Heat Lightning (20 page)

"I'd like to talk to you; I've got a Vietnam story for you," Virgil said.

"Always happy to hear Vietnam stories," Sinclair said. "Especially the ones where the American imperialist running-dogs get their comeuppance."

Virgil thought about that for a second, then said, "I bet you really pissed a lot of people off in your day."

"You have no idea," Sinclair said. "When are you coming over?"

"Right now."

"ARE YOU going north?" Sandy asked.

"Probably--but right now, I'm going over to the Sinclairs'. Could you get some plat books and spot Knox's place for me? Just send it to my e-mail."

"When are you going?"

"Don't know," Virgil said.

"I was thinking of going dancing tonight," Sandy said. "If you're around, we'll be at the Horse's Head."

"Sandy, you know . . ."

"What?"

"If I went dancing with you, I don't think Lucas would like it," Virgil said. "We're in the same group."

"Don't get your honey where you get your money," she said, one fist on her hip.

"I wouldn't put it that way," Virgil said. "But--think about it."

"I refuse to think about it," she said. "You think about it, when you're driving your lonely ass up to some godforsaken cabin in the North Woods."

"Sandy ..."

VIRGIL WANTED to check with Davenport in person, but Carol, his secretary, said he was in his third crisis meeting at the Department of Public Safety downtown. "He'll be completely insane by the time he gets back. I know he wants to see you. He wants to make sure there's not a boat on the back of your truck."

"I'll be back," Virgil said.

In the hallway, he ran into Shrake, who was coming down the hall carrying a tennis racket with a cannonball-sized hole through the face of it, the strings hanging free. Virgil didn't ask. Instead, he said, "Hey--Shirley Knox sorta liked your looks."

"Yeah?" Shrake said. "I sorta liked hers, too."

"Gotta be careful," Virgil said.

"I'm cool," Shrake said. "So, uh . . . what'd she say about me?"

THE DAY WAS getting away from him, he thought, sliding from afternoon into evening as he got to Sinclair's apartment. Sinclair was barefoot, wearing white cotton slacks and a black silk shirt open at the throat. "Mai's not here," he said. "We should be able to talk in peace and quiet."

"She dancing?"

"Grocery shopping. She's running around somewhere, looking for a particular kind of food store. Some place that has seafood and weird spices."

"Gorgeous and a good cook."

Sinclair laughed. "She taught herself to cook fourteen things really well. Two weeks of dinners. Every other Wednesday, rain or shine, we have Korean bulgogi. Not bad. But today is okra gumbo day. Good gumbo, but you know, sometimes I'll wake up on gumbo day and I think I can't look another okra in the face. . . . I can't tell her that, of course." He led the way to the back porch and his stack of papers. "What's your Vietnam story?"

Virgil laid it out: the theft of the bulldozers, the shoot-out at the house, the deaths of the men in the circle of thieves.

"That's a great story, Virgil," Sinclair said, sitting back in a lounge chair, fingers knitted behind his head. "The business about the shooting in the house. The murders. That was a wild time--you think this could be a comeback?"

"I don't know," Virgil said.

"I did some research on you, you know, after you picked up that line from Virgil," Sinclair said. "You're a writer."

"I write outdoor stuff," Virgil said.

"Hey--I read that story about the moose hunt up in the Boundary Waters, and packing that moose out in the canoes. That's good stuff, Virgil. There's a great American tradition of outdoor writing, of exactly that kind. Teddy Roosevelt did it," he said, and Virgil got red in the face, flushing, pleased by the flattery, had to admit it.

Sinclair let him marinate in his ego for a moment, then continued: "Anyway, this Vietnam story, what you just told me. If you could get Bunton to repeat that, or any of them to repeat that, if they'd go on the record--and if there's a connection going back to those old days--I could put you in touch with a guy on the

New York Times Magazine. They'd buy it in a minute."

"You think so?"

"I've been publishing for forty years in those kinds of magazines--they'd buy it," Sinclair said. "I mean, aside from the facts of the matter, it's a terrific story. A bunch of American rednecks flying into Vietnam as the place goes up in flames, to steal millions of bucks' worth of bulldozers? Are you kidding me? Keep your notes, buddy."

Virgil nodded. "But what do you think about the story?"

Sinclair ran his tongue over his lower lip, then shook his head. "I've worked with the Vietnamese for a long time. They can be a subtle bunch of people and they know how to nurse a grudge. On the other hand, they can be the biggest bunch of homeboy hicks that you could imagine. So I suppose it's possible that there's a Vietnamese connection . . ."

"But you don't believe it."

Sinclair shrugged. "I didn't say that. Millions of people were killed back then. Millions. Whatever happened in that house, however bad it was . . . was nothing. And the lemon thing. That's pretty obvious. It's like a flag to attract your attention. Have you thought about the possibility that it's coming from another direction?"

"Yeah, I have," Virgil said. "I've even got a guy I'm thinking about. But I don't want to take my eye off the Vietnamese connection, either."

"Which is why you were harassing Tai and Phem."

"Checked them out--they seem like they're on the up-and-up," Virgil said. "That's what the Canadians tell us, anyway. But who knows? They could be some kind of crazed Vietnamese hit team."

Sinclair nodded. "They could be. On the other hand, they could just be a couple of gooks who got lucky and were born in Canada instead of a reeducation camp."

"You still pissed about that?" Virgil asked.

"Yeah." He chuckled. "And they're still pissed at me. They don't believe that I didn't tell you about them."

Mai came back carrying two big grocery sacks, plunked them on the counter; she was wearing a simple white blouse and blue jeans, and looked terrific. She even looked like she smelled terrific, but when Virgil sniffed, he smelled raw crab. She asked, "Can you stay for dinner?"

Virgil thought about the okra. Okra is essentially a squid that grows in the ground instead of swimming in the ocean. He said, "I can't. I'm looking for a guy. Wouldn't mind walking you around the block, though."

"You should ask my daddy if it's okay."

"REALLY BORED," she said. They ambled along, and somewhere down the block she took hold of a couple of his fingers, and they went the rest of the way hand in hand. "St. Paul would be a nice place to live if you had something to do. I don't have anything to do."

"There's always sex," Virgil said. "You're away from home, where nobody knows you. You could indulge all your sexual fantasies and nobody would ever find out."

"But who would I sleep with?"

"We could put a notice in the paper, ask for volunteers."

"Did you ever find that guy you were looking for?" she asked.

"Yes, I did. He told me a strange story, which I just told to daddy. Something weird is going on. But I'll crack it," Virgil said.

"You think?"

"These things have a rhythm," Virgil said. "You get something going . . . it's like a plot in a novel. You start out with an incident, a killing, and there are millions of possibilities, and you start eliminating the possibilities. Pretty soon, you can see the line of the story and you can feel the climax coming. We're not there yet, but I can feel it. It's taking form."

"Be careful," she said. "This whole thing is pretty creepy."

BACK AT THE apartment, inside, at their door, she said, "You're sure you can't stay?"

"Got to move along," Virgil said; but he took a minute to kiss her. Didn't exactly catch her by surprise, but he felt a second of what might have been resistance, which surprised him, because they'd been getting along and he rarely miscalculated in these kinds of things--Sandy, for example, you wouldn't feel her stiffen up--and then Mai melted into him and the kiss got long and his hand drifted to her backside. . . .

"We gotta find a place," she said. She patted his chest. "The other night when I was sitting on your back . . . I got pretty warm."

"Well, I know a cabin over in Wisconsin," Virgil said. "We could go up for the day . . . but today and tonight, I'm working. I'm hunting for this guy--"

"Wisconsin. Let's go soon. I mean, I really need to go soon."

VIRGIL LEFT HER at the door and headed back to the motel, checked his e-mail.

Sandy had sent along a PDF file of a large-scale plat map, with an arrow pointing at the precise location of Knox's cabin on the Rainy River outside of International Falls, two hundred yards from Canada. A strange place for a cabin, for anyone else--but maybe not for a guy who did a lot of business there and might want to cross over without all the bureaucratic hassle of the border.

He called Davenport to tell him what he'd found out during the day.

When Virgil had finished, Davenport said, "I can't deal with this anymore. I got a tip that some real trouble is headed this way, and I need to work it. Nothing to do with Knox or your killings."

"Okay. Well, it's gonna break, I think."

"You going to International Falls?"

"Yeah. You know it?"

"I played hockey up there a few times when I was in high school," Davenport said. "It's a long way. Maybe you oughta see if you could get the Patrol to fly you up there--rent a car when you get there."

"Ah, I'm thinking about driving up tonight," Virgil said. "Get a few hours' sleep. The day's shot anyway, might as well drive. I could hit Knox's place first thing in the morning."

"Your call," Davenport said. "I got problems of my own. Just get this thing done with."

VIRGIL SET HIS alarm clock, and crashed. He woke at nine o'clock, scrubbed his mouth out, got his stuff together, and headed for the truck.

He always had fishing gear with him. He could drive for five hours, bag out at a backwoods motel, rent a boat at a resort in the morning, get in a couple hours on the water, and still make it to International Falls before noon.

Another good night to drive.

Chapter
14

THE SHOOTER was city, not country.

He wore comfortable, low-heeled shoes with pointed toes made of delicate Italian leather, summer-weight dark-blue wool pants, a short-sleeved cotton shirt, and a black cotton jacket. One of two things would happen that evening, he thought, because of his citiness: he'd either be eaten alive by mosquitoes, or he'd freeze.

The scout had spotted Bunton's hideout and had delivered both precise GPS coordinates and a satellite map that would take the shooter to a little-used, dead-end trail that ended at a marshy lake a hundred yards from Bunton's. From there, the scout suggested, the shooter could walk in. He'd be coming out of the deep woods, in the night, a direction that the Indian wouldn't expect, even if he was on his guard.

"I couldn't hang around, but I got good photographs. There's no security system that I can see. There's not even a motion-detecting garage light. The only wires going in are electric. No phone. The TV comes off a satellite dish, so there's no way for a remote alarm system to call out. . . ."

The shooter hadn't even driven past the Bunton place, hadn't even given them that much of a chance to spot him. He'd come from the opposite direction, from off the res, and had taken the trail down to the lake, where there was an informal muddy canoe launch. He pulled off into the weeds, checked the GPS, got his pistol and his sap, and called the scout.

"Going in."

The scout hadn't walked it himself in the daylight, because he'd been afraid to give it away. So the shooter was on his own going in--and within fifty feet of the car, he was slip-sliding through stinking mud and marsh, and kicking up every mosquito in the universe, spitting them out of his mouth and batting them away from his face, until he was driven into a jog just to stay ahead of them.

But the bugs dropped on him like chicken hawks when he came up to the house, and he'd eventually pulled his jacket over his head, blocking out everything but his eyes, retracting his hands into the coat sleeves.

Then they went after his eyes. . . .

BUNTON'S HIDEOUT was in a cluster of five small suburban-style houses that might have been built during the sixties, all facing a narrow wooded road from town. His house was the second from the end--the one with a cop car parked in the driveway.

The shooter called the scout: "I'm in, but he's got protection from the Indian police."

"Let me call," the scout said. He meant to call the coordinator. Three minutes later, the phone silently vibrated in the shooter's hand as he got back to the car.

"Take him alone if you can," the scout said. "If you can't--we've already broken the protocol. We need these two as fast as we can."