Heat Lightning

not even a motion-detecting garage light. The only wires going in are electric. No phone. The TV comes off a satellite dish, so there’s no way for a remote alarm system to call out. . . .”
    The shooter hadn’t even driven past the Bunton place, hadn’t even given them that much of a chance to spot him. He’d come from the opposite direction, from off the res, and had taken the trail down to the lake, where there was an informal muddy canoe launch. He pulled off into the weeds, checked the GPS, got his pistol and his sap, and called the scout.
    “Going in.”
    The scout hadn’t walked it himself in the daylight, because he’d been afraid to give it away. So the shooter was on his own going in—and within fifty feet of the car, he was slip-sliding through stinking mud and marsh, and kicking up every mosquito in the universe, spitting them out of his mouth and batting them away from his face, until he was driven into a jog just to stay ahead of them.
    But the bugs dropped on him like chicken hawks when he came up to the house, and he’d eventually pulled his jacket over his head, blocking out everything but his eyes, retracting his hands into the coat sleeves.
    Then they went after his eyes. . . .
     
 
BUNTON’S HIDEOUT was in a cluster of five small suburban-style houses that might have been built during the sixties, all facing a narrow wooded road from town. His house was the second from the end—the one with a cop car parked in the driveway.
    The shooter called the scout: “I’m in, but he’s got protection from the Indian police.”
    “Let me call,” the scout said. He meant to call the coordinator. Three minutes later, the phone silently vibrated in the shooter’s hand as he got back to the car.
    “Take him alone if you can,” the scout said. “If you can’t—we’ve already broken the protocol. We need these two as fast as we can.”
    “Of course,” the shooter said. He was in the back of the van, going through the garbage he’d accumulated during the drive up from the Twin Cities. “So if I need to take a police officer . . .”
    “If we have no choice, we have no choice.”
    The shooter rang off, risked a light, found what he’d been looking for—two plastic grocery sacks. He put the sacks in his jacket pocket, then took off his jacket. Using his penknife, he cut out the rayon lining.
    He could lose Bunton while he did all of this, he knew, but he also knew that he couldn’t tolerate even a half hour in the wood, with the insects. When the lining was free, he carefully wrapped it around his head, mummylike, until nothing was open except a small breathing hole and his eyes. He got his sunglasses off the passenger seat and stuck them in his jacket pocket with the plastic bags.
    When he was ready, he got his equipment and walked back through the woods to Bunton’s house, slipping and sliding in the oily slime at the edge of the marsh. By the time he got there, he was wet and muddy to the knees, and his Italian shoes felt as though they were about to dissolve.
    He sat at the end of the woods and listened, then quietly pulled the plastic sacks over his hands to fend off the mosquitoes. Moving slow as a glacier, he crept through the woods to a point directly behind Bunton’s house, watched, listened, waited, then crossed the dark backyard to the outer wall of the house.
     
 
NO AIR-CONDITIONING, nothing between the shooter and the target but some screens—and two other people. A television was going inside, and two men and a woman were talking a rambling, desultory conversation as they watched a rerun of American Idol. At one point, the woman said, “Hey, Ray? Could you get that?”
    The shooter didn’t know what that was, but there was at least one Ray in the house. He settled down to listen, against the wall of the house, like a lump, or a boulder, next to the electric meter, listening. The mosquitoes came for his eyes: he put on the sunglasses and bunched the fabric around them. He couldn’t see much, but there wasn’t much to see. A few cars went past, but not many. There wasn’t much down the road. The woman inside, he learned, was named Edna; Ray called her Ma. The other man was Olen.
    The shooter wondered if there were poisonous snakes in Minnesota. . . .
     
 
SOME TIME LATER, he wasn’t sure how long, but long enough to get stiff in his bones, he heard Ray say something about “Going to get some toilet paper. Want anything else?”
    “Oatmeal, for breakfast . .