hit his own flashers and took off after them, headed south out of town at high speed.
The roads were clear and dry and they were all running with lights and sirens. On the way, Virgil called Davenport and told him about it, and that there might be a cop down. Seven or eight minutes later, Davenport called back and said, “Card is dead. I just talked to Marshall. They had an ambulance run out to meet the guy bringing him in, but they say he’s gone. You gotta get these guys, Virgil.”
“You know the problem,” Virgil said.
The problem was, they knew who the killers were, but they couldn’t find them. If they’d fled Oxford an hour earlier, they could be anywhere in a circle maybe fifty miles in radius from Oxford. Using the formula A = pi r squared, A being the area and r being the radius and pi being 3.14 (roughly), they could be almost anywhere in an area of 7,850 square miles, and the area was expanding rapidly, with every moment they went undiscovered.
“I know the problem, but this is crazy, this is out of control.”
“Everybody in the state is looking for them,” Virgil said. “What do you want me to do?”
A minute after he got off the phone with Davenport, Duke called and said, “Dan Card is dead, but he shot one of the gang. We’ve got blood in the street, but we don’t know which one. The bank was robbed by two masked males, and one of them got hit.”
Duke was going on when Tom McCall called.
Virgil’s phone beeped with the incoming message, and he saw who it was, and he said to Duke, “I got McCall on the line. I’ll call you back.”
Duke said, “Hey-” but Virgil clicked through to McCall and said, “Tom? Where are you?”
McCall said, “Virgil, I’m running. Jimmy’s been shot in the leg, Becky just killed some woman in some farmhouse, I’m on the highway, I stole a Jeep and ran away from Becky, I got no gun, but Jimmy shot a cop, I think, and those deputies are gonna kill me if they find me. I don’t know what to do-”
“How bad is Jimmy?”
“He’s hurting, he’s bleeding bad, but they made a bandage out of a shirt. But fuck a bunch of Jimmy, man, I’m out here, I’m all fucked up-”
“I got you,” Virgil said. “You tell me where to go, and I’ll meet you there. Figure out the roads and an intersection, and I’ll take you in.”
“I don’t know what road I’m on. I’m out in the sticks.”
“Where’s the woman who got shot? Are you sure she’s dead? Where are they?”
“On County 9, right straight out of town. . out of Oxford. They pulled into a cornfield, an uncut cornfield. They’re hiding in the corn, must be eight or ten miles out of town.”
“North, south. .?”
“I don’t. . north, I guess. Up toward town, toward Bigham.”
Eight or ten miles north of Oxford on 9. Not that far from where he was. Virgil switched the cell phone to speaker, said, “You hang on here, I need to look at my map.”
He got the atlas off the passenger seat, found 9 out of Oxford, realized he had to jog east to catch it. He hated to cut McCall off, but he had no choice. “Tom, you need to call me back in five minutes, and I’ll bring you in. But I gotta get an ambulance and some cops going to this woman you say got shot.”
“You gotta help me, man. They had me held
“Call me in five minutes,” Virgil said. “I’ll bring you in.”
Virgil was still trailing the deputies’ cars, all rolling at eighty miles an hour or so, where they could, where the roads weren’t too bad, but they were coming up on an intersection that would take them over to 9 and the two sheriff’s cars went straight through, and without any way to talk to them directly, Virgil took the turn and called Duke and told him McCall’s story.
Duke said, “I’m coming into Oxford now, but some of it is lies for sure, because we’re talking to the witness and he said one guy was shot, but it was the
“He’s calling me and I’m gonna bring him in, but we’ve gotta find this house where the woman is down.”
“Okay, those boys who were ahead of you are the closest. I’ll turn them around,” Duke said. “You know where you’re going? Exactly?”
“Over to 9 and then south toward Oxford. McCall thinks they’re ditched in a cornfield, a standing cornfield about eight or ten miles north of town. There’s not that much standing corn this year.”
“You see them, you wait until we get there with the artillery,” Duke said. “We don’t need you dead and them running.”
“If I spot it, I’ll go on past to this farmhouse where McCall says the dead woman is. We can’t take a chance on that.”
“Call me. I’m heading that way. I’ll get everybody heading that way, but you’ll get there first. Call me.”
Virgil threw the phone on the passenger seat and put his foot down harder, both hands on the wheel. It was two miles on gravel over to 9, which was a good blacktop road. As he came up to it, he could see a cloud of gravel dust straight ahead, on the other side of the intersection, and thought about going after it but didn’t. The woman who’d been shot. .
If he had gone after it, he’d have caught Becky and Jimmy in the black Ford. Jimmy was feeling better, with the pain pills in him. The pain wasn’t entirely gone, but it had eased, and his mind was clear, and he kept coming back to Tom McCall. Becky had told him about the rape, and she was still breaking down, weeping into her chest. “That sonofabitch, I should have shot him. He’s fuckin’ talking to the cops right now.”
“He doesn’t know where we’re going.”
“They’ll be all over this county in half an hour,” Jimmy said. “Becky, you gotta go faster. Faster, c’mon, it’s a good way yet, we gotta go faster, we got no time.”
Virgil saw the standing corn from a half mile out, a patch of tan on the otherwise dark earth. He slowed to a normal pickup speed, fifty miles an hour, and cruised on by it, checking it out. No sign of a truck, but if they were in deep enough. . Then he crossed a culvert and saw tracks in the dirt and thought,
A moment later, he came up on a farmhouse that sat a hundred feet off the highway; the mailbox outside said “Towne.” The garage was open and empty, a nasty black rectangle like a missing tooth, and the openness of it caught him, and he said, “Oh, shit,” and he pulled into the driveway and called Duke, who answered instantly.
“I’m three miles south of 10 on 9, pink house with a garage on the side standing open, no sign of a car, it’s maybe a half mile south of some standing corn and there were some tracks going off there. I think it’s them. I’m going in the house.”
“You don’t go in that house, you stay right there,” Duke said. “That’s an order, mister. We’re not more than three or four minutes out.”
“Fuck that,” said Virgil, and he rang off, got out of the truck, took the shotgun out of the back, pushed in four double-ought shells, and let the gun’s muzzle lead him down the driveway.
As he went, he heard his phone ring. McCall, probably. He let it go.
The back door was open and he stepped through, into the mudroom, saw a man’s body lying on the floor and beyond him a woman, and then the man groaned and one arm twitched and Virgil jumped across his body, charged through a dining room and then the living room and back around through the kitchen, over the woman’s body-her sightless eyes stared straight up at him, she was dead-and back to the man.
He’d been shot with a shotgun, but much of the blast had apparently gone between his biceps and his chest, knocking a bloody patch in his rib cage and a piece out of his arm. He was lying in a pool of blood, but Virgil had seen bigger pools, and he put down his gun and called Duke and shouted, “We got two down, one dead, but one’s still alive. We need a medic here RIGHT NOW. Get somebody here RIGHT NOW.”
Duke said, “Hold on,” and then came back. “We’ve got an ambulance rolling, but it’s gonna be a while. One of my guys got medical training, he’s right behind me. . he’s got a medical kit. . I’m coming up on you now.”
Virgil looked down at the wounded man and couldn’t think of what to do: he was not a medic, and was afraid that anything he did would be worse than nothing. The man was oozing blood, but not pumping it. Then he thought
