“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…”