Heat Lightning (36 page)

Davenport called: "Got you a plane. They'll pick you up at the St. Paul airport. They're starting three guys to International Falls from Bemidji, but it's a ride. It'll take a while."

"It'll take Mai longer, unless they're flying," Virgil said. "If they're flying, they still won't be that far in front of us. I'm gonna try to call Knox, too. Tell him to get the fuck out."

"Tell him to leave the lights on," Davenport said. "Tell him to leave a car in the driveway. We need to pull them in there. We need to get this done with."

VIRGIL CALLED Knox, and this time the phone was answered. Virgil identified himself and was told that Knox was in bed. "Then get him out of bed," Virgil said. "I need to talk to him, now."

Knox came up a minute later. "What happened?"

"Warren got hit. He's dead. The killers are a Vietnamese intel team, apparently after revenge for the '75 murders."

"I had nothing to do with that," Knox said with some heat.

"Well, they don't know that--or they don't give a shit," Virgil said. "Anyway, they're headed your way. They know where you are."

A few seconds of silence, then; "How would they find that out?"

"Hell, man, I put our researcher on it, and she found your place in an hour," Virgil said. "You pay taxes on it and deduct them from your income tax. That is, if you're on the Rainy River, outside of International Falls."

"Sonofabitch." A moment of silence. Then: "You don't think they're here yet?"

"Not yet. Not even if they're flying," Virgil said. "I'm flying up now, I've got guys started up from Bemidji and Red Lake, and we're gonna ambush them. I need to know how to get into your place."

Knox gave him directions, right down to the tenth of the mile. "It's dark out here. If you get lost, you stay lost."

"I'll find it. I got GPS directions to the end of your driveway. I just wasn't too sure about the roads out there," Virgil said. "In the meantime, you oughta get out of there."

"Think so?"

"Yeah. There's nothing you can do at this point," Virgil said. "Don't use your cell phones, they might have some way to track them. Just go out somewhere to a resort and get a place for overnight."

"I'll leave a guy here, tell you about the security systems," Knox said. "He can help you out."

"That'd be great," Virgil said.

"Okay, then. Good luck. I'm outa here."

And he was gone.

Chapter
26

THE PILOT'S name was Doug Wayne. He was a small, mustachioed highway patrolman who looked like he should be flying biplanes for Brits over France; he was waiting in his olive-drab Nomex flight suit in the general aviation pilots' lounge at St. Paul's Holman Field.

Virgil came through carrying a backpack with a change of clothes, the ammo and the nightscopes and a range finder and two radios, a plastic sack with two doughnuts and two sixteen-ounce Diet Pepsis, and the M16 in a rifle case.

Wayne said, "Just step through the security scanner over there. . . ."

"Place would blow up," Virgil said. "We ready?"

"How big a hurry are we in?"

"Big hurry," Virgil said. "Big as you got."

WAYNE WAS flying the highway patrol's Cessna Skylane, taken away from a Canadian drug dealer the year before. International Falls was a little more than two hundred and fifty miles from St. Paul by air, and the Skylane cruised at one hundred forty-five miles per hour. "If you got two bottles of soda in that sack . . . I mean, I hope you got the bladder for it. We're gonna bounce around a little," Wayne said as they walked out to the flight line.

"I'll pee on the floor," Virgil said.

"That'd make my day," Wayne said.

"Just kiddin'. How bad are we going to bounce?"

Wayne said, "There's a line of thunderstorms from about St. Cloud northeast to Duluth, headed east. We can go around the back end, no problem, but there'll still be some rough air."

They climbed in and stashed Virgil's gear in the back of the plane and locked down and took off. St. Paul was gorgeous at night, the downtown lights on the bluffs reflecting off the Mississippi, the bridges close underneath, but they made the turn and were out of town in ten minutes. Looking down, the nightscape was a checkerboard of small towns, clumps of light along I-35, the lights growing sparser as they diverged from the interstate route, heading slightly northwest.

"Gonna take a nap if I can," Virgil said.

"Good luck," Wayne said.

Virgil liked flying; might look into a pilot's license someday, when he could afford it. He asked, "How much does a plane like this cost?"

"New? Maybe . . . four hundred thousand."

He closed his eyes and thought about how a cop would get four hundred thousand dollars--write a book, maybe, but it'd have to sell big. Other than that . . .

The drone of the plane and darkness started to carry him off. He thought about God, and after a while he went to sleep. He was aware, at some point, that the plane was shuddering, and he got the elevator feeling, but not too bad; and when he woke up, his mouth tasting sour, he peered out at what looked like the ocean: an expanse of blackness broken only occasionally by pinpoints of light.

He cracked one of the Pepsis and asked, "Where are we?"

"You missed all the good stuff," Wayne said. "Had a light show for a while, off to the east. We're about a half hour out of International Falls. You were sleeping like a rock."

"I've been hard-pushed lately," Virgil said. He looked at his watch: nearly one in the morning. Took out his cell phone: no service.

"You won't get service until we're ten minutes out," Wayne said. "We're talking vast wasteland."

VIRGIL TRIED AGAIN when they could see the lights of International Falls and Louis Jarlait came up. "We're just out of town," Jarlait said. "Where do you want to hook up?"

"Pick me up at the airport. We got some BCA guys coming up from Bemidji."

"I talked to them. They're probably a half hour behind us, they had to get their shit together."

"Okay. I'll get them on the phone, bring them into Knox's place," Virgil said. "We need to check at the airport and see if they had any small-plane flights in the last hour or so with some Vietnamese on board."

"I'll ask while we're waiting for you."

"Careful. You might walk in right on top of them."

Virgil couldn't reach the BCA agents from Bemidji: they were still too far out in the bogs.

WAYNE WAS going to turn the plane around and head back to the Cities. Virgil thanked him for the flight, and he said, "No problem. I love getting out in the night."

Louis Jarlait and Rudy Bunch were waiting when Virgil came off the flight line: "No small planes, no Vietnamese," Bunch said.

"So they're traveling by car. That was the most likely thing anyway," Virgil said. "They won't be here for at least a couple of hours."

They loaded into Bunch's truck, Virgil in the backseat, and Virgil asked, "What kind of weapons you got? You got armor?"

"We got armor, we got helmets, we got rifles. We're good," Jarlait said. "Goddamn, I been waiting for this. I can't believe this is happening."

"You've been waiting for it?"

"I was in Vietnam when I was nineteen--coming up on forty years ago," Jarlait said. "We'd send these patrols out, you could never find shit. I mean, it was their country. Those Vietcongs, man, they were country people, they knew their way around out there." Jarlait turned with his arm over the seat so he could look at Virgil. "But up here, man--this is

our jungle. I walk around in these woods every day of my life. Gettin' some of those Vietcongs in here, it's like a gift from God."

"I don't think they're Vietcong," Bunch said.

"Close enough," Jarlait said.

"Yeah, about the time you're thinking you're creeping around like a shadow, one of them is gonna jump up with a huntin' knife and open up your old neck like a can of fruit juice," Bunch said.

Virgil was looking at a map. "Take a right. We need to get over to the country club."

"Nobody gonna creep up on me," Jarlait said. "I'm doing the creeping."

THE DRIVEWAY into Knox's place branched off Golf Course Road, running around humps and bogs for a half mile through a tunnel of tall overhanging pines down to the Rainy River. The night was dark as a coal sack, their headlights barely picking out the contours of the graveled driveway. Not a place to get into, or out of, quickly, not in the dark.

"Weird place to build a cabin," Bunch said. "You're on the wrong side of the falls--if you were on the other side, you'd be two minutes out of Rainy Lake."

"He didn't build it for the fishing," Virgil said. "I think he built it so he and his pals can get in and out of Canada without disturbing anyone. The rumor is, he deals stolen Caterpillar equipment all over western Canada."

Knox's house was a sprawling log cabin, built from two-foot-thick pine logs and fieldstone; the logs were maple-syrup brown in the headlights. The house sat fifty yards back from the water on a low rise, or swell, above the rest of the land. A pinkish sodium-vapor yard light, and another one down by a dock, provided the only ambient light. Across the water, Virgil could see another light reflecting off a roof on the Canadian side.

"How far you think that is to the other side?" he asked Bunch as they parked. He was thinking about Warren, and how he'd been shot across the lake.

"Two hundred and fifty yards?"

"Further than that," Jarlait said.

Virgil fished his range finder out of the backpack and, when they stepped out of the truck, put them on the distant roof. "Huh."

"What is it?" Bunch asked.

"Three-eighty from here to the house over there."

"Told you," Jarlait said.

"I meant that the water was two hundred yards."

"Yeah, bullshit . . ."

Virgil said, "The main thing is, I think it's too long to risk a shot. They'll have to come in on this side--they can't shoot from over there."

"I shot an elk at three-fifty," Bunch said.

"Guy's a lot smaller than an elk . . . and there're enough trees in the way that they can't be sure they'd even get a shot. If they're coming in, it'll be on this side."

A MAN SPOKE in the dark: "Who are you guys?"

He was so close, and so loud, that Virgil flinched--but he was still alive, so he said, "Virgil Flowers."

He saw movement, and the man stepped out of a line of trees. He was carrying an assault-style rifle and was wearing a head net and gloves. "I'm Sean Raines, I work for Carl. Better come in, we can work out what we're gonna do."

Inside, the place was simply a luxury home, finished in maple and birch, with a sunken living room looking out across the river through a glass wall, and a television the size of Virgil's living-room carpet. Raines was a compact man wearing jeans and a camouflage jacket. He peeled off the head net to reveal pale blue eyes and a knobby, rough-complected face; like a tough Kentucky hillbilly, Virgil thought.

Virgil asked, "What about the windows?"

"Can't see in," Raines said. "You can't see it from this side, but they're mirrored. How many guys you think are coming?"

"Probably three," Virgil said. "Two guys and a woman. They've got a rifle--hell, they probably got anything they want."

"They any good in the woods?"

"Don't know," Virgil said.

"It's gonna be just us four?" Raines asked.

"We got three more guys coming from Bemidji, oughta be here pretty quick." As he said it, Virgil pulled his phone from his pocket and punched up the number he'd been given.

He got an answer: "Paul Queenen."

"Paul, this is Virgil Flowers. Where are you guys?"

"Fifteen, twenty minutes south of town on 71," Queenen said.

"Stay on 71 until you get to Country Club Road."

VIRGIL GAVE THEM instructions on getting in and then Raines took the three of them to an electronics room to look at the security system. "We got some deer around, so we keep the audio alarms off most the time, but I've got them set to beep us tonight. . . ."

Knox had a dozen video cameras set out in the woods, feeding views into three small black-and-white monitors, all of which were a blank gray. "When you hear an alarm, you get a beep and an LED flashes on the area panel," Raines said. He touched a ten-inch-long metal strip with a series of dark-red LEDs in numbered boxes. Above the LED strip was a map of Knox's property, divided into numbered zones that corresponded to the LEDs. "When you get a flash, you can punch up the monitor and get a view of the area . . . you almost always see a deer, though we've had bears going through. Sometimes you don't see anything because they're out of range of the camera."

"But in the dark like this . . ."

"The cameras see into the infrared, and there are infrared lights mounted with the cameras," Raines said. He reached over to another numbered panel, full of keyboard-style numbered buttons, and tapped On. One of the monitors flickered and a black-and-white image came up: trees, in harsh outline.