Rough country

23

VIRGIL WENT BACK to the truck and got a black nylon emergency jacket. August in Minnesota-chilly in the morning this far north, and this early in the day.

A river rat named Earl, drafted by Sanders, had just backed his eighteen-foot Alumacraft jon boat down the boat ramp into the water. Virgil would be riding with him, and with a cop named Rod. Rod was messing nervously with his AR-15, and kept looking downriver, where they expected the helicopter to show up. Two more jon boats were already in the water, and there were more both upriver and down.

"You going with your handgun?" Rod asked Virgil.

"Haven't decided," Virgil said.

Rod asked because he could see Virgil didn't have a long gun, and assumed his pistol was under his jacket; actually, it was under the front seat of the truck. All the guns were making Virgil nervous: they were heading into a swamp, without much visibility in some places, and six boats full of cops with rifles, converging on a central point from three different directions. Sanders's chief deputy was as nervous as Virgil, and worked back and forth through the deputies, talking about fire discipline.

Virgil went back to the truck again, looked back down the ramp, at all the deputies, at four cop cars and three trucks with trailers, watched Earl park his trailer, and thought that maybe the best idea would be to lie low in the boat; though lying low in a jon boat would shake your bones to pieces. The low, flat-bottom craft were fine when moving slow in flat water, but were no damn good in heavy chop; or in a heavy firefight, for that matter.

He thought about it some more, and finally pulled out his pump twelve-gauge, loaded three shells, and put seven more in his jacket pocket. If that wasn't enough, fuck him.

WAITED SOME MORE, in the mild stink of mud and rotting fish. One of the deputies borrowed a paddle and fished a plastic bag out of the water and threw it in a trash can. Somebody looked south and asked, "Wonder what they're doing down there?"

Then the chief deputy called, "Saddle up. Sheriff's on the way."

They all bustled down to the boats, climbed aboard, and the guys on the motors fired them up, quiet four-strokes, and eased out onto the lake, looking south. A minute later they heard the chopper, and then saw it, fairly high, coming fast, then slowing. And the shoulder radios went off and Rod said, "They got him! He's right under the chopper."

THEY ALL TOOK OFF, three boats carving long wakes in the smooth water, Rod holding his rifle straight up like a movie-poster commando, while Virgil sat on a cushion in the bow, back to the incoming wind. Rod, his fair face reddening with the cold wind, listened to his radio, and then shouted, "He's running for the trees, he's running for the trees."

The swamp was actually the remnants of a series of Mississippi oxbows, some of which could still be seen from the air, as long, curling cutoff lakes, separated from one another by wild rice flats, cattails, and brush. There was one big hunk of trees south of the flats. If the Deuce got into them, he'd be hard to dig out, especially if people were shooting at one another.

That had to be a ten- or fifteen-minute paddle, though, if he was still where he had been the night before. Sanders's flotilla was no more than two or three minutes away…

They crossed the lake, running hard-hard for a jon boat, anyway-and cut into a channel that wrapped around in a hard curve. Earl stayed with the speed, though, familiar with the territory, juked once for a snag, and blew into an intersecting channel that Virgil thought might be the river, though it was only forty or fifty feet wide.

The chopper was drifting south, away from them, but they were coming up quickly. Virgil risked standing up for just a second, couldn't see much-but could just see the tops of trees to the south.

Rod shouted, "He's cutting through the grass, he's back in the weeds…"

More noise, and Virgil looked back, saw the downriver boats coming up on them; now five boats running along, over a few hundred yards.

"Gotta be close," Rod shouted.

Another fifteen seconds and Rod shouted at Earl, and pointed, "Right there, right there…"

The chopper was probably no more than fifty or sixty yards ahead of them, and Virgil could hear a loudspeaker, but couldn't hear what was being said over the chop of the helicopter. Two more boats came in from the north, and Earl put them up against a bank of cattails; they drifted for a minute, then Virgil saw a small channel with flowing water, opening through the cattails. It wasn't more than eighteen inches wide.

"Can we push through there?" Rod asked.

"Tough," Earl said. He killed the motor, popped a pole mounted in brackets under the left gunwale, stood up, and pushed the boat back into the weeds. They got thirty feet, and that was it. "Too much drag," Earl said.

"Could we walk through it?" Rod asked.

"Nope. You might find shallow spots, but you'd be up to your neck every two minutes," Earl said. He started poling them back out, and Rod talked into his radio, and then said, "Back north-there's an open channel north. Shit, some guys are already going in, we're gonna miss it."

They got back out, and Earl fired up the motor, and they started north up the channel, and another boat backed out of the weeds and fell in behind them; Virgil could see more boats up ahead that had gone on while they tried to push into the cattails.

"He's at the trees," Rod shouted, and then, "They see him, they see him."

There were five fast pops, gunfire, and Rod shouted, "Holy cow, what was that?" and sat down, suddenly, and Virgil said, "Easy, easy, everybody, stay low…"

The helicopter was maneuvering overhead, and then they heard a long string of shots, semiauto fire, from two or three guns, and Rod shouted, "He's down, he's down, they got him," and Virgil thought: Shit.

THE HELICOPTER WAS RIGHTthere, so close they couldn't hear themselves think, but they couldn't get into the shooting scene without threading through a quarter mile of beaten-down grasses and cattails, and finally they turned a last curve and saw the flotilla pulled up on a muddy bank tangled with brushy trees, and a cluster of cops by an aluminum canoe another fifty yards down the bank.

They had to get out in the water and stumble along the shore, up to their knees, before they got there, and Virgil pushed through the circle of cops to find two guys tying compression bandages on the Deuce's thighs and lower leg, and then one of the cops said, "Get him on the tarp, get him on the tarp," and four guys lifted him, and he groaned, and they put him on a blue plastic tarp and he began leaking blood across it, lots of blood.

Five other cops and Virgil got pieces of tarp and lifted him, and staggered back through the water to the first of the jon boats, the Deuce crying in pain, his eyes liquid and flashing white, and he asked, two or three or four times, "Why did you shoot me? Why did you shoot me?" They put him on the bottom of the boat, and the boatman fired it up and nosed the boat down the channel, and then, out of sight, Virgil heard the engine open up.

"Where're they going?" he asked a cop.

"Got an ambulance coming to the landing," he said. He looked haggard, though it was early.

"What happened?" Virgil asked.

"He tried to make it into the trees," the guy said. "I was in the third or fourth boat, and somebody in the lead boat took him out."

"Was he… did he have his gun?"

The guy cleared his throat and his eyes slid away. "His gun, uh, his gun's still tied in the canoe. I don't know, I think he was trying to pull the canoe up on the bank and make a run for it… I don't know."

"How bad's he hit?" Virgil asked.

"His legs are all busted up, and he got one in the butt. Sideways in the butt. He's got some big holes."

Virgil looked around, lots of deputies standing back, now, talking in low voices.

Could be trouble, he thought.

THE DEPUTIES SAT on the scene, waiting for the BCA crime-scene people to show up. Mapes had had more business in Grand Rapids in a week than he'd had in the rest of his career, Virgil thought.

He moved around, talking to the deputies: two of them had fired their weapons. The first deputy had fired into the brush ahead of the Deuce to slow him down, to push him away from the trees. The second deputy thought the Deuce had opened fire, and fired at him, and as the Deuce had moved behind a tree from his point of view, then the first deputy fired again, confused about where the second burst had come from.

Virgil talked to a couple more deputies, then had Earl run him back to the boat ramp.

On the way, Earl said, "Don't think they shoulda shot that boy."

"If he'd gotten back in the trees with a rifle, could have got some people killed, digging him out," Virgil said, without much conviction.

Earl spit over the side. "He had plenty of chances to shoot somebody if he wanted to. Never untied that rifle."

"Not everything is simple to figure out," Virgil said. "Not everything is easy."

"That's the goldurned truth," Earl said. They were cutting through the channel with the early morning light coming on, throwing pale shadows on the water off the walls of wild rice, and Earl said, "God's country."

Virgil thought about Johnson Johnson saying the same thing, on Vermilion, and said, "Yes it is."

SANDERS WAS ALREADY AT THE HOSPITAL when Virgil arrived. He saw Virgil coming and walked toward him and asked, "Were you there?"

"Yeah, but I was the last boat in. I didn't see what happened. How's he doing?"

"He's hurt bad, they've got him in surgery, they're trying to control the bleeding. They're putting blood in him. I talked to one of the technicians, he's type O. You know, just remembering…"

"Yeah. That's gonna be important," Virgil said.

"I couldn't tell whether there was an exchange of gunfire down there."

Sanders used the exchange of gunfire cliche in a hopeful way, but Virgil was shaking his head. "He had a.22. It was still tied into the canoe when he was hit."

"Damnit. He didn't have a handgun or anything?"

"There was some confusion at the scene, but it was all complicated," Virgil said. "If he'd gotten back into the trees, with a gun, it would have been hell getting him out of there. Don't know what to tell you, Bob-but this might've been for the best. Nobody else got hurt."

"Tell that to Channel Three," Sanders said.

"They up here?"

"They called. I don't know if they're coming or not," he said. "How about your pal from the Star Tribune?"

"I don't know where he is; he's not exactly a pal-"

"Bullshit," Sanders said, showing a thin grin. "You must not have seen this morning's paper."

"Aw…"

"Smiling face right out there, on the front page," Sanders said. "Cracked the case."

"Aw, man."

SANDERS SAID THEY WOULDN'T know anything for certain until the surgeons came out to talk, and he thought that would be a while; an hour or two. "They gotta do a lot of work," he said.

He was going to wait. Virgil walked down to the front entrance and found a copy of the Star Tribune, paid for it, and looked at himself, standing, arms crossed, talking to Slibe. Not a bad shot; and he'd never seen Ignace shoot it, didn't even know that he carried a camera.

He looked pretty good, he thought. He was still thinking that when his cell phone rang. He pulled it out: Davenport.

"Yeah."

"You see the Star Tribune this morning?" Davenport asked.

"I'm looking at it right now. Let me tell you a few things; we had some trouble this morning…"

When he finished, there was a moment of silence, and Davenport asked, "How strong's the case?"

"We're doing DNA on the blood on the sleeve, and we can get DNA on Windrow from his house… get the Iowa guys to do it. If we get a match, and with the credit card, we'll put him away."

"So, we're happy, right?"

"Not happy. The kid could have done it, but I went out there looking at his old man. His old man feels right for it, but I don't know about the kid. The kid doesn't seem like a planner, to tell you the truth. I don't know…"

"So you won't be back tonight."

"No. And probably not tomorrow night. Goddamnit, Lucas, this has got a mushy feel about it."

"Stay with it, let me know what happens," Davenport said. "A state senator, Marsha Williams, called about the McDill case. She's a friend of McDill's father, wanted to see what was up."

"You're taking pressure?"

"No, not really, she was doing a favor and she asked to be kept up-to-date," Davenport said. "If it's okay with you, I'll give her a ring, tell her where we're at."

"You can, but, uh… leave a little wiggle room."

HE WAS WALKING back toward the emergency entrance when Wendy Ashbach ran through the doors. She was dressed in a loose white blouse, jeans, and flip-flops, her hair uncombed; she stopped, looked around, saw Virgil, and cried, "Is he dead? Where's my brother?"

Virgil came up and said, "He's in the operating room. He was shot."

She began to weep, and pleaded with him: "He'll be all right? He'll be all right?"

"He was mostly hit in the legs, but he's hurt," Virgil said. "He lost a lot of blood before they got him here, but they're putting more into him. They've got two docs working on him."

"Where is he?"

He led her along to the emergency room, where Sanders was waiting with two more deputies, and Sanders saw her and came striding over and took her hand and said, "They're working on him. I can't tell you how he is, yet, but as soon as I know, I'll let you know."

She began getting angry, wanted to know what had happened, and Sanders put an arm around her shoulder and walked her down the hall. Virgil thought that he wasn't bad at that-at taking care of a relative.

THEY WAITED ANOTHER HOUR. Virgil took a call from Ignace, and asked, "When did you start carrying a camera?"

"Pretty neat, huh? It's about the size of your dick, so it's easily concealed. Fully automatic, point-and-shoot. How'd you like the picture?"

"Okay, I guess."

"I'll make you a print," Ignace said. "So, anything happen this morning?"

TWO HOURS AFTER the Deuce went in the operating room, a stocky dark-bearded surgeon came out and said, "We've stabilized things, but he's pretty messed up. We've stopped the worst of the bleeding, but he has multiple shattered bones in his leg and pelvis. He's taken four units of blood. We've got a helicopter coming from Regions Hospital in St. Paul, we're going to lift him out."

"Will he be okay?" Wendy asked.

"He'll need a lot of rehab," the surgeon said. "And, uh, he's not totally out of the woods, yet. He's still in trouble, but we can move him."

THEY GOT MORE DETAILS, and Zoe came through the door, wrapped up Wendy. Half an hour later, the Deuce was rolled out to a waiting helicopter, saline and painkillers flowing into one arm, was loaded aboard, and was gone.