Heat Lightning (24 page)

The man who wasn't named Pat O'Hoolihan got on his cell phone, dialed a number, and said, "We good."

KNOX ARRIVED in a black GMC sport-utility vehicle with an unnecessary chrome brush guard on the front, and two little tiny chromed brush guards on the back taillights, and Virgil said to Sal, "These taillight brush guards look kinda gay."

Sal popped his gum. "I hadn't thought about it, but you're right."

Knox climbed out of the passenger seat, and another bent-nosed guy from the driver's seat. Knox was a large man, balding, with a fleshy face and a heavy gut, who looked like he might deal in bulldozers. He was wearing khaki cargo pants, a white shirt, a black sport coat, and more L.L. Bean hiking shoes.

He walked down to Virgil's place and said, "Mr. Flowers." Not a question.

Virgil shook hands with him and said, "Why don't we go inside?"

Knox looked at the cabin and shook his head. "Nah. I hate enclosed spaces that I don't know about. Let's go find a stump." To the security guys, he said, "Why don't you guys hang out?" and to the one who wasn't named Pat, he said, "Larry, come on with us."

Virgil said, "Yeah, come on, Larry."

Larry said, "That'd be Mr. Larry to you, Virgil. Let me get one of those six-packs."

THE THREE OF THEM strolled down to a picnic table behind one of the cabins, out of sight of the bar, out of sight of the driveway. The mom and daughter were kneeling on the dock, peering into the water, and Larry said, "Nice ass," and Knox said, "C'mon, man, she's only eight," and Virgil had to laugh despite himself. They all took a beer and settled on the picnic table bench. Larry faced away from them, looking up at the cabins; the other two men were wandering around the driveway.

"So what's the deal?" Knox said. "I understand you've been talking to my daughter."

"The deal is, somebody is killing people--and all the people who are dead went to Vietnam in '75 and stole a 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 pump outside, one of those old pump-handle things, and Chester said if we drank it, we'd get dysentery, but it was all right to rinse off with it, to cool down, and we'd go down there and pump water into a bucket and throw it on each other. It was cool . . . but there was this old man there, he'd come out and scream at us. . . . Screaming in French, didn't know what the fuck he was talking about."

Knox drifted away for a couple of minutes, then said to Virgil, "You know something, Flowers? This one time, I was delivering a used Cat over in Wisconsin, the west side of Milwaukee. They were building a subdivision, they were going to beat the band. And I was there, and they had these guys working in a trench, putting down a water line, and the trench fell on them. Sand and clay. Six or seven guys, but four guys went under, and we all jumped in there and started tearing up the dirt with our hands . . . and all four guys died. When we got them out, they were like sitting there, with their mouths full of dirt and their eyes open, but all covered with sand, deader'n shit. I don't think about that but once a year. And hell, it was an accident, you know. . . .

"This thing in Vietnam, I don't go two hours without thinking about it. For more than thirty years--"

Virgil said, "Somebody's across the lake with a high-powered rifle, and you're gonna say, 'The asshole's name is--' and pop! The killer nails you. So could you give me his name? Just in case?"

Knox made a huh-huh sound, which was his kind of big-guy chuckle. "Warren."

"Ralph Warren?"

"Yeah. I assumed you knew that," Knox said. "His name, anyway."

"I never got to anybody before they were dead, except Ray, and he didn't know who Warren was."

Knox laughed again, a short half grunt, half laugh. "Well . . . who else do you know who could import a bunch of bent-nosed, cold-eyed killers?"

"But one of the cold-eyed killers got killed," Virgil said.

"Yeah? That guy up at that rest stop?"

"Yeah. Ex-military, special forces," Virgil said.

"Probably Wigge's man. Probably an accident. Warren wouldn't have wanted Wigge to see it coming, because Wigge was a hard-ass himself. They've been tangled up forever--ever since Vietnam, anyway."

"So--what happened in Vietnam? Warren did the killing?"

Knox nodded. They'd gotten as much equipment as they could onto the ship--even though that meant that some perfectly good stuff would be left behind--and called it a day. But when the last truck left, Knox said, and they knew the truck itself would be lifted onboard the ship, Warren and Wigge produced a couple of bottles of rum that they'd bought the day before from some Cambodian security guards, and they started mixing up rum and Cokes.

"Cuba libres, they called them back then. Goddamn, they were good when it was hot outside," Knox said. "So we're sitting around drinking and we'd already had two or three gallons of beer, and we're gettin' pretty fucked up, and Warren says he's gonna take a bath. We're all laughing at him and giving him shit, and he pulls off his shirt and walks down to this house. Probably a hundred meters away. Pretty nice house, older, palm trees around it. Looked French, and this old guy used to yell at us in French, so maybe it was.

"Anyway, there was this chick down there, we'd seen her a couple of times, coming and going on a bicycle, but . . . mmm . . . Warren goes down there carrying this gun--Chester gave us a couple of M16s, just in case--and he starts taking off all his clothes until he's buck naked, and he's drunk, and he gets under this water at the pump . . . and this chick comes along on the bike and she doesn't see him until she's already off it, and she tries to run around him, and he comes after her, and grabs her ass, and he's drunk and sort of rubbing himself on her and laughing . . .

"So the old guy comes out, and this time he's got a rifle, and he points it up in the air and fires off a round and we're all, like, 'Jesus Christ,' and the girl runs into the house past him and he comes running down from the porch screaming at Warren, and Warren is like picking up his clothes, but the old man keeps coming and he gets too close and Warren throws his clothes at him and grabs his gun and boom. Then he runs in the house after the chick, and there's more shooting, like bam, bam, bam-bam-bam, and we're all running down there, but not too fast, because of the shooting, and we only got the one other gun.

"We get there, and there's this dead guy in the yard. And we all freaked out. We all stopped, and I remember Chuck saying, 'I'm getting the fuck out of here,' and then there was some screaming from the house, and we can hear Warren yelling, and we're all like going, 'What the fuck?'

"Then there's nothing. We're yelling, 'Ralph, Ralph,' and he yells, 'I'm okay,' and we go in there, look in there, and there's these dead kids in the hallway, these two dead little kids, and we can hear this . . . this . . ."

He stared away, across the lake, and Larry said, "Jesus Christ," and Knox went on: "I went through that and I went into the next room, and here was Warren, and he was fuckin' this chick. He was fuckin' her, and I could see she was dead, or she was dying, but he was crazy drunk and he was just fuckin' her. . . ."

"Pictures," Virgil said.

Knox nodded. "I had this Instamatic. Like this little Kodak pocket camera. I was wearing fatigue pants, and, shit, I had this bad feeling that I could get blamed, that we could all get blamed, and Warren was banging her like mad and Sanderson was yelling at him and he wouldn't stop, and Sanderson ran away and I took a shot of Warren banging this chick, and then I took off, but I took a shot of the kids, and the old man, and then I went running out of there. I was thinking if they tried to blame all of us we could use the pictures as evidence against Warren, who did the whole thing."

"But nothing ever happened?" Virgil asked.

"Nah. We didn't really understand it all at the time, but that whole country was going crazy. People were stealing everything that wasn't nailed down, people were trying to get out, they were stealing boats and robbing stores for money, it was crazy. Chester, when he found out about the killing, he freaked out. He said we had to get the fuck out of there and keep our mouths shut. That's what we did. We all got jammed in that van and we took off for the airport, and we camped out there for four days before I could get out, but some of the guys--Warren, I think, and maybe Sanderson--went with the boat."

"Ray said he saw Sanderson back at home just a couple months later, so he didn't go with the boat."

"Well, shit, they just took them to Indonesia," Knox said. "That's only, like, three or four days away."

"I don't know anything about that part of the world," Virgil said.

They all sat there, staring at the lake, then Virgil said, "I'll see what I can do about the photos. About attributing them to Ray. But . . . I don't know. I'm gonna have to have them, and if we have to argue about it in court, Warren's gonna know where they're coming from anyway."

Knox bit his lip and then said, "What if I tell the guys from Chicago to put a bullet in your head and walk away?"

"I'm heavily armed," Virgil said.

"That won't work, then," Knox said. He dipped into his jacket pocket and handed Virgil an envelope. "What I did was, I scanned the negatives and then I printed them out. I really don't have the negs with me--if you can get him with these, I'll bring the negs around as the final nail in the coffin. But I'm not giving them up. They might be the only thing between me and Ralph. As long as he doesn't know where the negs are . . ."