“Call them, and have them call me, and I’ll tell them about it,” Virgil said. “They’re gonna have to take custody, anyway, I can’t just haul him back across the river.”
Virgil hung up, and Johnson, who was still standing up in the back of the boat and steering with occasional foot nudges on the tiller, said, “You see that tiny gold speck of light straight ahead?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s the Schlitz beer sign hanging outside of the Rattlesnake Golf and Country Club. They’d be closed by now, but there might still be somebody around. He could hijack a truck, maybe.”
Virgil went back to the phone, and after some fooling around, found a phone number for the club, but nobody answered: it clicked over to the pro shop’s answering machine. “No answer.”
“How much longer?” Shrake asked.
“At this speed . . . four or five minutes.”
“When we see him land, we can’t go straight in after him, we’ve got to unload either downstream or upstream, or he’ll take us all out with one shot,” Virgil said.
Virgil took a call from the Vernon County sheriff, and explained quickly what was going on. “We’re in hot pursuit,” he said for the sheriff’s recorder. “We’ve got him pinned in a spotlight. He’s coming up to the Rattlesnake golf club. We’ll keep you posted on what happens.”
“We’ll start a car that way, but we don’t have a hell of a lot of resources available to come that way, at this very minute.”
“You tell your people to be careful—he’s armed, and he doesn’t have anything to lose.”
“I’ll tell ’em.”
—
THIRTY SECONDS LATER he took another call, this one from Davenport: “Yeah?”
“You busy?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I’ve got a couple things going on right now,” Virgil said.
“Is that an outboard I hear in the background?”
“As a matter of fact it is, Lucas. I’m chasing a guy with a shotgun across the Mississippi River, because he and a woman ambushed me and Shrake and Jenkins at Johnson Johnson’s cabin, and Jenkins took a shotgun pellet in the leg, and the woman was shot in the butt, and they’re waiting for an ambulance—that should be there by now—so I’m a little fuckin’ busy and I gotta go. Talk to you later.”
He clicked off, and Shrake asked, “Think he believed you?”
Virgil’s phone chirped, and he pulled it out and looked at the screen. A message from Davenport that said: “OK. Call when you get a minute.”
Virgil said, “Yeah, I guess he did.”
—
JOHNSON: “Vike’s right at the shoreline.”
Virgil said, “You know the golf club, what do you think—upstream or downstream?”
“Down. It’ll be faster, and there’s a track that runs out to the river,” Johnson said. “We can tie up there and we can follow the track right into the clubhouse, even without light.”
Johnson started angling south, and a few seconds later Shrake said, “I think he just hit land.” In the light shaft from Virgil’s jacklight, they saw Laughton scramble up the riverbank.
As they got closer, they could see Laughton’s empty boat turning in the river, just offshore. “That’s Larry Gale’s boat. He’s gonna be pissed if it goes over the lock and dam. We oughta try to get it back,” Johnson said.