Heat Lightning

name. These people were tougher than he’d been led to believe. Utecht had been soft and easy, and that had misled them.
    Cursing, he got on the phone. “Abort it. Two down. Coming out.”
     
 
THE SHOOTER rolled through the dark, fast but careful, putting Red Lake behind him. Only one name left now. The scout had needed to speak to Bunton. Needed to isolate him, to work on him. But what could you do in a place like this? The scout had told him that if he spent one hour on the res, in the open, everybody would be looking at him, everybody would know the van.
    The group had one more target that they knew of: the next target they had to isolate, they had to talk to, or the game was over.
    He followed his headlights through the dark, now sickened by the smell of raw blood in the back. He reached across to the grocery sack on the seat, took out the lemon, scratched the rind, held the lemon to his nose to kill the scent of the blood.
    The lemon didn’t work.
    The smell of blood, the shooter realized, had soaked into his brain: it was there forever. He would never escape it. Never.

15
    THE NIGHT was full of stars and night lights, like a Van Gogh painting, and Virgil followed the red taillights of a million cars headed toward cabin country. He got off at the I-35 rest stop where Wigge had been shot and David Ross was killed, to take a leak at the restroom and to look at the scene again. There was no sign of a murder, and a young couple and two children were sitting at the pavilion in back, near the murder scene, eating white-bread sandwiches in the light of a fluorescent camping lantern.
    On the way out the exit ramp, a tall thin blond kid with a backpack stuck his thumb out, and Virgil pulled over and popped the door. “Where you going?”
    “Duluth. Trying to get a ship out.”
    “I can take you most of the way,” Virgil said.
    The kid looked at all the lights on the dash as he settled down and asked, “Are you a police officer?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I know I’m not supposed to hitchhike along here—”
    “Don’t worry about it,” Virgil said. “Not many roads out here that I didn’t hitchhike over.”
    The kid, whose name was Don, had come off a farm outside of Blooming Prairie, had done a year at the University of Minnesota, working nights at UPS, throwing boxes, and finally realized that the whole thing wasn’t for him.
    “I was too tired to read, and the university . . . the place is sunk in bullshit,” he said. “I tried to figure out how long it would take me to get through, and it might take me six years, going full time, because there’s so much bullshit that you can’t even figure out ahead of time what you need to take to graduate.”
    Virgil had gone to the university, and they talked about that and looked at the stars, and the kid confessed that he had all three volumes of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. in his pack, and had read them so often that they were falling apart, and that he had just started Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and that he couldn’t get over the second paragraph.
    He quoted part of it from memory: “In the offing the sea and sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.”
    “London,” he said. “I’d give my left nut to go to London.”
    “You got a ship for sure?” Virgil asked.
    “I got a guy who says he’s got one, for sure. I’m probably gonna be lifting weight, but I don’t care—heck, I grew up on a dairy farm. There’s no ship that could be harder than that.”
    Virgil thought he was probably right, and wished for a moment that he was going with him.
    He dropped the kid at the I-35 intersection east of Moose Lake and cut cross-country to the west, thinking about the lakes he knew, and where he might bag out for the night, and still get a good couple of hours on the water before he had to move in the morning.
    The lights of Duluth were fading off the far eastern horizon when his cell phone rang. He glanced at it, saw that it came from the northern Minnesota area code, thought Ray, and then Ray’s gonna tell me something . . .
    He flipped