Heat Lightning

open the phone and a man on the other end said, “Virgil Flowers? This is Rudy Bunch. The Red Lake cop?”
    The young one. Virgil said, “Hey. How’s it going?”
    “Not so good, man. We’re in deep shit up here. We’ve got a dead cop and Ray’s gone.”
    Virgil peered into the dark; it was something like an embolism—part of his brain shut down for a minute. Then: “What?”
    “Somebody shot Olen Grey on the side of the road. He was watching Ray. Ray’s gone,” Bunch said.
    “Ray shot him?”
    “We don’t know what happened, but . . . I think maybe somebody took Ray. We’re calling both the state and the feds. Where are you at? St. Paul?”
    “No, no, I’m heading your way, I’m over by Grand Rapids,” Virgil said. He was still befuddled. “Man, what’re you telling me here? When was this? Have you closed down the roads?”
    “No. We’re pretty sure it happened an hour and a half ago. Olen and Ray were going to buy groceries and Ray’s mom saw them leave. Then a guy named Tom Broad was driving out and he saw Olen’s car sitting kind of in a ditch, and he thought that was strange, but it was a cop car, so he didn’t do nothin’. Then he was driving back out to his house and saw the car still sitting there, so he stopped and looked and he could see Olen dead in the front seat. He called us, and . . . that’s what happened. There’s blood on the passenger side and there’s bullet holes in the passenger-side window, and shit, I think somebody took Ray.”
    “Goddamnit. Listen, have you got a veterans’ memorial there?”
    “We got a flagpole with an MIA flag,” Bunch said.
    “Have somebody check it, see if they can find a body,” Virgil said. “You say you’ve got the state coming in? You mean us? The BCA?”
    “Yeah, the crime lab,” Bunch said.
    “Okay, freeze it. . . . I’ll be there quick as I can.”
    “What about Ray?”
    “I think Ray’s gone,” Virgil said.
     
 
CHARLES WHITING, the BCA agent-in-charge at Bemidji, said he’d sent the crime-scene crew and had been about to call St. Paul looking for Virgil. He said he would call the local cities, to have them check and then watch the veterans’ monuments.
    “We can do the crime scene, but this is gonna be a federal case. The FBI has two guys on the way from Duluth,” Whiting said. “There might be some question about why we arrested Bunton and then turned him loose, and he gets killed the next day. . . .”
    “I’ve got some questions about that myself,” Virgil said. “I haven’t been to Red Lake for five years, but unless it’s changed, it’s a mess of roads and tracks, and how in the hell did the killer find him? How? The whole point of going up there is that nobody could find him if he didn’t want to be found.”
    “Well—I don’t know. You left him at his mother’s house.”
    “Yeah, but, she has a different last name,” Virgil said. “They didn’t look him up in the phone book.”
    “No. She doesn’t have a wired phone, anyway, so that wasn’t it. You know, Virgil, I don’t know how they found him. But I will start pushing that question with the Red Lake cops.”
    “Do that,” Virgil said. “Bunton had to be under observation. I thought the deal was everybody could spot an outsider in a minute.”
    “I’ll push it. How far out are you?”
    “I don’t know exactly, I’m somewhere out in the dark, on 2, south of Grand Rapids. Coming fast as I can . . .”
    “You be careful up there in Red Lake. Olen Grey was a pretty popular guy, and they . . . you know. They’re gonna be looking for somebody to blame,” Whiting said. “We’ve had some problems, even before your stunt the other night. Some of the drug task-force guys went up there, undercover, and got their asses kicked out. They were told if they came back, they’d be arrested.”
    “I’ll take care.”
    ANOTHER TEN MINUTES, and Rudy Bunch called: “Nothing at the flagpole. Nobody’s seen anything there.”
    “Okay. Chuck Whiting is calling the other towns around, telling them to keep an eye out,” Virgil told him.
    “If we don’t find him, that’s good, right? There wasn’t too much blood in the car, on the passenger side. Ray might not have been hurt that bad.”
    Virgil thought about the bag full of Wigge’s finger joints. “I don’t know, Rudy. I don’t know. I got a real bad feeling.”
     
 
HE WENT THROUGH Grand Rapids with lights and siren and never did slow down, heading northwest in the dark, and