27
THE CANOE was an old red Peter Pond, rolled upside down with two plastic-and-aluminum paddles and moldy orange kapok life jackets stowed under the thwarts. Virgil twisted it upright, frantic with haste, chanting, “C’mon, c’mon,” and they threw it in the river, and clambered aboard with their weapons and Virgil’s backpack.
Whiting had backed the truck down to McDonald and was helping the wounded man into the truck; McDonald had a scalp gash that must’ve come from a wood splinter. Queenen saw them manhandling the canoe to the river and shouted, “Virgil, that’s Canada,” and Virgil saw Raines spinning out of the driveway in the other truck, running to the hospital with Bunch, and Virgil ignored Queenen and said to Jarlait, “If we roll, that armor will pull you under. Grab one of those life jackets,” and Jarlait grunted, “Ain’t gonna roll,” and they were off…
They slanted upstream, paddling hard, Virgil aiming to land a couple of hundred yards north of where he’d seen the jon boat disappear. If they were caught on the open river, they were dead.
They crossed in two minutes or so. Jarlait jumped out of the front of the boat, splashed across a muddy margin, and pulled the canoe in. Virgil stepped out into the shallow water and lifted the stern with a grab loop as Jarlait lifted the bow, and they dropped it fully on shore. A muddy game trail led back into the trees, and they took it for thirty feet, and somebody said in Virgil’s ear, “Virgil, the local cops are coming in.”
Virgil lifted the radio to his face and said, “Keep them off the place until we get back… Don’t be impolite, but tell them that the crime scene is all over the place and we need to get a crime-scene crew in there.”
Jarlait said into his radio, “You guys shut up unless you see these people and then tell us. But shut up.” To Virgil, he said off-radio, “Let’s go.”
THE CANADIAN SIDE was a snarling mass of brush, and they walked away from the river to get out of it. Virgil said quietly, “That topo map showed a road straight west of here-they’ve probably got a car back in the trees. Gotta hurry.”
They ran due west, quietly as they could, but with some inevitable breaking of sticks and rustling of leaves, and after two hundred yards or so, saw the road ahead. With Virgil now leading, they turned south, parallel to the road, inside the tree line, and ran another hundred and fifty yards, where a field opened out in front of them. They could see nothing across the field, and Jarlait asked, “Are you sure they’re this far down?”
“Yeah, a little further yet. There might be farm tracks between those fields right down to the trees.”
He started off again, back toward the river now, running in the trees, off the edge of the field. They spooked an owl out of a tree, and it lifted out in absolute silence and flew ahead of them for fifty yards, like a gray football, then sailed left through the trees.
At the end of the field, they turned south again, and Jarlait, breathing heavily, said, “I gotta slow down a minute. I can taste my guts.”
“Gotta slow down anyway-we’re close now.”
They moved slowly after that, stopping every few feet to listen, moving tree to tree, one at a time, covering each other, back toward the water.
If he’d missed them completely, Virgil thought, and if the car had been right down at the water, it was possible that they were gone. On the other hand, if he’d hit them, it was possible that they were lying dead or dying down at the waterline.
When they got to the river, they squatted ten yards apart and listened, and then began moving along the waterline, both crouched, stopping to kneel, to look, one of them always behind a tree. A hundred yards farther along the bank, Virgil saw the tail end of the jon boat. They’d dragged the bow out of the water, but there was no sign of anyone.
Virgil clicked once on the radio to get Jarlait’s attention, mouthed, “Boat,” and jabbed his finger at it, and Jarlait nodded and moved forward and farther away from the water, giving Virgil room to wedge up next to the boat.
They were in a block of trees, Virgil realized-trees that might run out to the road. The field they’d seen was now actually behind them. No sign of a truck or a car track.
They moved a step at a time, until Virgil was right on top of the boat. When he was sure it was clear, he duckwalked down to it and saw the blood right away. He risked the radio and said, quietly, “Blood trail.”
Jarlait, now fifteen yards farther in, looked over at him and nodded.
THE BLOOD looked like rust stains on the summer weeds and brush. There wasn’t much, but enough that whoever was shot had a problem. The blood was clean and dark red, which meant the injured man was probably bleeding from a limb but hadn’t been gut- or lung-shot. Still, they’d need a hospital, or at least a doctor-something to tell the Canadians if Mai and the second man were already gone.
Virgil went to his hands and knees and crawled along the blood trail, grateful for the gloves; Jarlait worked parallel to him. They were a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards from the road again, Virgil thought, but he didn’t know how far from wherever the Viets had left a vehicle. He could see no openings in the treetops, so it must be some distance out.
He picked up a little speed, risked going to his feet, while Jarlait ghosted along to his right. The trees thinned a little, the underbrush got thicker. There were still occasionally drops and smears of blood, but as the plant life got softer, less woody, Mai’s trail became clearer.
“Man, we sound like elephants in a cornfield,” Virgil said. “We gotta slow down.”
From up ahead-a hundred yards, fifty yards?-Virgil heard a clank and both he and Jarlait paused, and Jarlait asked, “What do you think?” and Virgil said, “It sounded like somebody dropped a trailer.”
They both listened and then they heard an engine start, and Virgil started running, Jarlait trying to keep up. At the end of the trail, they found a vehicle track through shoulder-high brush, an abandoned trailer sitting there, and then the end of a pasture, or fallow field, and on the other end of the pasture, a silver minivan bumped over the last few ruts and pulled onto the road a hundred yards away.
Not a hard shot.
Virgil lifted the rifle and put the sights more or less on the moving van and tracked it and picked up the house in the background, said, “Shit,” and took the rifle down.
They were gone.
And though Virgil didn’t know which one of the Viets was hurt, who had been bleeding, he believed that he’d caught something of Mai in the driver’s-side window, at the wheel.
VIRGIL GOT on the radio and called a description of the van back to Queenen, who was holding the fort on the other side of the river. When they walked back past the trailer, they saw, sticking out between a spare wheel and the trailer frame, a manila envelope. Virgil looked at it and found “Virgil” scrawled across it.
Inside were ten color photographs-crime-scene photos, in effect, of the house at Da Nang, apparently taken a day or so after the killings. Flies everywhere, all over the corpses. Two little kids, one facedown, one faceup, twisted and bloated in death. A woman, half nude, flat on her back, her face covered in blood. Another woman lying in a courtyard, apparently shot in the back. An old man, out in front of the house…
Jarlait kept going back to the picture of the kids. “Little teeny kids, man. Little peanuts,” he said.
“Bunton knew about it. So did all the others,” Virgil said. “They couldn’t have stopped it, the way they tell it-Warren did all the killing. But they all kept their mouths shut.”
They thought about that for a few seconds. “Little kids,” Jarlait said. “I can see them coming over, to get the killer. But they killed Oren. Oren didn’t do shit… Oren was a nice guy.”
“The guy you shot on the other side. He’s the guy who shot Oren,” Virgil said.