Heat Lightning

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 cigarette into it. “My best chance would be up on the res. If I was up there, they couldn’t get at me. Even people who live up there, they can’t find you if you don’t want to be found.”
    Virgil said, “You said, ‘this asshole who’s killing us.’ Can you tell me who ‘us’ is?”
    Bunton shook his head. “Not until after I talk to the lawyer. ‘Us’ is part of the problem. ‘Us’ is why I want to get up in the woods.”
    HE WOULDN’T TALK about it anymore; he’d talk, but not about the killings. “I had enough dealings with the law to know when to keep my mouth shut,” he said.
    “Then you gotta know you’re in some fairly deep shit, Ray. When you whacked me on the head, put me in the hospital . . .”
    “The hospital ? You pussy.”
    “Hey, I didn’t ask to go. They took me in an ambulance, I was out .”
    “Didn’t mean to hit you that hard,” Bunton said.
    “Shouldn’t have hit me at all. Whacking me earned you two years in Stillwater, my friend. Ag assault on a police officer. And if you don’t want to be in Stillwater . . .”
    Bunton said, “It’s not Stillwater—it’s the guys who could get me killed in Stillwater. If you bust them, then Stillwater’s okay. Sort of like having really good Social Security. I could get my teeth fixed, for one thing, and maybe even my knees.”
    “So you’re saying that there are people outside , who could order you killed inside . Like dopers?” Virgil asked.
    “Fuck you,” Bunton said. “You’re trying to sneak it out of me. I ain’t talking to you anymore.”
    He did, but only about rock ’n’ roll. “What’s that shirt you’ve got on?” he asked. “Is that a band?”
    Virgil looked down at his chest. He was wearing his KMFDM “Money” shirt: “Yeah, over on the industrial end,” he said. “You know, they’re the guys who became MDFMK? Then they went back to KMFDM. And I think a couple of them spun off and became Slick Idiot at some point.”
    That was more information than Bunton needed. “The only fuckin’ slick I know is Gracie Slick,” Bunton said. “Fuckin’ ABC, DEF.”
    Bunton liked the old stuff, acid and metal, narrative music, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother, middle Byrds, Black Sabbath up to AC/DC, and some of Aerosmith and even selected Tom Petty; and some outlaw country.
    Virgil tuned his satellite radio to a golden-oldie station and Steppen-wolf came up with “Born to Be Wild.”
    “That’s what I’m talkin’ about,” Bunton said, slapping time on the dashboard with