Heat Lightning

area, buying, selling, and trading mostly Caterpillar machines. He also—law-enforcement people knew about it only through rumor—bought and sold large amounts of stolen Caterpillar equipment, and moved it in Canada north of the Fifty-fifth Parallel.
    “Half the stuff up in the oil fields came through Knox, one way or another,” Bunton said. “I was right there at the beginning.” His voice trailed off. “Jesus Christ, this is awful.”
    “Is he the guy you’re afraid of?” Virgil asked.
    “Damn right I am. He’s the fuckin’ Mafia, man,” Bunton said. “He needs to get rid of us. He’s got some shooters from fuckin’ Chicago on our ass.”
    “You know this for sure?”
    “Well—no. But who the fuck else is it gonna be?” Bunton asked. “Who else has the shooters?”
    “Tell me about it,” Virgil said.
    “I DON’T KNOW all of it,” Bunton said. “Back at the end of March 1975 . . . I’d been in Vietnam in ’69 and ’70, I’d been out for five years. Anyway, this guy calls me. John Wigge. Wasn’t on the cops yet—he’s just out of the service, Vietnam. I got no job, he’s got no job—but he says he’s got a guy who’ll pay us twenty grand in cash for two weeks’ work back in Vietnam. Two weeks at the most, but it might be a little hairy. Shit, we were young guys, we didn’t give a fuck about hairy.
    “The story was this guy, Utecht, the one that got killed—his father was this crazy guy who operated all over the Pacific, selling heavy equipment. He sold a lot of shit to the South Vietnamese. Anyway, this guy is in Vietnam, and the place is falling apart. The North Vietnamese were coming down, everybody was trying to get out.”
    “I’ve seen the embassy pictures, the evacuation,” Virgil offered.
    “Yeah, that was like a month later. Anyway, Utecht, the old man, is in Vietnam, and he finds this whole field of heavy equipment, mostly Caterpillars, D6s up to D9s, is gonna be abandoned there. Good stuff. Some of it is almost new. And everybody’s bailing out.
    “So he cuts some kind of crooked deal with the South Viets, and brings in a ship, and calls up his kid, and tells him to get some heavy-equipment guys together and get his ass over there. We’re gonna take this shit out of the country.”
    “Steal it?”
    “Well—save it from the North Vietnamese. The enemy.” Bunton grinned at Virgil, showing the nicotine teeth.
    “All right,” Virgil said.
    “So Utecht knows Wigge, and Wigge knows everybody else, and he starts calling people,” Bunton said. “I could drive a truck, I could figure out a Cat if I had to. Twenty grand. That was a shitload of money at the time. Two years’ pay. So six of us, young guys, Sanderson was one . . . we all flew out to Hong Kong and then right into Da Nang. Not all together, whenever we could get on a plane, but all within a couple of days.”
    “I’ve heard of Da Nang, but I don’t know about it,” Virgil said.
    “Da Nang? Big base in Vietnam. Port city. So we flew in, and Utecht, the old man, picked me up at the airport, and what I did was, I drove a lowboy. There were thirty fuckin’ D9 Cats sitting there and all kinds of other shit. . . . You know what a D9 is?”
    “No.”
    “Biggest fuckin’ Cat there was, at the time,” Bunton said. He dropped his cigarette on the street, stepped on it, shook another out of the pack. “Maybe still are. They used them to clear out forest. Go through a bunch of fuckin’ trees like grease through a goose. Anyway, there was thirty of them at Da Nang, and they were just sitting there, waiting for the NVA. So here we are, with this lowboy and a bunch of heavy equipment guys to get the tractors going and to run them—that was the other guys. I’d haul them out to the harbor, and they’d lift them onto the ship with this big fuckin’ crane. One of the guys told me that they were headed for Indonesia, they had some oil fields going there. . . . I mean, some of these dozers were like fuckin’ new.”
    “All the guys who’ve been killed were on this trip?” Virgil asked.
    “Yeah. Anyway, what happened was, I dropped off the last load at the port, wasn’t just these Cats, it was all kinds of shit. Everything they could get moving. After I brought in the last load, they even picked up the fuckin’ lowboy and took that on board. Then Chester—”
    “Utecht. Chester Utecht, the old guy.”
    “Yeah, that one,” Bunton said.
    “Okay . . .”
    “He’s dead now. Died about a year