Virgil said, “I’ll write that in my notebook.”

The man said, “You do that.” Then he tapped Virgil’s chest. “The Pogues. Goddamn good band. I’m Irish myself.”

“You didn’t say what your name was,” Virgil said.

“Pat. O’Hoolihan. Pat O’Hoolihan.”

“You’re shittin’ me.”

The man showed his teeth again. “Yeah. I am.”

Sal came back with two cold six-packs: “Four drunks talking about bait. I thought my ears was gonna fall off, and I was only there for two minutes.”

“Gotta learn to relax,” Virgil said. “Get in the flow of the conversation.”

Sal popped his gum. “I’d rather be dead.”

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…