Heat Lightning

ago, in Hong Kong, is what Wigge told me,” Bunton said. He had to think a minute, to get back to the thread of the story. “Anyway, Chester pulls up in this old fucked-up Microbus, and as soon as the lowboy was off the ground, going on the ship, we took off to get the other guys. This was about forty-five minutes each way, from the port to the equipment yard. Chester had airline tickets to get us out of there, spread over a couple of days, and two of the guys were going with the ship.
    “So we got back to the yard, and what do we find? I’ll tell you—these dumb fucks were all about nine-tenths loaded and they’d set this house on fire. . . . And they were fuckin’ arguing with each other . . . I mean like, they were freakin’ out about this house, and screaming at each other, and they had these M16s. Chester said, ‘Fuck it, we’re going,’ and we went. Me and another guy, who I think was Utecht, the younger one, the kid, but this is so fuckin’ long ago . . .”
    “Okay . . .”
    “Me ’n’ Utecht, we flew out of there, to Hong Kong, and then back to Minneapolis, through Alaska. Wigge went with the ship, I think, because I didn’t see him again, and somebody else went with him. Sanderson, I saw a year or so later. I asked him what happened with the house, and he said some chick got killed—that somebody started yelling at them from the house, I don’t why, and one of the guys got pissed. He was already drunk, and somebody started shooting, and one of these guys went into the house with an M16 and shot the place all up and maybe some chick got shot and I guess some old man got shot. Maybe some other people.”
    Virgil said, “Ray—you’re telling me some people got murdered?”
    “Yeah . . . maybe,” Bunton said. He shrugged. “Who knows? The fuckin’ place was going up in smoke. Thousands of people got killed. Maybe . . . hell, maybe it was self-defense.”
    “So why is this gonna get you killed?” Virgil asked. “What does Carl Knox have to do with it?”
    “One of the guys was Carl Knox,” Bunton said. “When Utecht got killed, Sanderson called me up. He was freakin’ out. He said Utecht had got Jesus, and called him a couple of times, after Chester died, and said Utecht was talking about confessing the whole thing.”
    “Ah, man,” Virgil said.
    “So I’m thinking, Carl Knox—he’s not exactly the Mafia, but he knows some leg-breakers for sure. If he was the one who killed the chick, and he heard about Utecht, and if he needed a hit man, I bet he could find one. Get one out of Chicago. If he needed to kill someone in prison, he could get that done, too. If he did the shooting. I mean, if there was a bunch of guys who said he did murder . . . You see what I’m saying? He kills Utecht to shut him up, but then he starts thinking, these other guys will know why. . . .”
    “There’s this thing—the victims have lemons in their mouths,” Virgil said. “Even Wigge . . . but not his bodyguard.”
    “Don’t know about that,” Bunton said. “But I believe it goes back to ’Nam.”
    “I’ve been told that when they executed guys in Vietnam, sometimes they’d stuff lemons in their mouths to keep them quiet,” Virgil said.
    “Don’t know about that, either.” Bunton crushed his second cigarette and lit a third. “All I know is, I want to stay out of sight until I know where this is coming from. If it’s Knox. I want to stay out of jail, stay out of sight.”
    Virgil counted them off on his fingers. “There was you, and Utecht, and Sanderson, and Wigge, and this old Utecht, Chester Utecht, and Knox . . . that’s it?”
    “There was one more guy,” Bunton said. “Damned if I know his name.”
    “When they tortured Wigge, maybe that’s what they were looking for,” Virgil suggested. “The last names. Your name and the other guy’s name.”
    “So that’s good for you, huh?” Bunton asked. “Can’t be more than two more murders.”
     
BY THE TIME they got back to the jail, it was almost dark. Smith, the chief deputy, and Carter, the attorney, were playing gin rummy, and Carter had a stack of pennies by her hand. She looked up when they came in and asked, “What happened?”
    “We need to call the Red Lake guys,” Virgil said. His cell phone rang, and he looked at it: Davenport. “I gotta take this,” he said. “You guys call Red Lake. I’m gonna run Ray out there.”
     
 
DAVENPORT SAID, “I’m on the ground in St. Paul. I’m told you’re