Mad River vf-6 Read online

Billy Joe Shaver? Good, very good. There was a lot to be said for “Georgia on a Fast Train” and even, they agreed, “Wacko from Waco,” which testified to a certain genuineness of the lifestyle. Then there was “Old Five and Dimers Like Me,” covered by the likes of Bob Dylan, backed by Eric Clapton. What about that? What could you say about the second-best country song ever?

  They were still working through it, each with a Leinenkugel longneck in his right hand, and Cooper crowned with a black hundred-beaver cowboy hat from Santa Fe, New Mexico, when along came a Mankato cop named Bob Roberts, who everybody called Bob-Bob, and who said, “Hey there, Virg.”

  Virgil asked, “Is Ray Wylie the best living country singer?”

  Bob-Bob hitched up his duty belt and said, “Well, hell. Let me think. How about. . Emmylou Harris? Or maybe Linda Ronstadt?”

  There was a moment of silence, then Virgil said to Cooper, “You miserable sexist piece of shit. You never even considered a woman.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cooper said. “I apologize to all women. For everything.”

  “I don’t think that’s good enough,” Bob-Bob said. “You’ll have to come down to the station for an application of pussywhip.”

  Virgil, trying to smooth over the awkwardness, said, “I think we can all agree that the Texas guys write very smooth stuff.”

  “In other words, not tin-eared Nashville whining violin Martha White Grand Ole Opry banjo bullshit,” Cooper said.

  “And at this very moment, I say Ray Wylie leads the pack-nothing against the women,” Virgil said. He held out his bottle, and Cooper hesitated only for a moment, then clinked his bottle against it, and they both said, “Ray Wylie.” Cooper tipped his bottle up, finishing the last of the brew, and then looked down the alley and said, “See that net?”

  They couldn’t, because there was no net. What there was, was a hoop, with a sixty-watt bulb flickering just beyond it, where the kitchen staff shot baskets on slow nights.

  “Sort of,” Virgil said.

  “One shot each, for five dollars.”

  “You got it,” Virgil said.

  Cornelius carefully gauged the distance-just about a free throw-then arced the bottle toward the hoop. The bottle clanged off the rim, ricocheted down the alley, and shattered on a cobblestone. “Shit,” he said.

  Virgil finished his beer, and Bob-Bob said, “I got two dollars says you don’t even hit the rim.”

  Virgil said, “You got that, too,” and lofted the bottle down the alley; it dropped gracefully through the hoop, the neck just ticking the steel as it went down, and then shattered on another cobblestone. “That’s what you get when you go head-to-head with a natural athlete, you ignorant small-town hicks,” Virgil said. “Pay me.”

  “I been set up,” Bob-Bob said, as he dug two dollars out of his pocket. “By the way, Virgie, this BCA guy, Davenport, is trying to find you. He said you don’t answer your phone, but he knows you’re around here. He called at the station house and Georgina said she’d seen you down here. She sent me down to tell you to call in.”

  “I told you, you shouldn’t have been hittin’ on her,” Cooper said.

  “I was just being social,” Virgil said. To Bob-Bob: “Did Davenport say what he wanted me for?”

  “Not to me,” Bob-Bob said. “But calling at this time of night. .”

  They all reflexively looked up toward the moon: it was after midnight. A call after midnight meant there’d probably been a murder somewhere. Virgil fished the cell phone out of his pocket, turned it on, found three messages from Davenport.

  “Goddamnit. I got home from vacation at six o’clock, and he’s already on my ass.”

  “You look like you’re tanned,” Bob-Bob said, squinting in the bad light. “You didn’t get that here. Where you been?”

  “Bahamas,” Virgil said. “Bone fishing.”

  “Bahamas,” Bob-Bob said with amazement, as though Virgil had said Shangri-la.

  Virgil pushed the button to call Davenport, who picked up on the first ring.

  “We got a bad one in Shinder,” Lucas Davenport said. He sounded sleepy, and maybe bored. “You better get over there.”

  “I’d blow about a ten-point-three right now,” Virgil said. “Can it wait until morning?”

  “They’re holding everything for you,” Davenport said. “Get some coffee, and when you’re down to a seven, take off. I’ll find out where the highway patrol is, and you can dodge them. I’m putting Crime Scene on the road, soon as I can.”

  “Still probably three hours before I can get there,” Virgil said.

  “Three hours is better than anybody else we got,” Davenport said. “And you know that country.”

  “How many dead?”

  “Two. Man and a wife, named, uh, let me look. . uh, Welsh. Shot in their kitchen, probably last night or early this morning. The locals got nothing, except maybe their dicks in their hands.”

  “I’ll go,” Virgil said. “But I’ll be a little slow.”

  “You know about what happened Friday night?”

  “Friday night I was on Grand Bahama,” Virgil said, “fishing all day, and at night, playing beach volleyball with women wearing bikini bottoms.”

  There was a moment of silence, then Davenport said, “I might have to kill you. It was snowing up here.”

  “Yeah, well, what happened Friday?”

  “There was a double murder over in Bigham. I don’t know if these two are connected, but they’re over in the same corner of the state. Haven’t been four murders, that close, in that corner, in a hundred years.”

  “Who caught that?”

  “Ralph. But there wasn’t much to do after the crime-scene crew got finished. Nobody had any idea of what happened.”

  “Okay. Send me what Ralph got.”

  “I will,” Davenport said. “When you say they were wearing bikini bottoms, they were also, like, wearing the tops, right?”

  “Nope, just the bottoms,” Virgil said.

  “Fuck me,” Davenport said. “Anyway, you bring anything back home?”

  “Jesus, I hope not,” Virgil said.

  “I meant fish,” Davenport said.

  “Oh. No. No, I didn’t.”

  Cooper offered Virgil a ride home, but Bob-Bob said, doubtfully, “That don’t sound like a real good idea,” and Virgil said, “Thanks, anyway, Cornelius. I can use the walk.”

  Virgil lived the best part of a mile northeast of downtown, a cool walk in early April, but he was wearing an insulated Carhartt jean jacket over a black Wolfmother T-shirt, jeans, and boots, and was comfortable enough as he ambled along through the dark. He lived in a small two-bedroom frame house with a double garage. A fishing boat was usually parked in the driveway, in this case, an almost-new fishing boat, a Ranger. The boat had been purchased with some fear and trepidation about ethics, from a friend of the governor of the state of Minnesota.

  Virgil’s previous boat had been blown up by a mad bomber. Virgil had crawled away from the wreckage, unhurt, by the very skin of his teeth. The governor had offered to help out by locating the Ranger, two years old, but with only thirty hours on the motor. Virgil initially declined, because he thought that the boat broker might be doing a favor for the governor, some kind of political deal, and he didn’t want a part of that.

  But the governor had come back to him, said he appreciated Virgil’s ethical conundrum, and insisted that there was no deal, he’d only done it because he imagined that he and Virgil were friends and he felt bad about the bomb. No payback was expected or required from anyone. Virgil got a letter from the director of the BCA saying it was okay, and he bought the boat, because, the fact was:

  He hungered for it.

  It had been love at first sight. A Ranger Angler, red with black and gray trim, eighteen feet, six inches long with a ninety-eight-inch beam. There was a rod case under the front deck with space for six rods, plenty of storage in the side lockers, a Minn-Kota trolling motor on the bow, a 175 Merc on the back.

 
Virgil had to put up the whole insurance payment on his old boat and motor, plus he’d financed twelve thousand dollars over four years through the state credit union. That was cheap, he thought, when it came to true love.

  And now, as the saying went, he could pad his ass with fiberglass, a big change from his old aluminum boat.

  Virgil was a tall man, an inch or two over six feet, slender, with blue eyes and blond hair worn long for a cop, but not too long for farm country, where he usually worked. Like country people, he had a tendency toward ball caps, barn jackets, and cowboy boots, especially in the spring, when he needed to be mud-resistant. He’d been born out on the prairie, in Marshall, Minnesota, where he’d lettered in football, basketball, and baseball. He still looked like a competent third baseman.

  He got back to the house around twelve-thirty, clear of mind if not fresh of breath. He patted the boat on the nose and said, “Hey, baby,” went in the house, started a pot of coffee, brushed his teeth, threw a few days’ worth of shirts, jeans, and underwear in a satchel, along with a dopp kit. He got his pistol and a shotgun out of the gun safe, and some ammo, took the whole pile of gear out to his truck, a Toyota 4Runner, and packed it away. That done, he hooked the truck up to the boat, backed the boat into the garage, unhooked it, and locked the garage door behind himself.

  Back inside the house, he poured a cup of coffee, put the rest in a thermos, sipped at the coffee, and went back to the second bedroom he used as a study and dug out his Minnesota atlas.

  Shinder was a small farm town of a few hundred people, ordinary enough, as far as he knew, out on the prairie in western Minnesota. It was only thirty miles from Virgil’s hometown of Marshall, and probably seventy-five or eighty from his current home in Mankato.

  Though he’d been past Shinder a hundred times, he’d never stopped, because there wasn’t anything to stop for. He wasn’t even exactly sure what county the town was in-it was right where Yellow Medicine, Lyon, Redwood, and Bare came together. He thumbed through the atlas and found that it was just inside Bare County, five miles from the Yellow Medicine line.

  Virgil said, aloud, to his empty house, “Ah, man.”

  Bare County was run by Sheriff Lewis Duke, known to other local sheriffs as the Duke of Hazard. He believed in Guns, Punishment, Low Taxes, and the American Constitution. If he wasn’t the source of all those things-the Almighty God was-he was at least the Big Guy’s representative in Bare County.

  Among other things, he’d tried to set up a concentration camp on the site of an old chicken farm, complete with barracks and barbed-wire fences, for minor criminals. He believed that an actual indoor Minnesota jail was simply pampering the miscreants. He figured to rent space in the concentration camp barracks to other counties that wanted to unload expensive prisoners, and even make a profit for his Bare County constituents. The state attorney general’s office, backed by a court order, stopped the concentration camp.

  But no court order could stop Lewis Duke from being an asshole.

  At ten minutes after one o’clock in the morning, ninety-eight percent sober, Virgil pulled out on the street and rolled away in the dark toward Shinder. His phone rang on the seat beside him, and he picked it up: Davenport, who always stayed up late.

  Davenport asked, “How’re you feeling?”

  “Stone-cold sober, if that’s what you mean,” Virgil said. “I just pulled out of my house-I’m on the way.”

  “Good. It’d be best if you were gunned down in the line of duty, and not killed in a drunk-driving accident.”

  “Anyhooo. .”

  “The crime-scene truck is leaving town now,” Davenport said. “They’ll be an hour and a half or maybe two hours behind you. If you’re going over on 14, you don’t have to worry about the patrol, so you can let it roll. Watch out for town cops.”

  “I’ll do that,” Virgil said. “You think Ray Wylie Hubbard is better than Waylon Jennings?”

  “I don’t know, but they’re both better than any of the Beatles,” Davenport said. “I’m going to bed. Hesitate to call.”

  One good thing about a long drive in the dark, when you didn’t know anything about where you were going, or what you were going to do when you got there, was that you had lots of time to think.

  Virgil had for years worked a sideline as an outdoors writer, a freelancer for the diminishing number of magazines that were actually about the outdoors, as opposed to outdoors technology. He knew which brands of fishing rods he liked, and what reels, and he knew something about guns and bows and snowshoes and about boats and canoes, and not as much as he would have liked about dogs-his job made it almost impossible to keep a dog-but not much about technology.

  He wasn’t much interested in arguing whether a.308 was better or worse than a.30–06 on whitetail, or a Ranger a better boat than a Lund or a Tuffy, or a Mathews Solocam a better bow than a Hoyt or a PSE. He couldn’t have found his own ass with a GPS. He just did what most guys did, which was talk to his friends and try a few things out. The fact was, most of the known names worked pretty well, and you got used to what you had; you could punch all the half-inch holes in paper that you liked, but the fact is, when it came to hunting, anything in the bread box would do the job.

  So when he wrote, he looked for stories instead of technology. He usually sold them. He’d even sold a two-part crime story to The New York Times Magazine. Now he was stepping up. Maybe.

  A few months earlier, Davenport’s daughter had been shot in the arm, and he’d gone to see her in the hospital, and had seen her afterward at Davenport’s home. Her name was Letty, and she had been adopted by the Davenports after her alcoholic mother was killed on a case that Lucas Davenport had worked in northwestern Minnesota.

  Virgil had known that she had been a dirt-poor country girl, but he hadn’t quite understood how bad it had been, and what she’d actually done to survive. One thing she’d done was wander around the countryside with a bunch of leghold traps and a.22, trapping raccoon, mink, and muskrats-mostly rats. She’d sold them to a local fur buyer for enough money to keep the family’s head above water. Had done this when she was ten years old. .

  He’d gotten pieces of the story when she was recovering from the wound, and somewhere along the line, it occurred to him that it was a terrific story. Here was what appeared to be a stylish young high-school girl, who’d shot a cop-the same crooked cop-on two different occasions, and recently survived a shoot-out with two Mexican narcos, leaving the narcos dead. He talked to Davenport about it, and then Letty, and wound up doing five long interviews, on five consecutive weekends, during the fall, as well as some research up in the Red River Valley.

  He’d spent the next two months writing a girl’s short memoir of a nightmarish rural life-though she hadn’t at the time thought it particularly nightmarish, it just was-and sent it off to The New York Times Magazine, to the editor who’d bought his earlier pieces.

  The editor had gotten right back and said that while the Times wouldn’t buy it-it was simply too long-he’d sent it to a friend over at Vanity Fair, and they were definitely interested.

  The problem was, Vanity Fair wanted to send Annie Leibovitz out to the Red River Valley with a ton of photo equipment to shoot Letty and Lucas Davenport, as part of a major editorial package. Both Letty and Davenport had the faces for it, and Letty loved the idea of meeting Leibovitz, who was one of her media heroines, but the Davenports had gotten their knickers in a psychological twist about what the attention would do to their daughter, about the whole gestalt of Vanity Fair, about how Letty had already had way too much attention from the press, and blah blah blah. .

  That all had to be worked through. Virgil didn’t want to piss anybody off, and the Davenports were good friends of his, but he really wanted the piece in Vanity Fair. Really wanted it. Maybe not as much as he’d wanted the Ranger, but it was like that, the same order of magnitude: about an 8.4 on the Richter scale.

  Something else. He suspected that Vanity Fair liked the idea of having a g
un-toting shit-kicking cop as a roving reporter. If he could nail down that job. .

  During the drive out to Shinder, he considered a half dozen calming approaches he might take with the Davenports; he thought he might point out that all of the stories about Letty had been sensationalized TV trash, while his work was a sensitive retelling of the girl’s actual history. .

  And when he was done thinking about the Davenports, he thought a bit about God, and whether He might be some kind of universal digital computer, subject to the occasional bug or hack. Was it possible that politicians and hedge-fund operators were some kind of garbled cosmic computer code? That the Opponent, instead of having horns and a forked tail, was a fat bearded guy drinking Big Gulps and eating anchovy pizzas and writing viruses down in a hellish basement? That prayers weren’t answered because Satan was running denial-of-service attacks?

  He was still thinking about that when he came up to Shinder, running fast, and west, on State Highway 68. The Welshes, if that was actually the victims’ name, lived in the northeast part of town. Virgil knew that because he could see, across the barren, yet-to-be-planted prairie, a cluster of cars with their lights on, gathered around a house, and a bunch of houses with their lights on, all on the northeast corner of town.

  He came to the intersection leading into town, turned north, rolled past a roadhouse and a gas station, and a line of grain elevators that went off at a diagonal to the northwest. He was on April Street, and took it north across Apple, Cherry, Peach, Pear, and Plum, to Main, where he took a right, crossed May, June, July, and August, turned left, and crossed Aspen, Birch, Cedar, Elm, Maple, and Oak toward the pool of light, realizing, as he did so, that the east-west streets south of Main were named after fruits, and alphabetized, and the east-west streets north of Main were named after trees, and alphabetized.

  At the same time, the north-south streets were named after the months, apparently starting from the west edge of town and marching east. That meant that if a parent were told her kid was acting up at the corner of Pear and April, she would have an instant appreciation of the kid’s precise location. What would happen if the town built more than twelve north-south streets, Virgil couldn’t guess. In any case, it all seemed a little anal, even for Minnesota.