the truck.”
McCall turned and put his hands on the truck roof, in sight, and Virgil ran closer, stopping twenty-five or thirty feet away, and shouted, “I’m going to come in close. If you move your hands, I’ll shoot you. If you move your hands-”
“I won’t move, I won’t move,” McCall shouted back. He was looking over his shoulder, pale, frightened. Virgil took another step forward as a deputy caught up with him. The deputy had a handgun pointed at McCall and he screamed, “On your knees, on your knees-”
Virgil shouted at him, “Put your gun down. Put your gun down-”
The deputy was focused on McCall and shouted, “If you don’t go down on your knees, I will shoot you-”
Virgil stepped next to the cop and pushed the handgun off line and said, “If you shoot him, I’ll arrest you for murder.”
The cop flinched then, and looked at Virgil in disbelief. “What are you doing? What are you doing?”
“Put the gun down,” Virgil said. “If you shoot him, I’ll send you to prison for murder. Put your gun down.”
“He killed Dan-”
“He’s quit. Put your fuckin’ gun down,” Virgil said.
The cop looked back at McCall, and for a second Virgil thought he might fire; but then he looked back at Virgil and said, “This is bullshit.”
Duke came up. Virgil had seen him moving slowly out of his car, and faster only when he saw Virgil pushing on the deputy, but never quite in a jog. He’d expected the deputy to kill McCall, and didn’t want to be right there. Now he called, “What’s going on here?”
Virgil walked to McCall and said quietly, “I’m going to put some handcuffs on you. The safest thing you can do is cooperate, because these guys want to kill you. If you’ve got cuffs on, they can’t do that. Now, face the truck and put your first hand behind your back.”
McCall did that, and said, “Virgil, honest to God, I never hurt anybody. I was a hostage. They took me as a prisoner.”
“Other hand,” Virgil said.
McCall put his other hand behind him and said, “Jimmy shot that officer. I yelled for the officer to get down, but Jimmy-”
“You lying sack of shit,” the deputy shouted. “We got witnesses.” And to Virgil: “I ought to bust you for interfering with me. How would aggravated assault fill out your day?”
Virgil said quietly, “You were looking for an excuse to murder this man. You were interfering with an arrest while you were doing it. I’m going to talk to the attorney general about it. We may have to consider charges even now. We don’t allow lynchings in Minnesota. And we don’t allow convicted felons to be lawmen.”
“Bullshit-”
Duke snapped at the deputy, “Watch your language.” To Virgil: “You’d have a heck of a time making that argument with any jury around here.”
“There wouldn’t be a trial around here, it’d be up in the Cities,” Virgil said. Then he backed off: “But if you keep this fellow off me, we’ll just call it a bit of overenthusiasm, or excitement, and let it go at that.”
Duke said, “You know he killed Dan.”
“That’s what I heard,” Virgil said. “I’ll be happy to slap him in Stillwater just as fast as you would. But we’re gonna have a trial before we do that. We’re not going to shoot him down in a ditch.”
McCall said, “I never-”
Virgil said, “Shut up,” and, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you. You got all that?”
McCall nodded dumbly, and just to be sure he understood it, Virgil said, “Listen, you don’t have to talk to us if you don’t want to, but if you do talk to us, it can be used against you when we get to a trial. We’ll provide an attorney to represent you. You sure you got that?”
McCall said, “Yeah, I got it. But I didn’t do anything, I was kidnapped-”
“We all just want to make sure you understand about the attorney,” Virgil said.
“Okay.”
Virgil said to Duke and the deputy, “You’re witnesses to the Miranda. He’s my prisoner. It’d be best for all of us if we put him in jail over in Marshall, because if anything happened to him in Bare County. . Well, the trouble would be so deep it’s unlikely that any of you would be working in law enforcement again. So I’m taking him.”
The deputy looked at Duke and said, “Sheriff, you can’t-”
Duke snapped, “Don’t tell me what I can do.” He nodded at Virgil. “Take him. But I want to know every word that comes out of his mouth.”
“You’ll get it,” Virgil said. “Let’s get the crime-scene people over here to take this Jeep apart. We don’t want to miss a single thing. And don’t let anybody touch it-we don’t want any confusing DNA or fingerprints.”
And Virgil asked McCall, “Where’s your pistol? You were seen with one.”
“I don’t got no gun. They wouldn’t let me have no gun with bullets in it, because they were afraid I’d shoot Jimmy. Becky’s got the gun. She used it to shoot some woman back there, in the farmhouse. Did you find the farmhouse?”
“We found it,” Virgil said. “Who shot the man?”
McCall looked confused. “Wasn’t no man when I went running out of there. Becky shot this woman, and then there’s some other stuff, and she went to look for medicine for Jimmy, and when she went up the stairs, I grabbed the woman’s keys off the kitchen counter and ran out to the driveway and jumped in the Jeep. I didn’t see no man anywhere.”
Duke said, “This Clarence Towne is going to make it. Got word from the medics: he looks bad, but he’s got one good lung and no arteries hit, so we’ll find out if the boy is telling the truth on that. Not that it’ll make a hell of a lot of difference.”
Virgil said, “It could make some. . Tom’s in a lot of trouble, but there are things that could count to his benefit, if we go to trial.”
As he said it, he swiveled away from McCall so McCall couldn’t see his face, and winked at Duke and the deputy. Duke showed a tiny nod, and said, “So take him. I don’t want to look at him anymore.”
“Crime Scene’ll be here pretty quick,” Virgil said. “Don’t let anybody touch that truck.”
Virgil got McCall into the front seat and locked his handcuffed wrists to an eyebolt under the seat, using a chain that let McCall sit upright but not move much.
“What happens if we roll the truck? I couldn’t get out,” McCall whined.
“I know. You’d probably burn to death,” Virgil said. McCall blanched, and Virgil added, “Relax, Tom. You’re still alive, and you wouldn’t have been if anybody else had gotten to you first. And I’m not going to roll the truck. Probably.”
Behind them, Duke had turned around, with the other patrol car behind him, and they headed back toward the farmhouse.
It was a fifty-mile run into Marshall, and Virgil started by telling McCall that he was in desperate trouble, and almost certainly going to prison forever. “You can only help yourself by cooperating. If you’re convicted, maybe get early parole or something.”
After ten minutes of bullshit, with McCall breaking down to weep, and to claim his status as a victim, not a killer, Virgil, feeling that he’d primed the pump, held up a small handheld digital recorder and said, “I want to make a record of our talk. You know, your lawyer can use it to prove you cooperated.”
“I guess it’s okay,” McCall said.
Virgil turned the recorder on and said, “I just want to make sure that you remember that Miranda warning. Remember when I told you that you’ve got a right to remain silent. .” He went through it again, and McCall said, “Yeah, yeah, I remember.”
“Great,” Virgil said. “Listen, tell me about Jim Sharp and Becky Welsh. We gotta find them before they kill anybody else. You know where they’re at?”
“In a cornfield, I think,” McCall said. He told Virgil about running out of Oxford, with Jimmy bleeding from the
