of the empty garage, and the two bodies, and he slipped the man’s wallet from his pocket, opened it, found his driver’s license, and ran back out to his truck.
As he was crossing the driveway, Duke swerved into it and came to a dusty screeching halt next to Virgil’s truck. Another sheriff’s car was right behind him, and Virgil shouted, “Inside.”
Duke shouted back, “What’re you doing?”
Virgil called, “I think they took their cars. I’m going to get an ID on their cars.”
Duke ran up the driveway into the house, and a deputy from the second car unloaded a med pack from the trunk and ran toward the door, after Duke. Then two more sheriff’s cars arrived, coming from the same direction as Virgil had, the cops piling out into the yard.
Duke was back out fifteen seconds later, as Virgil was waiting for a reading on the victim’s auto registrations. He had them thirty seconds later, writing the descriptions on a notepad: one black Jeep Cherokee, one black Ford F-150 pickup, registered to Clarence and Edie Towne. He got the tags for both of them, then climbed out of the truck and gave the note to Duke and said, “We’re looking for these vehicles. McCall is in the Jeep, Sharp and Welsh probably have the pickup. It’s possible they’re still up in the cornfield.”
Duke issued orders that sent deputies to the corners of the cornfield, where they could see anybody trying to get out, and designated two other deputies to accompany himself and Virgil off the shoulder of the road into the cornfield.
Virgil said, “I need as many of them alive as we can get. There’s another thing going on here-we need them alive if we can get them without taking too big a risk.”
“No risk,” Duke said. “Alive if we can get them with no risk. I don’t want anybody else shot. You all know about Dan. . All right. Let’s go.”
They took off, moving at speed, led by the deputies who would go past the cornfield and then post up on its corners. Virgil led the sheriff’s own truck, and two more, ten seconds behind the first two.
As they went, he thought about the cloud of dust he’d seen disappearing down 10. Had that been them?
A minute after they left the farmhouse, Virgil took his truck off-road, down into the ditch, plowing along through dead grass, then onto a track that led down to a dry creek. He could see where somebody had busted up the other side of the creek bed, running over small saplings, and he stopped and got his shotgun out, and the other cops stopped behind him and he waved for them to spread out.
“Don’t anybody shoot anybody else,” he said. Every one of the deputies was carrying an M16, and they moved toward the corn in a skirmish line; and Virgil realized that with the limited visibility ahead, any hope of taking Sharp and Welsh alive was bound to be futile. There’d be no real chance of surrender, because they simply couldn’t be seen well enough, and nobody would take a chance that they were surrendering when they might just as well be ready to open fire.
The best chance, he thought, was if they’d both been shot and were on the ground.
“Got a truck here, got a Tahoe here,” one of the deputies screamed, and the line shifted in his direction, then stopped, then started forward again, collapsing on the target area. Virgil and Duke both jogged along the skirmish line, from opposite directions, and then Virgil saw the truck, but no sign of life around it.
They moved up slowly, cops leapfrogging past each other, always one or two focused on the truck while the others covered, and when they got close enough, Virgil called, “Don’t shoot me,” and jogged up to the truck, stopped, listened, then peeked in the back window. The truck was empty.
“Nobody,” he called. “Watch the corn, watch the corn.”
“Another track going out this way. There was another truck here,” somebody called, and Virgil went that way and looked. The corn had been knocked down by another vehicle that had come in and stopped ten feet from where the first one was parked.
“Reversed in here and backed out,” a deputy said. “They’re in that Ford.”
Virgil stepped back to the Tahoe and Duke, who’d been looking in the passenger-side door, said, “Somebody got hit hard. Lotta blood.”
Virgil looked in; there was a lot of blood, but not as much as there would be for somebody who was bleeding to death. McCall had been telling the truth: Jimmy had been hit, but not incapacitated. They’d be looking for a place to hide, where they could give the wound some attention, which meant somebody in an isolated farmhouse could get killed in the next little while.
Virgil said all that to Duke, who had already put out a stop order on the Townes’ Jeep and pickup.
“We’re gonna need the National Guard in here. We need to shut down every intersection for fifty miles around,” Duke said. “I’ll call the governor.” Then he asked, “What about McCall?”
Virgil nodded and went to his phone and punched in the call-back number. McCall answered on the second ring and whined, “Where are you, man, where are you?”
“I need to bring you in, Tommy. Where’re you at? You figured that out?”
“I’m on 79, going up toward town. Going, ah, north, I guess. I’m driving slow. Man, don’t tell the Duke, those fuckers will kill me bigger’n shit.”
“You pull over and wait. I’m coming,” Virgil said. “Just wait. These folks down here are madder’n hornets about the cop that Jimmy shot, and you really do want to wait for me.”
“I’ll pull over, man.”
“I’m coming,” Virgil said.
They rang off and Duke said, “We’re coming with you.”
“Behind me,” Virgil said. “I need this kid.”
Duke bristled. “This kid is the one that shot Dan. This Jimmy business is all lies.”
Virgil said, “Okay, I’ll buy that, but I don’t want to scare him any worse than he is. He doesn’t trust you, and I don’t want him to run off and hide and maybe kill somebody else. So you stay back.”
Duke seemed about to say something else, but then he nodded and said, “I’ll give the order.”
They rolled out of the ditch and onto the road, Virgil with Duke behind him, and another patrol car behind Duke, and Virgil thought it could be a close-run thing. Duke and his cops would kill McCall if they could get away with it; any excuse would do.
12
Virgil hadn’t told Duke exactly where McCall was, so Duke had little choice but to follow. A second patrol car fell in behind Duke. With everybody in several counties looking for McCall, there was a fair chance that some other cop would get to him before Virgil did, which would not be good. Virgil put his foot down, determined to get there first, pushing eighty miles an hour, and then ninety, which was about as fast as he could go on gravel roads without killing himself: the 4Runner was a decent truck, but it wasn’t a sports car.
None of which was made easier by the fact that he had to read his map book as he went. If McCall was on Highway 79, Virgil would have to make several zigzags up the road grid to get to him, and make them as soon as he could, since he didn’t know exactly how far north McCall was.
So they did that, going as far east as he could on each zig, before it ran out, finally getting onto a road that was big enough to take him all the way to 79. All three vehicles made a screaming turn on 79, and ran hard for ten minutes, and then Virgil saw the black Jeep on the side of the road, maybe three-quarters of a mile ahead.
In his side mirror, Virgil saw the second patrol car pull out into the passing lane, and Virgil moved over until the center line was running down the middle of his hood. The deputy in the second car pushed him for a few seconds, then Virgil, his eyes flicking to the rearview mirror, saw Duke wave at the other cop, who backed off.
Virgil slowed sharply, and Duke nearly rear-ended him, then Virgil floored it again, leaving Duke momentarily behind. A hundred yards ahead of the other two cars, and twenty-five yards short of the Jeep, Virgil stomped on the brakes and slewed sideway across the highway, felt the inside wheels lift off the road for a second, then slam back down.
He jammed the truck into “Park,” jumped out, carrying the shotgun, and jogged down toward the Jeep. McCall got out of the truck with his hands in the air. Virgil shouted, “Put your hands on the truck. Put your hands on
