Heat Lightning

call it up. When they were satisfied that he knew what they were doing, they headed out, across town, to the restaurant, a sandwich-and-pie place, and they all got coffee and a piece of pie and worked out the seating arrangements.
    When they were done, Virgil asked, “You happy?”
    Andreno nodded and said, “I am. It’s almost noon. Let’s make the call.”
    They went out to Virgil’s truck, gave Andreno a clean cell phone, which Shrake plugged into the microphone attachment on the laptop, and Warren’s cell-phone number.
    Andreno sat in the passenger seat, hunched over the phone, cleared his throat a couple times, and dialed. The phone call lasted a minute, and they replayed it from the recorder.
    ANDRENO: “Ralph Warren. I’m an ex-employee of a very old friend of yours, going back to the sixties. I need to talk to you.”
    “What friend? Talk about what?” Warren had a high-pitched, reedy voice on the phone. “How’d you get this number?”
    “We need to talk about all these dead people with lemons in their mouths. Your old friend figures that you might know something about it, and he’s very nervous. Therefore, he’s hiding out. The thing is, he took some pictures way back then, in that house, the one where the trouble started. He sent you copies. I had a little problem with your friend, and he canned my ass, so I lifted the pictures and here I am. All I want is my fee. Thirty thousand dollars. Then I go away.”
    “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, pal.”
    “Okay. Well, then, don’t show up,” Andreno said. “I’m gonna be at Spiro’s Restaurant, which is three blocks west on University from your Checkerboard Apartments, at one o’clock. If you’re not there by ten after one, fuck it, I mail the pictures to the television people and go on back to Chicago. See you there, or not. I know what you look like . . . from the pictures. Oh—if you want to know where your pal is, I can tell you that, too. ’Bye.”
    “Wait . . .”
    But Andreno had hung up.
    “He bit,” Shrake said from the backseat. “He’ll be there.”
     
 
JACKSON SET UP three hundred yards away with a camera lens as long as his arm. The rest of them stayed on the street, sitting in the backseats of plain-vanilla state cars, behind lightly smoked glass, each with a radio. For the first half hour, they saw nothing at all. Then the radio burped and Jenkins said, “Look at this guy. Red Corolla. He’s five miles an hour too slow and he’s checking everything.”
    “Can’t see his face,” Shrake said. Virgil was at the end of the line, watched the Corolla as it passed, but was on the wrong side of the street to see the driver’s face. He watched as the car made an unsignaled right turn off University. They’d driven the neighborhood before taking their parking spots, and there wasn’t much down that street—a crappy old industrial street with no residential.
    A minute later, the Corolla poked its nose back onto University and turned toward Virgil. “Corolla’s on the way back,” he said. “He’s probably our guy.”
    The car rolled past: the driver was a big guy, wearing a steel-gray suit, wine-colored necktie, and sunglasses. He looked like one of Warren’s security people: good physical condition and too big for the Corolla.
    “Got another one,” Jenkins said. “Look at the Jeep.”
    Red Jeep Cherokee, a few years old, slowed and turned into the parking lot. The Jeep made a slow tour, parked at the far end, sat for a moment, then slowly came back out. “I think they’re taking down the tag numbers on the cars,” Jenkins said. “It’d be interesting to know who’s running the numbers for them.”
    “Let’s figure that out,” Virgil said. “Let’s get the numbers on the plates ourselves, see who ran them.”
    The Jeep rolled out of the parking lot, turned back into traffic, drove a hundred yards up the street, then did a U-turn and parked two cars behind Shrake. “This isn’t good,” Shrake said.
    “Maybe they’ll get out when Andreno shows or Warren shows,” Jenkins said.
    “Hope so. Makes me nervous to have them right on my back.”
     
THEY ALL SAT, and waited, and got hot, and Andreno showed up at ten minutes to five, showing the Illinois tags, and turned into the parking lot. Shrake was watching the guys in the Jeep, through the windshield and rear window of the car behind him, and called, “They made him. They picked him out. As soon as they saw him get out