Heat Lightning

7

VIRGIL WALKED down to his truck, climbed in, thought about it for a minute, then drove around the block so the back of the truck was looking down at the Sinclairs’ condo. He shut the truck down, got his laptop, phone, camera, and an oversized photography book called Photojournalism, and crawled into the back.

Minnesota allows only a certain level of window tinting in cars, so that highway patrolmen won’t walk into a gun they can’t see. Virgil’s was twice as dark as the permissible tint, which was okay for police vehicles used for surveillance. Virgil didn’t use the 4Runner much for surveillance, but since it was always full of fishing tackle or hunting gear or camera equipment, the heavy tint worked as insurance, keeping the eyes of the greedy out of the back of his truck.

And it also worked for surveillance, as intended.

Sitting in the back, he was invisible from the outside, and a camping pillow made a comfortable-enough seat. If he’d jolted Sinclair in any way, then he might make a move. If not, he had things to do, which could be done from the back of the truck.

He called Carol and asked, “So where’s Ray Bunton?”

“Can’t find him. The cops at Red Lake are all out working, there’s nobody to talk to us. But they’re gonna call back,” she said.

“Check them every five minutes,” Virgil said.

That done, he opened the photojournalism book to the section called “Techniques of the Sports Shooter” and settled in for a little study, trying out things with his new Nikon as he did it.

The good thing about the new digital cameras, like his D3, was that you could see the shot instantly. He was working on his panning technique, shooting the occasional passerby, when Mead Sinclair walked out of his house, looked both ways, and then turned toward Virgil’s truck.

Virgil took a shot or two as Sinclair came up-couldn’t hurt to have a couple of current shots-and went on past. Sinclair never looked at the truck. He seemed to be talking to himself, or maybe singing to himself, and he had a hand-sized spiral notebook in one hand, with a pen clipped to it, and up the block, he stopped and made a note, then continued on. An intellectual, Virgil thought.

At the end of the block, Sinclair crossed the street and started along the next block, and Virgil watched him through the windshield. At the end of the second block, he wrapped around to his right, headed out to Grand Avenue.

Virgil followed in the truck, crossed the street that Sinclair had taken, saw him walking up the block. Virgil took the opportunity to back up a bit, watched him in a narrow gap between the edge of a house and a tree trunk. Sinclair crossed the street at the corner, carefully looking both ways before he crossed, and a moment later was out of sight again.

He could lose him right there, but Virgil took the chance and drove on another block, then right, to the end of the block, and eased out, looking down the block, and saw Sinclair crossing Grand, heading into a restaurant.

Sinclair had just eaten, he’d said. Virgil hadn’t been invited… So why the restaurant? Virgil parked, waiting to see who he might come out with-or who might come out that was interesting.

Nobody came out but Sinclair, a minute or so after he went in. He recrossed the street, then turned away, down the block, retracing his steps: might be headed home. Virgil made a quick turn, went down to the end of the block, found a bush he could stop behind. A minute later, Sinclair appeared a block away, crossed the street again, and headed back toward his house.

Virgil said, “Shoot,” and wrestled the truck in a quick U. Had he missed somebody? He should have waited outside the restaurant.

Nobody came out for ten minutes, and then it was two elderly ladies. Another five minutes, and two fat guys in golf shirts, one picking ferociously at his teeth with a toothpick. They got into a Cadillac and drove away; they seemed unlikely.

Virgil decided to look for himself. Walked down to the restaurant, stood at the hostess stand for a moment, checking out the ten or twelve people in the booths. They all looked unremarkable, and seemed focused on food or conversation. The hostess, who might have been a college girl from Macalester, came over and said, “One?”

“Ah, I was here to meet a guy, but I’m late, and I’m afraid I might have missed him. Good-looking older guy, still blond…”

“Oh-the professor?”

“Yeah. That’s him,” Virgil said.

“He was here, but made a call and then he left again. He might be trying to call you.”

“Thanks,” Virgil said. He backed away, glanced toward the rest-rooms, saw the old-fashioned black coin phone on the wall. “I’ll try him again on the phone.”

He went back and looked at it: the phone dial showed a number, and he jotted it down in the palm of his hand, under the number that Mai had written there.

Outside again, he thought about it. Sinclair had just walked four blocks to a cold phone to make a call. Interesting…

He noted the time and called Carol. “See if you can get a subpoena for the phone records for a pay phone at Stern’s Café, on Grand. Here’s the number…”

“You want me to check informally first?” She meant that Davenport knew a guy who could tell them whether a subpoena would be a waste of time.

“If you could. Get in touch with Red Lake?”

“Not yet; still trying.”

VIRGIL RANG OFF, looked at the phone for a moment, groped in his briefcase for his black book, punched in a number.

“Harold; it’s Virgil Flowers in Minnesota.”

“Yeah, Virgil. What’s up?”

“I got a killer who’s executed two older guys, left their bodies on vet memorials, with lemons stuck in their mouths. Killed them with a.22, two shots, maybe silenced. You ever hear of anything like that, with the cartels, the mob, or anybody?”

“New one on me,” Harold Gomez said. He was an agent with the DEA. “You got weird shit up there. I always said that.”

“If you have a line into the FBI, into that serial-killer unit, whatever it is… could you check the lemon thing? Without burning up any of your personal credit?”

“Sure. I know a guy who knows those guys,” Gomez said. “How fast you need it?”

“Well, if you get a hit, I need to know right away,” Virgil said. “The killer guy, we don’t know that he’s left town. If he’s crazy, if it’s business, or what it is. If he’s got a list, it could get ugly.”

“I’ll call-but to tell you the truth, it sounds more like some kind of goddamn Russian thing or Armenian or Kazakh. They’re into the rituals and warnings and shit. The mob, those assholes just shoot your ass and bury you in the woods with Jimmy.”

“Jimmy?”

“Hoffa.”

“Oh, yeah. Listen-another guy told me that the Vietnamese executioners sometimes stick lemons in the mouths of the people they’re going to execute,” Virgil said. “Like gags. If you can find any reference to that… maybe old Vietnam guys or something?”

“Sounds kinky. Let me check,” Gomez said. “You on your cell phone?”

“I am. One more thing, Harold? See if the guys in the serial-killer unit are looking at any chain of old veteran deaths. Even without lemons and memorials.”

“Sure.”

“I owe you, Harold.”

HE CLICKED OFF, got ready to move, but Carol called back.

“We talked to a guy in Red Lake who knows Bunton, and they’re out looking for a guy to call you back. Sandy dug up some pictures of him, she e-mailed them to you, along with every file she can find on him. Income tax, all of that. She can’t get into the military records, but there’s a reference in one of his DWI files that he was treated for alcoholism at the Veterans Administration Hospital, and that he did service in Vietnam… so he’s ex-military.”

“All right. I sort of knew that, but it all helps.”

HE WAS FIVE MINUTES from a Starbucks, where he had an online account. He got a white chocolate mocha Frappuccino, found a table, and brought the computer up as he sipped.

The photos of Bunton showed a hard, square-looking man, always in T-shirts. In one photo, he glared at the camera, a headband tight around his forehead, an eagle feather dangling over one ear. With his pale eyes, he didn’t look particularly Indian, Virgil thought-more like an IRA dead-ender. Was Bunton an Irish name? Or maybe Scots? Didn’t sound a hell of a lot like Ojibwa.

Whatever.

The rest of the Bunton file told him what he’d already guessed- Vietnam, hanging out, motorcycles, alcoholism, dope, and sporadic employment involving automobile parts.

When he finished, Virgil shut down the computer, looked at his watch.

Goddamn Bunton.

He stood up to leave, but his phone rang. Carol. He sat down again, flipped it open, and said, “Yeah?”

“Informally, the phone call went to the Minneapolis Hyatt. I’ve got the number, but not the room…”

THE MINNEAPOLIS HYATT is all tangled up in the Skyway system, and Virgil, operating on Kentucky windage, put his truck in the wrong parking ramp and debouched into the Skyway, not realizing that he wasn’t where he thought he was. He spent ten minutes running around like a hamster in a plastic habitat, before he found a map and realized his mistake.

The hotel’s lobby was empty, but the Hyatt desk was being run by a young woman who was far too sophisticated and generally out there to be running a hotel desk. Virgil had the uneasy feeling that if he asked her to connect a phone number to a room and a name, she’d call a manager, who might want to see a subpoena… blah-blah-blah.

He looked around and saw an elderly rusty-haired bellhop sitting on a window ledge, reading a sex newspaper called Seed, which, Virgil happened to know, was the publishing arm of an outlaw motorcycle gang.

Virgil went over and sat down next to him. The bellhop looked like a model for the next Leprechaun horror film, with a nose the size of a turnip and a bush of red hair shot through with gray.

He glanced at Virgil and said, “You look like a hippie, but you’re a cop.” He was wearing a tag that said George. “Looking for hookers?”

“Nope. I’m trying to find out which room is connected to a particular phone number without having to go through a lot of bureaucratic bullshit,” Virgil said. “The girl behind the desk looks like she lives for bureaucratic bullshit.”

The bellhop looked at the girl behind the desk and said, “Somebody turned me in for smoking in the stairwell last winter. It was about a hundred below zero, which is why I was there instead of outside. I think she’s the one. She’s like this no-smoking Nazi. When I was bitching about it, she said it was for my own good. I said, ‘What, getting fired?’ Bitch.”

“You think you could work this sense of anger and disenfranchisement into a room number? And a name?” Virgil turned his hand over; a folded-over twenty-dollar bill was pinched between his index and middle fingers.

“What’s the number?” George asked as he lifted out the twenty.

“Atta boy,” Virgil said. He wrote the number on a slip of paper and passed it over.

The bellhop disappeared into the back and a moment later was back. “Got the number and the names. It’s Tai and Phem, a couple of Japs.”

“Japs?” Virgil was puzzled. “The names sound Vietnamese.”

George shrugged. “Whatever. I’ll tell you what, though, they are bad, bad tippers. The other night, Tai-he’s the tall one-orders a steak sandwich and fries at midnight. They don’t give those things away, that’s a thirty-dollar meal. He gave me a fuckin’ buck.”

“What else you got?”

“Well-just what everybody knows,” George said. “They’re Canadian.”

“Canadian?”

“Yeah. They’ve been here, off and on, mostly on, for three months.

They’re supposedly working on a big deal with Larson International to build hotels.”

“Larson,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, you know.”

“I know.” The chain that Sinclair worked for. “So they’re high-fliers.”

“Well, if they are, somebody’s got them on a pretty friggin’ tight expense account-either that, or they’re putting down twenty percent for tips and keeping the cash.”

“They’re that kind of guys?” Virgil asked.

“They’re, uh… They’re some guys I wouldn’t fuck with,” George said.

“You’re fuckin’ with them now,” Virgil said.

The bellhop looked startled. “You’re not going to tell them.”

“No. I just wanted to see if you’d jump,” Virgil said, standing up, stretching. “You did, which means, you know, maybe you’re not bullshitting me.”

“You watch yourself, cowboy,” the bellhop said. “Them Japs is some serious anacondas.” He made a pistol shape with his thumb and forefinger, poked Virgil above the navel, and shuffled away.

VIRGIL HAD SPENT a good part of his life knocking on doors that had nobody behind them, entering rooms that people had just left, so he was mildly surprised when a slender man with longish hair, combed flat over the top of his head, and apparently nailed in place with gel, opened the door and said, pleasantly, “Yes?”

“Virgil Flowers, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said, flipping open his ID. “I talked to Mead Sinclair a while ago, he said you might be able to help me with some Vietnam-related stuff. Are you Mr. Tai?”

“Yes. Well… Okay, come in,” Tai said. He was thin, with a face that was delicate but tough. The splice lines of a major scar cut down his forehead, another white scar line hung under his left eye, another below his lip. “We’re working right now, it’s coming up on early morning in Vietnam, the markets are opening…”

“Just take a couple of minutes,” Virgil said.

He followed Tai into the suite’s main room, where another Asian man sat on a couch, with a laptop on his knee and a telephone headset on his head. He was shoeless, wearing a T-shirt and blue silky gym shorts. “My partner, Phem,” Tai said.

Phem didn’t look up from his laptop but said, “What’s up, eh?”

He said the “eh” perfectly: Canucks, Virgil thought, not Vietnamese.

Tai pointed at a chair, and Virgil settled in and said, “Have you ever heard of the Vietnamese, uh, what would you call it… custom? The Vietnamese custom of putting a lemon in a man’s mouth, as a gag, before they execute him?”

Tai had arranged his face in a smile, which vanished in an instant. “Jesus Christ, no. What’s up with that?”

“You guys are from…”

“ Toronto,” Tai said. “Born and raised.”

“But your parents must have been from Vietnam?”

He nodded. “ Saigon. Got out just before the shit hit the fan. I spoke Vietnamese until I was three, lucky for me. Hard language to learn later on,” he said. “It helps when you’re running around the rim. Phem the same, except he started English a little later.”

“The rim?”

“The Pacific Rim,” Tai said.

“Ah… so… well, heck, I just about used up my questions,” Virgil admitted. “That lemon thing is really bugging me. Have you seen the stories on TV, or the papers, about the guys who were murdered and left on veterans’ memorials?”

“Something about it, but we usually mostly read the financial pages.”

Phem nudged Tai, tapped his computer screen. Tai leaned over to look and said, “No way,” then turned back to Virgil.

“There’s some connection with Vietnam,” Virgil said. “One of the murdered men was going to meetings with a Vietnam vet group, and he’d talked to Sinclair, and I know nothing about Vietnam. Hell, I’ve never been much further away from here than Amarillo, Texas.”

Tai said, “ Amarillo? You ever have the chicken-fried steak at the Holiday Inn?”

“Oh, Lord, I have,” Virgil said. “That one right on Interstate 40?”

“That always has some soldiers hanging around?”

“Ah, man, that’s the one…”

They talked about the effects of the chicken-fried steak for a minute, the effects lasting, depending on which direction you were going, at least to Elk City, Oklahoma (east), or Tucumcari, New Mexico (west).

When the talk died down and he couldn’t think of any more sane questions, Virgil stood up, took out a business card, and handed it to Tai. “Well, shoot. If you have the time, ask some of your Vietnamese friends about lemons. Give me a call.”

Tai tilted his head back and forth. “Mm. I think that would be… inappropriate… for people in our position. But I’ll tell you what you could do. You could call a guy named Mr. Hao Nguyen at the Vietnamese embassy in Ottawa, and ask him. Don’t tell him you got his name from me, for Christ’s sakes.”

“Who is he?”

“The resident for the Vietnamese intelligence service,” Tai said. He stepped across to the telephone desk, picked up a small leather case, took out a business card, wrote on the back with a gold pen, and passed it to Virgil. He’d written, Hao Nguyen.

“Really? You know that sort of stuff?” Virgil asked.

“The embassy isn’t that big,” Tai said. “You go through a process of elimination, figuring out who is really doing what. Whoever’s left is the intelligence guy.”

“Really.”

Tai was easing him toward the door. “No big secret. Don’t tell him you talked to me. That would hurt. I would be interested in his reaction.” He giggled. “Really get his knickers in a bunch.”

“I’ll give him a jingle,” Virgil said.

Just before he went through the door, he let Tai see that he was checking the facial scars: “Play a little hockey?”

“High school goalie. Started my last two years,” Tai said.

“A Patrick Roy poster above the bed?”

Tai smiled and shook his head. “There are actually several cities in Canada, Mr. Flowers. Pat Roy was a hell of a goalie, but he played for Montreal. If I’d put up a Pat Roy poster, I’d have been strangled in my sleep. By my brother.”

“Shows you what I know about hockey,” Virgil said as the door closed behind him. The lock went snick.

“And don’t let the door hit you in the ass,” Virgil said to the empty corridor.

As he was going down in the elevator, he realized that Phem had said three words to him: “What’s up, eh?”

Back in the truck, Virgil looked at the business card: Nguyen Van Tai, Bennu Consultants. An address on Merchant Street in Toronto.

DIDN’T WANT TO do it; did it anyway.

Mai Sinclair said she went to a dance studio in the evening.

It was almost evening.

He parked two blocks down from the Sinclairs’ condo, half the truck behind a tree. He could see the front porch clearly. He settled down, took out his cell phone and called the information operator, and got the number for the Vietnamese embassy.

A woman answered, and Virgil said, “Could I speak to Mr. Hao Nguyen? I’m not sure I’m pronouncing that quite the right way.”

“I’ll see if Mr. Nguyen is in.” No problem there.

Nguyen came on a moment later, a deep voice with a heavy Vietnamese accent: “Mr. Nguyen speaking.”

“Mr. Nguyen, my name is Virgil Flowers. I’m a police officer with the state of Minnesota down in the U.S. I was told that you might be able to help me with a question.”

“Well… Officer Flowers… I’m a cultural attaché here. I’m not sure that I’m the person…”

“You should know,” Virgil said. “What I need to know is, when the Vietnamese execute a criminal, or whatever, do you guys stick a lemon in his mouth to keep him from protesting?”

“What?”

“Do you stick a lemon…”

“Is this a joke?”

“No, no. We’ve had two murders down here, that I’m investigating, and both of the dead men had lemons stuck in their mouths,” Virgil said. “I was told that Vietnamese executioners sometimes did that, you know, like firing squads, to keep the man quiet.”

“Why would I know something like that? Who told you to call me?”

“Well, I was told that you’re really the resident for Vietnamese intelligence, and that it’s something you would know.”

“What? Intelligence? Who would tell you such a thing?”

“Just a guy I met down here,” Virgil said.

“I don’t understand a single thing you are saying. I am hanging up now. Good-bye.” The phone banged down.

“Sounded like a big ‘Yes’ to me,” Virgil said aloud.

HE KILLED MORE TIME with his camera, and was looking through a long lens at the Sinclair apartment when Mai came out, forty-five minutes later, carrying a gym bag. Watched her walk away.

He let her get another block down the street, then started the truck, eased onto Lincoln. She walked four blocks, then over to Grand, where she became involved in a curious incident.

Two skaters turned the corner, slipping along on their boards, hats backward, long shirts, calf-length baggy pants, fingerless gloves, nearly twins except that one was black and one was white.

The white kid said something to her, with a body gesture that was right next to a smirk, and Mai stopped and said something back to him, and held up a finger; and said something else, and waited; and the two boys turned away, got off the sidewalk, and slipped on down the street.

Virgil eased the truck back behind the corner before Mai could turn far enough to see it. When he eased forward again, she’d gone on, taking a left on Grand. He went up to the corner, looked left, and saw her turn at a tan-brick building with the red scrawl of a neon sign in the window. He was at too sharp an angle to read the sign, but it looked like a dance studio.

He thought about going back after the kids, to ask what she’d said to them, but there’d be a risk in that if they were local, and if she should encounter them again.

Besides, he didn’t really need to. He knew what had been said.

Something close to:

“Hey, mama, you wanna feel a really hard muscle?”

And she’d said, “Go away, little boys. You don’t want to mess with me.”

They’d gone, because they’d seen the same thing that Virgil saw.

Virgil didn’t know a hell of a lot about karate or kung fu or jujitsu, but standing there, Mai had looked like one of the sword women in the Chinese slasher films that Virgil had seen three of, with titles like The Pink Flowers of Eternity and Swords amp; Shit.

A certain pose that didn’t say dance, but said, instead, “I’ll pluck your fuckin’ eyeballs out.”

You find out the most interesting things by spying on people, Virgil thought. Especially if you’re a cynical and evil motherfucker.

Just take the girl dancing, Virgil.

DAVENPORT CALLED AS VIRGIL was driving back toward the motel.

“What’re you doing?” Davenport asked.

“Nothing much. How about you?”

“Nothing much here,” Davenport said.

“Okay. Well, talk to you tomorrow,” Virgil said.

“Virgil… I’m too tired. Just tell me.”

Virgil gave him a recap of the day, and when he finished, there was a moment of silence, then Davenport said, “Good.”

“One thing. These guys, Tai and Phem-you know anybody in the Mounties who might take a peek into a computer, see what’s up with them?”

“I don’t, but Larry McDonald up in Bemidji, he works with them all the time. I got his number here.”

Virgil jotted the number on his pad, on the seat beside him, and the car on the left honked as he swerved slightly into that lane. “Fuck you,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Not you. Guy just honked at me,” Virgil said. “Road rage. Okay, I’ll jack up McDonald, but I think my best bet is Bunton. I can’t find anybody to tell me about him.”

“Be patient; you’ll have him by noon tomorrow,” Davenport said. “The big question is, are there more targets? It’d be sort of a Bad Thing if another body turned up.”

“Thank you, boss.”

Mc DONALD, AN AGENT in the BCA’s northern Minnesota office, was in the middle of dinner, which he mentioned in passing, and which Virgil ignored. He explained what he needed, and McDonald said, “I can do that-but my guy up there, the computer guy, won’t be in until tomorrow morning.”

“Anything we can get,” Virgil said. “People are starting to grit their teeth down here.”

Another phone call from Carol. “The Sinclair guy just called, and he’s pissed.”

“Did he say what about?”

“He said something about some Vietnamese…”

“I’ll call him.”

He did.

Sinclair said, “Why did you tell Phem and Tai that I gave you their names? They think you’re investigating them. I could be out of a job. How in the hell did you even know about them?”

“Asked around,” Virgil said. “You mentioned working for Larson on the hotels that they want to build in Vietnam, and I thought, well, maybe there’d be some Vietnamese I could talk to. Turns out they’re Canadian.”

“Goddamnit, Flowers, it’s gonna take forever to paper this over.”

“I could give them a call,” Virgil said.

“But you lied to them,” Sinclair said. “What could you tell them this time?”

“That I misspoke?”

Sinclair said, “Ah, man.” Then, “Listen, you want to talk to them again, don’t bring my name into it, okay? I mean, you’re really messing me up here.”

VIRGIL APOLOGIZED one last time as he rolled into the motel parking lot. He had one foot out of the truck when Sandy, the researcher, called.

“I had to tell some lies,” she said.

Cops all lie, Virgil thought. But he said, “Let’s meet at the cathedral. I’ll sprinkle some holy water on your ass.”

“Sounds like a deal,” she said, with a slender note of invitation in her voice. She paused, looking for a reaction.

“ Sandy!” He was shocked. Sandy was the office virgin, though, he’d noticed, from a move he’d seen with another guy in a hallway, actual virginity was unlikely.

“Chicken,” she said. “All right, what I got is this. If Ray Bunton got an unexpected tax refund, and it was sent to an old girlfriend, and the girlfriend called his cousin up in Red Lake and asked where she could send the check, she’d get a phone number to call. The phone number is attached to an address in south Minneapolis, off Franklin.”

“Atta girl.”

“That’s what I need. More atta girls.” And she was gone.

Ray Bunton: Virgil looked up at the motel, sighed, and got back in the truck.