Heat Lightning

one in New Ulm?”
    “Goddamnit, Daisy, we don’t need that lemon stuff out there,” Virgil said.
    “Oh, horseshit,” she said. “The killer knows he does it. You know he does it. I know he does it. The only people who don’t know he does it are the stupes. So I’m going to put it on the air, unless you give me something better.”
    “Okay, here’s something better,” Virgil said. “Yes.”
    “Yes, what?”
    “The killings are virtually identical,” he said. “The same guy did them both.”
    “Can I quote you?” she asked.
    “You can say that you spoke to me briefly, and that I acknowledged that there were striking similarities between the two,” Virgil said.
    She stuck out a lower lip: “I’m not sure that’s enough to kill the lemon angle. The lemon has a certain . . . interest about it.”
    “A lemon twist,” Shrake offered.
    “Oh, shit! That’s my lead,” Daisy said. “Thank you, Shrake.”
    “Okay. You’re gonna use it,” Virgil said. He stepped toward the TV lights. “I’ll go over and go on camera with these other guys, and give them my opinion about the killings. . . .”
    “Virgil—don’t do that,” she said, hooking his arm.
    “Daisy ...”
    “ All right . But if anybody else squeals lemon , I’ll be five seconds behind them.”
    “If you use my name on the air,” Virgil said, “mention that thing about the orgasmic wave, huh?”
     
 
AS THEY WALKED away from her, Shrake said, “I think she’s getting better as she gets older.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Did you ever . . . ?”
    “No, I did not, for Christ’s sakes. I don’t . . . Never mind.”
    “You mean, fuck everybody?” Shrake was enjoying himself.
    “Shrake ...”
    “Davenport tried to do that, you know, before he got married. You guys are somewhat alike.”
    “Bullshit. I’m a lot better-looking.”

4
    VIRGIL WAS staying at the Emerald Inn, made it back about a hundred feet in front of the first rush-hour car, went to his room, got undressed, set the alarm, and fell facedown on the bed.
    Too much.
    Four Leinie’s at the club, bedtime with Janey, then the murder. He’d started the day at five o’clock in the morning in Mankato, eighty miles south of the Twin Cities, and now was twenty-five hours down the line, with a hard day coming up.
    He would have been asleep in forty seconds, except thirty seconds after he landed facedown, the nightstand beeped at him. Beeped again thirty seconds later; again thirty seconds after that. No point in resisting: it wasn’t going to quit.
    He pushed up on his elbows, looked at the nightstand. Nothing there but a pile of dollar bills, the clock, and the lamp. Another beep. Had to be the clock, which had gone nuts for some reason. There was nothing to turn off except the alarm, and he needed the alarm, so he put the clock on the floor, pushed it under the bed, and dropped back on the pillow.
    Another beep, right next to his ear.
    Groggy, he looked at the nightstand. Nothing now but a pile of dollar bills and the lamp. He pulled open the only drawer, found a Gideon’s Bible, which he opened. The Gideon was not beeping him.
    Another beep. The lamp beeped? With the feeling that he was actually going insane, he inspected the lamp but could find no sign of anything that might beep. He’d just drawn back from it, looking at his pillow, when it beeped again.
    He was losing it, he thought. There was nothing there; the beep was in his head, and it would never go away. He flashed on a scene with himself at the Mayo Clinic, surrounded by shrinks, shaking their heads at the syndrome now known as Flowers’s Beep.
    He reached out to the stack of dollar bills . . . and found his cell phone beneath them, thin enough to be invisible. The low-battery warning. Jesus. He staggered over to his briefcase, got out the charger, plugged it in, and thought later that he must have passed out while hanging in midair over the bed, falling onto the pillow.
     
 
WHEN THE ALARM went off at nine o’clock, he woke bright-eyed, but in the bright-eyed, dazed way that means he’d feel like death at two o’clock in the afternoon. He cleaned up, staring at himself in the mirror as he shaved, and then said to his own image, “You’re too old for that Janey thing. You gotta wake up and fly right, Virgil. This is the first day of the rest of your life. You don’t have to be this way.”
    He wasn’t convinced. He got dressed, and spent a moment choosing a T-shirt that would go with his