Heat Lightning

by John Sandford

  “Then you know about Ray,” Knox said.

  “Yeah—how did you know about it?”

  “Have you looked at a TV this morning?” Knox asked.

  “All right. We need to talk,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah. But I’ve got myself ditched where this asshole can’t find me, and I’ve got my own security,” Knox said. “I’m pretty far from Bemidji, but I can get there. We need to meet someplace . . . obscure.”

  Virgil scratched his head, looking in toward the RootyToot. “Okay. Where are you coming from?”

  Hesitation. Then: “Down south of you a couple of hours.”

  Liar, Virgil thought. “Okay. There’s a broken-ass resort northwest of Bemidji on Highway 89 about four miles north of Highway 2. It’s called the RootyToot.”

  “Wait, wait, let me look at my atlas . . . page seventy-one . . . okay, I see it, south of Pony Lake.”

  “That’s it,” Virgil said. “There’s a Budweiser sign right on the highway. See you when? Noon?”

  “Noon. Be there right on the nose. I ain’t hanging out.”

  TWO HOURS and a little more; he could spend more time on the water, and he did, until the sun started cooking his nose. He had some suntan lotion in his tackle box, but he didn’t want to get started with that; he needed to go in and shave. He called Sandy and said, “I want you to do something for me. You heard that Ray Bunton got killed?”

  “Yes. It’s everywhere. All the TV people are flying up there, wherever you are,” she said.

  “Okay. What I need is, I need you to do research on Ray Bunton, and see if you can spot his mother’s house without knowing her name. If there’s a way to track Bunton through the res, somehow, and get to that house.”

  “I see what you’re getting at,” she said. “I’ll start right now.”

  HE CALLED Davenport before he started the motor, and Davenport came up and said, “What happened?”

  “You probably know as much as I do—or, if you don’t, call Chuck Whiting. What you don’t know is, Carl Knox called me and we just negotiated a meet-up north of Bemidji. He says he’s coming up from the south, but he’s lying—he’s coming down from International Falls.”

  “You gonna bust him?”

  “I’ve got nothing to bust him with. He says he’s hiding out from the shooter. But he wants to meet because he’s got something. We’re set up to meet at a place called the RootyToot Resort, whatever the heck that is. I gotta get my atlas out and find it, I’m heading up there to scout it out.”

  “Careful, Virgil. This might be a place that he’s got locked down,” Davenport said.

  “You don’t think he’d pull anything? With a cop?” Across the lake, the woman with the fly rod had hooked into a panfish of some kind, probably a bluegill, and handed the rod to the little girl, who played it in. And far down the lake, he could see the white line that meant a bigger powerboat was headed his way.

  “No. I’ve talked to him a couple times,” Davenport said. “He’s an asshole, but, you know . . . he’ll talk to you. He knows where things are at.”

  “All right. Listen, I gotta run. I’ll call you as soon as I hear something,” Virgil said.

  “Stay in touch. I’ll talk to Ruffe over at the Star Tribune, let him understand that things are breaking, that we should have something pretty quick. Maybe he could drop in a story that would take some pressure off.”

  In another thirty seconds, Davenport would hear the powerboat in the background. Virgil said, “Okay, I’m running. Talk to you.”

  Virgil stuck the phone back in his pocket and smiled: what Davenport didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Or Virgil. He cranked the motor and headed into shore, the water smooth as an old black mirror.

  WHEN HE WAS cleaned up, wearing a fresh but ancient white Pogues T-shirt, and a black cotton sport coat over his jeans, he went off to the bar to talk with Root, who’d had a couple eye-openers, getting up a morning shine so that he could drift painlessly through the afternoon before getting totally crushed in the evening.

  “Virgil fuckin’ Flowers, ” Root said. There were three other men in the bar, two facing each other across a table, the other sitting at the bar, all three with beers. Root introduced Virgil: “This is my friend Virgil Flowers, the famous outdoor writer, who is also a cop and is up here investigating that murder in Bemidji, I bet. Is that right?”

  Virgil nodded, and said, “Good morning, David. I see the lake is empty of fish, as usual. Give me a Diet Coke.”

  “Empty of fish,” Root said. “If you knew a fuckin’ thing about fishing . . . whoops . . .” He grimaced at his own language, and Virgil turned and saw the fisherwoman and the little girl walking past the screen windows, and a moment later they came inside.

  The woman was probably forty, Virgil thought, thin, small-breasted, with a sprinkling of freckles across her nose, and nice brown eyes. She had a fisherwoman’s tanned face and arms, with a small white scar on one of her arms, and Virgil felt himself slipping over the edge into love.

  She glanced at Virgil and smiled and then said to Root, “We need a cream soda and an ice cream cone,” and Root got a soda from a cooler behind the bar and the little girl fished an ice cream cone out of a freezer by the door, the woman paid, and they took the soda and the cone to a corner table.

  Root said to Virgil, “So what happened to this Indian dude?” and the three drinking men bent his way.

  Virgil shrugged and said, “Well—I know about what you do. The killer’s the same guy who killed those guys down in the Cities, and the guy in New Ulm. We know that. Now it’s just . . . working through it.”

  “What are the chances of getting him?” one of the men asked.

  “Oh, we’ll get him,” Virgil said. “The guy’s asking for it, and he’s gonna get it. The question is, will he kill anybody else before we get him.”

  “That is a question,” Root said. “The answer is, I think I’ll have a beer.”

  SO THEY SAT and talked about murder, fishing, hunting, and boats; and after a bit, the woman finished her cream soda and she and the girl left, the woman raising a hand to Root, saying, “See ya, Dave,” and he said, “See ya, El,” and when she was gone, Virgil asked, “Who was that?”

  “Her name is Loren; everybody calls her El, like the letter L. She and her husband got a place down the lake,” Root said. “He works in the Cities four days a week, comes up here three. Four days, though, she’s sorta . . . untended-to.”

  “Untended-to, my ass,” one of the men said. “You tend to her, her old man’ll blow you up, that’s a fact.”

  “You know him?” Virgil asked.

  “Asshole,” the man said. “Big shot at Pillsbury.”

  “How does that make him an asshole?” Dave asked, the beer bottle poised at his lower lip.

  “I dunno. He’s an asshole because he’s married to her and I’m not,” the guy said. “I’m sitting in a dogshit tavern at eleven-fourteen in the morning drinking beer.”

  “But that’s a good thing,” Dave said.

  THEY SAT UNTIL almost noon, adding women to the list of murder, fishing, hunting, and boats, and then Virgil excused himself and wandered off. His cabin was in easy sight of the driveway. He thought about it for a minute, then went to his truck, fished around under the seat, got his pistol and a leather inside-the-waistband holster, and tucked the gun into the small of his back.

  Then he sat on the top step of the cabin’s stoop, where he could be seen from the driveway. The woman and the girl were down at the dock, messing around in a boat, and Virgil watched for a couple of minutes, then a Jeep rolled into the parking lot and parked. The two men who got out weren’t fishermen, Virgil thought, and he stood up, and as they looked around, he nodded and they walked over.

  “Virgil?” The two looked like bookends: tall, dark-haired men with bent noses and an air of competency, both wearing black sport coats and khaki slacks and L.L. Bean hiking shoes and black sunglasses.

  “That’s me. But neither one of
you is Carl,” Virgil said, remembering the portrait photo at the dealership.

  “No, Carl’s coming in, he’ll be here in a minute or two,” the man said. He looked down at the lake, and the half-dozen boats tied to the pier, and the woman and kid. “Sal, why don’t you go get a few beers.”

  Sal nodded wordlessly and walked down to the bar.

  Virgil said, “You’re security.”

  “Yeah, sorta.”

  “Where’d you get your nose bent?” Virgil asked.

  The man grinned, and Virgil suspected all of his short glittering-white teeth had been capped by a very good dentist. “Chicago, actually.” He looked down at the pier. “You know the chick?”

  “I asked about her, they know her in the bar,” Virgil said. “And the owner didn’t know I was coming until this morning—I sorta dropped in.”

  “All right. Woman with a kid, they make a good recon team, you know?” the guy said. “You got a woman with a kid on the street, who’d think they might be wired-up?”

  Virgil said, “I’ll write that in my notebook.”

  The man said, “You do that.” Then he tapped Virgil’s chest. “The Pogues. Goddamn good band. I’m Irish myself.”

  “You didn’t say what your name was,” Virgil said.

  “Pat. O’Hoolihan. Pat O’Hoolihan.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.”

  The man showed his teeth again. “Yeah. I am.”

  Sal came back with two cold six-packs: “Four drunks talking about bait. I thought my ears was gonna fall off, and I was only there for two minutes.”

  “Gotta learn to relax,” Virgil said. “Get in the flow of the conversation.”

  Sal popped his gum. “I’d rather be dead.”

  The man who wasn’t named Pat O’Hoolihan got on his cell phone, dialed a number, and said, “We good.”

  KNOX ARRIVED in a black GMC sport-utility vehicle with an unnecessary chrome brush guard on the front, and two little tiny chromed brush guards on the back taillights, and Virgil said to Sal, “These taillight brush guards look kinda gay.”

  Sal popped his gum. “I hadn’t thought about it, but you’re right.”

  Knox climbed out of the passenger seat, and another bent-nosed guy from the driver’s seat. Knox was a large man, balding, with a fleshy face and a heavy gut, who looked like he might deal in bulldozers. He was wearing khaki cargo pants, a white shirt, a black sport coat, and more L.L. Bean hiking shoes.

  He walked down to Virgil’s place and said, “Mr. Flowers.” Not a question.

  Virgil shook hands with him and said, “Why don’t we go inside?”

  Knox looked at the cabin and shook his head. “Nah. I hate enclosed spaces that I don’t know about. Let’s go find a stump.” To the security guys, he said, “Why don’t you guys hang out?” and to the one who wasn’t named Pat, he said, “Larry, come on with us.”

  Virgil said, “Yeah, come on, Larry.”

  Larry said, “That’d be Mr. Larry to you, Virgil. Let me get one of those six-packs.”

  THE THREE OF THEM strolled down to a picnic table behind one of the cabins, out of sight of the bar, out of sight of the driveway. The mom and daughter were kneeling on the dock, peering into the water, and Larry said, “Nice ass,” and Knox said, “C’mon, man, she’s only eight,” and Virgil had to laugh despite himself. They all took a beer and settled on the picnic table bench. Larry faced away from them, looking up at the cabins; the other two men were wandering around the driveway.

  “So what’s the deal?” Knox said. “I understand you’ve been talking to my daughter.”

  “The deal is, somebody is killing people—and all the people who are dead went to Vietnam in ’75 and stole a bunch of bulldozers. The last guy to get killed . . .”

  “Ray.”

  “Yeah. Ray. Ray told me a story. He said that while you guys were stealing the bulldozers . . .”

  “Weren’t stealing them,” Knox said. “It was more of a repo.”

  “Whatever. When you’d finished taking the bulldozers, there was a nasty shooting incident. Murders, is what it was. Ray said that Chuck Utecht was talking about a public confession about the killings, and somebody needed to shut him up. But by then, Utecht had talked to Sanderson, and Sanderson had talked to Ray, and it was all getting out of control. The killings are professional. So we asked ourselves, ‘Who is still alive, who might be able to find some bent-nosed killers from someplace like Chicago to come in here and clean up his mess?’ I guess—well, hell, we thought of you.”

  They were sitting facing the lake, their legs away from the table, their elbows back on it. When Virgil stopped talking, Knox said, “You hear that, Larry? You’re a bent-nosed killer from Chicago.”

  “I resent the hell out of that characterization,” Larry said. He burped beer. “I have many fine qualities.”

  The repartee, Virgil thought, was a cover: Knox was thinking about it. Then he said, “This was a really long time ago, and I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “That’s what Ray said—he didn’t have anything to do with it. He said he was driving a lowboy back and forth, and when he got back the last time, some house was burning down and somebody had gotten shot.”

  More silence. Then: “It wasn’t one. It was four. At least. And that wasn’t all. . . .” He shook his head.

  “You want to tell me?” Virgil asked, pushing.

  “Yeah. I can’t prove it, but I might even be able to point you at the shooters,” Knox said. “But they’ll have deep cover. Deep cover. And if you go after this guy, you better get him . . . and I got a few more things I want.”

  “Like what?”

  “I might have some evidence,” he said. “You need to say you took it off Ray. Somehow found it in Ray’s shit. Not from me.”

  Virgil said, “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “Then, hey—maybe I can’t find it. . . . It’s not because I’m trying to avoid responsibility,” Knox said. “It’s because I don’t think you’ll get this guy. Even with the pictures. And if you don’t get him, there’s a good chance he’ll take me out. Or my kid, or my ex-wife, because he’s fuckin’ crazy. I know you and Davenport think I’m some kind of big crook, but honest to God, I never had anybody killed in my life. I wouldn’t even know who to ask. I sell bulldozers.”

  Virgil felt the ice going out: Knox knew. He went back to the essential point: “You got pictures. . . .”

  “Yeah. Not with me, but I can get them.”

  “So tell me the story. . . .”

  IN 1975, with Vietnam coming apart, old man Utecht found the bulldozers. He called his kid, who called Wigge, and Wigge called Knox. Knox was another ex-GI, who’d been stationed in Germany, and had been trained as a heavy-equipment operator. “I fit with their plan—we all knew heavy equipment, one way or another, and we were all ex-military, except Utecht, and Ray was the truck driver.”

  He flew to Vietnam with Chuck Utecht, and they were picked up at the airport by Chester Utecht, who drove them out to the equipment yard.

  “Some of the stuff was new, but was already in trouble because it’d been sitting there for a couple years, and the jungle was eating it up. The fuel lines were all clogged up and the fuel filters had turned into rocks, and some of the rubber hydraulic lines were eaten by squirrels, or something—these little red-bellied fuckers, they’d eat anything. Anyway, there was more stuff than you could believe. . . .”

  The crew went to work, restoring one machine at a time, getting them moving, and then Ray arrived and began hauling the bulldozers away. “We had a big truckload of spare parts, I don’t know where Chester got them from, but they were all new. We were sweatin’ like dogs out in the sun, there was no shade in the yard, it was about a million degrees out there, bugs as big as my thumbs. We had these whole pallets of Lone Star beer . . . we didn’t have access to safe drinking water, so we were drinking like three or four gallons of beer a day just to stay hydrated.

  “Anyway, there wa
s this big house just down the way . . . across this dirt road, and it had a water pump outside, one of those old pump-handle things, and Chester said if we drank it, we’d get dysentery, but it was all right to rinse off with it, to cool down, and we’d go down there and pump water into a bucket and throw it on each other. It was cool . . . but there was this old man there, he’d come out and scream at us. . . . Screaming in French, didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.”

  Knox drifted away for a couple of minutes, then said to Virgil, “You know something, Flowers? This one time, I was delivering a used Cat over in Wisconsin, the west side of Milwaukee. They were building a subdivision, they were going to beat the band. And I was there, and they had these guys working in a trench, putting down a water line, and the trench fell on them. Sand and clay. Six or seven guys, but four guys went under, and we all jumped in there and started tearing up the dirt with our hands . . . and all four guys died. When we got them out, they were like sitting there, with their mouths full of dirt and their eyes open, but all covered with sand, deader’n shit. I don’t think about that but once a year. And hell, it was an accident, you know. . . .

  “This thing in Vietnam, I don’t go two hours without thinking about it. For more than thirty years—”

  Virgil said, “Somebody’s across the lake with a high-powered rifle, and you’re gonna say, ‘The asshole’s name is—’ and pop! The killer nails you. So could you give me his name? Just in case?”

  Knox made a huh-huh sound, which was his kind of big-guy chuckle. “Warren.”

  “Ralph Warren?”

  “Yeah. I assumed you knew that,” Knox said. “His name, anyway.”

  “I never got to anybody before they were dead, except Ray, and he didn’t know who Warren was.”

  Knox laughed again, a short half grunt, half laugh. “Well . . . who else do you know who could import a bunch of bent-nosed, cold-eyed killers?”

  “But one of the cold-eyed killers got killed,” Virgil said.