Heat Lightning (23 page)

"Like I said, I got a guy," Virgil said. "I don't know if he's involved, but I'm going after him."

"Like soon?"

"Like tomorrow morning," Virgil said. "You guys: stay in touch."

"We will. You stay in touch with us, too," Jarlait said. "If something happens, and we can get in on it, we want in."

Chapter
16

VIRGIL FOUND a bed at the RootyToot Resort on Candi Lake, a place with tumbledown brown-painted fake log cabins and beds that were too short, and mattresses that were too thin, and pillows that were flat and hard and smelled like hair and Vaseline; but that also rented fourteen-foot aluminum boats with 9.9-horse Honda kickers, that came with the cabin and he could take out anytime.

Virgil had stayed there twice before and didn't mind having a beer or two with the resort's alcoholic owner, Dave Root, though at five o'clock in the morning, Root was unconscious and Virgil took a key out of a mailbox, left a note on Root's door, and checked himself in.

He lay in bed and thought about God and the people who were dead on this case, and who'd died years ago in Vietnam, if Ray Bunton had been telling the truth, and wondered what all that was about, and how somebody like the dumb-ass preachers on TV could think this could all be part of God's Plan.

God didn't have a plan, Virgil believed.

God had His limits, and one of them was, He didn't always know what would happen; or if He did know, He didn't care; or if He cared, He was constrained by His own logic and couldn't do anything about death and destruction. Virgil believed that God was actually a part of a rolling wave front, hurtling into an unknown future; and that humans, animals and, possibly, trees and chinch bugs had souls that would rejoin God at death.

Which brought him to Camus' big question, and he didn't like to think about Camus, so he went to sleep.

He woke up at eight, bone-tired, rushed through a shower, got his musky rod out of the car and his emergency tackle box and walked down to the boat, pushed it off; heard a man yelling at him, looked back and saw Root, standing on the grass shore, barefoot, in black Jockey shorts and a white T-shirt.

Root shouted, "Hey, big ballplayer," and he heaved a perfect, twenty-yard spiral pass and Virgil plucked a bottle of Miller Genuine Draft out of the air, ice cold. "Back in an hour," Virgil called, and he headed across the lake, into the wind, to the far shoreline, where he set up a drift and began casting along the edge of a weed bank.

The water was clear and the sun was on his back and he could see into the water as though it were an aquarium, and it all smelled wonderful, like pine and algae and fish, and nothing at all like a blood-soaked car. In forty-five minutes, in three drifts, he caught two hammer-handle northerns, threw them back, and had a follow from a decent, but not great, musky. He was happy to see the fish in the water and he worked a figure eight, trying to get it to strike, and finally gave up, sat down, and cracked the Miller.

The beer was pretty much dog piss, he thought as he drank it, but not bad on a morning that was cold on the verge of turning hot. He finished the beer and dropped the bottle in the bottom of the boat. He felt like a horse's ass for doing it, but took out his cell phone and checked for messages.

Two: Davenport and Carl Knox.

He stared at the Knox call for a moment, then clicked through to the number, and sat there on the bench seat looking at a woman and a small girl fly-fishing on the far shore, the woman showing the girl how to roll a cast out over the water, and Knox answered after two rings.

"Virgil Flowers, BCA, returning your call," Virgil said.

"Flowers--where are you?"

"Bemidji," Virgil said.

"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."