Heat Lightning

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.

12

IN THE TRUCK, Virgil backed in a circle, careful on the narrow road, held a palm up to the deputy, and headed back east, away from the reservation.

“Where’re we going?” Bunton asked. One hand was pulled forward and down between his legs, almost under the seat, and Bunton was humped over and down.

“ Bemidji. I’m gonna put you in a little dark room in the county jail and I’m gonna kick your ass. By the time you get out of there, you’re gonna look like a can of Campbell ’s mushroom soup.”

“Ah, bullshit,” Bunton said. “Why don’t you undo my hand? This is gonna kill my back, riding to Bemidji this way.”

Virgil looked at him, sighed, pulled the truck over. “If you so much as twitch the wrong way, I’ll break your goddamn arm,” he said, and he got out, walked around the truck, unsnapped the cuff, and snapped it back onto the safety belt. As he was walking around to get into the truck again, the deputy rolled by, dropped his passenger-side window.

“If I were you, I’d get out of rifle range,” he said.

“Think I’m okay,” Virgil said.

The deputy shook his head. “Don’t call me again,” he said. “You might be okay, but I gotta roam around here on my own.”

Virgil opened his mouth to apologize, but the deputy was rolling away. The DNR guy came up, dropped his window, and said, “You’re the writer guy, huh?”

Virgil said, “Yeah, I do some writing.”

“I read that piece on ice-fishing on Winni… Wasn’t as bad as it might have been, but, anyway, you just weren’t drinking enough.” He said it with a smile.

“Well, thank you, I guess,” Virgil said.

“We got a regional meeting up here in September, we’re looking for a speaker…”

What he meant was cheap speaker. Virgil gave him a business card, told him he was available to talk if he could get the time off.

“We’ll be in touch,” the guy said. “Hell of a run; that’s why I love this shit. But I gotta tell you, man, it’s better in a boat.”

“I hear you,” Virgil said.

WHEN HE GOT BACK in the truck, Bunton had managed to dig a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and light it. Virgil said, “This is a no-smoking truck.”

“I’ll blow the smoke out the window,” Bunton said.

“One cigarette,” Virgil said, and he touched the passenger-window button and rolled it down.

Bunton nodded. “You lost. I made it across the line. You had to cheat to get me.”

“Wasn’t a race, Ray. There are four people dead now, and you know who did it,” Virgil said.

“No, I don’t.”

“Ray, goddamnit, you know something. What I want to know is, are there more people gonna get killed? Are you gonna get killed?”

“Maybe,” Bunton said. “But I need to talk to a lawyer.”

“Fuck a bunch of lawyers. Talk to me. I’ll give you absolution right here. Your sins won’t count.”

“How about the crimes?” Bunton asked.

“Those might count,” Virgil admitted. “But you’re obligated-”

Bunton cut him off. “Here is why I can’t talk to you, okay? I’ll tell you this.”

Virgil nodded. “Okay.”

Bunton thought it over for a minute, taking another drag on the cigarette, blowing the smoke out the side window. “I once did something that, if I tell you about it, I might get put in Stillwater. Not murder or anything. Not really anything that bad-not that I did, anyway. But if I go to Stillwater, I’ll get murdered just quicker’n shit. I won’t last a month, unless they put me in solitary, and even then, something could happen.”

“Okay…”

“And if I don’t tell you…” Bunton looked out at the low, crappy landscape. “If I don’t tell you, and you don’t catch this asshole who’s killing us… then I might get killed. Shit, I probably will get killed. So I don’t know what the fuck to do, but I got to talk to a lawyer.”

“We’ll get you a lawyer as soon as you heal up,” Virgil said.

“Heal up?”

“From me puttin’ you in that room and beatin’ the crap out of you.”

Bunton half laughed. “I had you figured out way back in the garage. You’re one of those good-old-boy cops. Now, if you were John Wigge, I might tell you what I know, because if I didn’t, Wigge’d get out a pair of pliers and start pulling off my balls.”

Virgil thought about Wigge for a moment, and the cut-off fingers.

“Let me tell you about Wigge,” Virgil said. “We found his body, but not at the rest stop. Whoever did this…”

He told Bunton about it, Bunton’s face stolid, like it had been carved from oak. When Virgil finished, Bunton took another drag and said, “I just… shit. I gotta talk to a lawyer.”

They rode along for a minute, and then Virgil said, “I’ll have a lawyer waiting for you in Bemidji. But you gotta make up your mind quick. Things are happening.”

“I’ll tell you what, I might be fucked,” Bunton said. They crossed a patch of swamp and he snapped his