seeing how long he could keep the speedometer needle over the eighty-miles-an-hour mark. He’d see how lost he could get.
Part of it might even be genetic, he thought. One of his earliest memories, of men and cars, had been driving at night with his preacher father, riding shotgun in the old man’s bottle-green Pontiac Tempest, the car smelling of nicotine and oil, listening to the radio, to the Pentecostals and the psychics and, best of all, Wolfman Jack on that border blaster signal out of Rosarito Beach, Mexico. Sometimes Wolfman would play one of his father’s favorites, like the Stones singing “Faraway Eyes,” and the old man would sing along with it, nothing like the man who climbed that pulpit every Sunday morning. .
The run to Arcadia held some of that, even as urgent as it was: running at high speed with lights, scaring himself when the wheels broke free at bridges and at unseen curves. He encountered four checkpoints; the word about Arcadia had gotten around, the MPs waved him through in a hurry, calling out encouragement as he barreled past the parked Humvees, in words he didn’t have time to understand.
As fast as he moved, it took forty minutes to get to Arcadia, and when he got there, coming in from the south, he saw the sheriff’s truck sitting at the gas station, and swerved over to the station, parked, and hopped out.
Duke was talking to a couple of his deputies, but turned to Virgil and said, “I been talking to your duty officer. He says the phone company says the GPS is right there by the river. There’s nothing there but a dry cattail swamp and a ditch. I think she threw the phone out the window as she was going out of town.”
“Your guys didn’t run into anybody when they were coming down?”
Duke shook his head. “And I had them spread out as they were coming down, taking the roads that didn’t have checkpoints. They didn’t see anybody moving. Which means, if she went north, she didn’t go north more than about, mmm, fifteen minutes, or we would have seen her. Probably-there were a few roads we couldn’t cover.”
“The clerk is sure she went north?”
“He’s sure. As soon as he heard her truck start, he peeked out the window and saw her go, and when she was gone, he stuck his head out and saw her heading fast down the street. Then he called us. Going north, there’s only one road, until you get a half mile out, then we start running into the farm-to-markets. I got the Guard and my guys setting up a perimeter. Starting tomorrow, we’re going to squeeze them.”
Virgil talked to the clerk, as Duke listened, making sure that the woman was, in fact, Becky Welsh. He’d never doubted it, after talking to her on the phone, and the clerk said, “It was her. Man, she looks like a killer. She’s got those eyes. And somebody beat her up-her face had bruises up around her eyes, and her lip was cut.”
“She was raped,” Virgil told Duke. “Another little gift from our friend McCall.”
“Should have killed him in that ditch,” Duke said.
“No, we shouldn’t have,” Virgil said.
Duke laid out the arrangement of his forces, including the Guard and the highway patrol. “We were mostly north of here-we didn’t think they’d be as far south as this. But we got here quick. They’re in the net.”
Virgil went back to his truck and got out his Minnesota atlas, and spent a half hour looking at the maps.
The Channel Three truck showed up a few minutes later, and Daisy Jones walked over and talked to the sheriff. Virgil went back to the maps.
Duke might think that Welsh and Sharp were in the net, and while Arcadia was pretty far south of Bigham, it was actually on the northeast edge of where Virgil’s prison focus group thought they’d be. The heart of the search area, the focus group thought, should be south of Arcadia.
Virgil watched as Daisy did a stand-up with the sheriff, and when she’d finished, he went over and said to Duke, “I’m going to get some sleep, but I’ll be out here tomorrow morning. Where’re you going to set up?”
“Right here,” Duke said. “Don’t sleep late. You might not be in on the. . capture.”
17
Virgil drove all the way back to Marshall, still with the lights, running fast. Sally was gone, so he set the alarm on his phone, put it on the end table next to his ear, and was asleep when his head hit the pillow.
Sunrise was right around six-thirty, and at seven o’clock, Virgil was back out the door, carrying his duffel bag. The search area would be moving east, he thought, and Sally aside, Marshall was just too far away.
Jenkins and Shrake agreed to meet him at the Bigham Burger King, and from there, they’d head south toward the focus area; they said that a highway patrolman named Cletus Boykin was coming with them. “We can work in two-man teams that way,” Jenkins said. “Boykin’s an old friend of Shrake’s, and Shrake says he’s okay.”
“What does that mean? He’ll kill on command?”
“That, at least,” Jenkins said. “He’ll probably eat the dead, if you tell him to. See you in a half hour.”
In a cold dry spring, before the trees bud out, the morning sun seems to shine white like a silver dime on the horizon, and the clear air over the still-fallow ground gives the prairie a particular bleakness, if your mood is already bleak.
Virgil had a feeling that there’d be shooting before the end of the day, that people who were alive and even feeling good right then, maybe asleep in their beds, would be bleeding into the dirt before the sun went down.
Or maybe already: he called the Bare County sheriff’s department and was told nothing had happened yet, but that Duke’s forces were moving into position. Sometime in the middle of the night, the cell phone used by Becky Welsh had been found, and bagged, in case further proof was needed that she’d made the phone call.
Forty minutes after he left Marshall, running hard again, Virgil arrived at the Burger King and found Jenkins, Shrake, and Boykin drinking coffee among the remains of a nasty breakfast. Boykin was a thin, athletic man with white hair and sun wrinkles; he was wearing his highway patrol uniform. Virgil left his Minnesota atlas with them, and since he suspected that he might not eat again, and since the place offered the full menu twenty-four hours a day, he ordered a Double Whopper with cheese, large fries, and a Diet Coke; the bloat alone would carry him through to the evening.
When he was back at the booth, working on the Whopper and fries, Shrake, who had his face in a nutrition menu, said, “That’s sixteen hundred and fifty calories, right there, most of it grease.”
“Tastes really fuckin’ good, though,” Virgil said. He dabbed at his face with a napkin, wiped his fingers, and opened the atlas. “Okay. Here’s the situation. The Bare County people think they’ve got Sharp and Welsh in a net that’s roughly like this.” He traced a circle on the map with a pencil. “My focus group thinks they’ll be a little further south of that-south of Arcadia-and a bit west. The feeling was that they’d drop out of Bare County around here, after robbing that bank and Sharp getting shot.”
They talked about the search pattern and tactics, and Virgil made sure they’d all be wearing their vests, which Jenkins and Shrake didn’t like to do, and that the two teams would stay close, in case one of them needed support.
“If you don’t wear the vests, I’ll shoot you myself, just to make the point,” Virgil said. Shrake would go with his friend Boykin, and Virgil would go with Jenkins. Shrake referred to Boykin as “Mad Dog” and “Pit Bull” and Virgil said, “You can call him anything you want, but I’m not gonna ask you why.”
“Jesus, you’ve gotten pretty touchy,” Shrake said.
“Lot of dead people,” Virgil muttered.
“There are always a lot of dead people,” Shrake said. “You can see them on TV all day. Little children fucked and chopped to pieces by freaks. Every day, sure as the sun rises, somewhere in the world, a little child-”
“Shut up,” Virgil said.
“-will be slaughtered, and the TV people will find it and put it on your breakfast table. I’ve managed to handle that fact by deciding that I no longer give a shit.”
Jenkins said to Virgil, “Don’t encourage him. He’s been on this rant for two weeks now.”
“It’s not a rant. It’s my new meme,” Shrake said. “I’m passing it to others.”
He pronounced it “mem,” and Jenkins said, “How many times do I have to tell you-”
