Red Means Run: A Novel by Brad Smith

Author:Brad Smith [Smith, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2012-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

When Virgil left the diner, it was just filling up. College kids, most of them three sheets to the wind, rowdy and raucous, talking trash back and forth across the restaurant. Virgil slipped out a side door and headed west out of town. He crossed the thruway a few hundred yards before the tollgate and walked along Route 28, staying mostly on the shoulder and hunkering down in a ditch whenever cars passed.

A mile or so along he angled to the north, crossing a hay field in the moonlight. He was taking a shortcut version of the route he normally traveled when he drove back to the farm from Kingston. He wasn’t particularly worried about pursuit; it was evident from his conversation with Claire Marchand that the cops were convinced he’d left the country.

Good thing, because she’d kept him talking longer than he intended. All he really wanted to know was whether there was somebody involved in the investigation who hadn’t already convicted him. But then she’d started talking about other things, personal things, and pretty soon Virgil was thinking about her legs, and her full mouth, and those eyes, intelligent and quick but with something else there, something guarded and wary. He’d seen that quality in horses before, horses that had been treated badly. It took a while to get close to them. Sometimes it couldn’t be done.

She’d wanted to know about his marriage. What did that have to do with the murders? Once or twice during the conversation it had occurred to him that she was trying to keep him on the line long enough to get a trace. But that wasn’t possible. She would have had to set it up beforehand, or during the call, and how could she have?

At least he had her word that she would look at other suspects. Whatever her word was worth. Of course, what else would she tell him? But he had a sense that she was being straight with him. And, if nothing else, she’d verified that the man named Buddy Townes was somebody who might know something.

He reached the back road that ran behind the farm in a couple of hours. He climbed the boundary fence and moved into the back pasture, where his cattle were settled for the night, herded up between the pond and the woods. He walked alongside the fence line and took a quick head count. He’d never lost a steer in the past, but with the news of him being on the run it was possible somebody decided there was free beef for the taking. The herd was intact, though.

Keeping to the fencerow along the lane, he made his way up behind the barn, where he stopped to watch the house and the road out front for thirty minutes. When he had arrived at the same spot two nights earlier, he’d waited there for more than an hour, until he was reasonably certain nobody was watching the place. It had been easy to take the Jeep and drive away unnoticed.

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