They were running hard now, and thirty seconds or so later they heard a buzzing noise, and Johnson shouted, “He’s got a boat. He’s running in a boat.”
Another half-minute and they were at the marina, which was basically an indentation in the shoreline with a rambling dock that ran alongside it, with a few finger docks attached. They found no bodies, but did find the remnant of a boat’s bowline that appeared to have been shot in half.
They could still hear the buzzing from the fleeing boat, and Johnson yelled, “This one, get this one, get the rope, get the line…”
He’d jumped into a jon boat with a small engine on the back.
“We need a faster boat,” Virgil shouted.
“Can’t. They all need keys,” Johnson shouted back. “This one’s just a rope pull.” To prove the point, he yanked on the starter rope and nothing happened. Johnson said something that would have embarrassed the entire state of Minnesota, had the entire state overheard it. He whacked the motor a few times, pulled again, and the outboard sputtered to life. “We’re good: get in.”
Shrake and Virgil jumped in the boat, and Virgil unwrapped the dock line, and Johnson backed the boat away from the pier and they took off, more or less.
“This is really fuckin’ slow,” Shrake said. “Can’t we get more speed?”
“You could jump overboard,” Johnson suggested. “That’d lighten the load.” And to Virgiclass="underline" “Hey, Virgie, put your jacklight on that sucker.”
They couldn’t see Laughton’s boat, and they couldn’t hear it anymore, over the buzz of their own small engine, but had an idea of where he was. Virgil turned on the jacklight. Laughton was already a long way out, but the light pinned him, three or four hundred yards ahead, pointed out into the river. He was also in a jon boat, and also had a small engine on the back.
“All right,” Johnson shouted. “The chase is on.”
Virgil and Shrake were looking at Laughton’s back, trying to keep it in sight. Johnson, who was standing in the stern, pulled his Para-Ordnance .45 out of his beltline and fired two shots so quickly they almost blended into one, and almost inspired both Virgil and Shrake to jump over the side.
Virgil screamed, “Johnson, what the fuck are you doing?”
“Chasing him,” Johnson shouted back. “Is this a great country, or what?”
26
Nothing like a slow-speed chase on a pleasant summer night on the Mississippi. They could see a towboat, but it was far upriver, and no immediate danger; far downstream they could see a hint of the lights on the lock and dam, and across the river, on the far bluffs, radio towers sending flashing red light out into the ether. Halfway across, Laughton fired a shot at them, but he was far enough away that they didn’t even see the shot hit the water.
“Wonder what the maximum range for shot is?” Virgil asked.
Shrake said, “There’s a range I shoot at in Wisconsin, they say four hundred yards to be safe. But everybody says not even buckshot carries much further than three hundred.”
Johnson said, “My .45’ll carry a lot further than that.”
Virgiclass="underline" “Johnson, I swear to God, if you take that gun out again, I’ll throw both of you in the fuckin’ river.”
Shrake: “I wonder if he thinks if he makes it to Wisconsin, we won’t be able to follow because we’re Minnesota cops?”
“Only if he’s got his head up his ass,” Virgil said. “Though we probably ought to call the Wisconsin sheriff’s office, whichever one it is, and tell them we’re coming. Maybe we could get a little help.”
Virgil got on the line to Purdy’s office, and when the duty officer answered, gave him a quick explanation, and he said he’d call the sheriff across the river: “But don’t expect them too quick, this time of night, they’ll be coming all the way from Viroqua.”
“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.
“You get it back,” Virgil said. “Shrake and I will go after Vike. I don’t want you there with a gun if the Wisconsin cops show up. At this point, we can just tell them you were the boat driver.”
Johnson grumbled a bit, but he was worried about the other boat. He put them ashore two hundred yards down from where Laughton had landed, and said, “Just angle in right toward the beer sign. The track is straight as an arrow. Don’t get shot, it’s a long ride back to the clinic.”
Shrake and Virgil climbed ten or twelve feet up the bank, found the end of the track. Virgil turned off the spotlight, which was way too bright, and they started following the track toward the clubhouse, staying ten or fifteen yards apart, moving slowly. They came to a circle of trees around a green, and Virgil said, “Find a place to take cover. I’m going to yell at him.”