Heat Lightning

photography, that he might be out in North Dakota somewhere. Maybe I could put out a BOLO on his car, maybe with the North Dakota guys. I don’t know where to take it. . . .”
    “How are these Vietnamese finding this shit out?” Davenport demanded. “Where are they getting their information?”
    “Good fuckin’ question,” Virgil said. “I’ll talk to Sinclair about that.”
    “You said he wasn’t home.”
    “He’s not. I don’t know where the hell he is,” Virgil said. “He’s not answering his cell. Maybe he’s with the Viets—he was some kind of fruitcake left-winger. . . .”
    “So what’re you gonna do?”
    “I’m going to put Shrake outside Sinclair’s house. If he comes back, we nail him. I’m gonna head down to the office, start working the phones. Honest to God, we gotta find Knox. Maybe tomorrow morning we could drop something in the media, something that would get him to call in.”
    “If he sees it,” Davenport said. “Man, you gotta do better than this. You just gotta do better than this.”
     
 
THEY SOUNDED pretty good, Virgil thought after he rang off. He’d have bought it.
    Virgil stopped first at the BCA office, transferred his outdoors duffel to a state car, including head nets and cross-country ski gloves, good for shooting and fending off mosquitoes. From the BCA equipment room, he got armor and an M16 and five magazines and two night-vision monoculars. Driving the state car, he stopped at the motel, picked up a jacket, and traded his cowboy boots for hiking boots.
    Davenport called: “Got you a plane. They’ll pick you up at the St. Paul airport. They’re starting three guys to International Falls from Bemidji, but it’s a ride. It’ll take a while.”
    “It’ll take Mai longer, unless they’re flying,” Virgil said. “If they’re flying, they still won’t be that far in front of us. I’m gonna try to call Knox, too. Tell him to get the fuck out.”
    “Tell him to leave the lights on,” Davenport said. “Tell him to leave a car in the driveway. We need to pull them in there. We need to get this done with.”
    VIRGIL CALLED Knox, and this time the phone was answered. Virgil identified himself and was told that Knox was in bed. “Then get him out of bed,” Virgil said. “I need to talk to him, now.”
    Knox came up a minute later. “What happened?”
    “Warren got hit. He’s dead. The killers are a Vietnamese intel team, apparently after revenge for the ’75 murders.”
    “I had nothing to do with that,” Knox said with some heat.
    “Well, they don’t know that—or they don’t give a shit,” Virgil said. “Anyway, they’re headed your way. They know where you are.”
    A few seconds of silence, then; “How would they find that out?”
    “Hell, man, I put our researcher on it, and she found your place in an hour,” Virgil said. “You pay taxes on it and deduct them from your income tax. That is, if you’re on the Rainy River, outside of International Falls.”
    “Sonofabitch.” A moment of silence. Then: “You don’t think they’re here yet?”
    “Not yet. Not even if they’re flying,” Virgil said. “I’m flying up now, I’ve got guys started up from Bemidji and Red Lake, and we’re gonna ambush them. I need to know how to get into your place.”
    Knox gave him directions, right down to the tenth of the mile. “It’s dark out here. If you get lost, you stay lost.”
    “I’ll find it. I got GPS directions to the end of your driveway. I just wasn’t too sure about the roads out there,” Virgil said. “In the meantime, you oughta get out of there.”
    “Think so?”
    “Yeah. There’s nothing you can do at this point,” Virgil said. “Don’t use your cell phones, they might have some way to track them. Just go out somewhere to a resort and get a place for overnight.”
    “I’ll leave a guy here, tell you about the security systems,” Knox said. “He can help you out.”
    “That’d be great,” Virgil said.
    “Okay, then. Good luck. I’m outa here.”
    And he was gone.

26
    THE PILOT’S name was Doug Wayne. He was a small, mustachioed highway patrolman who looked like he should be flying biplanes for Brits over France; he was waiting in his olive-drab Nomex flight suit in the general aviation pilots’ lounge at St. Paul’s Holman Field.
    Virgil came through carrying a backpack with a change of clothes, the ammo and the nightscopes and a range finder and two radios, a plastic sack with two doughnuts