Heat Lightning

is connected to a particular phone number without having to go through a lot of bureaucratic bullshit,” Virgil said. “The girl behind the desk looks like she lives for bureaucratic bullshit.”
    The bellhop looked at the girl behind the desk and said, “Somebody turned me in for smoking in the stairwell last winter. It was about a hundred below zero, which is why I was there instead of outside. I think she’s the one. She’s like this no-smoking Nazi. When I was bitching about it, she said it was for my own good. I said, ‘What, getting fired?’ Bitch.”
    “You think you could work this sense of anger and disenfranchisement into a room number? And a name?” Virgil turned his hand over; a folded-over twenty-dollar bill was pinched between his index and middle fingers.
    “What’s the number?” George asked as he lifted out the twenty.
    “Atta boy,” Virgil said. He wrote the number on a slip of paper and passed it over.
    The bellhop disappeared into the back and a moment later was back. “Got the number and the names. It’s Tai and Phem, a couple of Japs.”
    “Japs?” Virgil was puzzled. “The names sound Vietnamese.”
    George shrugged. “Whatever. I’ll tell you what, though, they are bad, bad tippers. The other night, Tai—he’s the tall one—orders a steak sandwich and fries at midnight. They don’t give those things away, that’s a thirty-dollar meal. He gave me a fuckin’ buck.”
    “What else you got?”
    “Well—just what everybody knows,” George said. “They’re Canadian.”
    “Canadian?”
    “Yeah. They’ve been here, off and on, mostly on, for three months.
    They’re supposedly working on a big deal with Larson International to build hotels.”
    “Larson,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah, you know.”
    “I know.” The chain that Sinclair worked for. “So they’re high-fliers.”
    “Well, if they are, somebody’s got them on a pretty friggin’ tight expense account—either that, or they’re putting down twenty percent for tips and keeping the cash.”
    “They’re that kind of guys?” Virgil asked.
    “They’re, uh . . . They’re some guys I wouldn’t fuck with,” George said.
    “You’re fuckin’ with them now,” Virgil said.
    The bellhop looked startled. “You’re not going to tell them.”
    “No. I just wanted to see if you’d jump,” Virgil said, standing up, stretching. “You did, which means, you know, maybe you’re not bullshitting me.”
    “You watch yourself, cowboy,” the bellhop said. “Them Japs is some serious anacondas.” He made a pistol shape with his thumb and forefinger, poked Virgil above the navel, and shuffled away.
     
 
VIRGIL HAD SPENT a good part of his life knocking on doors that had nobody behind them, entering rooms that people had just left, so he was mildly surprised when a slender man with longish hair, combed flat over the top of his head, and apparently nailed in place with gel, opened the door and said, pleasantly, “Yes?”
    “Virgil Flowers, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said, flipping open his ID. “I talked to Mead Sinclair a while ago, he said you might be able to help me with some Vietnam-related stuff. Are you Mr. Tai?”
    “Yes. Well . . . Okay, come in,” Tai said. He was thin, with a face that was delicate but tough. The splice lines of a major scar cut down his forehead, another white scar line hung under his left eye, another below his lip. “We’re working right now, it’s coming up on early morning in Vietnam, the markets are opening . . .”
    “Just take a couple of minutes,” Virgil said.
    He followed Tai into the suite’s main room, where another Asian man sat on a couch, with a laptop on his knee and a telephone headset on his head. He was shoeless, wearing a T-shirt and blue silky gym shorts. “My partner, Phem,” Tai said.
    Phem didn’t look up from his laptop but said, “What’s up, eh?”
    He said the “eh” perfectly: Canucks, Virgil thought, not Vietnamese.
    Tai pointed at a chair, and Virgil settled in and said, “Have you ever heard of the Vietnamese, uh, what would you call it . . . custom? The Vietnamese custom of putting a lemon in a man’s mouth, as a gag, before they execute him?”
    Tai had arranged his face in a smile, which vanished in an instant. “Jesus Christ, no. What’s up with that?”
    “You guys are from . . .”
    “Toronto,” Tai said. “Born and raised.”
    “But your parents must have been from Vietnam?”
    He nodded.