Heat Lightning

back toward the kitchen, pulling her along as if by gravity. “What happened the other night?”
    She busied herself, getting coffee. “All I’ve got is instant. . . . I told him not to go out.”
    “Instant’s fine,” Virgil said. “Why shouldn’t he walk the dog?”
    “Something was going on, and he wouldn’t tell me about it. Two nights ago, some men came to see him—they were talking in the street. Arguing.”
    “Was he afraid of them?”
    She paused with a jar of instant coffee, a puzzled look on her face. “No, no, he wasn’t afraid of them . Whatever it was, whatever they were talking about, that’s why he took the gun with him. He was really upset when he came back in.”
    “What did the guys look like?” Virgil asked.
    “I only saw one of them clearly—I didn’t know him, but he looked like a cop,” Owen said. “Like a policeman. He had that attitude. He was always hooking one thumb in his belt, like you see cops do. I don’t know—I thought he was a cop.”
    Virgil took his notebook out of his jacket pocket. It was a black European-style notebook called a Moleskine, with an elastic band to keep it closed. He bought them a dozen at a time, one for each heavy case he worked. When he was done with a case, he put the notebook—or several of them sometimes—on a bookshelf, a vein to be mined if he ever started writing fiction.
    He slipped the elastic on the cover, flipped open the notebook, wrote, “cop.”
    “You couldn’t see the other guy?” he asked.
    “No. Not very well. But I got the feeling that he might have been an Indian.”
    “You mean, like, a dot on the forehead? Or an American Indian?”
    “American Indian,” Owen said. “I couldn’t see him very well, but he was stocky and had short hair, but there was something about the way he dressed that made me think Indian. He was wearing a jean jacket and Levi’s, and I think he came on a motorcycle and walked down here, because I heard a motorcycle before Bobby went out, and then, when he came back in, I heard a motorcycle pulling away. The cop guy came in a car.”
    “What kind of car?”
    She showed a small smile. She knew the answer to this one: “A Jeep. I had one just like it, my all-time favorite. A red Jeep Cherokee.” Then she turned away from him again, like the first time he lost her, and she said, “God, why did this happen?” and she shook a little, standing there with the coffee in her hands.
    “You okay?” Virgil asked after a moment. He wrote “red Cherokee” in his notebook, and “Indian/motorcycle.”
    “No, I’m not,” she said.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “You okay for a couple more questions?”
    “Yeah, let me get this coffee going.” She spooned coffee into two china mugs, filled them with water, stirred, and stuck them in a microwave; the whole procedure was so practiced that Virgil would have bet she did it every morning with Sanderson. “Something else,” she said. “It’s possible that the Indian’s name is Ray. I don’t know that, but it could be.”
    “Why Ray?” The microwave beeped and she took the cups out, and slid one across to Virgil. They both took a sip, the coffee strong and boiling hot, and Virgil said again, “Ray?”
    Ray was an Indian, an Ojibwa, a Chippewa, from Red Lake. She’d never met him, but he was an old pal of Sanderson’s—Bobby never explained how they met—and the past three weeks they’d been going to vet meetings in St. Paul.
    Virgil perked up. “Vet meetings?”
    “Yes. Bobby didn’t tell me about those either. I mean, it’s starting to sound like he didn’t tell me about anything, but that’s not true. He could be a talkative man. But these men in the street, these meetings . . . it’s like he couldn’t talk to a woman about them. This was man stuff, like maybe it went back a long time.”
    Virgil wrote “Ray/Indian” in his book, and “vet meetings.”
    “When you say vet meetings,” he asked, “did you get the impression it was just a bunch of guys, a bull session, or was it more like group therapy or what?” Virgil asked.
    “Group therapy. Maybe not exactly that, but more than a bull session.” She squinted at him across the work island. “I don’t know why Bobby would need vet’s therapy, though. He worked in a motor pool for some obsolete missile battalion. He said they’d shoot off their missiles, for practice, and they couldn’t hit this mountain that they used as a target.”
    “In Korea.”
    “Yes.