Heat Lightning

do.”
    “Give it to the FBI guy, tell him to e-mail me. I’ll pop something back to him.”
     
 
MAI HAD GONE WITH a man’s white dress shirt, unbuttoned about three down, jeans, and sandals, and had pulled her hair into a ponytail. She looked terrific, her heart-shaped face framed by the white collar, and country enough.
    “Dad’s writing,” she said, quietly, at the door. Most of the lights in the apartment were out.
    “He works at night?” he asked. He always asked when other writers worked.
    “And early. He gets up at dawn. Always has. He says he can get five hours of work done before anybody else is up. He’s still really angry with you, by the way. He doesn’t believe you found those Vietnamese by calling Larson.”
    “Well—suspicious old coot.”
     
 
THEY TALKED ABOUT personal biography in the truck—growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, for her, in Marshall, Minnesota, for him. She told him about working as her father’s editorial assistant, about looking for work as an actress, as a dancer. He told her about being a cop; about killing a man the year before.
    “My father hates killing,” she said. “He spent his life fighting the idea of killing as a solution to anything.”
    “I hope he doesn’t find out about me calling up the intelligence guy,” Virgil said.
    “What? You called the CIA?” Eyebrows up.
    “No, no,” Virgil said. “I called the Vietnamese intelligence guy at their embassy in Ottawa. You know—their spy guy.”
    “Oh . . . you did not.”
    “Yes, I did,” Virgil said, glancing over at her. “His name was something like, you know, Wun Hung Low.”
    “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