John Sandford - Heat Lightning

In the motel lot? But he never told Sinclair where he was staying.

Though he’d told Mai.

HE’D FELT himself circling around her. Great girl, but… how in the hell did a hot young dancer-woman grow up in Madison, Wisconsin, in the nineties and not know what Hole was? How was that possible?

When he’d suggested to her that you could have a good time at the University of Wisconsin, out on the Terrace or down in the Rat, she seemed uncertain. But how could you be a hot young dancer chick from Madison and not know about hanging out on the Terrace or down in the Rathskeller? Then, when he’d gone outside to talk to the guy from Hong Kong, he’d come back to find her talking to her father, to Sinclair. Or to somebody she’d said was Sinclair. Out on the lake, a few minutes later, she’d pushed the conversation to the Terrace, to the Rat, as though she were proving to him that she knew about them.

She’d been covering herself, Virgil thought.

He remembered a few times when her turn of phrase seemed off, or unusually formal; remembered because he was a writer and the words she’d used seemed tinny on his ear. She’d once asked him, “When do you return?” instead of, “When ya comin’ back?”

He said to himself, “No goddamn way.”

HE LAY ON THE FLOOR for another three minutes, then climbed the stairs to Davenport’s office. Carol’s office was out in the open, in a cubicle, and he rifled her Rolodex and found the home phone number and cell phone for Sandy.

He caught her at home, on the way out: “I’ve got a date,” she protested. “Me and some people are…”

“I don’t care if you’re going out to fuck Prince Charles, get your ass in here,” Virgil snarled. “Where are you?”

She was intimidated, sounded frightened. “I live over by Concordia.”

“Ten minutes, goddamnit. Be here in ten minutes.”

Virgil couldn’t stand it, went out and walked around the parking lot, looked at his traitorous truck, kept checking his watch. She took fifteen minutes coming in, and during the interval, she’d gone from intimidated to pissed.

“You know what? I’m pretty gosh-darned upset,” she said. Her glasses were glittering under the lights from the streetlamps. “You have no right to talk to me like that. I’ve done nothing but help.”

“Walk while you’re talking,” Virgil said, and he set off toward the building entrance. Looked at his watch: almost six.

She caught up and took a breath and said, “Okay. Something happened. Are there more dead people?”

“Sandy… I need to get into the Wisconsin driver’s license bureau, whatever it’s called, and I’ve got to retrieve a license and look at the photograph.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You’re gonna have to find a way. Talk to a friend in Wisconsin, talk to somebody.” He stopped short and stepped next to her and said, “Sandy, you gotta help me. I don’t know this shit, and I’m desperate.”

She put her hands on her hips: “Neither do I. If it was the middle of the day and I had some support…” Then her eyes slid sideways behind her glasses, and she said, “You know, the duty guys coordinate with Wisconsin. Maybe they could get it?”

“Atta girl. See, I didn’t think of that,” Virgil said. “C’mon, keep talking, let’s go. Who do you know in Canada?”

WHILE SHE WAS working the phones and the computers, Virgil went back to the floor of the office, eyes closed, looking for anything. Finally crawled to his briefcase, found his phone book, fished the phone off the top of the desk, lay down again, and called Red Lake.

Now that things were starting to crack up, the luck was running with him. Jarlait was off duty, but had stopped at the law-enforcement center to shoot the shit with a friend. He came up, and Virgil said, “You know that Apache dude that your friend saw on the reservation the day Ray was killed?”

“ Could have been an Apache.”

“Look, you got basically two kinds of guys up there-Indian guys and white guys. Maybe a black guy every once in a while, but not too often. So if you see a guy who isn’t white and isn’t black…”

“Spit it out,” Jarlait said.

“You think your pal could have seen a Vietnamese and thought he was an Apache?”

Long pause. Then: “Huh. You know? I know some Vietnamese, and some of them do look like Apaches. Yeah, you get the right-looking Vietnamese…”

THE STUFF FROM Canada got back quicker than the stuff from Wisconsin. The Canada request was apparently routine for the Canadians, who turned around a couple of passport photos for Tai and Phem. Tai and Phem were definitely of Vietnamese heritage, small slender men with dark eyes and good smiles, and neither one of them was the Tai or Phem that Virgil met at the hotel.

“Ah, man.”

“This is getting a little scary,” Sandy said. “This woman, Mai… do you know her?”

“Yeah, we’ve talked,” Virgil said.

“Does she seem pretty nice?”

“I guess,” he said. “Goddamnit, I was a fuckin’ chump.”

“Hey, how often do you deal with spies?” she asked.

Mai photos came in. She was nice-looking, round-faced, pleasant, and not the Mai that Virgil knew.

“Now what?” Sandy asked.

“Now I gotta go talk to somebody,” Virgil said.

“Let me tell you something sincere before you go talk to somebody,” she said.

“Okay…”

“You smell like a fish.”

FUCK A BUNCH of fish. Virgil was in the truck two minutes later, running with lights, rolling down to I-35 and then left on I-94 across town to Cretin, south on Cretin to Randolph and over to Mississippi River Boulevard, to Davenport’s house. There were lots of lights, and Virgil parked in the driveway and walked up and pounded on the front door. Davenport popped it open, standing there in a tuxedo with a satin shawl collar, his tie draped around his neck, untied, and he said, “There’s a doorbell, Virgil.”

“Man…”

“Come on in.”

They went and sat in Davenport’s living room, and Virgil laid it out: Sinclair and Tai and Phem and Mai. “They’re not here by accident. And I had to wonder about Sinclair, a couple of the things he said… I mean, he led me straight to them, making that phone call. What do you think if you’re doing surveillance on a guy, and he walks out to a cold phone and makes a call like that? You think he’s got something going on. And he calls right in to Phem and Tai… like he was pointing me at them.”

“Maybe not. I’ve had some dealings with these kinds of people,” Davenport said, “Their problem is, they’re smart, but they’re not smart enough to know that they’re not as smart as they think they are. It gets everybody in trouble.”

“What I can’t get over is that they used me, and the truck, to locate Bunton. At least Bunton. Maybe gave them a lead on Knox, maybe gave them a lead on Warren-Christ, they heard everything I said when we were setting Warren up.”

And the more he thought about it, the more pissed he got.

WEATHER CAME DOWN the stairs, wearing a frilly black cocktail dress that skillfully showed off her ass. She said, “Hi, Virgil… Say, you smell like a fish.”

“Ah, for Christ’s sakes.” To Davenport: “What do I do?”

“What do you want to do?” Davenport asked.

“Go beat the shit out of Sinclair,” Virgil said. “Find out what’s going on.”

“Well, God bless you, Virgil.”

“You think I should?” Virgil asked.

“Yup. That’s what I would do,” Davenport said. “I’ll have my cell phone with me-let me know what you find out.”

Weather had taken Davenport’s tie from around his neck, fit it around his collar, and began tying it. She said, “Give us a little time to party, though.”