Mad River Read Free Page A

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