Heat Lightning

by John Sandford

  “Well, Mai, I was pretty . . . intent,” Virgil said. “I would have put your little round butt in jail if I could have.”

  “Mmm. How is Mead?”

  “Mead’s fine.”

  “I could not believe your governor’s press conference,” Mai said. “I was in Victoria when I began to see news stories about it. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Get you in trouble back home?” Virgil asked.

  “No. You know, here, what’s done is done. Then you go on. I would have liked to have told you about the people who were killed in Da Nang,” she said. “The old man was my grandfather. The woman was my aunt, the little children were my cousins. I never knew any of them. My father, in his whole life, was insane with the grief of them dying. They went through the whole war, and then, just as the victory arrives, they are killed by American criminals. When this chance came, well, our whole family took it. Justice too long delayed.”

  She waited for a reaction. Virgil finally came up with “There would have been a better way to handle it.”

  “Well—my great-uncle is dying,” Mai said. “Nothing but old age, and he is famous here, the head of our family, so his life is good enough. But this justice was his one last wish. We didn’t have too much time; he will die this autumn, I think.”

  “So what do you want from me?” Virgil asked.

  “Closure. Say good-bye. I liked dancing with you, Virgil. I liked sleeping with you. We’d be friends if we could be, but we can’t.”

  “Mmm,” Virgil said.

  “So when you get rich and start to travel, if you ever come to Hanoi—give me a ring,” she said. “Or even a good neutral country. China.”

  “I wouldn’t go to China if I were you. To Hong Kong,” Virgil said.

  Another bit of silence. “Virgil—what did you do?”

  “I talked to that Chinese cop again,” Virgil said. “He’s a little annoyed that Vietnamese intelligence came into Hong Kong and murdered a guy without even a courtesy card.”

  “Oh, Virgil. Goddamnit. He knows who I am?”

  “Yeah, we squeezed that out of Mead,” he said. “So, if I were you, I might hesitate before going in there. For a while, at least.”

  Then she laughed. “Virgil . . . you were a surprise.”

  “So were you, Mai.”

  “Good-bye,” she said.

  And she was gone.

  “OLD GIRLFRIEND?” Lark asked. She had her legs up on the opposite seat, two empty Grain Belt bottles by her elbow; clicked her front teeth with her silver tongue stud after asking the question.

  “Not exactly,” Virgil said. “Now, Lark, about these goddamn baby pants ...”

  THE TAIL END of August was hot. Davenport got in a lot of trouble working a new case, and called for help. Virgil went north, in the night, and found the entire east side of St. Paul in darkness. Some cog or gear in the power system had given up under the strain of the hundreds of thousands of screaming air conditioners, and popped.

  The BCA was a puddle of light, minimal services—not including the air-conditioning—running off an emergency generator. He checked in with the duty man and was told that Davenport, Del, Shrake, and Jenkins were out on the street somewhere, looking for a crazy guy in a wheelchair. “You’re welcome to wait in Lucas’s office, but I don’t think he’s coming back. Not soon, anyway.”

  Virgil went up to the office, walking down dark hallways; only the emergency lights were working in the halls. Davenport still had some power. Virgil got a fan going, pointed it at Davenport’s chair, turned on Davenport’s small flat-panel TV, and sat back in the chair.

  The convention had arrived. The parties had started, the champagne was flowing, the Young Republicans were barfing in the Mississippi, the anarchists were flying the black flag in Mears Park, and Daisy Jones was anchoring the street action. She was so excited that her glitter lipstick was melting.

  He was taking it all in when Sandy leaned in the door. “God, it’s hot,” she said. She had a plastic bottle of Coke in her hands, sweating with condensation.

  Virgil said, “Get yourself a fan.”

  “You’ve got the only fan in the building. Who has fans in an air-conditioned office? Lucas, that’s who.” She was barefoot, wearing a T-shirt and a taffeta girly-style skirt. She looked a little dewy, and pretty good.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Research,” she said. She took off her glasses, put them on a bookcase. “Can’t believe this heat. It’s still eighty-five out there, and it’s midnight.”

  “You heard that Mai called me?”

  “I heard,” she said. She twisted the cap off the Coke, took a drink, leaned back against the doorway, and rolled the cold bottle against the side of her face and neck.

  “Hot,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah, screw it,” she said. She put the bottle on top of the bookcase, pulled her arms through the sleeve holes of her T-shirt, popped the back snap on her bra, pulled the straps over her hands, pushed her hands back through the sleeves, and then pulled the bra from under the shirt and put it on the bookcase next to the glasses. “That’s better.”

  “Gotta be comfortable,” Virgil said. “That’s the important thing.”

  “Damn right,” she said.

  Virgil stood up and stretched, yawned, said, “Where’d you get the Coke? The machine’s still working?”

  “Yeah.”

  They ambled down the hallway together to the canteen room, where Virgil got a Diet Coke, then back toward Davenport’s office. She said, “I don’t think there’s anybody else in the building except the duty man.”

  They were under the glass skylights when they caught the brilliant flash to the west, and lingered there, elbows on the banister over the courtyard, looking up through the glass at the clouds churning above the bright city lights.

  “You get strange cases,” she said, looking up at him. Without her glasses, her eyes looked as large as moons.

  “I do,” he said.

  They both thought about it, standing shoulder to shoulder, and she took a hit of her Coke and said, “I like working them. I’m a hippie, God help me, and I like chasing down rat-fuckers.”

  Virgil laughed and stood up, and could see the line of her spine through the thin cloth of the T-shirt, and without thinking, ran his middle knuckle up her spine. She wiggled, and slipped closer, her hip against his. They got another flickering flash off to the west.

  “Heat lightning,” she said.

  • • •

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