small towns, clumps of light along I-35, the lights growing sparser as they diverged from the interstate route, heading slightly northwest.
“Gonna take a nap if I can,” Virgil said.
“Good luck,” Wayne said.
Virgil liked flying; might look into a pilot’s license someday, when he could afford it. He asked, “How much does a plane like this cost?”
“New? Maybe… four hundred thousand.”
He closed his eyes and thought about how a cop would get four hundred thousand dollars-write a book, maybe, but it’d have to sell big. Other than that…
The drone of the plane and darkness started to carry him off. He thought about God, and after a while he went to sleep. He was aware, at some point, that the plane was shuddering, and he got the elevator feeling, but not too bad; and when he woke up, his mouth tasting sour, he peered out at what looked like the ocean: an expanse of blackness broken only occasionally by pinpoints of light.
He cracked one of the Pepsis and asked, “Where are we?”
“You missed all the good stuff,” Wayne said. “Had a light show for a while, off to the east. We’re about a half hour out of International Falls. You were sleeping like a rock.”
“I’ve been hard-pushed lately,” Virgil said. He looked at his watch: nearly one in the morning. Took out his cell phone: no service.
“You won’t get service until we’re ten minutes out,” Wayne said. “We’re talking vast wasteland.”
VIRGIL TRIED AGAIN when they could see the lights of International Falls and Louis Jarlait came up. “We’re just out of town,” Jarlait said. “Where do you want to hook up?”
“Pick me up at the airport. We got some BCA guys coming up from Bemidji.”
“I talked to them. They’re probably a half hour behind us, they had to get their shit together.”
“Okay. I’ll get them on the phone, bring them into Knox’s place,” Virgil said. “We need to check at the airport and see if they had any small-plane flights in the last hour or so with some Vietnamese on board.”
“I’ll ask while we’re waiting for you.”
“Careful. You might walk in right on top of them.”
Virgil couldn’t reach the BCA agents from Bemidji: they were still too far out in the bogs.
WAYNE WAS going to turn the plane around and head back to the Cities. Virgil thanked him for the flight, and he said, “No problem. I love getting out in the night.”
Louis Jarlait and Rudy Bunch were waiting when Virgil came off the flight line: “No small planes, no Vietnamese,” Bunch said.
“So they’re traveling by car. That was the most likely thing anyway,” Virgil said. “They won’t be here for at least a couple of hours.”
They loaded into Bunch’s truck, Virgil in the backseat, and Virgil asked, “What kind of weapons you got? You got armor?”
“We got armor, we got helmets, we got rifles. We’re good,” Jarlait said. “Goddamn, I been waiting for this. I can’t believe this is happening.”
“You’ve been waiting for it?”
“I was in Vietnam when I was nineteen-coming up on forty years ago,” Jarlait said. “We’d send these patrols out, you could never find shit. I mean, it was their country. Those Vietcongs, man, they were country people, they knew their way around out there.” Jarlait turned with his arm over the seat so he could look at Virgil. “But up here, man-this is
“I don’t think they’re Vietcong,” Bunch said.
“Close enough,” Jarlait said.
“Yeah, about the time you’re thinking you’re creeping around like a shadow, one of them is gonna jump up with a huntin’ knife and open up your old neck like a can of fruit juice,” Bunch said.
Virgil was looking at a map. “Take a right. We need to get over to the country club.”
“Nobody gonna creep up on me,” Jarlait said. “I’m doing the creeping.”
THE DRIVEWAY into Knox’s place branched off Golf Course Road, running around humps and bogs for a half mile through a tunnel of tall overhanging pines down to the Rainy River. The night was dark as a coal sack, their headlights barely picking out the contours of the graveled driveway. Not a place to get into, or out of, quickly, not in the dark.
“Weird place to build a cabin,” Bunch said. “You’re on the wrong side of the falls-if you were on the other side, you’d be two minutes out of Rainy Lake.”
“He didn’t build it for the fishing,” Virgil said. “I think he built it so he and his pals can get in and out of Canada without disturbing anyone. The rumor is, he deals stolen Caterpillar equipment all over western Canada.”
Knox’s house was a sprawling log cabin, built from two-foot-thick pine logs and fieldstone; the logs were maple-syrup brown in the headlights. The house sat fifty yards back from the water on a low rise, or swell, above the rest of the land. A pinkish sodium-vapor yard light, and another one down by a dock, provided the only ambient light. Across the water, Virgil could see another light reflecting off a roof on the Canadian side.
“How far you think that is to the other side?” he asked Bunch as they parked. He was thinking about Warren, and how he’d been shot across the lake.
“Two hundred and fifty yards?”
“Further than that,” Jarlait said.
Virgil fished his range finder out of the backpack and, when they stepped out of the truck, put them on the distant roof. “Huh.”
“What is it?” Bunch asked.
“Three-eighty from here to the house over there.”
“Told you,” Jarlait said.
“I meant that the water was two hundred yards.”
“Yeah, bullshit…”
Virgil said, “The main thing is, I think it’s too long to risk a shot. They’ll have to come in on this side-they can’t shoot from over there.”
“I shot an elk at three-fifty,” Bunch said.
“Guy’s a lot smaller than an elk… and there’re enough trees in the way that they can’t be sure they’d even get a shot. If they’re coming in, it’ll be on this side.”
A MAN SPOKE in the dark: “Who are you guys?”
He was so close, and so loud, that Virgil flinched-but he was still alive, so he said, “Virgil Flowers.”
He saw movement, and the man stepped out of a line of trees. He was carrying an assault-style rifle and was wearing a head net and gloves. “I’m Sean Raines, I work for Carl. Better come in, we can work out what we’re gonna do.”
Inside, the place was simply a luxury home, finished in maple and birch, with a sunken living room looking out across the river through a glass wall, and a television the size of Virgil’s living-room carpet. Raines was a compact man wearing jeans and a camouflage jacket. He peeled off the head net to reveal pale blue eyes and a knobby, rough-complected face; like a tough Kentucky hillbilly, Virgil thought.
Virgil asked, “What about the windows?”
“Can’t see in,” Raines said. “You can’t see it from this side, but they’re mirrored. How many guys you think are coming?”
“Probably three,” Virgil said. “Two guys and a woman. They’ve got a rifle-hell, they probably got anything they want.”
“They any good in the woods?”
“Don’t know,” Virgil said.
“It’s gonna be just us four?” Raines asked.
“We got three more guys coming from Bemidji, oughta be here pretty quick.” As he said it, Virgil pulled his
