Heat Lightning

two hundred miles away,” Virgil said. “Had to run out of town. Looking for that guy.”
    “Find him?” she asked.
    “That’s an official police secret,” Virgil said.
    “Pooh,” she said. “So . . . when do you return?”
    Virgil thought about it for a minute, then said, “I’m on my way right now. I’ll get back really late. Need to get some sleep. How about tomorrow night?”
    “Call me.”
    He thought about what she’d asked him. When do you return?
     
 
DAVENPORT, VERY LATE, lights of the Twin Cities on the far horizon. “Can’t find Knox. He’s crawled into a hole. Shrake talked to his daughter, and she says he’s traveling. Says he’s taken up art photography as a hobby, and nobody knows where he is. Says he never takes a cell phone, so people can’t bother him and he can concentrate on his art.”
    “You believe her?” Virgil asked.
    “No. He’s hiding out,” Davenport said. “We need to know why. Are you on the way back?”
    “Coming up to Wyoming.”
    “Okay . . . Tell me about this Vietnamese chick.”
    So they talked about it, Davenport sitting in a leather chair with a Leinie’s, Virgil rolling along under the stars, big fat yellow-gutted bugs whacking the windshield like popcorn.
    A wonderful summer night, Virgil thought. Or, as Ray would have said, a wonderful fuckin’ night.

13
    VIRGIL SLEPT until ten o’clock, when Davenport called. “Where are you?”
    “About to leave the motel. I slept a little late,” he said, sitting up in bed, scrubbing at his tangled hair.
    “You gonna go talk to Shirley?” Shirley Knox was Carl Knox’s oldest daughter.
    “That’s the plan,” Virgil said. They’d worked it out the night before. First the push from Shrake, then another push from Virgil.
    “I’ll be running around with Rose Marie putting out brush fires,” Virgil said. “We’re pretty much guaranteeing people that it’ll all be over in a week. They just don’t want it to slop over into the convention.”
    “Good going,” Virgil said.
    “Hey, no pressure—if you can’t produce, we can always turn it over to the FBI.”
    A USED Caterpillar 988B rubber-tire front-end loader, with a spade-nosed bucket, repainted and updated, sat on a patch of grass in front of Knox Equipment. A hand-lettered sign in the bucket said, in large black letters, “New Front Differential!” and under that, in smaller letters, “6000 hrs.”
    A hard-faced, dark-haired young woman was behind the counter. Virgil walked in, sniffing at the odor of diesel fuel, scuffing his boot heels. The woman had one yellow pencil behind her ear and another in her hand, and was focused on a stack of invoices and a hand calculator. On the wall behind her were two color portrait photos, with a sign that read, “Our owners.” Under a picture of a square-faced man, a label said, “Carl.” The other picture, of the woman behind the counter, said, “Shirley.”
    Shirley didn’t look up for a minute as Virgil waited at the counter. Her lips were moving, and then she jotted a number on an invoice and looked up and smiled and said, “Sorry. You caught me in the middle. Are you Dave?” She had one slightly crooked front top tooth, and the smile and the tooth gave her a sudden snaky charm.
    “Nope. I’m Virgil. I’m looking for Mr. Knox.”
    “Dad isn’t here,” she said. “If I could help you?”
    Virgil shook his head, pulled his ID out, and said, “I really need to talk to him.”
    She looked vexed. “I talked to Officer Shrake yesterday. I explained all this.”
    “He’s out taking photographs,” Virgil said.
    “That’s correct,” she said.
    “Look—you, me, and all the wise guys on the corner, we all know that Carl is a big fat crook.”
    “That’s not right . . .” She was sputtering, but faking it.
    Virgil held up a hand. “I’m not recording anything, so you can save the act. We all know he’s a crook, we all know he’s hiding out because of these guys getting killed, and—I want to emphasize this, so you can tell him when you call him on your clean cell phone—we know why. Tell him we know all about the job in Da Nang, about stealing the bulldozers, and we don’t care. Now. If he doesn’t call me on my cell phone, we’re going to put out a press release that says we’re looking for Carl Knox in connection with these murders, and the TV stations will be on you like Holy on the Pope. So call him, tell him that, tell him Davenport doesn’t think he’s the killer,