Heat Lightning

for anything. Finally crawled to his briefcase, found his phone book, fished the phone off the top of the desk, lay down again, and called Red Lake.
    Now that things were starting to crack up, the luck was running with him. Jarlait was off duty, but had stopped at the law-enforcement center to shoot the shit with a friend. He came up, and Virgil said, “You know that Apache dude that your friend saw on the reservation the day Ray was killed?”
    “ Could have been an Apache.”
    “Look, you got basically two kinds of guys up there—Indian guys and white guys. Maybe a black guy every once in a while, but not too often. So if you see a guy who isn’t white and isn’t black . . .”
    “Spit it out,” Jarlait said.
    “You think your pal could have seen a Vietnamese and thought he was an Apache?”
    Long pause. Then: “Huh. You know? I know some Vietnamese, and some of them do look like Apaches. Yeah, you get the right-looking Vietnamese . . .”
     
 
THE STUFF FROM Canada got back quicker than the stuff from Wisconsin. The Canada request was apparently routine for the Canadians, who turned around a couple of passport photos for Tai and Phem. Tai and Phem were definitely of Vietnamese heritage, small slender men with dark eyes and good smiles, and neither one of them was the Tai or Phem that Virgil met at the hotel.
    “Ah, man.”
    “This is getting a little scary,” Sandy said. “This woman, Mai . . . do you know her?”
    “Yeah, we’ve talked,” Virgil said.
    “Does she seem pretty nice?”
    “I guess,” he said. “Goddamnit, I was a fuckin’ chump.”
    “Hey, how often do you deal with spies?” she asked.
    Mai photos came in. She was nice-looking, round-faced, pleasant, and not the Mai that Virgil knew.
    “Now what?” Sandy asked.
    “Now I gotta go talk to somebody,” Virgil said.
    “Let me tell you something sincere before you go talk to somebody,” she said.
    “Okay . . .”
    “You smell like a fish.”
     
 
FUCK A BUNCH of fish. Virgil was in the truck two minutes later, running with lights, rolling down to I-35 and then left on I-94 across town to Cretin, south on Cretin to Randolph and over to Mississippi River Boulevard, to Davenport’s house. There were lots of lights, and Virgil parked in the driveway and walked up and pounded on the front door. Davenport popped it open, standing there in a tuxedo with a satin shawl collar, his tie draped around his neck, untied, and he said, “There’s a doorbell, Virgil.”
    “Man . . .”
    “Come on in.”
    They went and sat in Davenport’s living room, and Virgil laid it out: Sinclair and Tai and Phem and Mai. “They’re not here by accident. And I had to wonder about Sinclair, a couple of the things he said. . . . I mean, he led me straight to them, making that phone call. What do you think if you’re doing surveillance on a guy, and he walks out to a cold phone and makes a call like that? You think he’s got something going on. And he calls right in to Phem and Tai . . . like he was pointing me at them.”
    “Maybe not. I’ve had some dealings with these kinds of people,” Davenport said, “Their problem is, they’re smart, but they’re not smart enough to know that they’re not as smart as they think they are. It gets everybody in trouble.”
    “What I can’t get over is that they used me, and the truck, to locate Bunton. At least Bunton. Maybe gave them a lead on Knox, maybe gave them a lead on Warren—Christ, they heard everything I said when we were setting Warren up.”
    And the more he thought about it, the more pissed he got.
     
 
WEATHER CAME DOWN the stairs, wearing a frilly black cocktail dress that skillfully showed off her ass. She said, “Hi, Virgil. . . . Say, you smell like a fish.”
    “Ah, for Christ’s sakes.” To Davenport: “What do I do?”
    “What do you want to do?” Davenport asked.
    “Go beat the shit out of Sinclair,” Virgil said. “Find out what’s going on.”
    “Well, God bless you, Virgil.”
    “You think I should?” Virgil asked.
    “Yup. That’s what I would do,” Davenport said. “I’ll have my cell phone with me—let me know what you find out.”
    Weather had taken Davenport’s tie from around his neck, fit it around his collar, and began tying it. She said, “Give us a little time to party, though.”
    Virgil said, “Even though you insulted me about my fish smell, I gotta say, that dress does good things for you.”
    “I was afraid it made my ass look