Heat Lightning

him back there. . . . I mean, I just think . . . I think he got away with it.”
    “Then why all the killing?”
    “Well—they couldn’t hang him for it, but if these pictures got out, that’d be the end of him, businesswise. Look at those little kids he gunned down. Look at him fuckin’ the dead woman. Nobody would touch him. He’d be like Hitler.”
    Virgil made Knox walk through it again, then said, “You think you’re okay where you’re at? For the duration?”
    “Couldn’t find me in a million years,” Knox said.
     
WHEN THEY were gone, Virgil called Davenport.
    “I got a killer,” he said. “Might not be able to get him, because it was all so far away and long ago, but I’ve got pictures of the crime in progress.”
    “Anybody I know?” Davenport asked.
    “Yeah.”
    Long moment of silence, and then Davenport said, “Virgil, goddamnit ...”
    “Ralph Warren,” Virgil said.
    Longer moment. Then: “I gotta see the pictures. How fast can you get back?”
    “I’m heading out now,” Virgil said. “I’ll be back by dinnertime.”
    “Then come to dinner at my place. Six o’clock,” Davenport said.
    “See you then.”
     
 
VIRGIL GOT his gear out of the cabin, threw it in the truck, and went to get a beer to drink as he headed south. The fisherwoman was putting the little girl in a new Mercedes station wagon, and she nodded at Virgil and asked, “Was that some kind of meet?”
    “What?”
    “Well, they told me in the bar that you’re a state investigator, and a writer, but you were up here on that awful murder, and all of you guys were wearing black sport coats like you’re covering up guns, and I could tell that those other guys were hoodlums of some kind.” The woman had a small handhold on his heart, and it was getting stronger. The way she could roll that fly line out there . . .
    “A meet. That’s what it was, I guess,” Virgil said. “I’d be happy if you kept it under your hat.”
    “Mmm. I’ll do that. Virgil Flowers? Is that right?”
    “Yes, ma’am.” She had little flecks of gold in her eyes.
    “Are you armed right now?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” Virgil said.
    “Huh. Well, my name is Loren Conrad.”
    “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”
    She walked around the car and stopped before opening the door. And the little girl, maybe ten, was looking at Virgil out through the glass of the passenger-side window, solemn, as if something sad were about to happen. “Maybe if you come up again, during the week, we could go fishing.”

17
    VIRGIL THOUGHT about the woman and daughter as he drove back. Had Mom been hitting on him, just the lightest, mildest of hits? What was the sadness in the small girl’s eyes? Had she seen other men spoken to when Dad wasn’t there?
    The whole thing seemed less like an invitation to romance than an invitation to a story of some kind. Not journalism, a short story. Something Jim Harrison might write.
    Virgil had had an interest in short stories when he was in college, but journalism seemed more immediate, something with its claws in the real world. The older he got, though, the wider he found the separation between reported facts, on one hand, and the truth of the matter on the other hand. Life and facts were so complicated that you never got more than a piece of them. Short stories, though, and novels, maybe, had at least a shot at the truth.
    He was so preoccupied by the idea that he almost ran over a mink that crawled out of a ditch, poised for a dash across the road. He dodged at the last minute, wincing for the crunch as the animal went under the tire, felt nothing, looked in the wing mirror and saw it scurry across the tarmac, unhurt.
    A small blessing.
     
THE WORLD was little more than a month past the summer solstice, so the sun was still high in the sky when he got off I-94 and turned south on Cretin Avenue in St. Paul, past the golf course with all the rich guys with their short pants and stogies, and farther south, hooked west on Randolph, then over to Davenport’s house on Mississippi River Boulevard.
    He parked on the street so he wouldn’t block the three cars already in the driveway, and as soon as he stepped out, smelled the barbecue, heard the people talking in the back. He walked around the garage and pushed through the back gate, and Weather, Davenport’s wife, spotted him and called, “Virgil Flowers!”
    Davenport was there, with a former Minneapolis cop turned bar owner named Sloan, and his wife; and fellow