“I’ll play,” Davenport said.
IN THE TRUCK, headed down to the BCA office, Virgil got on the phone to Davenport, shouting: “Warren’s dead. They shot him at his house…”
Davenport: “Have you found Knox? Where the hell is Knox?”
“I don’t know. His daughter says he does photography, that he might be out in North Dakota somewhere. Maybe I could put out a BOLO on his car, maybe with the North Dakota guys. I don’t know where to take it…”
“How are these Vietnamese finding this shit out?” Davenport demanded. “Where are they getting their information?”
“Good fuckin’ question,” Virgil said. “I’ll talk to Sinclair about that.”
“You said he wasn’t home.”
“He’s not. I don’t know where the hell he is,” Virgil said. “He’s not answering his cell. Maybe he’s with the Viets-he was some kind of fruitcake left-winger…”
“So what’re you gonna do?”
“I’m going to put Shrake outside Sinclair’s house. If he comes back, we nail him. I’m gonna head down to the office, start working the phones. Honest to God, we gotta find Knox. Maybe tomorrow morning we could drop something in the media, something that would get him to call in.”
“If he sees it,” Davenport said. “Man, you gotta do better than this. You just gotta do better than this.”
THEY SOUNDED pretty good, Virgil thought after he rang off. He’d have bought it.
Virgil stopped first at the BCA office, transferred his outdoors duffel to a state car, including head nets and cross-country ski gloves, good for shooting and fending off mosquitoes. From the BCA equipment room, he got armor and an M16 and five magazines and two night-vision monoculars. Driving the state car, he stopped at the motel, picked up a jacket, and traded his cowboy boots for hiking boots.
Davenport called: “Got you a plane. They’ll pick you up at the St. Paul airport. They’re starting three guys to International Falls from Bemidji, but it’s a ride. It’ll take a while.”
“It’ll take Mai longer, unless they’re flying,” Virgil said. “If they’re flying, they still won’t be that far in front of us. I’m gonna try to call Knox, too. Tell him to get the fuck out.”
“Tell him to leave the lights on,” Davenport said. “Tell him to leave a car in the driveway. We need to pull them in there. We need to get this done with.”
VIRGIL CALLED Knox, and this time the phone was answered. Virgil identified himself and was told that Knox was in bed. “Then get him out of bed,” Virgil said. “I need to talk to him, now.”
Knox came up a minute later. “What happened?”
“Warren got hit. He’s dead. The killers are a Vietnamese intel team, apparently after revenge for the ’75 murders.”
“I had nothing to do with that,” Knox said with some heat.
“Well, they don’t know that-or they don’t give a shit,” Virgil said. “Anyway, they’re headed your way. They know where you are.”
A few seconds of silence, then; “How would they find that out?”
“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.
26
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?”