . but they were another point.
He picked up his microphone and said, “I have a Tahoe at the credit union in Oxford.”
