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."