Heat Lightning

civilized countries, anyway. Maybe they hired mercenaries in the Middle East, but they really wouldn’t go around killing people on the streets . . . would they?
    His fuckin’ truck.
    Burned him.
     
HE WALKED THROUGH the mostly empty building to his temporary office, shut the door and lay down on the floor behind the desk, closed his eyes.
    Sinclair . . .
    He thought about Sinclair: about Sinclair making the phone call from the cold phone to Tai and Phem. Why’d he do that? Why didn’t he have a cold cell phone? You could buy them over the counter. . . .
    Christ.
    Tai and Phem. Were they working with Sinclair, had Sinclair fingered him somehow? But he’d only talked to Sinclair once, for any amount of time. It’d take testicles the size of basketballs to hook that electronics package into Virgil’s truck, when it was parked almost outside the door. If Virgil had gotten up and walked out at some point, Sinclair wouldn’t have had time to get them out.
    They had to do it some other time, but when?
    In the motel lot? But he never told Sinclair where he was staying.
    Though he’d told Mai.
     
 
HE’D FELT himself circling around her. Great girl, but . . . how in the hell did a hot young dancer-woman grow up in Madison, Wisconsin, in the nineties and not know what Hole was? How was that possible?
    When he’d suggested to her that you could have a good time at the University of Wisconsin, out on the Terrace or down in the Rat, she seemed uncertain. But how could you be a hot young dancer chick from Madison and not know about hanging out on the Terrace or down in the Rathskeller? Then, when he’d gone outside to talk to the guy from Hong Kong, he’d come back to find her talking to her father, to Sinclair. Or to somebody she’d said was Sinclair. Out on the lake, a few minutes later, she’d pushed the conversation to the Terrace, to the Rat, as though she were proving to him that she knew about them.
    She’d been covering herself, Virgil thought.
    He remembered a few times when her turn of phrase seemed off, or unusually formal; remembered because he was a writer and the words she’d used seemed tinny on his ear. She’d once asked him, “When do you return?” instead of, “When ya comin’ back?”
    He said to himself, “No goddamn way.”
     
 
HE LAY ON THE FLOOR for another three minutes, then climbed the stairs to Davenport’s office. Carol’s office was out in the open, in a cubicle, and he rifled her Rolodex and found the home phone number and cell phone for Sandy.
    He caught her at home, on the way out: “I’ve got a date,” she protested. “Me and some people are . . .”
    “I don’t care if you’re going out to fuck Prince Charles, get your ass in here,” Virgil snarled. “Where are you?”
    She was intimidated, sounded frightened. “I live over by Concordia.”
    “Ten minutes, goddamnit. Be here in ten minutes.”
    Virgil couldn’t stand it, went out and walked around the parking lot, looked at his traitorous truck, kept checking his watch. She took fifteen minutes coming in, and during the interval, she’d gone from intimidated to pissed.
    “You know what? I’m pretty gosh-darned upset,” she said. Her glasses were glittering under the lights from the streetlamps. “You have no right to talk to me like that. I’ve done nothing but help.”
    “Walk while you’re talking,” Virgil said, and he set off toward the building entrance. Looked at his watch: almost six.
    She caught up and took a breath and said, “Okay. Something happened. Are there more dead people?”
    “Sandy . . . I need to get into the Wisconsin driver’s license bureau, whatever it’s called, and I’ve got to retrieve a license and look at the photograph.”
    “I can’t do that.”
    “You’re gonna have to find a way. Talk to a friend in Wisconsin, talk to somebody.” He stopped short and stepped next to her and said, “Sandy, you gotta help me. I don’t know this shit, and I’m desperate.”
    She put her hands on her hips: “Neither do I. If it was the middle of the day and I had some support . . .” Then her eyes slid sideways behind her glasses, and she said, “You know, the duty guys coordinate with Wisconsin. Maybe they could get it?”
    “Atta girl. See, I didn’t think of that,” Virgil said. “C’mon, keep talking, let’s go. Who do you know in Canada?”
    WHILE SHE WAS working the phones and the computers, Virgil went back to the floor of the office, eyes closed, looking