Heat Lightning (16 page)

" 'Bout a million back roads up there."

"I know, but hell--he's trying to make time, he won't be sneaking around the lakes, he'll try to get up there quick as he can. If we flood the area up there, keep people moving, we should spot him."

"Flood the area? Virgil, we're talking about maybe twenty guys between here and Canada."

"Do what you can, Chuck. I'm thinking he probably won't risk Highway 2 all the way, there'll be too many cops," Virgil said. "He'd have to go through Cass Lake and Bemidji--I'm thinking he's more likely to take 46 up past Squaw Lake and then cut over."

"What if he's not going to Red Lake? What if he's going to Leech Lake?"

"Then he's already there and we're out of luck. But he's enrolled at Red Lake, that's where his family is, that's where they know him. . . . You get the people up there, I'm getting off 2, I'm turning up 46."

Virgil figured Bunton and his cousin had a half hour head start. They'd be moving fast, but not too fast, to avoid attention from cops.

Virgil, on the other hand, running with lights and occasionally with the siren, tried to keep the truck as close to a hundred as he could. He didn't know exactly how far it was from Grand Rapids to Red Lake, but he'd fished the area a lot and had the feeling that it was about a hundred miles by the most direct route. Longer, if you were sliding around on back roads.

Did the math; and he had to move his lips to do it. He'd take a bit more than an hour to get to Red Lake, he thought. If they had a thirty-mile jump on him, and were going sixty-five, and went straight through . . . it'd damn near be a tie. Even closer, if they were staying on back roads, where it'd be hard to keep an average speed over fifty.

Red Lake, unlike the other Minnesota reservations for the Sioux and Chippewa, had chosen independence from the state and effectively ran its own state, and even issued its own license plates and ran its own law-enforcement system, including courts, except for major crimes. And for major crimes, the FBI was the agency in charge.

In addition, the relationship between the Red Lake cops and the state and town cops had always been testy, and sometimes hostile.

Though it wasn't all precisely that clear, precisely that cut-and-dried. Some of the reservation's boundaries were obscure, some of the reservation land had been sold off, scattered, checkerboarded. Sometimes, it wasn't possible to tell whether you were on the res or off . . . and sometimes, maybe most of the time, all the cops got along fine. A complicated situation, Virgil thought.

Virgil came up behind an aging Volkswagen camper-van, blew past, listened to the road whine; lakes and swamp, lakes and swamp, and road-kill. A coyote limped across the road ahead of him, then sat down on the shoulder to watch him pass, not impressed by the LED flashers.

WHITING CALLED: "Got all the guys I can get and a bunch of crappie cops will help out, stay in their trucks instead of hitting the lakes."

"Okay, but tell those guys to take it easy," Virgil said. "They're a little trigger-happy."

"Yeah, well--I'm not going to tell them that," Whiting said. "You tell them that."

"Chuck ..."

"And listen, goddamnit, Virgil, you take it easy when you get up to Red Lake. We've got a decent working relationship with those folks, right now, and we don't want it messed up."

"Chuck, you know me. I am the soul of discretion," Virgil said.

"Yeah. I know you," Whiting said. "I'm telling you, take it easy, or I will personally kick your ass."

HE BURNED PAST Cut-Foot Sioux Lake, past Squaw Lake, made the turn at the Alvwood crossroads on Highway 13, which became 30 when he crossed the Beltrami County line, headed into Blackduck. Blackduck slowed him down, but he got through town, eating a sandwich from his cooler, drinking a Coke, paging through his Minnesota atlas, onto Highway 72 going straight north . . .

Worried some more: he was getting close, and nobody had seen Bunton or the van. Maybe they had ditched in a cabin somewhere, or back in the woods, waiting for nightfall to make the final run in.

Phone rang. Whiting: "Got them. Spotted them. They're ten miles out of Mizpah. Running to beat the band, heading toward Ponemah ..."

"Let me look, let me look . . ." Virgil fumbled with his maps. "Who we got on him?"

"DNR guy, but he's pulling a boat, he's not gonna run them down," Whiting said.

"Ahh, I can't read this map," Virgil said; he was going too fast to track across the map pages.

"Where are you?"

"Uh, Highway 72, I went through Blackduck five minutes ago."

"Let me look on our maps . . . Okay. You're gonna come out right on top of him," Whiting said. "Let me give you a radio channel, you can talk to the DNR guy, and I've got a sheriff's deputy I can pull down there, I think."

They found a mutual radio channel and Virgil got the DNR guy, who was shouting into his radio, "Man, they're pulling away from me--they aren't stopping, they got the best part of a mile on me, I just passed Hoover Creek, we're not but five miles out of Kelliher . . ."

Virgil was six or seven miles out of Kelliher; Jesus, it was going to be close. And Virgil was cranked. What nobody ever told the civilians was, a good car chase was a hoot, as long as you didn't get killed or maimed, or didn't kill or maim any innocent civilians.

Sheriff's deputy came up. "I'll be in Kelliher in two minutes. Where is he, where is he?"

"We'll be there in one minute," the DNR cop shouted. "I can see it, goldang it, he's just about there, and with this boat, I'm all over the place."

Bunton's van busted the intersection--never slowed. Virgil saw lights coming both from the east and the north, and said, "I'm a minute out, guys, let's not run over each other. . . ."

The sheriff's car made the turn, then Virgil, with the DNR guy trailing. The deputy called, "We're about twenty miles off the res, depending on how he does it. We're asking for help there, but they're not too enthusiastic."

"So we're gonna have to push him off before he gets there."

The van was holding its distance, but Virgil closed on the deputy and said, "Let me get by here. If there's a problem, we can let the state pay the damage."

The deputy let him by, and Virgil slowly pulled away from him but hardly closed in on the van. Two minutes, three minutes, and then the van made a hard bouncing left, and Virgil almost lost the truck in the ditch, had to fight it almost to a complete stop before he was okay, and then he punched it and they were off again, and the deputy called, "Okay, there's only one way in from here, you got a hard right coming up, but if we don't get close before then, he's gonna make it across the line."

Virgil let it all out, traveling way too fast, right on the edge of control, and began closing up on the van. Another two minutes, three minutes, and now he was only a hundred yards behind, freaking out, when the van suddenly slowed again and cranked right. Virgil was ready for it, and came out of the turn less than fifty yards behind.

"Got another left," the sheriff's deputy screamed, and Virgil and the van went into the hard left and the deputy shouted, "They're almost there."

Up ahead, Virgil could see a truck parked on the side of the road--not blocking it--and two men standing beside it, safely on the ditch side, looking down at Virgil and the van. That, Virgil thought, must be the finish line.

He hammered the truck, closing in, and the van swerved in front of him, but Virgil saw it coming and went the other way, and with a quick kick he was up beside it, and he looked over at the other driver, who seemed to be laughing, pounding on the steering wheel, and Virgil said, aloud, "Fuck it," and he moved right and as they came up to the parked truck he leaned his truck against the van and the van moved over and he moved close again, so close that the mirrors seemed to overlap; he moved over another bit.

Waiting for the scrape of metal on metal: but the other driver chickened out, jammed on his brakes, tried to get behind Virgil, but Virgil slowed with him and in a dreamy slide, they slipped down the road to the parked truck and the van went in the left-hand ditch and Virgil was out with his gun in his hand, ignoring the two men in the parked truck, screaming, "Out of there, out of there, you motherfuckers."

Out of control. He knew it, and it felt pretty good and very intense, and if one of these motherfuckers so much as looked sideways at him he was going to pop a cap on the motherfucker. . . .

He could hear people yelling behind him, and then the driver got out of the van with his hands over his head but still laughing, and then Ray Bunton got out on the other side and began running across the swampy scrub, and Virgil turned and shouted, "Watch this guy," to whoever was behind him, and he took off after Bunton.

Virgil was in his thirties and ran on most nice nights. He liked to run. Bunton was sixty-something, had smoked since he was fourteen, and was wearing a leg brace. Virgil caught him in thirty yards, ran beside him for a second, and when Bunton looked at him, Virgil clouted him on the side of his head and the old man nose-dived into the dirt.

Virgil put a knee in the small of Bunton's back, with some weight, pulled the cuffs out of his belt clip, and wrestled Bunton's arms behind his back and cuffed his wrists.

"C'mon, dickhead," he said, and pulled Bunton to his feet. As they came back to the trucks, and the van in the ditch, the DNR cop was just pulling up, trailing his boat. Two Indian men, one older, in his fifties, the other young, maybe twenty-five, were standing between Virgil and his truck. Neither one wore a uniform, but both were wearing gunbelts. "Where're you going with him?" asked the older of the two.

"Jail," Virgil said, tugging Bunton along behind.

Bunton said, "Don't let him do it, Louis. I'm on the res."

"You can't have him, son," the older man said. "You're on reservation land."

"Sue me," Virgil said.

The two men stepped down to be more squarely between him and the truck, and the younger man dropped his hand to his gun and Virgil picked it up. "You gonna shoot me?" he demanded. He edged up closer to the younger one. "You gonna shoot me?" He looked at the sheriff's deputy still at the side of the road, with the DNR guy coming up behind. "If these assholes shoot me, I want you to kill them."

The deputy called, "Whoa, whoa, whoa . . ."

Virgil was face-to-face with the younger man. "C'mon, take your gun out and shoot me. C'mon. You're not gonna pussy out now, are you?"

"Son--" the older man began.

"I'm not your son," Virgil snapped. "I'm a BCA agent and this guy"--he jerked on Bunton's arm--"is involved in the murders of four people. I'm taking him."

"Not gonna let you do it," the younger man said, and his hand rocked on the butt of his pistol. "If I gotta shoot you, then I'm gonna shoot you."

Virgil was quick, and his pistol butt was right there. He had his gun out in an instant, and he stepped close to the younger man, who'd taken a step back, and he said, "Pull it out. C'mon, pull it out, Wyatt Earp. Pull the gun, let's see what happens."

"Wait, wait, wait, wait," the older man said, his voice rising to a shout. "You're crazy, man."

"I'm taking him," Virgil said.

"Louis . . ." Bunton said.

The older man's eyes shifted to Bunton. "Sorry, Ray. Little too much shit for a quarter-blood. Maybe if we had some more guys here . . ."

The younger man looked at Louis, said, unbelieving, "We're gonna let him take him?"

"Shut up, stupid," the older man said. "You want a bunch of people dead for Ray Bunton? Look at this crazy fuckin' white man. This crazy white man, he's gonna shoot your dumb ass bigger than shit."

He turned back to Virgil. "You take him, but there's gonna be trouble on this."

"Fuck trouble," Virgil snarled.

The younger man nodded. "I'll come down there . . ."

But the tension had snapped. Virgil said to Bunton, "Come on."

As they passed the sheriff's deputy, the deputy said, "That was pretty horseshit," and to Louis, "Man, I'm sorry, Louis. This is a murder thing. I hate to see it go like this, you know that."

Louis said, "I know it, but you got a crazy man there. Hey, crazy man--fuck you."

Virgil gave him the finger, over his shoulder without looking back, and heard Louis start to laugh, and Virgil put Bunton in the truck, cuffed him to a seat support, shut the door. Then he stepped back and put his head against the window glass, leaning, and stood like that for a moment, cooling off.

After a moment, he walked back to the two Indians and said to the older man, "I'll come and talk to you about this sometime. I drove from St. Paul to here at a hundred miles an hour--I'm not kidding. Hundred miles an hour, just to take this jack-off. He put me in the hospital a couple of days ago, and there really are four dead men down there, executed, shot in the head, and he knows about it. If you'd taken him on the res, you'd be up to your ass in FBI agents. This is better for everybody."

"Well, you were pretty impolite about it," Louis said.

"Yeah, well." Virgil hitched up his pants. "Sometimes it just gets too deep, you know? You can have the other guy and the van, if you want them. I'm not interested in him."