Heat Lightning

by John Sandford

  “Do you have anybody traveling with them?”

  “Nope. We’re just talking to local deputies, who’re passing them through,” the Grand Rapids patrolman said.

  “Have them take a look at the plates,” Virgil said. He read off Bunton’s plate number. “Don’t be too obvious about it. We don’t want to spook him.”

  “If your guy is in there, we’d have trouble pulling him out,” the patrolman said. “Everybody’s cranked about this funeral. We could have a riot here tomorrow, if those church people show up. We’d rather not have a riot tonight, busting one of the riders.”

  “So take it easy. I think he’s riding up there as cover, so he can shoot the rest of the way up to Red Lake,” Virgil said. “I’m coming up, I’ll take him out. But keep an eye on him. If he makes a run for Red Lake, you gotta grab him.”

  “We’ll keep an eye out,” the cop said. “When’ll you get here?”

  “I’m driving and I got lights, so I’ll be coming fast—but it’s gonna be a while,” Virgil said. “I won’t catch them before they get there. Call me when you know anything at all.”

  “We’ll do that.”

  HE CALLED Carol and told her where he was going; stopped at the motel, grabbed a change of clothes and his Dopp kit, but didn’t check out; stopped at a Cub supermarket and bought some premade cheese-and-meat sandwiches, a six-pack of Diet Coke, and a sack of ice for his cooler. He packed it all up and headed north on I-35, lights but no siren, moving along at a steady hundred miles an hour, past the rest stop where he’d been at midnight—still cop cars where Wigge had been killed—almost to Duluth.

  From there he hooked northwest through Cloquet toward Grand Rapids.

  On the way, he got two calls. The first came an hour and ten minutes out of St. Paul, the highway patrolman reporting that Bunton had been spotted by a deputy who’d cruised the whole pack as they left Duluth. “Not sure it’s him, but it’s his bike.”

  “I’m coming,” Virgil said. He was tired now, too long without sleep. Needed some speed, didn’t have it.

  When he was twenty minutes out of Grand Rapids, the Grand Rapids patrolman called again and said, “Your guy is still with the group. They just rode into town and we picked him out. It’s the guy in your pictures. He’s wearing a bright red shirt with a black do-rag on his head. Easy to track.”

  TOM HUNT, the state trooper, was waiting on the shoulder of the road just south of town. Virgil followed him into the patrol station, where Hunt transferred to Virgil’s truck, tossing a shoulder pack in the backseat. “Saw him myself,” Hunt said. Hunt was a sandy-haired man with wire-rimmed glasses, dressed in khaki slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. He looked more like a junior high teacher than a cop. “He wasn’t trying to hide. He was like the third guy in line.”

  “Well, nobody ever said he was the brightest guy in the world,” Virgil said.

  Hunt looked out the side window and said, “Huh.”

  Virgil grinned. “So what you’re wondering is, if he’s so damn dumb, how’d he kick my ass?”

  “Well, I figure, shit happens,” Hunt said, being polite.

  “Truth is, we were having a little talk—polite, not unfriendly,” Virgil explained. “And he’s an old guy. Got me looking in the wrong direction and sucker-punched me. He’s old, but he’s got a good right hand.”

  THE LIBERTY PATROL had taken a block of rooms at an AmericInn, but after checking in had begun heading out to Veterans Memorial Park for an afternoon barbecue. Hunt directed Virgil through town to the park, which was built on the banks of the Mississippi. They left the car a block away, Hunt got the shoulder pack out of the backseat, and they ambled on down the street, cut through a copse of trees, onto a low mound covered with pine needles, the fragrance of pine sap all about them. Another guy was there, leaning on a tree. He turned when he heard them coming, and as they came up, Hunt said to Virgil, “Josh Anderson, Grand Rapids PD.”

  “He’s still down there,” Anderson said. “Got a beer, over by the barbecue.”

  The bikers were a hundred yards away, their bikes on one side of a pavilion, a few women clustered around a couple of picnic tables on the other side, the guys around two smoking barbecue pans. The afternoon breeze was coming at them, and Virgil could smell the brats and sweet corn, and the fishy scent of the river. Hunt unslung the pack, took out a pair of binoculars, looked over the gathering. After a moment, he said, “Huh,” just like he had in the car. A rime of skepticism.

  “What?” Virgil asked.

  “There’s a guy in a red shirt and a black do-rag . . . but he sort of doesn’t look exactly like the guy I saw.”

  “Let me look.” Virgil took the glasses and scanned the gathering, found the man in the red shirt, studied him, took the glasses down, and said, “We’re too far away. We need a closer look.”

  Hunt asked, “You want more backup?”

  “Ah . . . nah. If it’s him, and he sees me, he’ll either run or try to get the other guys to back him up. These other guys—they’re not bad guys. I don’t think they’ll have a problem with an arrest for assault on a cop. And if he runs . . . we’ll take him.”

  Anderson, the Grand Rapids cop, took a radio out of his pocket. “We’ve got a couple more guys around. We got a car across the bridge, we could block that.”

  “Do that,” Virgil said.

  ANDERSON MADE A CALL, then the three of them walked down to the pavilion. Something about cops, Virgil thought, got everybody looking your way. By the time they got to the group, most of the men were looking at them, but not the guy in the red shirt. He’d turned his back. Virgil let Hunt take the lead. He produced an ID and asked a guy, “Is there somebody in charge? We’ve had an issue come up. . . .”

  While he was talking, Virgil walked over to the barbecue to get a closer look at the man in the shirt. As he walked around him, the guy first looked away, then glanced up. Not Bunton. But Bunton had been there—the way the guy looked at Virgil, half defiant, half placating, meant that he was wearing the red shirt and do-rag as a decoy. Virgil could see it in his eyes.

  Virgil said, “Goddamnit,” and turned and walked back to Hunt, who was talking to a gaunt, gray-bearded man who must have been pushing seventy.

  “Darrell Johnson,” Hunt said when Virgil came up. “He’s the president.”

  Virgil stepped close to Johnson. “How long ago did he leave? Is he on his bike?”

  Johnson’s eyes shifted and he started, “You know . . .”

  “Darrell, don’t give us any trouble,” Virgil said. “There’s a felony warrant out on Bunton. I’m amazed you don’t know—it’s been all over the radio and television.”

  “We been ridin’. We didn’t know,” Johnson said.

  “It’s part of an investigation into the murders of four people— including the three guys whose bodies got dumped on the veterans’ memorials. You know about those? I guess the question is, are you guys only going to funerals? Or are you manufacturing them?”

  Johnson sputtered, “What’re you talking about? We didn’t know Ray had anything to do with that. He said it was traffic tickets.”

  “It’s murder, Darrell,” Virgil said. “When did he leave?”

  A couple more bikers had eased up to the conversation, including a woman with a plastic bowl of potato salad. Before Johnson could answer, one of the other bikers said, “I told you he was bad news. Something was up.”

  Johnson said, “Look, we came up here for this funeral. Those crazies are coming up, and we’re gonna get between them and this boy who got killed.”

  Virgil said, “I’m a veteran, Darrell. I appreciate what you do. But we got four bodies. We gotta deal with that.”

  Johnson nodded, and sighed. “He got out of here probably fifteen minutes after we rode in. He went out the back. He said he was meeting a friend here.”

  “You see the friend?”

  A few more of the bikers had stepped up. “I did,” one of them said. “He was driving a piece-of-shit old white Ast
ro van. Said something on the side about carpet service. Somebody’s carpet-cleaning service. I think they put the bike inside of it.”

  Virgil nodded. “Thanks for that. Now, could you ask this guy in the red shirt to come over here? We don’t want to disturb anybody, but we need to talk.”

  The guy in the red shirt was named Bill Schmidt. “He said he was dodging parking tickets,” Schmidt said, not quite whining. “I don’t know anything about any murders. He said the cops had a scofflaw warrant out for him.”

  Schmidt said Bunton was headed for the res, that a cousin had picked him up. He asked, “Are you gonna arrest me?”

  “Not unless I find out you’re holding something back,” Virgil said. “This is serious stuff, Bill.”

  “He said traffic tickets . . .”

  Virgil looked at Hunt: “He sucker punched me again.”

  VIRGIL LEFT Hunt and the others in Grand Rapids, put the truck on Highway 2 and headed northwest toward Bemidji, and called into the BCA regional office. The agent in charge, Charles Whiting, said he would touch base with every cop and highway patrolman between Grand Rapids and Red Lake.

  “We can’t play man-to-man, we’ve gotta set up a zone defense,” Virgil said. “We need to get as many people as we can, sheriff’s deputies and patrolmen and any town cops who want to go along, get them up on the east and south sides of Red Lake.”

  “ ’Bout a million back roads up there.”

  “I know, but hell—he’s trying to make time, he won’t be sneaking around the lakes, he’ll try to get up there quick as he can. If we flood the area up there, keep people moving, we should spot him.”

  “Flood the area? Virgil, we’re talking about maybe twenty guys between here and Canada.”

  “Do what you can, Chuck. I’m thinking he probably won’t risk Highway 2 all the way, there’ll be too many cops,” Virgil said. “He’d have to go through Cass Lake and Bemidji—I’m thinking he’s more likely to take 46 up past Squaw Lake and then cut over.”

  “What if he’s not going to Red Lake? What if he’s going to Leech Lake?”

  “Then he’s already there and we’re out of luck. But he’s enrolled at Red Lake, that’s where his family is, that’s where they know him. . . . You get the people up there, I’m getting off 2, I’m turning up 46.”

  Virgil figured Bunton and his cousin had a half hour head start. They’d be moving fast, but not too fast, to avoid attention from cops.

  Virgil, on the other hand, running with lights and occasionally with the siren, tried to keep the truck as close to a hundred as he could. He didn’t know exactly how far it was from Grand Rapids to Red Lake, but he’d fished the area a lot and had the feeling that it was about a hundred miles by the most direct route. Longer, if you were sliding around on back roads.

  Did the math; and he had to move his lips to do it. He’d take a bit more than an hour to get to Red Lake, he thought. If they had a thirty-mile jump on him, and were going sixty-five, and went straight through . . . it’d damn near be a tie. Even closer, if they were staying on back roads, where it’d be hard to keep an average speed over fifty.

  Red Lake, unlike the other Minnesota reservations for the Sioux and Chippewa, had chosen independence from the state and effectively ran its own state, and even issued its own license plates and ran its own law-enforcement system, including courts, except for major crimes. And for major crimes, the FBI was the agency in charge.

  In addition, the relationship between the Red Lake cops and the state and town cops had always been testy, and sometimes hostile.

  Though it wasn’t all precisely that clear, precisely that cut-and-dried. Some of the reservation’s boundaries were obscure, some of the reservation land had been sold off, scattered, checkerboarded. Sometimes, it wasn’t possible to tell whether you were on the res or off . . . and sometimes, maybe most of the time, all the cops got along fine. A complicated situation, Virgil thought.

  Virgil came up behind an aging Volkswagen camper-van, blew past, listened to the road whine; lakes and swamp, lakes and swamp, and road-kill. A coyote limped across the road ahead of him, then sat down on the shoulder to watch him pass, not impressed by the LED flashers.

  WHITING CALLED: “Got all the guys I can get and a bunch of crappie cops will help out, stay in their trucks instead of hitting the lakes.”

  “Okay, but tell those guys to take it easy,” Virgil said. “They’re a little trigger-happy.”

  “Yeah, well—I’m not going to tell them that,” Whiting said. “You tell them that.”

  “Chuck ...”

  “And listen, goddamnit, Virgil, you take it easy when you get up to Red Lake. We’ve got a decent working relationship with those folks, right now, and we don’t want it messed up.”

  “Chuck, you know me. I am the soul of discretion,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah. I know you,” Whiting said. “I’m telling you, take it easy, or I will personally kick your ass.”

  HE BURNED PAST Cut-Foot Sioux Lake, past Squaw Lake, made the turn at the Alvwood crossroads on Highway 13, which became 30 when he crossed the Beltrami County line, headed into Blackduck. Blackduck slowed him down, but he got through town, eating a sandwich from his cooler, drinking a Coke, paging through his Minnesota atlas, onto Highway 72 going straight north . . .

  Worried some more: he was getting close, and nobody had seen Bunton or the van. Maybe they had ditched in a cabin somewhere, or back in the woods, waiting for nightfall to make the final run in.

  Phone rang. Whiting: “Got them. Spotted them. They’re ten miles out of Mizpah. Running to beat the band, heading toward Ponemah ...”

  “Let me look, let me look . . .” Virgil fumbled with his maps. “Who we got on him?”

  “DNR guy, but he’s pulling a boat, he’s not gonna run them down,” Whiting said.

  “Ahh, I can’t read this map,” Virgil said; he was going too fast to track across the map pages.

  “Where are you?”

  “Uh, Highway 72, I went through Blackduck five minutes ago.”

  “Let me look on our maps . . . Okay. You’re gonna come out right on top of him,” Whiting said. “Let me give you a radio channel, you can talk to the DNR guy, and I’ve got a sheriff’s deputy I can pull down there, I think.”

  They found a mutual radio channel and Virgil got the DNR guy, who was shouting into his radio, “Man, they’re pulling away from me—they aren’t stopping, they got the best part of a mile on me, I just passed Hoover Creek, we’re not but five miles out of Kelliher . . .”

  Virgil was six or seven miles out of Kelliher; Jesus, it was going to be close. And Virgil was cranked. What nobody ever told the civilians was, a good car chase was a hoot, as long as you didn’t get killed or maimed, or didn’t kill or maim any innocent civilians.

  Sheriff’s deputy came up. “I’ll be in Kelliher in two minutes. Where is he, where is he?”

  “We’ll be there in one minute,” the DNR cop shouted. “I can see it, goldang it, he’s just about there, and with this boat, I’m all over the place.”

  Bunton’s van busted the intersection—never slowed. Virgil saw lights coming both from the east and the north, and said, “I’m a minute out, guys, let’s not run over each other. . . .”

  The sheriff’s car made the turn, then Virgil, with the DNR guy trailing. The deputy called, “We’re about twenty miles off the res, depending on how he does it. We’re asking for help there, but they’re not too enthusiastic.”

  “So we’re gonna have to push him off before he gets there.”

  The van was holding its distance, but Virgil closed on the deputy and said, “Let me get by here. If there’s a problem, we can let the state pay the damage.”

  The deputy let him by, and Virgil slowly pulled away from him but hardly closed in on the van. Two minutes, three minutes, and then the van made a hard bouncing left, and Virgil almost lost the truck in the ditch, had to fight it almost to a complete stop before he was okay, and then he punched it and they
were off again, and the deputy called, “Okay, there’s only one way in from here, you got a hard right coming up, but if we don’t get close before then, he’s gonna make it across the line.”

  Virgil let it all out, traveling way too fast, right on the edge of control, and began closing up on the van. Another two minutes, three minutes, and now he was only a hundred yards behind, freaking out, when the van suddenly slowed again and cranked right. Virgil was ready for it, and came out of the turn less than fifty yards behind.

  “Got another left,” the sheriff’s deputy screamed, and Virgil and the van went into the hard left and the deputy shouted, “They’re almost there.”

  Up ahead, Virgil could see a truck parked on the side of the road—not blocking it—and two men standing beside it, safely on the ditch side, looking down at Virgil and the van. That, Virgil thought, must be the finish line.

  He hammered the truck, closing in, and the van swerved in front of him, but Virgil saw it coming and went the other way, and with a quick kick he was up beside it, and he looked over at the other driver, who seemed to be laughing, pounding on the steering wheel, and Virgil said, aloud, “Fuck it,” and he moved right and as they came up to the parked truck he leaned his truck against the van and the van moved over and he moved close again, so close that the mirrors seemed to overlap; he moved over another bit.

  Waiting for the scrape of metal on metal: but the other driver chickened out, jammed on his brakes, tried to get behind Virgil, but Virgil slowed with him and in a dreamy slide, they slipped down the road to the parked truck and the van went in the left-hand ditch and Virgil was out with his gun in his hand, ignoring the two men in the parked truck, screaming, “Out of there, out of there, you motherfuckers.”

  Out of control. He knew it, and it felt pretty good and very intense, and if one of these motherfuckers so much as looked sideways at him he was going to pop a cap on the motherfucker. . . .