Heat Lightning

sometimes nauseated him now. Didn’t happen before. Only the last couple of years. He slipped a lemon from his pocket, scraped it with a fingernail, and inhaled the odor of the lemon rind. Better. Better than blood.
    Then he bent, pushed down Sanderson’s jaw, shoved the lemon into his dead mouth.

2
    EVERY NIGHT, before he went to bed, Virgil Flowers thought about God.
    The practice was good for him, he believed, and saved him from the cynicism of a cop’s life. Virgil was a believer. A believer in God and the immortal soul, though not in religions—a position that troubled his father, a Lutheran minister of the old school.
    “Religion is a way of organizing the culture, your relationship to God and the people around you,” his father argued the last time Virgil went back home. “It’s not a phone booth to God. A good religion reaches wider than that. A good religion would be a value in itself, even if God didn’t exist.”
    Virgil said, “My problem with that is I don’t believe God cares what we do. Everything is equally relevant and irrelevant to God. A religion is nothing more than a political party organized around some guy’s moral views, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, like conventional political parties are organized around some guy’s economic views. Like Bill Clinton’s.”
    His father disdained Bill Clinton, but he took the shot with appreciation.
    So they’d argued around the breakfast table in the kitchen, enjoying themselves, the odor of breakfast rolls lingering in the air, cinnamon and white frosting and hot raisins, and coffee; and mom humming in the background. Though he and his father had the usual growing-up troubles, they’d become closer as Virgil got into his thirties, and his father began dealing with sixty and the reality of age.
    His father, Virgil understood, appreciated that his son believed in the immortal soul and that he actually thought about God each night. He may have also envied the fact that his son was a cop; the preacher thought of himself as a man of peace, and he envied the man of action.
    The son didn’t envy the father. Virgil had been raised in a church, and the problems his father dealt with, he thought, would have driven him crazy. It’s relatively easy to solve a problem with a gun and a warrant and a prison; but what do you do about somebody who is unloved?
    Better, Virgil thought, to carry a badge, and maintain your amateur status when it came to considering the wonders of the universe.
     
 
ON THIS HOT, close night, Virgil’s consideration of the wonders of the universe were discomfited by the proximity of Janey Small’s naked ass, which, in Virgil’s opinion, was one of the wonders of the universe. Like a planet. A small, hot planet like Mercury, pulling you both with its heat and its gravity.
    Janey was asleep on her side, snoring a bit, her butt thrust toward him, which Virgil believed was not an accident. They’d already gone around twice, but Janey was fond of what she called “threesies,” and Virgil had been married to her long enough to understand the signal he was getting. Married to her second; that is, between his first and third wives. And before her third and fourth.
    Janey Small had been a rotten idea. Virgil had been in town, had dropped by the Minnesota Music Café to see what was up, and there she was, leaning on the bar, the wonder of the universe packed into a pair of women’s 501s.
    One thing led to another—it wasn’t like they were sexually incompatible. That hadn’t been the problem. They’d just been incompatible in every other way, like when she became webmaster of a Celine Dion fan site, or decided that fried tofu strips were better than bacon, or that fish felt lip pain.
    Janey.
    A problem. He liked her, but only for a couple hours at a time.
    Maybe if he could slide really slowly over to the edge of the bed . . . his jeans and boots and shirt were right there on the floor, he could be halfway to the door before she woke up.
    Virgil was making his move when the cell phone went off on the nightstand, and Janey woke with a start and rolled flat and said, “You left the cell phone on, you goddamned moron.”
    Not like she had a mouth on her.
    Virgil fumbled for the phone, peered at the view-screen, hoping against hope that the call was from an 888 number, but it wasn’t.
    Lucas Davenport. Virgil said aloud, “It’s Davenport.”
    “That’s not good,” Janey said. She was a cop groupie and knew what a