Heat Lightning

Root, standing on the grass shore, barefoot, in black Jockey shorts and a white T-shirt.
    Root shouted, “Hey, big ballplayer,” and he heaved a perfect, twenty-yard spiral pass and Virgil plucked a bottle of Miller Genuine Draft out of the air, ice cold. “Back in an hour,” Virgil called, and he headed across the lake, into the wind, to the far shoreline, where he set up a drift and began casting along the edge of a weed bank.
    The water was clear and the sun was on his back and he could see into the water as though it were an aquarium, and it all smelled wonderful, like pine and algae and fish, and nothing at all like a blood-soaked car. In forty-five minutes, in three drifts, he caught two hammer-handle northerns, threw them back, and had a follow from a decent, but not great, musky. He was happy to see the fish in the water and he worked a figure eight, trying to get it to strike, and finally gave up, sat down, and cracked the Miller.
    The beer was pretty much dog piss, he thought as he drank it, but not bad on a morning that was cold on the verge of turning hot. He finished the beer and dropped the bottle in the bottom of the boat. He felt like a horse’s ass for doing it, but took out his cell phone and checked for messages.
    Two: Davenport and Carl Knox.
    He stared at the Knox call for a moment, then clicked through to the number, and sat there on the bench seat looking at a woman and a small girl fly-fishing on the far shore, the woman showing the girl how to roll a cast out over the water, and Knox answered after two rings.
    “Virgil Flowers, BCA, returning your call,” Virgil said.
    “Flowers—where are you?”
    “Bemidji,” Virgil said.
    “Then you know about Ray,” Knox said.
    “Yeah—how did you know about it?”
    “Have you looked at a TV this morning?” Knox asked.
    “All right. We need to talk,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah. But I’ve got myself ditched where this asshole can’t find me, and I’ve got my own security,” Knox said. “I’m pretty far from Bemidji, but I can get there. We need to meet someplace . . . obscure.”
    Virgil scratched his head, looking in toward the RootyToot. “Okay. Where are you coming from?”
    Hesitation. Then: “Down south of you a couple of hours.”
    Liar, Virgil thought. “Okay. There’s a broken-ass resort northwest of Bemidji on Highway 89 about four miles north of Highway 2. It’s called the RootyToot.”
    “Wait, wait, let me look at my atlas . . . page seventy-one . . . okay, I see it, south of Pony Lake.”
    “That’s it,” Virgil said. “There’s a Budweiser sign right on the highway. See you when? Noon?”
    “Noon. Be there right on the nose. I ain’t hanging out.”
     
TWO HOURS and a little more; he could spend more time on the water, and he did, until the sun started cooking his nose. He had some suntan lotion in his tackle box, but he didn’t want to get started with that; he needed to go in and shave. He called Sandy and said, “I want you to do something for me. You heard that Ray Bunton got killed?”
    “Yes. It’s everywhere. All the TV people are flying up there, wherever you are,” she said.
    “Okay. What I need is, I need you to do research on Ray Bunton, and see if you can spot his mother’s house without knowing her name. If there’s a way to track Bunton through the res, somehow, and get to that house.”
    “I see what you’re getting at,” she said. “I’ll start right now.”
     
 
HE CALLED Davenport before he started the motor, and Davenport came up and said, “What happened?”
    “You probably know as much as I do—or, if you don’t, call Chuck Whiting. What you don’t know is, Carl Knox called me and we just negotiated a meet-up north of Bemidji. He says he’s coming up from the south, but he’s lying—he’s coming down from International Falls.”
    “You gonna bust him?”
    “I’ve got nothing to bust him with. He says he’s hiding out from the shooter. But he wants to meet because he’s got something. We’re set up to meet at a place called the RootyToot Resort, whatever the heck that is. I gotta get my atlas out and find it, I’m heading up there to scout it out.”
    “Careful, Virgil. This might be a place that he’s got locked down,” Davenport said.
    “You don’t think he’d pull anything? With a cop?” Across the lake, the woman with the fly rod had hooked into a panfish of some kind, probably a bluegill, and handed the rod to the little girl, who played it in.