Heat Lightning (11 page)

"It is not, and that's racist," she said.

"Sorry. His name was, uh, Hao Nguyen," Virgil said. "He was pretty surprised to hear from me, I can tell you."

She brushed it off. "You called a spy?"

"Yup. He told me to get lost."

She had her phone out, dialed, waited a minute, then said, "Hey, Dad. Virgil and I are on the way to the dance club. He just told me that he called some spy up in the Vietnamese embassy in Ottawa. About you. Yeah. He said 'One Truck Load' . . . No, no, he said, Hao Nguyen. Yeah. Yeah, I bet. Okay, I will."

She hung up, and Virgil said, "Boy, I sure hope he doesn't hear about that."

She said, "Now he's really pissed."

"You said, 'I will.' What was that?"

"He wants me to see what else I can worm out of you," she said.

"Well, hell," Virgil said, "I am the talkative sort."

HE TOOK HER TO One-Eyed Dick's Tejas Tap in Roseville, where they had dancing and live music. They lucked into a booth, she got a Corona with a slice of lime, he ordered a lemonade. "You have a problem with alcohol?" she asked.

It took him a second, then he said, "Oh. No. Not that way. I got whacked on the head last night."

He told her about it, dramatizing a little because she looked so good, and she said, "The same guy you were telling Dad about? The Indian guy?"

"Yeah. I don't know what's up with him. He figures in here somehow. Anyway, he's running. I'll find him." He took a sip of lemonade.

"Why are you wearing a shirt that says, 'Hole'?"

"Just another band," he said. "C'mon. Let's dance."

So they danced, cheek-to-cheek, and she was a perfect dancer, like a warm, well-rounded shadow. He wasn't bad himself, he thought. One-Eyed Dick's didn't do much in the way of line dancing, a fad that had faded, but still did some, including a beginner's electric slide, and she caught on instantly and he had her laughing hard with it, dark eyes sparkling. Watching her, he thought he might give quite a bit to see her laughing over the years. But then, he'd had that same thought with three other women.

While he was at the bar, getting another lemonade and beer, he watched her talking excitedly on her cell phone. She was putting it away when he got back, and she said, "Girlfriend from Madison. She found my perfect life-mate."

"Dancer?"

"Psychiatrist," she said, and they both laughed, and she said, "She was serious, too."

She probed on murder investigations: how he did them, why he did them. Asked if cops still beat people up to get information.

"I wouldn't," he said. "It's torture. Torture's immoral."

"The CIA doesn't seem to think so."

"No, no." He wagged a finger at her. "Some people in the CIA think it is immoral. Maybe some don't."

"What about with things like 9/11, where you've got terrorists blowing up buildings?"

He shrugged. "Are you going to torture people because you suspect they might be up to something? Somebody's always up to something. What about a guy you suspect is killing little children? Do you torture him because of what you suspect? If you torture people you suspect of being criminals, where do you stop? Who do you trust to do the suspecting? And if you don't want to torture people in advance, then do you torture them afterwards? For what? For revenge? That doesn't seem like something civilized people would do."

"What about capital punishment?" she asked.

"Don't believe in it," Virgil said.

"You're a weird cop," she said.

"Not really--a lot of cops don't believe in it. Torture, anyway. The problem isn't what it does to the victim, it's what it does to the people who do it. Messes them up. Turns them into animals. I'll tell you something--you show me an executioner, and I'll show you a screwed-up human being."

"But you killed a guy last year . . ."

"Who was trying to kill me. I do believe in self-defense," Virgil said. "But torture and cold-blooded execution . . . those things are sins."

They danced some more, and the music and the lights began to jiggle his brain around, and finally she put a hand on his chest and asked, "Are you okay?"

"The headache's coming back. It's the lights," he said.

"So we can dance anytime. Why don't you take me home and get some rest? Or, better yet, you can take the Mai Sinclair instant concussion cure."

"What's that?"

"Can't be explained, only shown," she said.

BACK AT HER APARTMENT, she put a finger to her lips, said, "Quiet--if he wakes up, he'll never get back to sleep." They crept inside, across the living room to the glassed-in porch where Sinclair did his writing; on the way, Mai got a pillow from a couch.

On the porch, a six-foot-long Oriental carpet spread out behind Sinclair's writing chair. After Mai had closed the porch door, she said, "I want you to lie down on the carpet, arms above your head, folded, fingers touching, forehead on the pillow. Facedown, so your spine is straight."

All right. Virgil sprawled facedown on the carpet, moved his hands around until she was satisfied that his body was squared up; then she straddled him, sitting in the small of his back, probed his neck with her fingertips, as if looking for something, then suddenly dug in. The pain was like an electric shock, and he arched his back and yelped: "Ah."

"Shhh," she whispered. "Relax. I'm going to do that again, but it won't hurt as much. Your neck muscles are like wood--that slows down the blood flow you need. So relax . . ." Her voice lulled him, and she dug in again, at the instant he no longer expected it, and the shock was as bad as the first: "AHHHH."

"Easy, easy . . . that's the last shock. Now I'm going to pull some of the muscles apart." She did, and it still hurt; but the pain gradually ebbed, to be replaced by a surging warmth, and he went away for a while, only to come back when she stood up, slapped him on the butt, and said, "You're cured, cowboy."

He sat up, a little dizzy. "Ah, jeez . . ." But he felt good--though tired--and the headache was gone.

"You need to go home and get some sleep," she said. "Tomorrow morning, you'll feel good. If you get some sleep."

"Hmm." He ran his hands through his hair, shaking it out. "All right. What'd you just do? Some kind of massage therapy?"

"Something like that--a little like acupuncture, too," she said. "Dancers learn that stuff. We've always got aches and pains."

She was moving him toward the door, he realized. He wasn't going to get any further this night; better to go with shyness, or politeness, than to make a grab at her. "I appreciate it. Jeez, I'd like to take you dancing again."

"Give me a call," she said at the door. She kissed a fingertip and pressed it against his nose, and closed the door.

Second time that happened. Just like with the Vietnamese guys: don't let the door hit you in the ass, Virgil.

He was back in his truck when he became aware of a kind of erotic warmth in his back and side muscles, where her butt and legs had weighed on him. Not a tease, because she hadn't been wiggling around or anything, but the feeling was there, and lingering.

He thought about Janey, probably home alone and lonesome. And he thought, That would be wrong, Virgil.

But would it really be wrong to bring a little warmth and comfort to a lonely woman? To help someone out who needed . . .

What a load of self-serving, hypocritical BS.

Mai Sinclair, he thought. Pretty damn good.

Chapter
9

THE SCOUT sat in the back of a two-year-old white Chevy van, in a cluster of cars under a spreading oak, on Edgecumbe down from the corner at Snelling, watching John Wigge's house.

Waiting for the lights to go out. Waiting to go to bed. He'd been there waiting, for four hours, since Wigge got home.

The house was a single-story brick-and-shingle affair surrounded by a close-cropped lawn. A tough nut to crack. Wigge was an ex-cop, now the vice president of a high-end private security agency, and he'd taken advantage of the job: there were motion detectors, glass-break alarms, magnetic window sensors that would start screaming with any movement at all. The security panel, set into the wall near the back door, looked like it could launch the space shuttle.

Wigge had taken part in the meeting at Sanderson's, with Sanderson and Bunton and the unknown man in the backseat of Wigge's car. With Bunton on the run, Wigge was the next target--but he'd have to be taken outside the house. Inside the house, he had too many advantages.

Now, if he'd just go to bed, they could start again tomorrow.

THE SHOOTER was two blocks from the scout. He sat in silence, not moving. No iPod, no headphones, no book, though he couldn't have read in the dark anyway. He needed none of that, the artificial support, when he could simply run his memories, smile with them, cry with them, and all the time, all five senses could reach out over the landscape, looking for targets. . . .

Though, when he thought about it, had he ever used taste? He reached back through his memories . . . and was still there when the light came on in Wigge's garage.

That was one weakness in Wigge's security, and the scout had noticed it earlier and brought it to the shooter's attention. The garage was connected directly to the house, so Wigge could get out and into his car without being seen. But he had a garage door opener with an automatic overhead light. As soon as he touched the button to lift the door, the light went on. If he did that from the garage, rather than from inside the car, he'd be exposed, if only for a moment or two.

The shooter was in the back of the van, in a legal parking space, with the rifle on the floor beside him. When the light came on in the garage, he reacted instantly, dropping the window with one jab of his finger, swiveling the gun up . . .

The cell phone burped: no sign of life in the garage. The shooter picked up the phone, and the scout said, "He's in the car," and "He's moving."

And here it came, a big black GMC sport utility vehicle with a ton of chrome and gray-tinted windows of the kind popularized by the Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq. Wigge backed out, paused, watched the garage door all the way down, then backed into the street, aimed at Snelling, and drove away. The shooter waited until it turned the corner, then started after it.

His cell phone beeped, and he put it to his ear, and the scout said, "Straight up Snelling."

The shooter saw the truck again as it turned down the ramp onto I-94, headed east. He was ten seconds behind it.

JOHN WIGGE was a big red-faced man, bullet-headed and bullet-brained. He'd retired with a full pension from the St. Paul cops, where he'd spent most of his career working Vice. His nickname had been R-A, pronounced "ARR-AYY," which stood for Resisting Arrest. Sell dope in his territory without Wigge's okay, run a hooker without a nod from Wigge, and there was a good chance that you'd resist arrest and get your head busted, or an arm or a leg. He'd walked right up to the edge of criminal charges a few times, but he'd always walked away again.

A different proposition than Sanderson or Utecht. Sanderson was like a banty rooster, but a banty rooster was still a chicken. Wigge was not.

Still, the shooter could take him. There was no question about that. If he could get Wigge alone for thirty seconds, or even ten seconds. He had a gun, a lead-weighted sap, a roll of duct tape. Sometimes you had to take calculated risks; and sometimes, if you work at it hard enough, you get lucky.