Heat Lightning

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 our jungle. I walk around in these woods every day of my life. Gettin’ some of those Vietcongs in here, it’s like a gift from God.”
    “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 phone from his pocket and punched up the number he’d