John Sandford - Heat Lightning

“Hell, man, I put our researcher on it, and she found your place in an hour,” Virgil said. “You pay taxes on it and deduct them from your income tax. That is, if you’re on the Rainy River, outside of International Falls.”

“Sonofabitch.” A moment of silence. Then: “You don’t think they’re here yet?”

“Not yet. Not even if they’re flying,” Virgil said. “I’m flying up now, I’ve got guys started up from Bemidji and Red Lake, and we’re gonna ambush them. I need to know how to get into your place.”

Knox gave him directions, right down to the tenth of the mile. “It’s dark out here. If you get lost, you stay lost.”

“I’ll find it. I got GPS directions to the end of your driveway. I just wasn’t too sure about the roads out there,” Virgil said. “In the meantime, you oughta get out of there.”

“Think so?”

“Yeah. There’s nothing you can do at this point,” Virgil said. “Don’t use your cell phones, they might have some way to track them. Just go out somewhere to a resort and get a place for overnight.”

“I’ll leave a guy here, tell you about the security systems,” Knox said. “He can help you out.”

“That’d be great,” Virgil said.

“Okay, then. Good luck. I’m outa here.”

And he was gone.

THE PILOT’S name was Doug Wayne. He was a small, mustachioed highway patrolman who looked like he should be flying biplanes for Brits over France; he was waiting in his olive-drab Nomex flight suit in the general aviation pilots’ lounge at St. Paul ’s Holman Field.

Virgil came through carrying a backpack with a change of clothes, the ammo and the nightscopes and a range finder and two radios, a plastic sack with two doughnuts and two sixteen-ounce Diet Pepsis, and the M16 in a rifle case.

Wayne said, “Just step through the security scanner over there…”

“Place would blow up,” Virgil said. “We ready?”

“How big a hurry are we in?”

“Big hurry,” Virgil said. “Big as you got.”

WAYNE WAS flying the highway patrol’s Cessna Skylane, taken away from a Canadian drug dealer the year before. International Falls was a little more than two hundred and fifty miles from St. Paul by air, and the Skylane cruised at one hundred forty-five miles per hour. “If you got two bottles of soda in that sack… I mean, I hope you got the bladder for it. We’re gonna bounce around a little,” Wayne said as they walked out to the flight line.

“I’ll pee on the floor,” Virgil said.

“That’d make my day,” Wayne said.

“Just kiddin’. How bad are we going to bounce?”

Wayne said, “There’s a line of thunderstorms from about St. Cloud northeast to Duluth, headed east. We can go around the back end, no problem, but there’ll still be some rough air.”

They climbed in and stashed Virgil’s gear in the back of the plane and locked down and took off. St. Paul was gorgeous at night, the downtown lights on the bluffs reflecting off the Mississippi, the bridges close underneath, but they made the turn and were out of town in ten minutes. Looking down, the nightscape was a checkerboard of small towns, clumps of light along I-35, the lights growing sparser as they diverged from the interstate route, heading slightly northwest.

“Gonna take a nap if I can,” Virgil said.

“Good luck,” Wayne said.

Virgil liked flying; might look into a pilot’s license someday, when he could afford it. He asked, “How much does a plane like this cost?”

“New? Maybe… four hundred thousand.”

He closed his eyes and thought about how a cop would get four hundred thousand dollars-write a book, maybe, but it’d have to sell big. Other than that…

The drone of the plane and darkness started to carry him off. He thought about God, and after a while he went to sleep. He was aware, at some point, that the plane was shuddering, and he got the elevator feeling, but not too bad; and when he woke up, his mouth tasting sour, he peered out at what looked like the ocean: an expanse of blackness broken only occasionally by pinpoints of light.

He cracked one of the Pepsis and asked, “Where are we?”

“You missed all the good stuff,” Wayne said. “Had a light show for a while, off to the east. We’re about a half hour out of International Falls. You were sleeping like a rock.”

“I’ve been hard-pushed lately,” Virgil said. He looked at his watch: nearly one in the morning. Took out his cell phone: no service.

“You won’t get service until we’re ten minutes out,” Wayne said. “We’re talking vast wasteland.”

VIRGIL TRIED AGAIN when they could see the lights of International Falls and Louis Jarlait came up. “We’re just out of town,” Jarlait said. “Where do you want to hook up?”

“Pick me up at the airport. We got some BCA guys coming up from Bemidji.”

“I talked to them. They’re probably a half hour behind us, they had to get their shit together.”

“Okay. I’ll get them on the phone, bring them into Knox’s place,” Virgil said. “We need to check at the airport and see if they had any small-plane flights in the last hour or so with some Vietnamese on board.”

“I’ll ask while we’re waiting for you.”

“Careful. You might walk in right on top of them.”

Virgil couldn’t reach the BCA agents from Bemidji: they were still too far out in the bogs.

WAYNE WAS going to turn the plane around and head back to the Cities. Virgil thanked him for the flight, and he said, “No problem. I love getting out in the night.”

Louis Jarlait and Rudy Bunch were waiting when Virgil came off the flight line: “No small planes, no Vietnamese,” Bunch said.

“So they’re traveling by car. That was the most likely thing anyway,” Virgil said. “They won’t be here for at least a couple of hours.”

They loaded into Bunch’s truck, Virgil in the backseat, and Virgil asked, “What kind of weapons you got? You got armor?”

“We got armor, we got helmets, we got rifles. We’re good,” Jarlait said. “Goddamn, I been waiting for this. I can’t believe this is happening.”

“You’ve been waiting for it?”

“I was in Vietnam when I was nineteen-coming up on forty years ago,” Jarlait said. “We’d send these patrols out, you could never find shit. I mean, it was their country. Those Vietcongs, man, they were country people, they knew their way around out there.” Jarlait turned with his arm over the seat so he could look at Virgil. “But up here, man-this is our jungle. I walk around in these woods every day of my life. Gettin’ some of those Vietcongs in here, it’s like a gift from God.”

“I don’t think they’re Vietcong,” Bunch said.

“Close enough,” Jarlait said.

“Yeah, about the time you’re thinking you’re creeping around like a shadow, one of them is gonna jump up with a huntin’ knife and open up your old neck like a can of fruit juice,” Bunch said.

Virgil was looking at a map. “Take a right. We need to get over to the country club.”

“Nobody gonna creep up on me,” Jarlait said. “I’m doing the creeping.”

THE DRIVEWAY into Knox’s place branched off Golf Course Road, running around humps and bogs for a half mile through a tunnel of tall overhanging pines down to the Rainy River. The night was dark as a coal sack, their headlights barely picking out the contours of the graveled driveway. Not a place to get into, or out of, quickly, not in the dark.

“Weird place to build a cabin,” Bunch said. “You’re on the wrong side of the falls-if you were on the other side, you’d be two minutes out of Rainy Lake.”

“He didn’t build it for the fishing,” Virgil said. “I think he built it so he and his pals can get in and out of Canada without disturbing anyone. The rumor is, he deals stolen Caterpillar equipment all over western Canada.”