Heat Lightning

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