Heat Lightning

“What? You called the CIA?” Eyebrows up.

“No, no,” Virgil said. “I called the Vietnamese intelligence guy at their embassy in Ottawa. You know-their spy guy.”

“Oh… you did not.”

“Yes, I did,” Virgil said, glancing over at her. “His name was something like, you know, Wun Hung Low.”

“It is not, and that’s racist,” she said.

“Sorry. His name was, uh, Hao Nguyen,” Virgil said. “He was pretty surprised to hear from me, I can tell you.”

She brushed it off. “You called a spy?”

“Yup. He told me to get lost.”

She had her phone out, dialed, waited a minute, then said, “Hey, Dad. Virgil and I are on the way to the dance club. He just told me that he called some spy up in the Vietnamese embassy in Ottawa. About you. Yeah. He said ‘One Truck Load’… No, no, he said, Hao Nguyen. Yeah. Yeah, I bet. Okay, I will.”

She hung up, and Virgil said, “Boy, I sure hope he doesn’t hear about that.”

She said, “Now he’s really pissed.”

“You said, ‘I will.’ What was that?”

“He wants me to see what else I can worm out of you,” she said.

“Well, hell,” Virgil said, “I am the talkative sort.”

HE TOOK HER TO One-Eyed Dick’s Tejas Tap in Roseville, where they had dancing and live music. They lucked into a booth, she got a Corona with a slice of lime, he ordered a lemonade. “You have a problem with alcohol?” she asked.

It took him a second, then he said, “Oh. No. Not that way. I got whacked on the head last night.”

He told her about it, dramatizing a little because she looked so good, and she said, “The same guy you were telling Dad about? The Indian guy?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what’s up with him. He figures in here somehow. Anyway, he’s running. I’ll find him.” He took a sip of lemonade.

“Why are you wearing a shirt that says, ‘Hole’?”

“Just another band,” he said. “C’mon. Let’s dance.”

So they danced, cheek-to-cheek, and she was a perfect dancer, like a warm, well-rounded shadow. He wasn’t bad himself, he thought. One-Eyed Dick’s didn’t do much in the way of line dancing, a fad that had faded, but still did some, including a beginner’s electric slide, and she caught on instantly and he had her laughing hard with it, dark eyes sparkling. Watching her, he thought he might give quite a bit to see her laughing over the years. But then, he’d had that same thought with three other women.

While he was at the bar, getting another lemonade and beer, he watched her talking excitedly on her cell phone. She was putting it away when he got back, and she said, “Girlfriend from Madison. She found my perfect life-mate.”

“Dancer?”

“Psychiatrist,” she said, and they both laughed, and she said, “She was serious, too.”

She probed on murder investigations: how he did them, why he did them. Asked if cops still beat people up to get information.

“I wouldn’t,” he said. “It’s torture. Torture’s immoral.”

“The CIA doesn’t seem to think so.”

“No, no.” He wagged a finger at her. “Some people in the CIA think it is immoral. Maybe some don’t.”

“What about with things like 9/11, where you’ve got terrorists blowing up buildings?”

He shrugged. “Are you going to torture people because you suspect they might be up to something? Somebody’s always up to something. What about a guy you suspect is killing little children? Do you torture him because of what you suspect? If you torture people you suspect of being criminals, where do you stop? Who do you trust to do the suspecting? And if you don’t want to torture people in advance, then do you torture them afterwards? For what? For revenge? That doesn’t seem like something civilized people would do.”

“What about capital punishment?” she asked.

“Don’t believe in it,” Virgil said.

“You’re a weird cop,” she said.

“Not really-a lot of cops don’t believe in it. Torture, anyway. The problem isn’t what it does to the victim, it’s what it does to the people who do it. Messes them up. Turns them into animals. I’ll tell you something-you show me an executioner, and I’ll show you a screwed-up human being.”

“But you killed a guy last year…”

“Who was trying to kill me. I do believe in self-defense,” Virgil said. “But torture and cold-blooded execution… those things are sins.”

They danced some more, and the music and the lights began to jiggle his brain around, and finally she put a hand on his chest and asked, “Are you okay?”

“The headache’s coming back. It’s the lights,” he said.

“So we can dance anytime. Why don’t you take me home and get some rest? Or, better yet, you can take the Mai Sinclair instant concussion cure.”

“What’s that?”

“Can’t be explained, only shown,” she said.

BACK AT HER APARTMENT, she put a finger to her lips, said, “Quiet-if he wakes up, he’ll never get back to sleep.” They crept inside, across the living room to the glassed-in porch where Sinclair did his writing; on the way, Mai got a pillow from a couch.

On the porch, a six-foot-long Oriental carpet spread out behind Sinclair’s writing chair. After Mai had closed the porch door, she said, “I want you to lie down on the carpet, arms above your head, folded, fingers touching, forehead on the pillow. Facedown, so your spine is straight.”

All right. Virgil sprawled facedown on the carpet, moved his hands around until she was satisfied that his body was squared up; then she straddled him, sitting in the small of his back, probed his neck with her fingertips, as if looking for something, then suddenly dug in. The pain was like an electric shock, and he arched his back and yelped: “Ah.”

“Shhh,” she whispered. “Relax. I’m going to do that again, but it won’t hurt as much. Your neck muscles are like wood-that slows down the blood flow you need. So relax…” Her voice lulled him, and she dug in again, at the instant he no longer expected it, and the shock was as bad as the first: “AHHHH.”

“Easy, easy… that’s the last shock. Now I’m going to pull some of the muscles apart.” She did, and it still hurt; but the pain gradually ebbed, to be replaced by a surging warmth, and he went away for a while, only to come back when she stood up, slapped him on the butt, and said, “You’re cured, cowboy.”

He sat up, a little dizzy. “Ah, jeez…” But he felt good-though tired-and the headache was gone.

“You need to go home and get some sleep,” she said. “Tomorrow morning, you’ll feel good. If you get some sleep.”

“Hmm.” He ran his hands through his hair, shaking it out. “All right. What’d you just do? Some kind of massage therapy?”

“Something like that-a little like acupuncture, too,” she said. “Dancers learn that stuff. We’ve always got aches and pains.”

She was moving him toward the door, he realized. He wasn’t going to get any further this night; better to go with shyness, or politeness, than to make a grab at her. “I appreciate it. Jeez, I’d like to take you dancing again.”

“Give me a call,” she said at the door. She kissed a fingertip and pressed it against his nose, and closed the door.

Second time that happened. Just like with the Vietnamese guys: don’t let the door hit you in the ass, Virgil.

He was back in his truck when he became aware of a kind of erotic warmth in his back and side muscles, where