Mad River by John Sandford

Author:John Sandford [Sandford, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2012-08-31T07:00:00+00:00

14

BECKY WELSH HAD SPENT a lot of time around rough guys, and had slept with a few, but had never before experienced anything like a rape. After loading Jimmy into the truck, and they got back on the road, Becky began to weep again. Jimmy’s pain had diminished, but he was confused, partly by shock and partly by the drugs, and he asked, “What the fuck’s wrong with you, anyway?”

She looked over at him and said, “I told you. Tom raped me.”

“What the fuck?”

“He raped me,” Becky said. “He pushed me down on the bed and raped me and beat me up. Then he did it again and then he took off. Then the guy came and I shot him and I’m just, I’m just, I’m just . . .”

Jimmy seemed to think about that for a while, or maybe his mind just wandered, but finally he said, “I’ll kill the motherfucker. Where is he?”

“He took off. I don’t know where he went,” Becky said. She looked over at Jimmy. “You gotta promise me.”

“What?”

“If we catch him, I get to kill him. I’m gonna cut his balls off, and then I’m gonna shoot him in the stomach and watch him die.”

“Deal,” Jimmy said. And, “Where’d you get this truck?”

• • •

BECKY TOLD HIM the whole story, from the time they left him in the cornfield until she loaded him into the truck; he remembered everything after that. “We gotta get your leg bandaged up better and I got some stuff we can put on it.”

“We need to get as far away as we can,” Jimmy said. “They’ll be tearing up the countryside. Did Tom get all our money?”

“No, no, we got the money, it’s behind the seat,” Becky said.

“See if you can reach it,” Tom said.

Becky fished around behind the seats and got the handles of the two grocery bags and pulled them over the seat and put them in Jimmy’s lap. She said, “You know what I think? I think he’s gonna turn himself in and blame everything on us.”

Jimmy nodded, but didn’t seem to be tracking very well; his eyes were bright, either because he was reviving, or because he was feverish. She reached out and put her hand on his forehead and thought he felt warm. Not real warm, but pretty warm.

“You might be getting an infection,” she said. “We need to get some medicine on there.”

“Need some pills, penicillin or something,” Jimmy said.

Becky sobbed again, then wiped the tears out of her eyes, steadied her voice, and said, “You’re sounding a lot better, honey.”

“Feeling better,” he said. Then, “We better cut on south. We don’t want to meet any more cars than we have to. Stay on the gravel. If you see any gravel dust, try to find a place to turn off.”

They went south, and she said, “What are we going to do? Everybody in the world is looking for us.”

Jimmy said, “We need to get down south of Arcadia. There’s this old guy down there, he lives alone, off the road.

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