Heat Lightning

said.
    “So yank it out—but go see Sinclair first.”
    “OK.”
    “Did that truck thing do any good?” Davenport asked. “You know, pretending you were still with the truck?”
    “I think it killed three people,” Virgil said. “They bought the whole thing.”
    “You are a shifty motherfucker,” Davenport said.
    “Yeah, I know. I remind you of yourself when you were younger.”
    “Not much younger,” Davenport said.
    Virgil made a rude noise and they rolled through St. Paul to BCA headquarters, and Davenport dropped Virgil beside his truck. “The meeting with the Washington guys is in an hour, or an hour and fifteen minutes, so you don’t have much time,” Davenport said. “Do what you can.”
     
 
AT THE TRUCK, Virgil lay down beside the front fender, looked up at the transmitter. A couple of wires led into the turn signal box, and he yanked one of them out of the transmitter. That would kill it; creeped him out to think about the thing giving up Ray Bunton.
    Ten minutes to Sinclair’s. He parked in the street, turned on the laptop recorder, slid it into the pack, put the envelope on top of it, threw the pack over his shoulder, and walked to Sinclair’s place.
    He pushed the doorbell, and Sinclair answered immediately, as though he’d been waiting for it: “Who is it?”
    “Virgil.”
    The door buzzed and he went on through, and Sinclair was waiting at the open door to his apartment.
    “What happened to Hoa?” he asked.
    “Made it to Canada,” Virgil said.
    Relief showed in Sinclair’s face. “I couldn’t help liking her,” he said. “What about the other guys?”
    “Phem and Tai, whatever their real names are, are dead,” Virgil said. He was thinking of the recorder. “So’s another guy that I never met. Another guy got out. Either he’s wounded, or Mai is. We found a blood trail, but it was in Canada, and they had an exit route all set up. We called the Canadians with a description of the vehicle, but they haven’t seen it yet.”
    “Phem and Tai. Not bad guys, actually, for a killer and a torturer,” Sinclair said.
    “I’ll quote you when I write my article for the Atlantic,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah, right. Fur ’n’ Feather is more like it. . . . When did you get back?”
    “Ten minutes ago,” Virgil said. “I talked to my boss on the phone, and he told me you were here.”
     
 
THEY’D MOVED through the apartment, talking, out to the porch. Virgil tossed his pack on the table, undid the quick-release buckles, pulled out the envelope of photographs, left the end of the laptop hanging out, one of the tiny camera lenses facing Sinclair.
    He handed the envelope to Sinclair: “They left them for us. Deliberately, I’m sure.”
    Sinclair slid them out of the envelope, thumbed through them, then looked at them carefully, one at a time. He looked up and said, “That’s bad—and they’re real. I’ve had some training in this stuff. If they’re not real, they’re better than anything we could do.”
    “They’re real,” Virgil said. “We got some shots from the last guy they were looking for. Carl Knox. He took some right at the time of the shootings. The bodies look the same, the way they landed. No way to fake that.”
    Sinclair leaned back and said, “What are you guys planning to do?” Virgil shrugged. “It’s not up to me. There’s a big meeting, forty-five minutes from now—I’ve got to go—with some guys from Washington.
    I suspect we’re about to shovel a whole bunch of dirt over the whole thing.”
    “That’s one way to handle it,” Sinclair said. “What about me?”
    “Hard to avoid the fact that you were helping out,” Virgil said. “People already know . . . lots of cops, probably some newspeople. Gonna be hard to make it go away. I suspect what will happen is that you’ll wind up on trial in one of those intelligence courts, the secret-testimony ones, and then . . . what it is, is what it is.”
    Sinclair bared his teeth. “I could get really fucked, if that happens,” he said.
    Virgil spread his hands. “Shouldn’t have signed up with them.”
    “There was pressure. I told you about my daughter,” Sinclair said. “They were gonna fuck me over with that whole thing about the agency. I’d lose my job at the university . . . I’d be cooked.”
    “Shit happens,” Virgil said.
    Sinclair grinned and said, “You’re a lot rougher than you look, Virgil. You look like some kind of rockabilly, straw-headed, woman-chasing