VIRGIL SET HIS alarm clock, and crashed. He woke at nine o’clock, scrubbed his mouth out, got his stuff together, and headed for the truck.
He always had fishing gear with him. He could drive for five hours, bag out at a backwoods motel, rent a boat at a resort in the morning, get in a couple hours on the water, and still make it to International Falls before noon.
Another good night to drive.
14
THE SHOOTER was city, not country.
He wore comfortable, low-heeled shoes with pointed toes made of delicate Italian leather, summer-weight dark-blue wool pants, a short-sleeved cotton shirt, and a black cotton jacket. One of two things would happen that evening, he thought, because of his citiness: he’d either be eaten alive by mosquitoes, or he’d freeze.
The scout had spotted Bunton’s hideout and had delivered both precise GPS coordinates and a satellite map that would take the shooter to a little-used, dead-end trail that ended at a marshy lake a hundred yards from Bunton’s. From there, the scout suggested, the shooter could walk in. He’d be coming out of the deep woods, in the night, a direction that the Indian wouldn’t expect, even if he was on his guard.
“I couldn’t hang around, but I got good photographs. There’s no security system that I can see. There’s not even a motion-detecting garage light. The only wires going in are electric. No phone. The TV comes off a satellite dish, so there’s no way for a remote alarm system to call out…”
The shooter hadn’t even driven past the Bunton place, hadn’t even given them that much of a chance to spot him. He’d come from the opposite direction, from off the res, and had taken the trail down to the lake, where there was an informal muddy canoe launch. He pulled off into the weeds, checked the GPS, got his pistol and his sap, and called the scout.
“Going in.”
The scout hadn’t walked it himself in the daylight, because he’d been afraid to give it away. So the shooter was on his own going in-and within fifty feet of the car, he was slip-sliding through stinking mud and marsh, and kicking up every mosquito in the universe, spitting them out of his mouth and batting them away from his face, until he was driven into a jog just to stay ahead of them.
But the bugs dropped on him like chicken hawks when he came up to the house, and he’d eventually pulled his jacket over his head, blocking out everything but his eyes, retracting his hands into the coat sleeves.
Then they went after his eyes…
BUNTON’S HIDEOUT was in a cluster of five small suburban-style houses that might have been built during the sixties, all facing a narrow wooded road from town. His house was the second from the end-the one with a cop car parked in the driveway.
The shooter called the scout: “I’m in, but he’s got protection from the Indian police.”
“Let me call,” the scout said. He meant to call the coordinator. Three minutes later, the phone silently vibrated in the shooter’s hand as he got back to the car.
“Take him alone if you can,” the scout said. “If you can’t-we’ve already broken the protocol. We need these two as fast as we can.”
“Of course,” the shooter said. He was in the back of the van, going through the garbage he’d accumulated during the drive up from the Twin Cities. “So if I need to take a police officer…”
“If we have no choice, we have no choice.”
The shooter rang off, risked a light, found what he’d been looking for-two plastic grocery sacks. He put the sacks in his jacket pocket, then took off his jacket. Using his penknife, he cut out the rayon lining.
He could lose Bunton while he did all of this, he knew, but he also knew that he couldn’t tolerate even a half hour in the wood, with the insects. When the lining was free, he carefully wrapped it around his head, mummylike, until nothing was open except a small breathing hole and his eyes. He got his sunglasses off the passenger seat and stuck them in his jacket pocket with the plastic bags.
When he was ready, he got his equipment and walked back through the woods to Bunton’s house, slipping and sliding in the oily slime at the edge of the marsh. By the time he got there, he was wet and muddy to the knees, and his Italian shoes felt as though they were about to dissolve.
He sat at the end of the woods and listened, then quietly pulled the plastic sacks over his hands to fend off the mosquitoes. Moving slow as a glacier, he crept through the woods to a point directly behind Bunton’s house, watched, listened, waited, then crossed the dark backyard to the outer wall of the house.
NO AIR-CONDITIONING, nothing between the shooter and the target but some screens-and two other people. A television was going inside, and two men and a woman were talking a rambling, desultory conversation as they watched a rerun of American Idol. At one point, the woman said, “Hey, Ray? Could you get that?”
The shooter didn’t know what that was, but there was at least one Ray in the house. He settled down to listen, against the wall of the house, like a lump, or a boulder, next to the electric meter, listening. The mosquitoes came for his eyes: he put on the sunglasses and bunched the fabric around them. He couldn’t see much, but there wasn’t much to see. A few cars went past, but not many. There wasn’t much down the road. The woman inside, he learned, was named Edna; Ray called her Ma. The other man was Olen.
The shooter wondered if there were poisonous snakes in Minnesota…
SOME TIME LATER, he wasn’t sure how long, but long enough to get stiff in his bones, he heard Ray say something about “Going to get some toilet paper. Want anything else?”
“Oatmeal, for breakfast… maybe some eggs, if you want scrambled eggs.”
The shooter broke cover, eased around the back of the house, crawled up the far side, watching the end house, looking for people who might glance out a window. Two of the windows had no curtains, but the others were closed off. He saw no one, no movement.
He made it to the front of the house, the side next to the garage. He’d been there two minutes when the front door opened, and Ray and the cop came out on the porch, and the cop stretched and said, “Cold,” and Ray said, “Let me get my jacket,” and he went back inside the house. The officer lit a cigarette and ambled down to the car, and the shooter processed it alclass="underline" two men, one dark street, getting darker as it went through the woods. No traffic.
If he took them here, he had to think about the woman: if she saw him, he’d have to take her, too. It wouldn’t be the odd dead officer, it’d be a massacre. The bodies were already beginning to stack up, beginning to get intense coverage from the media.
He decided, and turned, and moved as silently as he could back down the garage wall, across the backyard and into the trees, and then, using a tiny button flash, he ran as best he could through the trees toward the van. Behind him, he heard the police car start, and he ran faster, and he heard the car door slam and he crossed the trail to the lake, ran down to the van, climbed in, tore the jacket from his head, and threw the van into a circle and banged back to the main road.
The cop car was taking it easy, and the shooter caught them a mile down the road, in the dark, coming up fast. On the way, he’d called the scout: “Come in now,” he said. “North on that road.” Nothing to identify location.
When he caught them, he began flashing his high beams, blasting them through the cop car’s back window, and the cop turned on his flashers and pulled over, and the shooter pulled in behind him and jumped out of the car and ran to the police car, as if he were looking for help, and the cop, not thinking, cracked the door and the shooter shot him in the head and yanked the door open and pointed the gun at Ray’s face and said, “Get out. Get out.”