Heat Lightning

by John Sandford

  “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.

  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.”

  “Of course,” the shooter said. He was in the back of the van, going through the garbage he’d accumulated during the drive up from the Twin Cities. “So if I need to take a police officer . . .”

  “If we have no choice, we have no choice.”

  The shooter rang off, risked a light, found what he’d been looking for—two plastic grocery sacks. He put the sacks in his jacket pocket, then took off his jacket. Using his penknife, he cut out the rayon lining.

  He could lose Bunton while he did all of this, he knew, but he also knew that he couldn’t tolerate even a half hour in the wood, with the insects. When the lining was free, he carefully wrapped it around his head, mummylike, until nothing was open except a small breathing hole and his eyes. He got his sunglasses off the passenger seat and stuck them in his jacket pocket with the plastic bags.

  When he was ready, he got his equipment and walked back through the woods to Bunton’s house, slipping and sliding in the oily slime at the edge of the marsh. By the time he got there, he was wet and muddy to the knees, and his Italian shoes felt as though they were about to dissolve.

  He sat at the end of the woods and listened, then quietly pulled the plastic sacks over his hands to fend off the mosquitoes. Moving slow as a glacier, he crept through the woods to a point directly behind Bunton’s house, watched, listened, waited, then crossed the dark backyard to the outer wall of the house.

  NO AIR-CONDITIONING, nothing between the shooter and the target but some screens—and two other people. A television was going inside, and two men and a woman were talking a rambling, desultory conversation as they watched a rerun of American Idol. At one point, the woman said, “Hey, Ray? Could you get that?”

  The shooter didn’t know what that was, but there was at least one Ray in the house. He settled down to listen, against the wall of the house, like a lump, or a boulder, next to the electric meter, listening. The mosquitoes came for his eyes: he put on the sunglasses and bunched the fabric around them. He couldn’t see much, but there wasn’t much to see. A few cars went past, but not many. There wasn’t much down the road. The woman inside, he learned, was named Edna; Ray called her Ma. The other man was Olen.

  The shooter wondered if there were poisonous snakes in Minnesota. . . .

  SOME TIME LATER, he wasn’t sure how long, but long enough to get stiff in his bones, he heard Ray say something about “Going to get some toilet paper. Want anything else?”

  “Oatmeal, for breakfast . . . maybe some eggs, if you want scrambled eggs.”

  The shooter broke cover, eased around the back of the house, crawled up the far side, watching the end house, looking for people who might glance out a window. Two of the windows had no curtains, but the others were closed off. He saw no one, no movement.

  He made it to the front of the house, the side next to the garage. He’d been there two minutes when the front door opened, and Ray and the cop came out on the porch, and the cop stretched and said, “Cold,” and Ray said, “Let me get my jacket,” and he went back inside the house. The officer lit a cigarette and ambled down to the car, and the shooter processed it all: two men
, one dark street, getting darker as it went through the woods. No traffic.

  If he took them here, he had to think about the woman: if she saw him, he’d have to take her, too. It wouldn’t be the odd dead officer, it’d be a massacre. The bodies were already beginning to stack up, beginning to get intense coverage from the media.

  He decided, and turned, and moved as silently as he could back down the garage wall, across the backyard and into the trees, and then, using a tiny button flash, he ran as best he could through the trees toward the van. Behind him, he heard the police car start, and he ran faster, and he heard the car door slam and he crossed the trail to the lake, ran down to the van, climbed in, tore the jacket from his head, and threw the van into a circle and banged back to the main road.

  The cop car was taking it easy, and the shooter caught them a mile down the road, in the dark, coming up fast. On the way, he’d called the scout: “Come in now,” he said. “North on that road.” Nothing to identify location.

  When he caught them, he began flashing his high beams, blasting them through the cop car’s back window, and the cop turned on his flashers and pulled over, and the shooter pulled in behind him and jumped out of the car and ran to the police car, as if he were looking for help, and the cop, not thinking, cracked the door and the shooter shot him in the head and yanked the door open and pointed the gun at Ray’s face and said, “Get out. Get out.”

  The cop had collapsed in his seat and now slid out the open door, and Ray, eyes staring, fumbled at the door handle. The shooter kept the gun on him, the muzzle pointing at his eyes, and pushed the door open, and the shooter, fast as a snake, vaulted the hood of the car, sliding across it, to Ray’s side.

  Ray lurched back into the car and slammed the door and fumbled at the cop and the shooter realized he was going for the cop’s gun and he fired two quick shots through the window into Ray’s legs and then slid across the hood again and thrust the pistol into Ray’s face and said, “I’ll kill you now. Get out.”

  Ray said, “I’m hit.”

  “Get out. Get out.”

  Ray got out, holding on to the door, and screamed when his feet hit the ground, and he called, “I’m hit; shit, I’m hit bad.”

  When Ray was well clear of the door, the shooter pulled back and ran through the headlights, keeping the gun trained on Ray, who was holding himself up on the far door, and the shooter came around and said, “Walk to the van.”

  Ray said, “I can’t walk.”

  “Then crawl.”

  Ray turned to look at the van, and the shooter stepped closer, worried that he was about to fall, and then Ray slammed the door and charged him, head down, legs working fine, and Ray caught the shooter’s shirt in one hand and yanked on him and the shooter thrust him aside and Ray twisted and came back for him and the shooter fired and hit him in the heart and Ray went down and died.

  THE SHOOTER was counting time in his head. The whole thing, at this point, had taken perhaps thirty seconds, from the time he killed the cop until he killed Ray. He needed time to move. He ran back around the police car, pushed the cop back inside, scanned the controls, killed the light bar. The car was still running, and he shifted it into gear and pushed it farther to the side of the road, got it straight, turned off the engine, and slammed the door.

  Bunton.

  He spent five seconds looking up and down the long dark road: nothing but the lights of his own van. He dragged Bunton to the van by the collar of his jeans jacket, threw him in the back.

  Wiped his hands on his pants: what was he forgetting?

  Nothing that he could think of.

  Except the error. Another mistake. Another dead man, but no name. These people were tougher than he’d been led to believe. Utecht had been soft and easy, and that had misled them.

  Cursing, he got on the phone. “Abort it. Two down. Coming out.”

  THE SHOOTER rolled through the dark, fast but careful, putting Red Lake behind him. Only one name left now. The scout had needed to speak to Bunton. Needed to isolate him, to work on him. But what could you do in a place like this? The scout had told him that if he spent one hour on the res, in the open, everybody would be looking at him, everybody would know the van.

  The group had one more target that they knew of: the next target they had to isolate, they had to talk to, or the game was over.

  He followed his headlights through the dark, now sickened by the smell of raw blood in the back. He reached across to the grocery sack on the seat, took out the lemon, scratched the rind, held the lemon to his nose to kill the scent of the blood.

  The lemon didn’t work.

  The smell of blood, the shooter realized, had soaked into his brain: it was there forever. He would never escape it. Never.

  15

  THE NIGHT was full of stars and night lights, like a Van Gogh painting, and Virgil followed the red taillights of a million cars headed toward cabin country. He got off at the I-35 rest stop where Wigge had been shot and David Ross was killed, to take a leak at the restroom and to look at the scene again. There was no sign of a murder, and a young couple and two children were sitting at the pavilion in back, near the murder scene, eating white-bread sandwiches in the light of a fluorescent camping lantern.

  On the way out the exit ramp, a tall thin blond kid with a backpack stuck his thumb out, and Virgil pulled over and popped the door. “Where you going?”

  “Duluth. Trying to get a ship out.”

  “I can take you most of the way,” Virgil said.

  The kid looked at all the lights on the dash as he settled down and asked, “Are you a police officer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know I’m not supposed to hitchhike along here—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Virgil said. “Not many roads out here that I didn’t hitchhike over.”

  The kid, whose name was Don, had come off a farm outside of Blooming Prairie, had done a year at the University of Minnesota, working nights at UPS, throwing boxes, and finally realized that the whole thing wasn’t for him.

  “I was too tired to read, and the university . . . the place is sunk in bullshit,” he said. “I tried to figure out how long it would take me to get through, and it might take me six years, going full time, because there’s so much bullshit that you can’t even figure out ahead of time what you need to take to graduate.”

  Virgil had gone to the university, and they talked about that and looked at the stars, and the kid confessed that he had all three volumes of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. in his pack, and had read them so often that they were falling apart, and that he had just started Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and that he couldn’t get over the second paragraph.

  He quoted part of it from memory: “In the offing the sea and sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.”

  “London,” he said. “I’d give my left nut to go to London.”

  “You got a ship for sure?” Virgil asked.

  “I got a guy who says he’s got one, for sure. I’m probably gonna be lifting weight, but I don’t care—heck, I grew up on a dairy farm. There’s no ship that could be harder than that.”

  Virgil thought he was probably right, and wished for a moment that he was going with him.

  He dropped the kid at the I-35 intersection east of Moose Lake and cut cross-country to the west, thinking about the lakes he knew, and where he might bag out for the night, and still get a good couple of hours on the water before he had to move in the morning.

  The lights of Duluth were fading off the far eastern horizon when his cell phone rang. He glanced at it, saw that it came from the northern Minnesot
a area code, thought Ray, and then Ray’s gonna tell me something . . .

  He flipped open the phone and a man on the other end said, “Virgil Flowers? This is Rudy Bunch. The Red Lake cop?”

  The young one. Virgil said, “Hey. How’s it going?”

  “Not so good, man. We’re in deep shit up here. We’ve got a dead cop and Ray’s gone.”

  Virgil peered into the dark; it was something like an embolism—part of his brain shut down for a minute. Then: “What?”

  “Somebody shot Olen Grey on the side of the road. He was watching Ray. Ray’s gone,” Bunch said.

  “Ray shot him?”

  “We don’t know what happened, but . . . I think maybe somebody took Ray. We’re calling both the state and the feds. Where are you at? St. Paul?”

  “No, no, I’m heading your way, I’m over by Grand Rapids,” Virgil said. He was still befuddled. “Man, what’re you telling me here? When was this? Have you closed down the roads?”

  “No. We’re pretty sure it happened an hour and a half ago. Olen and Ray were going to buy groceries and Ray’s mom saw them leave. Then a guy named Tom Broad was driving out and he saw Olen’s car sitting kind of in a ditch, and he thought that was strange, but it was a cop car, so he didn’t do nothin’. Then he was driving back out to his house and saw the car still sitting there, so he stopped and looked and he could see Olen dead in the front seat. He called us, and . . . that’s what happened. There’s blood on the passenger side and there’s bullet holes in the passenger-side window, and shit, I think somebody took Ray.”