Heat Lightning

11

THE PHONE RANG.

Virgil was facedown on the bed: no coherent thought, just a lizard-like twitch. The phone didn’t quit. He finally crawled across the bed and flipped it open, noticing, before he did it, that it was 5:23. He’d been in bed for a little more than an hour.

The duty guy: “Man, Virgil, I hate to do this to you.”

Virgil groaned. “They found Wigge?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah, the lemon in the mouth, the whole thing.”

“Where is he?” Virgil asked.

“You know up on Capitol Hill, the Vietnam veterans’ monument by the Veterans Service Building? Not the name wall, but the green statue?”

“Ahhh… jeez.” One of the best-known public spaces in the state, not ten minutes from where Virgil was lying.

“The St. Paul cops are there,” the duty man said.

“Tell them that I’m on the way.”

“Virgil… you know, the veterans’ monument isn’t the worst of it.”

“Huh?”

“The St. Paul cops say it looks like Wigge, was, uh…”

“What?”

“… was crucified.”

THE VETERANS’ MONUMENT is more or less on the front lawn of the enormous white state Capitol Building. The emerald-green lawn, the size of several football fields, stretched from the steps of the Capitol, down a broad hill dotted with monuments and flanked by government buildings, almost to the interstate highway that went through St. Paul, and looked toward downtown St. Paul and the Mississippi.

Virgil had taken two minutes to stand in the shower before he dressed and rolled out, hair still wet. In the parking lot, he found his truck hemmed in between a van and a sedan, so closely that he could barely get the door open without dinging the van: always something, he thought, when you were in a crazy hurry.

Wigge’s body was beside the parking lot for the Veterans Service Building, and that’s where he found the usual clump of cop cars. He waved his ID at the cop at the entrance to the parking lot, dumped the truck, and walked through the early-morning light down to a gaggle of cops gathered at the statue. Waters, the cop who’d met Virgil at Wigge’s house, was among the dozen uniforms and three detectives, and he stepped over to Virgil and said, “This is bullshit, man. This is stickin’ it right up our ass.”

“Wigge for sure?”

“What’s left of him,” Waters said, his voice grim. “You’re not gonna believe this. And there ain’t no way we’re gonna keep it off TV-it looks like he was nailed up, or something. Like Jesus.”

WHEN VIRGIL had worked with St. Paul, he’d not known Wigge well, more to nod at than to talk to. When he looked down at the body, his first thought was, Time passes. Wigge was an old man. He hadn’t been old when Virgil knew him, but he was old when he was murdered.

“Hell of a goddamned thing.” Tim Hayes was a longtime St. Paul detective. A gaunt man, but with a small beer belly, he was watching the crime-scene people work over the body. “I understand you were looking for him up north.”

“Yeah.” Virgil pointed down the hill. “You see that building, that warehouse with the old painted sign on it? A guy who lives there was murdered off I-35 tonight and Wigge was with him, I think. There’s some blood on the ground up there, and I think it was Wigge’s. We’ll match it.”

“He probably spent some time wishing he’d died, before he did,” Hayes said. “Look at this…” They edged up to the body, which had been planted under a bronze statue of a Vietnam veteran, and Hayes said, “Look at his hands.”

He had no fingers or thumbs. The palms were all that remained, and in the center of each palm was a bloody hole. Virgil shook his head. “Ah, man. Ah, Jesus.”

“See that sack?” Hayes pointed at an ordinary brown paper grocery sack, the kind that might have held three cans of beer. “His fingers are in there. They didn’t just cut them off, they cut them off one joint at a time. With a pair of nippers of some kind. Brush cutters; tin snips. Something like that. I think there were, like, twenty-eight individual cuts. They tortured the shit out of him. He had bare feet, the bottom of his feet looked burned… they focused on his hands and his feet.”

Crucified; but Virgil didn’t think of Jesus, but of Jezebel, in 2 Kings 9:35, lying in the streets of Jezreel, and when the dogs were done, nothing was left but the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet.

Wigge was faceup; and between his gray lips, Virgil could see the yellow of the lemon.

“The shit’s gonna hit the fan today,” Virgil said, standing up, fighting the sour taste in his throat. “People are gonna be screaming for blood.” He looked down toward the town. “Republicans gonna be here in a month, everybody’s getting dressed up, and we got a crucified ex-cop on the front lawn of the state Capitol. Mother. Fucker.”

He called Davenport: seven o’clock in the morning in Washington, and Davenport rarely got up before nine. Davenport answered with “It can’t be that bad.”

“It’s worse,” Virgil said.

DAVENPORT LISTENED as Virgil told him about the night, starting with the call from Bunton, through the murders off I-35, to the body at the Capitol. When he finished, Davenport said, “I’ll call you back in five minutes or less.”

Virgil walked around, looking at the scene, oblivious to the growing roar of cars on the I-35 as the rush hour started. The television crews would be here anytime, and the politicians would jump in with both feet. Since there was nothing useful they could do, they’d start looking for somebody to blame. The whole thing would spin out of control…

A cop came by: “What’re you going to do about it?”

“What I am doing: try to find the guy who did this,” Virgil snapped.

“Try harder,” the cop said, squaring off a little. “Wigge was one of us.”

“Why don’t you go find the guy?” Virgil asked. “Gotta go write traffic tickets or some shit?”

Another nearby cop said, “Take it easy…”

DAVENPORT CALLED: “I yanked Rose Marie out of bed, she’s gonna do damage control,” he said. “I’m coming back, but I can’t get out until almost noon here. I won’t be back until late afternoon. Listen: we’re putting out the usual stuff to the media, Rose Marie will take care of it. But you gotta move. You gotta move, Virgil. What about Bunton?”

“I will get him today,” Virgil said. “So help me God.”

“I’ll call Carol and tell her to get into the office. We’ll start working the phones, we’ll push everybody to find him. TV is gonna be all over us anyway, we might as well put it out there.”

VIRGIL CHECKED the time, got a Minneapolis address for Ralph Warren, the owner of the security company, and headed that way. Found it, a white-stucco and orange-tile-roof Spanish-looking place off Lake of the Isles. Each square foot of the lot, Virgil thought, as he eased into the driveway, was worth more than his truck.

When he got out, a big man stepped out of the front porch, and then another came from the garage end of the driveway, both wearing black nylon windcheaters, both of them with their hands flat on their stomachs, as if they were holding in their guts. Actually, he knew, their hands were a quarter inch from a fast-draw weapon.

He called, “Virgil Flowers, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, here to see Mr. Warren.”

“Mr. Warren isn’t up yet,” said the man at the front door. Virgil was walking up the driveway, and the man said, “You should stop right there until we confirm your identity.”

“Get Warren,” Virgil said. He held up his ID.

The big man said something back into the house, and a third man looked out, nodded, and said, “Come on up to the porch.”

Virgil walked to the porch, and the third man said, “Can I ask why you need to talk to Mr. Warren?”

“Because one of his vice presidents just got chopped into pieces about the size of a cocktail weenie, and that was after they crucified him,” Virgil said. “Now, you wanna get him out of bed?”

“Who?” the man asked, but he was believing it.

“John Wigge.”

“Are you shittin’ me?”

“Can I talk to Warren, or what?”

VIRGIL WAITED in the entry, under the eye of the biggest of the three security men, while they got Warren. Warren was a man of middle height, an inch or two under six feet, with deep-set black eyes, a small graying mustache, and a gray scrubby-looking soul patch under his lower lip. He came out wearing a black silk dressing gown with scarlet Japanese characters on it, like the bad guy in a TV movie; if you squinted at him, he looked a little like Hitler.

“John Wigge…”

“… and David Ross.”

“… and Ross, too?” Warren was astonished, but not astonished enough. Virgil thought, He knows something.

“They were ambushed at a meeting with Ray Bunton at a rest stop up north on I- 35,” Virgil said. “Do you know what they were talking about? Why they were meeting?”

“I don’t know any Ray Bunton,” Warren said. “Is this about the veterans thing?”

“If you don’t know, how did you put that together?” Virgil asked.

“John told me. He said he knew the guys who were killed,” Warren said. “That’s why he had Dave Ross hanging out with him.”

“But why are you stacking up with security?” Virgil tipped his head toward the bodyguard still in the room. The other two had moved back to their posts, wherever they were. “Three guys around the clock?”

Warren shook his head. “Nothing to do with that. I’m providing security for the convention. I’ve got two hundred guys in it, armed-response guys, bodyguards. I’ve got plans for the whole works right here in my briefcase, and the Secret Service requires, you know-they require that we keep it all under guard. The plans, me, everything.”

“So this doesn’t have anything to do with Wigge?” Virgil was skeptical.

“No, no. This is strictly the convention,” Warren said. “You think this guy, the killer-you don’t think he’d come after… people who know John?”

Virgil shrugged. “We don’t know what he’s doing, Mr. Warren. So the security is not a bad idea. But you’re telling me that you didn’t know about this meeting, about what’s going on. Wigge never told you anything about it?”

“I think it might go back to his cop days-he said the Mafia might be involved,” Warren said.

“The Mafia.” Virgil let the skepticism show.

“That’s what he said.”

“In Minnesota?” Virgil asked.

“The Mafia is here,” Warren said. “If you don’t believe that, I can’t help you.”

“I know it’s here-I know both guys,” Virgil said. “Their average income last year was fourteen thousand dollars, from delivering pizza.”

They talked for another five minutes, but Warren didn’t know what was going on; he wanted a few details about Wigge’s death, shook his head when Virgil told him about the torture.

“Why did they torture him?” he asked.

“They must think he knows something. They’re trying to find something out. I don’t know what that is.”

“Well, I sure as shit don’t-”

The conversation was interrupted by Virgil’s cell.

Carol said, “We got a break, I think. I got a number for you, it’s a cop out in Lake Elmo.”

VIRGIL EXCUSED himself, walked out on the front lawn, and called Roger Polk, who was in Lake Elmo, all right, but turned out to be a Washington County deputy sheriff. “The Liberty Patrol is on a run up to Grand Rapids for a funeral-”

Virgil said, “Wait, wait. The Liberty Patrol?”

“Bunch of bikers who provide security for the funerals of guys who get killed in Iraq. You know-they’ve got these antiwar church goofs who show up at the funerals to scream at the kid’s parents? About how the kid deserved to die?”

“Yeah, I read something about that,” Virgil said.

“The Patrol backs them off. Anyway, they met yesterday after work, and rode up to Duluth, sixty of them, about, riding in a pack. They’re staying overnight in Duluth, and then they’re heading over to Grand Rapids. One of the guys’ wives is my sister-in-law, and she heard the thing on the radio, about Ray Bunton. She says that Ray Bunton was riding with them. She knows him. He’s gone before.”

“All right, all right. That’s good, that’s terrific,” Virgil said.

VIRGIL SAID GOOD-BYE to Warren, trotted back to his truck, got out his atlas. Minnesota is a big state, but a good part of the northern third, where Bunton was heading, was vacationland: thousands of cabins on hundreds of lakes, surrounded by thirty thousand square miles of forest, bogs, and prairie.

As long as Bunton stayed on a highway, it’d be possible to locate him. If he were headed into the Red Lake reservation, as his uncle said he was, he’d be a lot harder to find. There was a history of animosity between the Red Lake tribal cops and outside cops, especially when it came to arresting tribal members.

And if Bunton weren’t headed specifically to Red Lake, if he was planning to stop at one of the tens of thousands of cabins scattered all over hell, all off-highway, he’d be impossible to locate.

Best shot to catch him was on the highway and Bunton knew it-that was probably why he went up in a pack, using the other riders for cover.

VIRGIL GOT on the phone, talked to the highway patrol office in Grand Rapids. Because of the potential for trouble at the funeral, the Grand Rapids office knew where the Liberty Patrol was-still in Duluth. “They’re eating down on the waterfront, making a little tour of it, picking up some Duluth guys.”

“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 Astro 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…

He could hear people yelling behind him, and then the driver got out of the van with his hands over his head but still laughing, and then Ray Bunton got out on the other side and began running across the swampy scrub, and Virgil turned and shouted, “Watch this guy,” to whoever was behind him, and he took off after Bunton.

Virgil was in his thirties and ran on most nice nights. He liked to run. Bunton was sixty-something, had smoked since he was fourteen, and was wearing a leg brace. Virgil caught him in thirty yards, ran beside him for a second, and when Bunton looked at him, Virgil clouted him on the side of his head and the old man nose-dived into the dirt.

Virgil put a knee in the small of Bunton’s back, with some weight, pulled the cuffs out of his belt clip, and wrestled Bunton’s arms behind his back and cuffed his wrists.

“C’mon, dickhead,” he said, and pulled Bunton to his feet. As they came back to the trucks, and the van in the ditch, the DNR cop was just pulling up, trailing his boat. Two Indian men, one older, in his fifties, the other young, maybe twenty-five, were standing between Virgil and his truck. Neither one wore a uniform, but both were wearing gunbelts. “Where’re you going with him?” asked the older of the two.

“Jail,” Virgil said, tugging Bunton along behind.

Bunton said, “Don’t let him do it, Louis. I’m on the res.”

“You can’t have him, son,” the older man said. “You’re on reservation land.”

“Sue me,” Virgil said.

The two men stepped down to be more squarely between him and the truck, and the younger man dropped his hand to his gun and Virgil picked it up. “You gonna shoot me?” he demanded. He edged up closer to the younger one. “You gonna shoot me?” He looked at the sheriff’s deputy still at the side of the road, with the DNR guy coming up behind. “If these assholes shoot me, I want you to kill them.”

The deputy called, “Whoa, whoa, whoa…”

Virgil was face-to-face with the younger man. “C’mon, take your gun out and shoot me. C’mon. You’re not gonna pussy out now, are you?”

“Son-” the older man began.

“I’m not your son,” Virgil snapped. “I’m a BCA agent and this guy”-he jerked on Bunton’s arm-“is involved in the murders of four people. I’m taking him.”

“Not gonna let you do it,” the younger man said, and his hand rocked on the butt of his pistol. “If I gotta shoot you, then I’m gonna shoot you.”

Virgil was quick, and his pistol butt was right there. He had his gun out in an instant, and he stepped close to the younger man, who’d taken a step back, and he said, “Pull it out. C’mon, pull it out, Wyatt Earp. Pull the gun, let’s see what happens.”

“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” the older man said, his voice rising to a shout. “You’re crazy, man.”

“I’m taking him,” Virgil said.

“Louis…” Bunton said.

The older man’s eyes shifted to Bunton. “Sorry, Ray. Little too much shit for a quarter-blood. Maybe if we had some more guys here…”

The younger man looked at Louis, said, unbelieving, “We’re gonna let him take him?”

“Shut up, stupid,” the older man said. “You want a bunch of people dead for Ray Bunton? Look at this crazy fuckin’ white man. This crazy white man, he’s gonna shoot your dumb ass bigger than shit.”

He turned back to Virgil. “You take him, but there’s gonna be trouble on this.”

“Fuck trouble,” Virgil snarled.

The younger man nodded. “I’ll come down there…”

But the tension had snapped. Virgil said to Bunton, “Come on.”

As they passed the sheriff’s deputy, the deputy said, “That was pretty horseshit,” and to Louis, “Man, I’m sorry, Louis. This is a murder thing. I hate to see it go like this, you know that.”

Louis said, “I know it, but you got a crazy man there. Hey, crazy man-fuck you.”

Virgil gave him the finger, over his shoulder without looking back, and heard Louis start to laugh, and Virgil put Bunton in the truck, cuffed him to a seat support, shut the door. Then he stepped back and put his head against the window glass, leaning, and stood like that for a moment, cooling off.

After a moment, he walked back to the two Indians and said to the older man, “I’ll come and talk to you about this sometime. I drove from St. Paul to here at a hundred miles an hour-I’m not kidding. Hundred miles an hour, just to take this jack-off. He put me in the hospital a couple of days ago, and there really are four dead men down there, executed, shot in the head, and he knows about it. If you’d taken him on the res, you’d be up to your ass in FBI agents. This is better for everybody.”

“Well, you were pretty impolite about it,” Louis said.

“Yeah, well.” Virgil hitched up his pants. “Sometimes it just gets too deep, you know? You can have the other guy and the van, if you want them. I’m not interested in him.”

“Still gonna kick your ass,” the younger man said.

“Keep thinkin’ that,” Virgil said, and clapped him on the shoulder before he could step back, and walked back to his truck.

The DNR guy was there, looking stoned, like most of them do. “That was way fuckin’ cool,” he said.