Heat Lightning

he might be using a silencer—he either took the time to pick up the ejected shells, or he had some kind of little catch basket rigged on the side, or he’s really good at hand-capturing them.”
    “That seems likely,” Mapes said. “You could silence a single-shot, but this isn’t a single-shot. These people were shot in a hurry.”
    “He’s a professional,” Bunch said.
    “That’s right,” Virgil said.
     
 
VIRGIL STAYED until four in the morning, hoping against hope that they might find something. They went back to Bunton’s place, where his mother sat in a rocker staring at a wall, and looked at what Bunton had left behind: a motorcycle saddlebag with a few shirts and a pair of jeans, but not a single piece of paper.
    At four o’clock, he told Jarlait and Bunch that he was heading back to Bemidji to get some sleep.
    “Let me ask you something,” Jarlait said. They were off by themselves, leaning on Jarlait’s truck. Up and down the street, people were standing in their yards, watching the cops at Bunton’s place. “We’ve been talking about the white van and the Indian man, and dope. I know goddamn well that the dope people in Minneapolis got shooters. Or they could get them if they needed them. And when we started talking about dope, you were thinking about something. Do you know something? Do you know where the connection is? Between all the lemons and Ray? That has to do with the dope people?”
    Virgil thought about Carl Knox. Carl Knox had put money into dope dealers, the BCA’s organized-crime people said, but nobody had been able to prove it, because he’d never dealt dope himself. All he did was provide financing, and then only at four or five levels above the street. His return was smaller, but also safer.
    “Virgil?”
    “It’s something I gotta think about,” Virgil said. “I’ve got a guy . . . I can’t talk about it, really . . . but there’s a guy in all of this who was a moneyman for dope dealers. Might still be.”
    “We need to know this shit, because that’s one of our friends sitting back there dead in that cop car,” Jarlait said. “Ray . . . Ray was okay, but this was gonna happen sooner or later, one way or another, with Ray. He was gonna ride his bike into a phone pole, or he was gonna piss off the wrong guy. But Olen . . . Olen didn’t deserve anything like this. He was a good guy.”
    “Like I said, I got a guy,” Virgil said. “I don’t know if he’s involved, but I’m going after him.”
    “Like soon?”
    “Like tomorrow morning,” Virgil said. “You guys: stay in touch.”
    “We will. You stay in touch with us, too,” Jarlait said. “If something happens, and we can get in on it, we want in.”

16
    VIRGIL FOUND a bed at the RootyToot Resort on Candi Lake, a place with tumbledown brown-painted fake log cabins and beds that were too short, and mattresses that were too thin, and pillows that were flat and hard and smelled like hair and Vaseline; but that also rented fourteen-foot aluminum boats with 9.9-horse Honda kickers, that came with the cabin and he could take out anytime.
    Virgil had stayed there twice before and didn’t mind having a beer or two with the resort’s alcoholic owner, Dave Root, though at five o’clock in the morning, Root was unconscious and Virgil took a key out of a mailbox, left a note on Root’s door, and checked himself in.
    He lay in bed and thought about God and the people who were dead on this case, and who’d died years ago in Vietnam, if Ray Bunton had been telling the truth, and wondered what all that was about, and how somebody like the dumb-ass preachers on TV could think this could all be part of God’s Plan.
    God didn’t have a plan, Virgil believed.
    God had His limits, and one of them was, He didn’t always know what would happen; or if He did know, He didn’t care; or if He cared, He was constrained by His own logic and couldn’t do anything about death and destruction. Virgil believed that God was actually a part of a rolling wave front, hurtling into an unknown future; and that humans, animals and, possibly, trees and chinch bugs had souls that would rejoin God at death.
    Which brought him to Camus’ big question, and he didn’t like to think about Camus, so he went to sleep.
    He woke up at eight, bone-tired, rushed through a shower, got his musky rod out of the car and his emergency tackle box and walked down to the boat, pushed it off; heard a man yelling at him, looked back and saw