Heat Lightning

by John Sandford

  “I DON’T KNOW all of it,” Bunton said. “Back at the end of March 1975 . . . I’d been in Vietnam in ’69 and ’70, I’d been out for five years. Anyway, this guy calls me. John Wigge. Wasn’t on the cops yet—he’s just out of the service, Vietnam. I got no job, he’s got no job—but he says he’s got a guy who’ll pay us twenty grand in cash for two weeks’ work back in Vietnam. Two weeks at the most, but it might be a little hairy. Shit, we were young guys, we didn’t give a fuck about hairy.

  “The story was this guy, Utecht, the one that got killed—his father was this crazy guy who operated all over the Pacific, selling heavy equipment. He sold a lot of shit to the South Vietnamese. Anyway, this guy is in Vietnam, and the place is falling apart. The North Vietnamese were coming down, everybody was trying to get out.”

  “I’ve seen the embassy pictures, the evacuation,” Virgil offered.

  “Yeah, that was like a month later. Anyway, Utecht, the old man, is in Vietnam, and he finds this whole field of heavy equipment, mostly Caterpillars, D6s up to D9s, is gonna be abandoned there. Good stuff. Some of it is almost new. And everybody’s bailing out.

  “So he cuts some kind of crooked deal with the South Viets, and brings in a ship, and calls up his kid, and tells him to get some heavy-equipment guys together and get his ass over there. We’re gonna take this shit out of the country.”

  “Steal it?”

  “Well—save it from the North Vietnamese. The enemy.” Bunton grinned at Virgil, showing the nicotine teeth.

  “All right,” Virgil said.

  “So Utecht knows Wigge, and Wigge knows everybody else, and he starts calling people,” Bunton said. “I could drive a truck, I could figure out a Cat if I had to. Twenty grand. That was a shitload of money at the time. Two years’ pay. So six of us, young guys, Sanderson was one . . . we all flew out to Hong Kong and then right into Da Nang. Not all together, whenever we could get on a plane, but all within a couple of days.”

  “I’ve heard of Da Nang, but I don’t know about it,” Virgil said.

  “Da Nang? Big base in Vietnam. Port city. So we flew in, and Utecht, the old man, picked me up at the airport, and what I did was, I drove a lowboy. There were thirty fuckin’ D9 Cats sitting there and all kinds of other shit. . . . You know what a D9 is?”

  “No.”

  “Biggest fuckin’ Cat there was, at the time,” Bunton said. He dropped his cigarette on the street, stepped on it, shook another out of the pack. “Maybe still are. They used them to clear out forest. Go through a bunch of fuckin’ trees like grease through a goose. Anyway, there was thirty of them at Da Nang, and they were just sitting there, waiting for the NVA. So here we are, with this lowboy and a bunch of heavy equipment guys to get the tractors going and to run them—that was the other guys. I’d haul them out to the harbor, and they’d lift them onto the ship with this big fuckin’ crane. One of the guys told me that they were headed for Indonesia, they had some oil fields going there. . . . I mean, some of these dozers were like fuckin’ new.”

  “All the guys who’ve been killed were on this trip?” Virgil asked.

  “Yeah. Anyway, what happened was, I dropped off the last load at the port, wasn’t just these Cats, it was all kinds of shit. Everything they could get moving. After I brought in the last load, they even picked up the fuckin’ lowboy and took that on board. Then Chester—”

  “Utecht. Chester Utecht, the old guy.”

  “Yeah, that one,” Bunton said.

  “Okay . . .”

  “He’s dead now. Died about a year ago, in Hong Kong, is what Wigge told me,” Bunton said. He had to think a minute, to get back to the thread of the story. “Anyway, Chester pulls up in this old fucked-up Microbus, and as soon as the lowboy was off the ground, going on the ship, we took off to get the other guys. This was about forty-five minutes each way, from the port to the equipment yard. Chester had airline tickets to get us out of there, spread over a couple of days, and two of the guys were going with the ship.

  “So we got back to the yard, and what do we find? I’ll tell you—these dumb fucks were all about nine-tenths loaded and they’d set this house on fire. . . . And they were fuckin’ arguing with each other . . . I mean like, they were freakin’ out about this house, and screaming at each other, and they had these M16s. Chester said, ‘Fuck it, we’re going,’ and we went. Me and another guy, who I think was Utecht, the younger one, the kid, but this is so fuckin’ long ago . . .”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Me ’n’ Utecht, we flew out of there, to Hong Kong, and then back to Minneapolis, through Alaska. Wigge went with the ship, I think, because I didn’t see him again, and somebody else went with him. Sanderson, I saw a year or so later. I asked him what happened with the house, and he said some chick got killed—that somebody started yelling at them from the house, I don’t why, and one of the guys got pissed. He was already drunk, and somebody started shooting, and one of these guys went into the house with an M16 and shot the place all up and maybe some chick got shot and I guess some old man got shot. Maybe some other people.”

  Virgil said, “Ray—you’re telling me some people got murdered?”

  “Yeah . . . maybe,” Bunton said. He shrugged. “Who knows? The fuckin’ place was going up in smoke. Thousands of people got killed. Maybe . . . hell, maybe it was self-defense.”

  “So why is this gonna get you killed?” Virgil asked. “What does Carl Knox have to do with it?”

  “One of the guys was Carl Knox,” Bunton said. “When Utecht got killed, Sanderson called me up. He was freakin’ out. He said Utecht had got Jesus, and called him a couple of times, after Chester died, and said Utecht was talking about confessing the whole thing.”

  “Ah, man,” Virgil said.

  “So I’m thinking, Carl Knox—he’s not exactly the Mafia, but he knows some leg-breakers for sure. If he was the one who killed the chick, and he heard about Utecht, and if he needed a hit man, I bet he could find one. Get one out of Chicago. If he needed to kill someone in prison, he could get that done, too. If he did the shooting. I mean, if there was a bunch of guys who said he did murder . . . You see what I’m saying? He kills Utecht to shut him up, but then he starts thinking, these other guys will know why. . . .”

  “There’s this thing—the victims have lemons in their mouths,” Virgil said. “Even Wigge . . . but not his bodyguard.”

  “Don’t know about that,” Bunton said. “But I believe it goes back to ’Nam.”

  “I’ve been told that when they executed guys in Vietnam, sometimes they’d stuff lemons in their mouths to keep them quiet,” Virgil said.

  “Don’t know about that, either.” Bunton crushed his second cigarette and lit a third. “All I know is, I want to stay out of sight until I know where this is coming from. If it’s Knox. I want to stay out of jail, stay out of sight.”

  Virgil counted them off on his fingers. “There was you, and Utecht, and Sanderson, and Wigge, and this old Utecht, Chester Utecht, and Knox . . . that’s it?”

  “There was one more guy,” Bunton said. “Damned if I know his name.”

  “When they tortured Wigge, maybe that’s what they were looking for,” Virgil suggested. “The last names. Your name and the other guy’s name.”

  “So that’s good for you, huh?” Bunton asked. “Can’t be more than two more murders.”

  BY THE TIME they got back to the jail, it was almost dark. Smith, the chief deputy, and Carter, the attorney, were playing gin rummy, and Carter had a stack of pennies by her hand. She looked up when they came in and asked, “What happened?”

  “We need to call the Red Lake guys,” Virgil said. His cell phone rang, and he looked at it: Davenport. “I gotta take this,” he said. “You guys call Red Lake. I’m gonna run Ray out there.”

  DAVENPORT SAID, “I’m on the ground in St. Paul. I’m told you’re chasing Bunton.”

  “Got him,” Virgil said. “But I’m letting him go. This is the deal. . . .”

  He t
old Davenport the story, and when he was done, Davenport said, “I don’t know if we can hold up our end of the bargain.”

  “Neither do I,” Virgil said. “But hell with it—let the lawyers work it out. That’s what they’re for. What’s happening down there?”

  “Wall-to-wall screaming,” Davenport said. “Crazy accusations and finger-pointing. Complaints about competence, threats about budgets. Questions from the Secret Service.”

  “So—the usual,” Virgil said.

  Davenport laughed. “Yeah. Tell you the truth, I think everybody likes it—gives them something to do, and they can go on TV. But it’d be best if we could catch the guy like . . . tomorrow.”

  “Well, if we can get to Knox,” Virgil said. “Bunton thinks Knox has a finger in it.”

  “He’s wrong,” Davenport said. “I know Knox. Knox would never do anything like this. Not in a million years. I don’t doubt that he could make people go away, but if he’d done it, there wouldn’t have been a ripple. No lemons, no monuments—just gone.”

  “Still gotta find him,” Virgil said.

  “Get your ass back here. I’ll have Jenkins and Shrake chase him down, but I want you here to talk to him. What about this last guy?”

  “Don’t know—maybe Knox will know.”

  THE RES WAS DARK, clusters of houses scattered along narrow roads radiating out from the town of Red Lake. Ray steered Virgil to his mother’s house—“Her name is Reese now, so that won’t give me away.”

  The two Indian cops were waiting in Reese’s yard, sitting on a concrete bench, drinking from cartons of orange juice. Virgil hadn’t been introduced when they were all down in the roadside ditch, and when they got out of the truck, Bunton pointed to the older one and said, “Louis Jarlait, who used to bang the brains out of my little sister, and Rudy Bunch, who’s going to kick your ass someday.”

  “Fuck him if he can’t take a joke,” Virgil said. Then to Jarlait: “Thanks for doing this.”

  “What are we supposed to do with him?” Bunch asked.

  “Keep an eye on him,” Virgil said. “Keep an eye out for strangers who might be looking for him. He says he’ll be safe here . . . hell, ask him. Once you get him talking, he won’t shut up.”

  Jarlait looked at Bunton. “You okay with this?”

  “Only goddamned way I’m gonna stay alive,” Bunton said. “Even if you guys kissed me off this afternoon.”

  “We don’t have to keep him or nothing?” Jarlait asked Virgil. “He takes care of himself, I mean, moneywise?”

  “He stays with his mom, maybe you could have a guy hang with him. We can talk about compensation for your time, maybe later?”

  “What about him puttin’ you in the hospital?” Bunch asked.

  “We’ve decided to let that go,” Virgil said.

  The two cops looked at Ray, who nodded, so Jarlait shrugged and said, “Okay by me, I guess, if it’s okay with Ray.”

  “So we’re good,” Virgil said. “And we’re all good friends.”

  Bunch grinned, a tight grin. “If I were you, I wouldn’t park my car in Red Lake.”

  “Rudy, Rudy . . .”

  BUNTON TOOK VIRGIL inside to meet his mother, who seemed nice enough, and they sat down to chat, and Virgil fell asleep. A gunfight woke him up, but it was on television. “You passed out,” Reese said. She was a heavyset woman, wearing a fleece, though the room was warm.

  “Tired,” Virgil said. “Listen, thanks for lettin’ me sleep.” He looked at his watch. He’d been out for two hours.

  Bunton came in from the kitchen, crunching on a carrot. “You outa here?”

  “I am,” Virgil said. “You take it easy, Ray. This thing’s gonna wear itself out pretty quick now. If you keep your head down for a week, you’ll be okay.”

  LATE, RUNNING FOR HOME, probably wouldn’t make it back until 2 A.M. Looking at the stars, listening to the radio, singing along with a country hit by the Rolling Stones, “Far Away Eyes” . . .

  Two calls on the way back. The first from Mai: “I had a pretty good time last night.”

  “Slammed the door on my ass,” Virgil said.

  “If I hadn’t, you would have been climbing on me like ivy,” she said.

  “Might possibly be true,” Virgil admitted. “That was quite the neck rub.”

  She giggled, sounding girlish, and asked, “So why don’t you come over? We can walk out and get a Coke.”

  “ ’Cause I’m two hundred miles away,” Virgil said. “Had to run out of town. Looking for that guy.”

  “Find him?” she asked.

  “That’s an official police secret,” Virgil said.

  “Pooh,” she said. “So . . . when do you return?”

  Virgil thought about it for a minute, then said, “I’m on my way right now. I’ll get back really late. Need to get some sleep. How about tomorrow night?”

  “Call me.”

  He thought about what she’d asked him. When do you return?

  DAVENPORT, VERY LATE, lights of the Twin Cities on the far horizon. “Can’t find Knox. He’s crawled into a hole. Shrake talked to his daughter, and she says he’s traveling. Says he’s taken up art photography as a hobby, and nobody knows where he is. Says he never takes a cell phone, so people can’t bother him and he can concentrate on his art.”

  “You believe her?” Virgil asked.

  “No. He’s hiding out,” Davenport said. “We need to know why. Are you on the way back?”

  “Coming up to Wyoming.”

  “Okay . . . Tell me about this Vietnamese chick.”

  So they talked about it, Davenport sitting in a leather chair with a Leinie’s, Virgil rolling along under the stars, big fat yellow-gutted bugs whacking the windshield like popcorn.

  A wonderful summer night, Virgil thought. Or, as Ray would have said, a wonderful fuckin’ night.

  13

  VIRGIL SLEPT until ten o’clock, when Davenport called. “Where are you?”

  “About to leave the motel. I slept a little late,” he said, sitting up in bed, scrubbing at his tangled hair.

  “You gonna go talk to Shirley?” Shirley Knox was Carl Knox’s oldest daughter.

  “That’s the plan,” Virgil said. They’d worked it out the night before. First the push from Shrake, then another push from Virgil.

  “I’ll be running around with Rose Marie putting out brush fires,” Virgil said. “We’re pretty much guaranteeing people that it’ll all be over in a week. They just don’t want it to slop over into the convention.”

  “Good going,” Virgil said.

  “Hey, no pressure—if you can’t produce, we can always turn it over to the FBI.”

  A USED Caterpillar 988B rubber-tire front-end loader, with a spade-nosed bucket, repainted and updated, sat on a patch of grass in front of Knox Equipment. A hand-lettered sign in the bucket said, in large black letters, “New Front Differential!” and under that, in smaller letters, “6000 hrs.”

  A hard-faced, dark-haired young woman was behind the counter. Virgil walked in, sniffing at the odor of diesel fuel, scuffing his boot heels. The woman had one yellow pencil behind her ear and another in her hand, and was focused on a stack of invoices and a hand calculator. On the wall behind her were two color portrait photos, with a sign that read, “Our owners.” Under a picture of a square-faced man, a label said, “Carl.” The other picture, of the woman behind the counter, said, “Shirley.”

  Shirley didn’t look up for a minute as Virgil waited at the counter. Her lips were moving, and then she jotted a number on an invoice and looked up and smiled and said, “Sorry. You caught me in the middle. Are you Dave?” She had one slightly crooked front top tooth, and the smile and the tooth gave her a sudden snaky charm.

  “Nope. I’m Virgil. I’m looking for Mr. Knox.”

  “Dad isn’t here,” she said. “If I could help you?”

  Virgil shook his head, pulled his ID out, and said, “I really need to talk to him.”

  She looked vexed. �
�I talked to Officer Shrake yesterday. I explained all this.”

  “He’s out taking photographs,” Virgil said.

  “That’s correct,” she said.

  “Look—you, me, and all the wise guys on the corner, we all know that Carl is a big fat crook.”

  “That’s not right . . .” She was sputtering, but faking it.

  Virgil held up a hand. “I’m not recording anything, so you can save the act. We all know he’s a crook, we all know he’s hiding out because of these guys getting killed, and—I want to emphasize this, so you can tell him when you call him on your clean cell phone—we know why. Tell him we know all about the job in Da Nang, about stealing the bulldozers, and we don’t care. Now. If he doesn’t call me on my cell phone, we’re going to put out a press release that says we’re looking for Carl Knox in connection with these murders, and the TV stations will be on you like Holy on the Pope. So call him, tell him that, tell him Davenport doesn’t think he’s the killer, and tell him we need to talk.”

  “I’m telling you, I have no way of reaching him,” she said, but she was lying through her teeth, and Virgil could see it, and she could see him seeing it. She smiled at him again, acknowledging all the knowing.

  “Great. But when you call him, tell him that.” Virgil snapped a business card down on the counter. “My phone number.”

  As Virgil turned to leave, she said, “He really is a photographer.”

  He stopped. “So am I. Is your dad any good?”

  “Pretty good.” She pointed to some big black-and-white prints hung along one wall, photos of old combines rusting in farm fields.

  Virgil went over to look; they were okay, he thought, but not great. “Terrific shots,” he said. He looked at them in a way he hoped was pensive, then drifted back to the counter and said, “Listen. I know you don’t like us sniffing around, but I think your old man is in deep shit. Deeper than he might know. He better call us.”

  “I’m telling you . . .”

  “Okay, okay—I’m just sayin’.”