John Sandford - Heat Lightning

“And he said something about the Viets being a bunch of frogs… meaning Frenchmen… that made me think he’d been there,” Sinclair said. “He said it in a way… I don’t know. Anyway, at that point, Bunton was staring him down, and Sanderson saw it and shut up. On the street, I was just coming out the door, and they were already out there, and I heard Bunton say something about ‘keeping your mouth shut.’ I was curious, I dug around, but they told me to take a hike. I’d let that Fonda shit out…” He grinned wryly. “Some of those guys’ll never forget. If Jane doesn’t outlive them, her gravestone’s gonna have urine stains all over it.”

“Huh,” Virgil said.

“Are you going to ask me where I was last night?”

Virgil yawned and said, “Sure. Where were you last night?”

“Asleep.” He laughed. “Mai and I ordered out, ate in-around eight o’clock-and I did some correspondence on the Internet, and Mai and I had a little talk about my health… and then we went to bed.”

“Your health?”

Sinclair tapped his chest. “Had a nuclear stress test yesterday morning. Starting to show what the cardiologist calls ‘anomalies.’ I eat eggs, I eat bacon, I drink milk. They want me to eat air with some plastic spray on it.”

“So how bad? Bypass?” Virgil asked.

“Not yet-but that could be down the road. We’re gonna do an angiogram and figure out what to do. They could put a stent in,” he said. “That’s why Mai’s up here-she’s trying to get me to go home to Madison, where she can keep an eye on me.”

“Hmmph. Makes me nervous just hearing about it. I do like my bacon,” Virgil said. Then he asked, “Why are you here, anyway? In St. Paul? You’re a big shot in Madison.”

“A couple reasons. Teaching, mostly. I was drying up in Madison. I had this gig, I’d do my gig, and it was like I was teaching from reflex. Grad students, small classes.” Virgil was listening, but thought it all sounded rehearsed. Scripted. Sinclair was saying, “So I had this seminar, and one day we sat working through class, and every one of the students yawned at one time or another. I started noticing. So-I took a year’s leave. Got a teaching job here: I teach nothing but freshmen and sophomores, they ask off-the-wall questions, they push me around, they’ve got no respect. It’s working-it’s like fresh air.”

“Why would the University of Minnesota be any different than Wisconsin? Except that we don’t smoke as much dope?”

“I’m not teaching at Minnesota. I’m teaching at Metro State,” Sinclair said, amused. “I went way down-market.”

“All right,” Virgil said. “You said a couple of reasons. What’s the other one?”

“You know Larson International, the hotels? Headquarters down in Bloomington?”

“Sure. I’ve got a frequent-guest card for Mobile Inn,” Virgil said. “Owned by Minnesota ’s fourth-richest billionaire.”

Sinclair nodded. “They’re trying to build some big resort hotels in Asia- Vietnam, Thailand, maybe even China. I’m consulting with them on the Vietnam project. I’ve still got a bit of a reputation there. The idea is, I can help them with government contacts and so on.”

“Can you?”

“Yes. I speak the language and I know how things work,” Sinclair said. “You know, who gets greased, and how heavily. So they get their money’s worth.”

MAI CAME BACK and took a chair, swiveled it back and forth with her excellent legs. “I looked it up on the Net-WWTDD. What Would Tyler Durden Do. Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club.”

Virgil and Sinclair looked at each other, then Sinclair turned back to his daughter, a puzzled look on his face. “What are you talking about?”

“Aww…” She looked at Virgil. “I really need to go dancing,” she said. “I signed up for a dance class here, but it’s all… dance. I need to go to a club. You know the clubs?”

“I know a few.” Also a few that he’d have to stay away from, like the ones that Janey went to. “You ever do any line dancing?”

She was stricken. “Oh, no. You are not serious…”

VIRGIL GOT AROUND to asking Sinclair where he was the night of Utecht’s murder, and Sinclair got up, came back with a leatherette calendar, put on a pair of reading glasses, paged through it, and said, “Same thing as with last night’s. I was here, asleep.”

“The best alibi of all,” Virgil said.

“Why’s that?” Sinclair asked, his crystal blue eyes peering over the top of the half glasses.

“Because it can’t be broken,” Virgil said.

Sinclair looked at Mai. “He’s smarter than he looks.”

“Thank God,” she said. “He looks like he ought to be waxing his surfboard. If they’ve got surf in Iowa.”

Virgil laughed again, said, “Y’all are pickin’ on me.”

“I like the way that hick accent comes and goes,” Sinclair said to Mai. “It’s like a spring breeze-first it’s here, and then it’s gone.”

“Okay. The hell with it. I don’t even know why I’m talking to you.” Virgil pushed off the chair, but Sinclair held up a hand. “So Sanderson and this other man were executed? Is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s what it looks like.” Virgil hesitated, then said, “One other thing-they both had lemons stuffed in their mouths.”

“Ah… shit.” The word sounded strange, and peculiarly vulgar, coming from Sinclair, with his aristocratic manner.

“What?”

Sinclair glanced at Mai. “When the Vietnamese execute a prisoner-a political prisoner, or even a murderer-they’ll gag him by stuffing a lemon in his mouth. Hold it there with tape. Duct tape. Keeps them from talking while they’re walking out to the wall.”

“That’s pretty goddamn interesting,” Virgil said.

Mai rolled her eyes. “And probably an urban myth.”

“What would you know about it?” Sinclair snapped.

His daughter turned her face, embarrassed by the sudden pique. “It’s too dramatic, it’s too weird. Why would anybody do something like that? It’s got the earmarks of a legend; if you’d studied literature, you’d know that.”

“Ahh… They did it, take my word for it,” Sinclair said irritably. To Virgil: “ We don’t have anything to do with any of this, but it sounds to me like it goes back to Vietnam. Somehow. I’d take a good close look at Sanderson. See what unit he was in. See if there’s anything blacked out in his file. Some of these Vietnam vets, they’re crazier than a barrel of wood ticks. They’re getting old and ready to die. You might have an old rogue killer with an agenda. He might be good at it, if he was Phoenix, or something…”

“I heard about Phoenix when I was in,” Virgil said. “You’d hear about it from these old sergeants-major. Sounded like there was an element of bullshit to it.”

“Of course there was! Of course there was!” Sinclair said, leaning forward and rapping on the table with his knuckles. “But there’s a core of reality to it, too. We did have assassins. We did murder people in their homes. We did hire men with silencers and guns and no useful skill but murder. We even had a name for it-wet work! Look it up! Look it up!”

Virgil exhaled, stuck his notebook in his hip pocket, and said, “I better find Ray.”

Sinclair relaxed, suddenly affable again, and he smiled and said, “Good luck to you.”

MAI TAGGED ALONG to the front door, walking close to Virgil’s side. He said, “I would be delighted to take you dancing anytime you want, ma’am, except not tonight, because I gotta find this guy.” His words were tumbling out, a little confused, but that was one of his more endearing traits, he’d been told, so he worked it. “I can’t make any promises about tomorrow or any other night, because of this murder thing, but if I could call you about six o’clock, some night when I’ll know what I’m doing…”