Mad River

18

Virgil got one of the last rooms at the Minnesota Valley Lodge, where it seemed that half the cops in Minnesota were camped out, many of whom he knew. Whatever else had happened with this rampage, it was good for the local motel and diner business, he thought.

He ate with a couple of sheriffs and a couple of their deputies who’d come in on a mutual aid arrangement, talking about the state of the search, about the craziness of kids, about salaries and budgets and retirement plans, and one of the deputies wondered if there was any action in Bigham, and his boss said, “If you find any action, I’ll tell your wife.”

“What’s the point in going out of town. .?”

The sheriff said, “Doug, the fact is, if you found any action, you wouldn’t know what to do with it. I’d know what to do with it. Virgil would know what to do with it. You wouldn’t know. You’d just call up your old lady and say, ‘Marge, I found some action. What should I do with it?’”

Doug said, “Well. You got me there. Maybe I’ll just have another beer.”

“Attaboy,” said the sheriff.

After dinner, Virgil walked downtown to The Bush, where a half dozen younger guys were shooting pool while a couple of wives or girlfriends watched, everybody armed with bottles of beer; and some older guys watched from the bar or sat elbows-on-the-bar and talked. Roseanne Bush was working as the bartender and, when she came down to him, asked, “What can I do you for?”

“You got a Leinie’s?”

“Does a chicken have lips?” He didn’t know the answer to that, but she went down to a cooler and brought back a bottle of Leinenkugel’s, and popped the top off for him. He deliberately chose a stool at the end of the bar, away from the others, and he asked quietly, “Any of Jimmy Sharp’s friends in here? Guys he shot pool with?”

She said, just as quietly, and with a friendly grin, “What the fuck are you doing coming in here and asking me that? I’m not supposed to know you.”

Virgil, “Any of them?”

She stopped in mid-sentence, then said, “The big guy in the turquoise T-shirt with the orange thing on it. Donny Morton. He’s the only one. And he wasn’t friends, they just shot pool together. Now, don’t ask me any more questions. Just git.”

Virgil nursed the beer for a while, then looked around, picked out the guy in the turquoise shirt with the orange thing on it. He had no idea what the orange thing was, but it looked like some kind of Indian symbol. Morton was no Indian: he was maybe six-seven, with long blond hair and a chubby pink face. Under thirty, Virgil thought, and maybe a biker; he had a wallet connected to his belt with a brass chain, wore heavy motorcycle boots, and put out a vibration.

He looked sort of mean, but in a hygienic, Minnesota way.

Virgil didn’t want to give Roseanne away, and since Morton hadn’t paid any attention to him, he finished the beer, laid five dollars on the bar, and headed for the door.

Outside, under the entrance light, he took out his pocket notebook, a Moleskine, and paged through some brief notes, until he found the name “Laura Deren.” He’d been told by one of the O’Learys that Deren was the woman who’d accompanied Ag O’Leary to the Cities, where she’d either miscarried or had an abortion.

Once he had her name, he checked her driver’s license at the DMV and got an address and ran the address through the smartphone’s map program, and found that Deren was a half mile away.

With no traffic lights, wide streets, or even much traffic, Virgil walked to Deren’s place in nine minutes by his watch and found that it was a smaller, older apartment building, of brown brick, built in a residential area. The front door was locked, but he found Deren’s name on a doorbell and rang it. He got no answer, leaned on the bell for a while, still got no answer. As he turned to leave, a Toyota Camry pulled into the parking area on the side of the building. A line of single-car garages was built along the length of the parking area, and the car waited while the door to one of them rolled up. The DMV had listed Deren as the owner of a Camry, and when the car had parked, a woman stepped out of the garage, aimed a key-ring remote at it, and the door rolled down.

Virgil stepped up and asked, “Miz Deren?”

She was wearing high heels and a suit, and he startled her, speaking from the dark, and she said, “Uh. .”

Virgil said quickly, “I’m a police officer, with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I’m investigating the death of Ag O’Leary.”

Still tentative, she asked, “You have identification?”

“Sure.” He took his ID out of his jacket and handed it to her.

There was still a light on above the garage, and she stepped back and scanned it, frowned, said, “Okay,” and, “How did you find me?”

“I got your name from the O’Learys, and your address from the Department of Motor Vehicles,” Virgil said.

More confident now: “Okay. What can I do for you?”

They went up to her apartment, and she offered Virgil a glass of wine, which he declined; she poured one for herself and sat in an easy chair, while Virgil perched on a couch. “This is a confidential conversation. I’d ask that you not speak to anyone about it, unless you feel that you need to talk to an attorney.”

“Why would I need to do that?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t object to your talking to an attorney, that’s all. I don’t suspect you of doing anything wrong. But I have some sensitive questions.”

She gazed at him for a moment-she was a pretty young woman with shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes; her dress was a muted green chosen to fit well with her modest gold necklace. She’d kicked off her high heels when she sat down. “Sensitive questions. . about Ag?”

“About Ag’s relationship with her husband.”

“Interesting,” she said. “Will this conversation be made public?”

“Only as part of a court hearing, and if we get as far as that, there’d be more important issues than your privacy.”

She nodded and said, “So ask a question.”

“When you went to the Twin Cities with Ag, did she miscarry? Or did she have an abortion?”

She flinched at the word, and her eyes went flat, and Virgil had the answer.

She saw him react and realized that she’d given it away, so she told the truth. “We went to Planned Parenthood in St. Paul,” Deren said. “We had an appointment, and the pregnancy was terminated. Her parents don’t know that. They’re all good Catholics.”

“Does Dick Murphy know that?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since the day we went to the clinic. I did see Ag quite a bit, and she hadn’t told him three days. . I think it was three days. . before she died. We’d put that miscarriage story out there, and her parents. . whether she told him the truth or not, I don’t know.”

“Had she asked him for a divorce?”

“No. We don’t ask for divorces anymore, Officer Flowers. We simply tell them. She’d told him.”

“I knew that. . about the telling,” Virgil said. “I’ve been told myself.”

“Well, there you go,” Deren said. She smiled for the first time.

“The reason I asked about it,” Virgil said, “was that Dick was apparently visiting her at her parents’ house.”

“He did. Ag was going through the fiction that they were separated, and they might get back together. That was so she could spare her parents’ feelings-like I said, they’re all Catholic over there-until she could get set up with an apartment in the Cities, and buy some furniture and so on. We were going to start doing that this week. Ag planned to work for a year, while she waited to see what happened with her med school applications. She was planning to go back to school.”

“Did Dick ever get physical with her?”

“Yes. He raped her, but she wouldn’t call it that. He knew better than to hit her. He’d twist her and squeeze her. . he had a way of squeezing her that was agonizing, but didn’t show much of a sign of anything. He’d put his arms around her from the back, with his knuckles turned into her breast bone, and he’d squeeze her really hard. She told me she thought she was dying when he did that.”

“She didn’t tell anybody else about it?”

“No. For one thing, it didn’t leave a mark, like I said, so it’d be hard to prove,” Deren said. “But what really worried her was, one of her brothers, or a bunch of her brothers, would go pound on Dick. An assault conviction doesn’t help your med school application, and the whole bunch of them plan to be doctors.”

“So she. .”

“She had it all planned out. She was in her parents’ house, and wouldn’t be alone with him. And then, she was going to disappear,” Deren said. “Go up to the Cities. Her family would know where she was, but Dick wouldn’t. She’d only come down here for the divorce proceedings, which would be fast.”

Virgil mulled that over for a minute, until she asked, “What’s this about? Dick wasn’t involved in her death. . I mean, I thought everybody knew what happened.”

“We’re pretty sure we know who pulled the trigger,” Virgil said. “It was Jim Sharp. Murphy and Sharp were shooting pool the night before the night Ag was murdered. Jim didn’t have a pistol, and was so broke that the morning of the shooting he spent the last of his money, the last of Becky Welsh’s money and the last of Tom McCall’s, on a loaf of bread and some peanut butter. That night, he had a gun and a thousand dollars.”

She gazed at him for a moment, then whispered, “You think Dick paid to have Ag murdered?”

“That’s the aspect that I’m investigating,” Virgil said. “If she aborted his baby-”

“Oh, bull,” she said. “Dick probably didn’t want the baby any more than she did. Dick wants stuff-cars and cabins and boats, and he’d like to go to Vegas at Christmas. To get that, he needed to get at her trust fund. If you don’t get him, he’ll have it, too.”

“I’m not sure what the status of that is,” Virgil said.

Deren shook her head. “Ag didn’t have a will. She was a young woman, she was in perfect health. Why would she have a will? What could go wrong? So. . he gets it.”

“Why did she ever marry him?”

“Well. . he’s good-looking. He’s athletic. He’s somewhat intelligent, and he pursued her. And maybe. . Ag was a little socially awkward. She wasn’t one of the social kids in high school, or college, either one. You know, a firstborn, with all the firstborn traits: bossy, pushy, privileged,” Deren said. “And then, Dick wasn’t an O’Leary. They are very good people, to a fault. Ag felt like she was on a railroad train to medical school. Had to be the hardest worker in high school to get the grades to get the best slots in college. Had to be the hardest worker in college to get the grades to get into medical school. Dick was like, ‘Hey, chill out. Have a couple beers. Let’s get in the car and run down to Vegas and roll the dice and go to the shows and get drunk and make love. . ’ So, they wound up getting married, and after a while, guess what?”

“What?”

She smiled ruefully. “She found out she was an O’Leary.”

“He couldn’t be too bright if he paid Jimmy Sharp to kill her,” Virgil said.

“Unless he planned to kill Jimmy Sharp afterward,” she said. When Virgil’s eyes went up, she hastily added, “I don’t know anything. I’m just saying. . you know. And he could do it. And who’d ever see that connection?”

Virgil asked, “What do you do, Miz Deren?”

“I’m a bookkeeper, right now. I’m almost finished with my degree in accounting. I’m going to be a CPA.”

“Can you keep this conversation quiet?” Virgil asked.

“I can. But you have to get him. Dick, I mean.”

“We’ll see. Right now, this is mostly conjecture.”

“When you said he was playing pool with Jim Sharp the day before? That’s when it added up for me. He did it. Paid Jim Sharp.”

Her opinion about that was interesting, but it’d be useless in court, Virgil thought, as he ambled back toward town. He looked in the doorway at Roseanne’s, saw that Morton was still there, leaning against a wall, his pool cue grounded while two other guys worked through a game.

Virgil backed out, walked down to the motel, said hello to a few people, then went to his room, changed into dark slacks, a sport coat, and a collared shirt with a necktie. He saw Jenkins as he was walking toward the door, and Jenkins said, “Don’t tell me you’ve got a date.”

“I’m talking to a guy. I was watching him a little, a couple hours ago, in a beer joint, but he wasn’t looking at me. I don’t want him to remember that I was there.”

Jenkins nodded and said, “You need somebody to watch your back?”

“Naw. I’m good.”

He walked back to The Bush, still not in a hurry. When he stepped inside, the talk immediately dropped off: his dress had given him away as unusual, which he’d expected. He looked around, saw Morton looking at him, nodded at him, went that way. “Are you Don Morton?”

Morton nodded, and unconsciously chalked his cue tip. “Yeah. Who’re you?”

“I’m Virgil Flowers. I’m an agent with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I need to talk to you for a moment.”

A woman on a stool next to a bowling machine said, “He is. I seen him on TV.”

Morton asked, “What’d I do?”

“Nothing, I hope,” Virgil said. “We’ve been talking to a lot of people, and one of them told us you were playing some pool with Jimmy Sharp down here, before all the shooting started. We’re just wondering what he had to say-what might have set him off.”

“I don’t know nothing,” Morton said.

“So come and answer my questions,” Virgil said. “We can just go sit in the front booth, where it’s a little quieter.”

Morton shrugged, a nervous assent, and followed Virgil back to the front booth. The woman who’d seen Virgil on TV asked, “Can I listen?”

Virgil grinned at her and said, “No. But I’ll talk to you next, if you want. Did you see Jimmy down here?”

“Yup, I did,” she said.

“Then sit right there,” Virgil said.

He and Morton sat in the booth and Virgil said, “I’ll buy you another beer, if you want,” and Morton showed some broken teeth and said, “I couldn’t turn that down.”

Virgil waved over the only waitress, and Morton ordered a Bud, and Virgil asked him, “You got anything at all that might be interesting? About Jimmy Sharp? What’d he talk about?”

“Well, he wanted to shoot for dollars, which is pretty low-rent, but he got some games, and. . mostly talked about being up in the Cities. ’Bout the assholes up there. Had a really good-looking chick with him, this Becky, and this other guy, the one that got caught.” He frowned, then flicked a finger at Virgil: “Wait a minute. Was that you?”

Virgil nodded. “Yeah.”

“Surprised you just didn’t put him down, right on the spot,” Morton said, and he took a swig of beer.

“I don’t do that,” Virgil said.

Morton shook his head and said, “If I was a cop. . Anyway, I shot some with Jim, and took a couple dollars off him, and that was about it.”

“Did you see him shooting with Dick Murphy?” Virgil asked.

“Dick? Uh, yeah. They were shooting, some, but I don’t know what they talked about. You’d have to ask Dick.”

“Is he here?”

“Not tonight,” Morton said. “The visitation for his wife is tonight. . He was here last night.”

“Did he seem pretty broken up by her murder?”

Morton peered at him for a long moment, then said, “Look, I don’t want to get Dick in trouble. He’s not a bad guy.”

Virgil said, “Really? He’s not a bad guy?”

Morton’s eyes shifted. A second later they came back, and he said, “You’re not going to tell anybody what we’re talking about here?”

“Not unless we get into court,” Virgil said.

“I gotta live here,” Morton said.

“I was born in Marshall, and I still live in a small town,” Virgil said. “I know how it is.”

Morton licked his lower lip. “Dick and Ag wasn’t getting along. They were going to get divorced.”

“Was Dick unhappy about that?”

“He started calling her ‘the bitch.’ The bitch did this and the bitch did that. So yeah. .”

“He ever mention her money?”

“Money? No, not that I ever heard. I guess she had some, her being an O’Leary.”

Morton didn’t have much more, but when Virgil finished, he asked, “You think Dick got Jimmy to kill her?”

“I don’t think anything in particular,” Virgil said. “I just go around and ask questions that I think should be asked. Sometimes, interesting facts come popping out of the ground, like mushrooms.”

“You got a pretty fuckin’ good job,” Morton said. “I wouldn’t mind being a cop.”

“Well, come on up to the Cities, go to school, get a job,” Virgil said. “That’s what I did. And you’re right. It’s a pretty good job.”

“I don’t think that’d work,” Morton said.

“Why not?”

“I once defenestrated a guy. The cops got all pissed off at me. I was drunk, but they said that was no excuse.”

“Ah, well,” Virgil said. Then, “The guy hurt bad?”

“Cracked his hip. Landed on a Prius. Really fucked up the Prius, too.”

“I can tell you, just now is the only time in my life I ever heard ‘defenestration’ used in a sentence,” Virgil said.

“It’s a word you learn, after you done it,” Morton said. “Yup. The New Prague AmericInn, 2009.”

Virgil was amazed. “Really? The defenestration of New Prague?”

The woman who wanted to talk to Virgil was named Marjorie Kay, and when Morton went back to the pool table, she slid eagerly into the booth and said, “Fire away.”

“Don’t have anything to fire,” he told her. “I’m just asking about who said what to whom, when Jimmy Sharp was here.”

“Poop. I didn’t talk to him,” she said. Then brightened. “But I heard him talking to people. And I talked to his girlfriend, that Becky girl. And George Petersen, he told her, Becky, that he’d give her fifty dollars to go out to his truck with him. She got all mad, but Jimmy just laughed.”

“George Petersen.”

“He’s an over-the-road trucker. He’s on the road. He hauls chickens out of New Age Poultry.”

“Was Dick Murphy here that night?”

“Dick? Oh, yeah.”

“Did he talk to Jimmy?”

She looked at him for a moment, her eyes like pigeon eyes, curious but oddly cold and shiny and slightly protrusive, and then she whispered, “You think he was in on it? Ag’s murder?”

Virgil repeated his line about not thinking anything in particular, but she wasn’t buying it: “Bull-hockey, you think he did it. So do I. I told my sister that, right after Ag got killed. I said, ‘That’s really pretty convenient for Dicky, isn’t it?’ Everybody knows she had money.”

“What do people in the bar think?”

She looked over her shoulder at the people around the table, and then came back and said, “They think the same thing as I do. It’s pretty convenient. Dick doesn’t get on with his old man. Surprised he wasn’t murdered. The old man, I mean.”

They talked for a few more minutes, and when Virgil wouldn’t give her any inside information on the case, she went back to the pool table. Virgil paid for Morton’s beer, walked back to the motel. An informal strategy meeting was going on in the breakfast area, a bunch of cops arguing about the best way to run down Sharp and Welsh. The wrangling was only semi-serious, fueled with alcohol. Virgil sat with Jenkins and Shrake, filled them in on his ideas about Dick Murphy, and told them about his conversation with Morton the defenestrator. They agreed to meet the next morning at eight o’clock.

Duke had been sitting with a bunch of deputies, looking tired, and before he left he came over and said, “We’ve got a bunch of guys laying back in the weeds, to see if they try to sneak out of the search area.”

“Let me know. . and get some sleep.”

“You, too.”

Virgil left Jenkins and Shrake and went back to his room. He was sitting on the bed, setting the alarm, when a call came in from the BCA duty officer. “We got a call from somebody who says her name is Marjorie, and she says you’ve got to go back to Roseanne’s. She says she’s got a guy there who knows about Dick Murphy and Jim Sharp.”

Something uncurled in Virgil’s stomach, a warm sense of satisfaction: in most cases, there was a moment when things started to work for him, when things started to get done. He’d taken his boots off, and he put them back on and went out and walked back to Roseanne’s.

The upside: if the guy really knew about Murphy and Sharp, he might have enough, with his other evidence, to bust Murphy. Especially, he thought, if they could get that thousand dollars off Sharp, and find out where it came from.

The downside: Marjorie. . Kay?. . that seemed right; Marjorie Kay was obviously blabbing about Virgil’s ideas about Murphy. That wasn’t all bad, but meant that he’d lost control of the rumor mill. Word would get back to Murphy, and he’d hunker down.

When Virgil got back to Roseanne’s, there were two guys leaning on the front of a pickup right at the door, drinking out of beer bottles, their backs to him. One of them heard him coming, and they both dropped their hands out of sight. Virgil grinned: they were breaking the law, just as he had, a few nights before, drinking outside the Rooster Coop back in Mankato.

He was going to say something as he went past, and was looking at the back of the closest one, and had just opened his mouth when the man turned and Virgil got a glimpse of a bandanna pulled over his face, like an old-timey bank robber, and behind that image was the image of an incoming fist and Virgil never had time to get a hand or anything else in the way, but he barely had the time to flinch away, and instead of connecting with the middle of his face, the fist connected with the side of his forehead and knocked him down in the dirt and a half second later he was rolling away, his hands up around his head, unable to get far enough away from them to get to his feet, as they kicked at his legs and ribs and face. .

The gravel in the parking lot was cutting at him as he scrambled and went down, scrambled and went down, and he could feel the palms of his hands and his shoulders getting cut, but all he was thinking about was his head and his kidneys, protecting them from the boots.

He never had the leisure to take a good look at them, but they were wearing boots and jeans and leather jackets and ball caps and the masks, and they weren’t yelling or really making any noise at all except occasional curses, and “Get him, get out of the way, get out of my way. .”

Whether they’d done this before, or not, he had no way of knowing, but they weren’t well coordinated. Virgil kept trying to move in ways that kept one of them eclipsed behind the other, as much as he could, and was succeeding at least some of the time, and managed to get partway to his feet before he stumbled and he called out, “Police officer. I’m. .”

They kept coming and Virgil figured they must already know that. They’d come for him, not for a fight. They’d either badly beat him, put him in the hospital for sure, or maybe kill him, because he just couldn’t get away from them, but then a truck pulled into the parking lot, splashing headlights across the three of them, and Virgil kept moving and he saw more figures spilling out of the truck, and he didn’t know if he was further screwed, or saved, when one of the new people called, “Hey! Hey, what the hell. .”

Virgil shouted, “Police officer! Help me. .”

One of the new people yelled, “He’s a cop, let’s get them. . ” There was some running and scuffling, and then the two men who’d jumped him ran, down toward the end of the bar and around behind it and out of sight.

His rescuers didn’t go after them. Instead, they squatted around him, four young men, two in sport coats, two in casual jackets, and one of them asked, “You all right?”

“I’m pretty scuffed up,” Virgil managed. He pushed himself into a sitting position, but every time he moved, something hurt. “I think maybe. . I ought to go to an emergency room.”

One of the men said to another, “Go on in the bar and call the cops. And an ambulance.”

Virgil said, “Thanks.”

One of the men, whose faces he couldn’t see very clearly, said, “Man, you are bleeding to beat the band.”

Virgil said, “Artery?”

“No, I don’t think so. You look like you fell off your Harley. Like seriously bad road rash. You really a cop?”

Virgil said, “Yeah.” He still couldn’t see them clearly, and began to suspect that one of the kicks had connected with his head; things weren’t quite right. He asked, “Who are you guys?”

One of them, exactly who was unclear, said, “Pi Kappa Alpha.”

Virgil thought he’d misheard. “What?”

“We’re fraternity brothers. . from the U. . down here with a friend on spring break.”

“Ah. .”

The guy who’d gone inside came running back out and said, “I called nine-one-one. Everybody’s coming.”

More people came out of the bar to look, and Virgil tried to get to his feet, got halfway up with one of the frat boys holding his arm, and then fell back on his butt. The kid said, “Just wait. Somebody’ll be here in a minute.”

Virgil did not feel good.

The cops got there first, and one of them looked at Virgil and said, “Criminy! It’s the state cop, Flowers.”

Virgil said, “Hi.”

The cop said, “Set right there,” and to somebody else, “You better call Duke.”

A minute later, an ambulance arrived, and when Virgil couldn’t make it to his feet, they locked up his neck and head, put him on a gurney, and loaded him aboard. His eyes still weren’t quite focusing; he said to the ambulance attendant, “I’m a cop, and I’ve got to call somebody. Get my cell phone out of my pocket, will you?”

“We’re not supposed to-”

“Just do it,” Virgil said.

A minute later, Davenport came up and said, “Yo. You get them?”

“Not exactly,” Virgil said. “I’m in an ambulance headed for the hospital. I just got the shit beat out of me.”

Virgil went into the emergency room, where a nurse helped him take his clothes off, and a doc came and looked at him, and did some simple focusing tests, and recall tests, then said, “You’ve got a concussion. And you look pretty roughed up. We’ll do some X-rays.”

“The guys at the bar said I’m bleeding.”

“Not enough blood to worry about. It’s what’s going on inside that worries me,” the doc said.

He used his hands to probe at Virgil’s chest and kidneys, while questioning him, and Virgil couldn’t remember any particularly hard blows to the body. “I was trying to keep them on my arms and legs. . I was on my back most of the time.”

The hospital staff drew what seemed like a lot of blood, and wheeled him around for the X-rays, and at some point Shrake and Jenkins showed up, and Virgil told them what happened, and realized that he could now focus on their faces. But he was very tired, and began to shake.

The doc, called by Shrake, came back and said that he might be suffering some post-combat shock, that the adrenaline overload was catching up to him, and that it should wear off fairly quickly. When Virgil told him he could focus, the doc said, “Excellent, that’s a very positive sign,” and went away again.

Shrake and Jenkins had disappeared, probably shooed away by the nurse, Virgil thought. He was alone for a while and may have slept, then the doc came back and said, “Good news: there’s no sign of a skull fracture or any spinal problems. As far as I can tell, you don’t have any broken bones. You may have some pulled muscles or some other soft tissue injuries. We won’t know for sure until tomorrow. But you are seriously bruised up and you are going to hurt for a week. And you’re still concussed. We’re going to keep you for a while-overnight, anyway-to make sure that the concussion isn’t too bad. We’ll give you something to help you sleep.”

They did that.

When Virgil woke in the morning, Davenport was sitting next to the bed, tapping on an iPad, looking grim. Virgil cleared his throat, and Davenport looked up and said, “Well, you’re still alive.”

“That’s the good part,” Virgil said. “But I need a drink, and I’ve got to pee.”

“I can get you some water, but you’ll have to pee on your own,” Davenport said. “I’ll call the nurse.”

With the nurse helping, Virgil got out of bed and walked to the bathroom, hurting every step of the way, peed-happy to see no blood-and when he came back out, Davenport handed him a glass of water and Virgil said to the nurse, “I’m okay. I’ll use the chair.”

He sat down-and it hurt to sit down-and Davenport said, “Tell me.”

Virgil told him, and Davenport said, “We’ll talk to this Marjorie, but five’ll get you ten that whoever called Richards saw her talking to you, and used that to pull you back to the bar.” Richards was the BCA duty officer who’d called Virgil the night before.

“That sounds right,” Virgil said. “I really had my head up my ass: I bit on it like a hungry trout.”

“Gotta rework your metaphors,” Davenport said. And, “Duke was here. He said he’d see you this afternoon, but they’re out running the search again.”

“Wrong spot, I think,” Virgil said.

Davenport continued, “Jenkins and Shrake are out tearing up the countryside, looking for the two guys who jumped you. Those frat boys showed up at the right time, but they didn’t get a license plate, and we can’t find anybody at the bar who knows who they are. But we’ll find them.”

“Couple of assholes, not important,” Virgil said. “They weren’t very good at it, either. Probably friends of Dick Murphy. Maybe even Dick Murphy, for all I know. But: I think I worried Murphy enough for him to do this. That’s the only reason I can think of that somebody’d jump me. If I could find those guys. . maybe they’d talk.”

“What do you have on Murphy?”

Virgil laid it out, and when he was finished, Davenport said, “I agree with you that he probably paid Sharp. We need Sharp to say so. Or Welsh to say that Sharp told her that.”

“So we need to keep at least one of them alive,” Virgil said.

Davenport stood up and said, “You take it easy. I think they’re going to let you out this afternoon, but I already told the doc that if he thinks you ought to stay, that they ought to make you stay. Not to take any bullshit from you.”

“All right. But I really do need to get out of here. This whole thing is probably going to end today.”

“Can’t go much longer,” Davenport agreed. He stepped toward the door, then said, “You notice I didn’t say a single fuckin’ thing about you going up to that bar without a gun.”

“I appreciate that,” Virgil said.

“But if you had a gun with you, like you should have, as soon as you were hit, you could have rolled and come up with the weapon and just squeezed off a couple of rounds. . even if you didn’t hit anything, that would have ended it. They’d have run, and you wouldn’t be in here. And if you’d hit one of them, we could talk to the guy about Murphy.”

“No. That’s what would have happened if you had a gun,” Virgil said. “You can do that, because that’s the way you think. If I’d had a gun, and even remembered it, I probably would have dropped it trying to get it out. Then I’d have really been up shit creek, with a gun floating around. I’m just no damn good with pistols, Lucas.”

Davenport looked at him for a moment, then shook his head and said, “Take it easy, man. We’ll find these guys. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they resist arrest.”

Virgil said, “Take care,” and Davenport was gone.

He still had a residual headache, but he’d had worse; and he’d hurt worse, like the time he got thrown off an ex-rodeo horse and pulled a groin muscle. He remembered the wrangler looking down at him and saying, “You take good dirt.”

Maybe he did, he thought as he hobbled around the hospital room, because even though he hurt all over, he would have given a hundred American dollars to get five minutes alone with either of the guys who’d jumped him. “But not both at the same time,” he said aloud, grinning at himself in the bathroom mirror. He had a bad scrape on the left side of his forehead, on his left cheek, and below that, on the left side of his jaw. He had a bruise the size of a Kennedy half-dollar on the right side of his forehead, and he could feel dried blood in his hair, right at the crown of his head.

He was wearing a hospital gown. He pulled the bathroom door closed, peeled off the gown, and took a look at himself. He had a half dozen big boot-shaped bruises on each arm, more on his butt and thighs, and one on his shin. He was scraped mostly on his forearms and hands, where skin had been exposed to gravel, and on his knees.

He put the gown back on, went out and checked his clothes. The jeans were ripped at the knees, and would have to be tossed, and his jacket was a wreck. He thought about getting dressed, but instead, turned around, got on the bed, and went back to sleep.

The nurse woke him at ten o’clock, said that Dr. Rogers was about to look at him. Rogers, who was not the same doc he’d talked to the night before, took a long look at him and said, “All right. I’ll give you a couple things that’ll make you feel better. . or hurt less. . but I want you to stay away from aspirin and alcohol.”

After telling Virgil what he could and couldn’t do, he said that another doc, named Wu, would be in to see him in a few minutes, and if Wu signed off, he could leave: “But take it easy for a few days.”

The next doc to show up wasn’t Wu, but John O’Leary, who was wearing a short white staff doctor’s coat. “I just heard what happened. Does this have something to do with Dick Murphy?”

“Maybe,” Virgil said. “Maybe. Probably. I can’t think of anyone else who’d want to put me in the hospital for a while.”

“I don’t get that,” O’Leary said. “I’d think the last thing he’d want to do is get your dander up.”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Virgil said. “The people around here, they’ve had a lot of people killed by Sharp and Welsh. Your daughter and Emmett Williams here in Bigham, three people in Shinder, two in Marshall, two more out in the country, and a cop. . that we know of.”

“You think there are more?”

“We’ll find out when we locate them,” Virgil said. “Anyway, the feeling here is that the local folks are going to kill them when they find them. It’s absolutely turned into a duck hunt. But, when I got the chance to take in McCall, I got him to Marshall alive. I don’t think Murphy would want me to get Jim or Becky to jail alive. Jimmy could turn on them.”

“And you need their testimony.”

“That’s about it. . Uh, I thought you’d be at the funeral.”

“I will be, but I have patients,” O’Leary said. “Anyway, good luck with getting Sharp and Welsh. Truth is, I believe you’re right about what’s going to happen. I haven’t talked to a single person here who thinks they’ll be taken alive. Their best chance would be to drive down to Iowa and turn themselves in to the Des Moines cops. Some big-city police station, someplace far away from here.”

“They’re not smart enough,” Virgil said. “Anyway, as soon as this Wu gets here, I’m gone.”

An Asian man stuck his head around the corner of the open door. “Wu you looking for?”

Wu turned out to have a good sense of humor and strong hands, and he only hurt Virgil a little. An hour later, Virgil was back on the street, still feeling creaky. He called what he suspected was the town’s only cab, was told that in fact there were two, and rode back to the motel. Moving around helped; either that, or it was the pills that Rogers had prescribed, of which he had taken three.

Shrake and Jenkins were walking out as Virgil walked in, and Shrake said, “We’ve got a few names. We’re going to go talk to them now. You think you scuffed them up at all?”

“Only their legs,” Virgil said. “I was on the ground with the first punch, and after that, I was just trying to stay alive. I kicked one guy in the shins a few times, but that’s about it. He’ll have some bruises.”

“One of those frat boys, a big guy, said he caught one of the guys a pretty good lick in an eye, and the side of a nose. Says the guy’ll have a shiner.”

“These names. . are they tied to Murphy?” Virgil asked.

“A couple of them,” Jenkins said. “The rest are from Davenport’s network-local guys who might do something like this.”

“Well, take it easy,” Virgil said. “I need these guys scared and willing to talk to me. I don’t need them all beat up and pissed off.”

Jenkins patted him on the shoulder. “You’re a fuckin’ saint, Virgil,” he said. “But I gotta tell you-I can’t guarantee these guys’ll be in pristine condition. I can guarantee that they’ll be scared.”