Mad River

leg wound, about hiding in the cornfield, about walking back to the farmhouse to get medicine and a different car.

As he told the story, he slowed, and his eyes caught Virgil’s, and Virgil realized that he was editing the story as he told it. Some of it, at least, was a lie. “We got down to this farmhouse, and there wasn’t anybody home. The back door was locked, but Becky knew how to get it open with a driver’s license. We, uh, we got inside. . uh, we were going to look for medicine, but, uh. .”

“Yeah? What about Becky?”

“She always wanted to fuck me. That’s the God’s truth. She’d play footsie with me under the dinner table, like she was daring Jimmy to catch us. Jimmy’d kill her if she did. But then, Jimmy was hurt so we got to this empty house and she said she wanted to fuck me and we went back into this bedroom and did it. She had this big gun-”

“She had a big gun and made you take her back into the bedroom and f-” He remembered the recorder, and covered himself. “-have sex with her?” Virgil’s skepticism shone through.

“No, no, not exactly that way. . I could take it or leave it, you know. She makes me nervous. She wants to be smacked around a little, which is weird. Anyhow, we were back there, just finished up and getting dressed, when we heard this Jeep come into the driveway. We didn’t know it was a Jeep, but it was. Anyway, she gets up with this gun, and this woman walks in through the kitchen and Becky goes around through the dining room and gets in behind her, and I hear the woman saying, like, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ and Boom. Becky shoots her. I go running through the dining room, and I say, ‘What’d you do? Oh, no, not another one,’ and Becky said, ‘Don’t tell Jimmy what we done, about fuckin’ me,’ just like the dead woman didn’t count for nothing. Then she said she was going to go upstairs and look for medicine, and I said I’d watch the road. Soon as I heard her upstairs, I grabbed the keys off the counter and ran out to the Jeep and took off.”

“And you never saw a man. .”

“No. Never did. I just took off and I didn’t stop running until I got you on the phone and you told me to stop. I was cooperating.”

There was something screwed up about the story, Virgil thought, but he called Duke and told him about it. “Have somebody check that back bedroom, see if there might have been some sex going on there.”

“I’m right outside. Just hang on,” Duke said. Virgil heard a screen door slam, and Duke saying something to somebody else, then Duke came up and said, “Well, something happened here. There’s some blood on a pillow. Not much. Like a cut or something. Looks like it’s been used, the blankets are all over the place.”

“Get Crime Scene on it,” Virgil said. “Don’t let anybody else in there.”

When he got off the phone, McCall said, “You believe me now?”

Virgil said, “Maybe.”

And after a minute, Virgil asked, “Tell me what happened at the O’Leary house.”

“Okay. Okay. Jimmy didn’t have any money. Never did. Didn’t have a pot to piss in, nor a window to throw it out of. I had an apartment, up in the Cities, but lost my job, and was running out of rent, and Jimmy said if we could get to Bigham, he knew a guy who’d get us jobs. I had like eighteen dollars, for gas and some food. So we went there, in Jimmy’s old car-we actually spent a night living in the car, and it was colder ’n shit. The car was a piece of shit, and kept breaking down, the starter didn’t work, and the guy who was supposed to get us jobs didn’t know where we could get one. So then Jimmy said he knew this O’Leary guy, and me and Becky should come along with him. . and maybe get a loan. We started out late, and we didn’t know exactly where it was, and the car was giving us trouble, so we left it in this parking lot and walked. It was pitch-dark when we got there. We went down the side of the house, and I sez, ‘What the hell is this?’ and Jimmy pulls out this gun and puts it up against my chest, and he sez, ‘You’re gonna open a window, big guy, or I’m gonna shoot you in the heart.’ He’s a short guy, and I’m not, so we went to this window, and I lifted it up, and he pointed the gun and said, ‘Get in there,’ so I went in there.”

McCall said the three of them crept through the house, McCall quaking in his shoes. Jimmy forced him to climb the stairs, then pointed him to the front of the house, where they woke up two girls in a bed. “One of the girls started screaming, and Jimmy shot her. And somebody started yelling from another part of the house, and I ran, and they all come behind me.”

Out in the street, they ran down the hill to the car, but couldn’t get it started. Jimmy completely freaked out, McCall said, but then they saw a man come out of the apartment house and walk over to his car. Jimmy jumped out of the car and ran over and shot him. “Just like that. Not even a howdy-do.” A minute later, they were on the way to Shinder.

“They kept telling me, ‘Tom, we’re gonna kill you, you motherfucker, if you make one noise or try to get away.’”

“But where did the money come in?” Virgil asked. “This money he had?”

“Well, we got to Shinder, and we were going to hide in Jimmy’s house until things quieted down, but Jimmy, man, he was like, crazy, and he got in an argument with his old man and shot the old fucker down.

“Jimmy said we’d have to run, sooner or later, and the old man’s truck was no good, we needed some money to get a better one, and I said, ‘Shit, where’ll we get any money?’ and Jimmy said, right out of the blue, ‘Well, I got a grand.’ And Becky and I both said, ‘What?’ and he pulled this roll of brand-new twenties out of his pocket. He said he took it off that girl he shot, but that’s bullshit. It was pitch-dark in there, and she was in bed. She had the money between her legs or something? I don’t think so.”

“So where do you think he got it?”

“That’s the thing. Becky kept giving him shit about it, so he whips out this old pistol and blows across the barrel, and sez, ‘Never thought you’d be fuckin’ a hit man, huh?’”

“A hit man?”

“That’s what he said. But that’s all I know about it. That he called himself a hit man,” McCall said.

“If somebody paid him to kill the girl, who would that have been?” Virgil asked.

McCall shrugged. “I got no idea.”

“How long were you in Bigham?”

“Three days. . well, we got there late one day, then overnight, then another day, then overnight, then another day, and that night was the, you know, thing at O’Leary’s.”

“Okay. When you lifted the window, did you have to force a lock?”

“Nope. Went right up. Zip. Like it was greased,” McCall said.

“Did Jimmy pick it?”

“Yeah. He went right to it. It was pretty high up, it was over a kitchen counter, so it was a little too high for him. That’s why he needed me. And I wasn’t going to say no, with a pistol pointed at my heart.”

Virgil thought it over, and then said, “Those nights when you were in Bigham. . what’d you do?”

“Hung out, mostly. Didn’t have the money to do much. Shot some pool. Jimmy thought he was a pool shark. But he’s not. He looks like a pool shark, but he’s really bad at it.”

“Was Jimmy hanging with anybody in particular? Did he seem tight with anyone?”

McCall looked at Virgil for a long moment, then said, “You know, I got an answer to that, but I think I need to talk to a lawyer. Like you said, you’d get me a lawyer.”

Virgil thought, Ah, shit. He’d been so close, but with the tape running, he had no choice. “All right. We’ll stop right here, get you to Marshall, and hook you up with an attorney.”

He turned off the tape and said, “You motherfucker, you killed that cop. I hope you rot in hell.”

That put a further dent in the conversation. McCall cowered against the passenger-side door until they got to the law enforcement center in Marshall, and Virgil turned him over to the sheriff.

After spending a half hour on paperwork, he called Davenport and said, “One down. But somebody else is probably dead, unless Jim and Becky are out in another cornfield.”

“They can’t hide for long,” Virgil said. “The governor just put the National Guard on the roads-they’re deploying at every intersection out there. As soon as they’re in, they’ll organize teams of troops and cops and hit every house on the prairie.”

“How long will that take?”

“Probably be in place by tomorrow morning, and the search’ll start by tomorrow afternoon.”

“That means that they’ll probably kill them,” Virgil said. “I need Jimmy alive long enough to get the guy who