Mad River

“Far better?”

“Maybe not far better,” she said.

“Then we just gotta try harder.”

“I could do that.”

A while later, he said, “We should have done this a long time ago.”

She said, “I was too young. You weren’t, but I was. You were like a big goddamn dangerous thing, you had hormones coming out of your ears. You scared the heck out of me. In a good way, kinda-you’d get me so hot-but it just didn’t seem right. Then, of course, you jumped Linda Smith.”

That sat there for a minute, then Virgil, cornered, said, “True.”

“Was it worth it?”

He thought again, and then said, “Yes.”

That made her laugh, and she asked, “Whatever happened to Linda?”

“She married a rich farmer guy from over by Chamberlain. I think she works part-time for some kind of social services agency over there.”

“South Dakota?”

“Yeah. Jackie Bolt told me they’ve got a place that looks down on the Missouri. Supposed to be really pretty. I guess they spend their winters down in Panama. That’s what I heard. They go big-game fishing. They’ve got a sailfish in their farmhouse living room. In South Dakota.”

Then, since it was impossible to screw all the time, he told her about chasing Sharp and Welsh and McCall, the details of the various killings, and the problem of finding Sharp and Welsh; at the same time, stroking her nipples and other good parts.

“See, we know everything-we’ll convict them in one minute, when we get them to court. But we can’t find them. This country is too big.”

“But there are so many people looking for them.”

Virgil pushed himself up on an elbow, trailed a finger down to her navel, and said, “I was on another case that involved a guy out in the countryside. The thing is, he sold a bunch of dope to a dealer down in Worthington, and the Worthington cops got there about two minutes late, and this guy took off and the cops were chasing him. They chased him about fifty miles or so, before they caught him, and then he dumped his car and started running through the cornfields. This was at night, and they lost him.

“He was a Canadian guy, and what we found out later was, he decided to walk back to Canada. He broke into houses and a convenience store along the way, to get food. I got involved when he was somewhere up in Yellow Medicine. So I figured out, sitting in this motel, you could get about five hundred and eighty football fields, between the goal lines, not including the end zones, in a square mile. Yellow Medicine County, I happen to know, is about seven hundred and sixty square miles, because I looked it up. So that means you could have about thirty-five thousand football fields in Yellow Medicine. Could you hide in a football-field-sized patch of land out in farm country? Damn right you could. If the guy lay down in a ditch, you could walk right past him. You can’t even figure out how to find somebody who’s doing that. So we can’t find them. Becky and Jimmy. We don’t think they’re far away, especially with Jimmy being shot. But where?”

“What happened to the Canadian guy?”

“He got away,” Virgil said.

“Completely?”

“Completely. But he was a dope dealer, so he’s probably gotten to his use-by date.”

“You mean, he’s dead?” she asked.

“Or rich enough to have quit,” Virgil said. “A few of them manage to do that. You see them sitting on their yachts down in the Caribbean.”

“I don’t think of Canadians as being drug dealers,” she said.

“They are,” Virgil said. “Generally, as a nation, they’re pretty depraved. At least, that’s been my experience.”

“See, that’s another thing I didn’t know.”

Now she sat up and asked, “Why don’t you cops have experts on chasing people? I mean, you’ve got experts on everything else.”

“Never thought of that,” Virgil said, studying her parts in an academic way. They were very good. “I mean, how would they get to be experts? What would you study?”

“You know-how people think when they’re running. Where they’d run to. How they’d think about it. That kind of thing. You know, psychologists.”

“Well, maybe somebody should,” he said.

Then they got involved again, and then they went to sleep-Virgil liked sleeping with women (the sleeping part), and so it wasn’t until four o’clock in the morning that his eyelids popped open and he said, “Ah, man.”

She twitched, and he groped around on the nightstand and knocked his wallet on the floor, and she woke up and rolled toward him and asked, “What are you doing?”

“Calling Stillwater penitentiary,” he said. He found his cell phone.

“At four o’clock in the morning? What for?”

He told her, and she said, “I’m flattered, but if you’re going to do that, you’ll have to leave pretty soon.”

“Pretty soon,” he agreed.

“It’s been a while since I’ve done this,” she said. “You think. .?”

“I don’t have to leave immediately,” Virgil said.

Stillwater was the biggest penitentiary in Minnesota, and though it wasn’t the only one, or the closest one, it was the one with most of the experts. Virgil talked to a skeptical duty officer who, in any case, said he’d pass along Virgil’s request.

“Just get the warden to call me on my cell. He knows me. I’m going to assume that he’ll cooperate, and start that way.”

“I dunno. .”

“Get him to call me,” Virgil said.

At five o’clock in the morning, feeling fairly light in his boots, he and Sally shared a kiss in the cool morning air on the motel room’s doorstep, and he said, “I’ll try to get back tonight, but I don’t know how that’s going to work out.”

“Catch the kids. When you come back, I want your full attention,” she said.

From Marshall, which was not all that far from South Dakota, to Stillwater, which was on the river that separated Minnesota from Wisconsin, was a three-and-a-half-hour drive, assuming no hang-ups in morning traffic. Virgil left Marshall at five o’clock, took six or seven phone calls from various prison officials, including the warden, over the next three hours, and finally the warden called at eight o’clock and said, “We’re ready to go when you get here.”

“I’m hung up in traffic on 494 headed toward the airport,” Virgil said. “It could be a while.”

“You got lights and a siren?”

“Yeah, but that’d get me there about one minute sooner, and the noise would drive me crazy. I’ll just coast,” Virgil said. “Hey-thanks for this. It’s goofy, but it’s all I got.”

“I think it’s kinda interesting,” the warden said. “I read about what you did up in Butternut Falls. This is sort of like that.”

Stillwater prison sits on a hill in Bayport, Minnesota, a few miles south of the town of Stillwater, and why it wasn’t called Bayport prison, Virgil didn’t know; nor was he curious enough to find out. The prison was not a particularly welcoming place, but neither was it particularly grim. Virgil had been inside perhaps a dozen times. He called ahead two minutes before he got there, parked across the street, locked up his guns, and walked over to the administration building.

An assistant warden named Ron Polgar was waiting for him and escorted him to the warden’s office. The