Heat Lightning

bunch of bulldozers. The last guy to get killed . . .”
    “Ray.”
    “Yeah. Ray. Ray told me a story. He said that while you guys were stealing the bulldozers . . .”
    “Weren’t stealing them,” Knox said. “It was more of a repo.”
    “Whatever. When you’d finished taking the bulldozers, there was a nasty shooting incident. Murders, is what it was. Ray said that Chuck Utecht was talking about a public confession about the killings, and somebody needed to shut him up. But by then, Utecht had talked to Sanderson, and Sanderson had talked to Ray, and it was all getting out of control. The killings are professional. So we asked ourselves, ‘Who is still alive, who might be able to find some bent-nosed killers from someplace like Chicago to come in here and clean up his mess?’ I guess—well, hell, we thought of you.”
    They were sitting facing the lake, their legs away from the table, their elbows back on it. When Virgil stopped talking, Knox said, “You hear that, Larry? You’re a bent-nosed killer from Chicago.”
    “I resent the hell out of that characterization,” Larry said. He burped beer. “I have many fine qualities.”
    The repartee, Virgil thought, was a cover: Knox was thinking about it. Then he said, “This was a really long time ago, and I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
    “That’s what Ray said—he didn’t have anything to do with it. He said he was driving a lowboy back and forth, and when he got back the last time, some house was burning down and somebody had gotten shot.”
    More silence. Then: “It wasn’t one. It was four. At least. And that wasn’t all. . . .” He shook his head.
    “You want to tell me?” Virgil asked, pushing.
    “Yeah. I can’t prove it, but I might even be able to point you at the shooters,” Knox said. “But they’ll have deep cover. Deep cover. And if you go after this guy, you better get him . . . and I got a few more things I want.”
    “Like what?”
    “I might have some evidence,” he said. “You need to say you took it off Ray. Somehow found it in Ray’s shit. Not from me.”
    Virgil said, “I don’t know if I can do that.”
    “Then, hey—maybe I can’t find it. . . . It’s not because I’m trying to avoid responsibility,” Knox said. “It’s because I don’t think you’ll get this guy. Even with the pictures. And if you don’t get him, there’s a good chance he’ll take me out. Or my kid, or my ex-wife, because he’s fuckin’ crazy. I know you and Davenport think I’m some kind of big crook, but honest to God, I never had anybody killed in my life. I wouldn’t even know who to ask. I sell bulldozers.”
    Virgil felt the ice going out: Knox knew. He went back to the essential point: “You got pictures. . . .”
    “Yeah. Not with me, but I can get them.”
    “So tell me the story. . . .”
     
 
IN 1975, with Vietnam coming apart, old man Utecht found the bulldozers. He called his kid, who called Wigge, and Wigge called Knox. Knox was another ex-GI, who’d been stationed in Germany, and had been trained as a heavy-equipment operator. “I fit with their plan—we all knew heavy equipment, one way or another, and we were all ex-military, except Utecht, and Ray was the truck driver.”
    He flew to Vietnam with Chuck Utecht, and they were picked up at the airport by Chester Utecht, who drove them out to the equipment yard.
    “Some of the stuff was new, but was already in trouble because it’d been sitting there for a couple years, and the jungle was eating it up. The fuel lines were all clogged up and the fuel filters had turned into rocks, and some of the rubber hydraulic lines were eaten by squirrels, or something—these little red-bellied fuckers, they’d eat anything. Anyway, there was more stuff than you could believe. . . .”
    The crew went to work, restoring one machine at a time, getting them moving, and then Ray arrived and began hauling the bulldozers away. “We had a big truckload of spare parts, I don’t know where Chester got them from, but they were all new. We were sweatin’ like dogs out in the sun, there was no shade in the yard, it was about a million degrees out there, bugs as big as my thumbs. We had these whole pallets of Lone Star beer . . . we didn’t have access to safe drinking water, so we were drinking like three or four gallons of beer a day just to stay hydrated.
    “Anyway, there was this big house just down the way . . . across this dirt road, and it had a water