Heat Lightning

maybe even one-twenty. Had to take him smoothly…

Close now.

The shooter’s hand was at his side, with the pistol dangling from it. When they’d scouted Sanderson on a previous walk, they noted that the dog was always on a long lead-there’d be some distance between the dog and Sanderson. The dog didn’t seem particularly nervous, but might well sense a man waiting in the night.

Comes the dog.

The shooter went into his routine, squaring his feet, the deep breath already taken. He exhaled slowly, held it, and the dog was there, ten feet out, turning his big head toward the shadow-the alarm, or curiosity, or something, in his eyes, he knew something.

THE SHOOTER was in his shooting crouch, arms extended, and the gun recoiled a bit. There was a fast snap sound, like an electrical spark, and a mechanical ratcheting as the gun cycled. The dog dropped, shot between the eyes, and the shooter vaulted from the shadows, moving fast, right there in Sanderson’s face in a quarter second.

This was no TV show, and you do fuck with the Man. Sanderson’s eyes just had time to widen and his hand went to his pocket-he never really thought he’d need the pistol.

Never really thought.

The shooter had reversed the pistol in his hand and now held it by the silencer, so that it functioned as a hammer. He chopped Sanderson on the left ear and Sanderson staggered, falling, and put down his gun hand, no gun in it, and the gun pocket hit the ground with a clank, and the shooter, realizing that he hadn’t hit him quite hard enough, hit him again, and this time, Sanderson went flat.

Not a killing blow.

They needed those names.

THE SHOOTER was trained, the shooter was a killing machine, but he was still human. Now, breathing hard, he tasted blood in his mouth like you might after a tough run; and all the time, he was looking for lights, he was looking for an alarm, a cry in the dark.

He said into the mouthpiece, “Come now.”

He yanked the dog lead off Sanderson’s wrist, dragged the dog’s body into the darkness under the limestone blocks. Moved Sanderson next, the man twitching, trying to come back, but the shooter, gripping him by the shirt collar, moved him effortlessly into the dark. Another look around.

The scout came, all of a sudden, like a vampire bat dropping from the sky. He took a loop of rope from his pocket. The rope was a short noose, with a twisting handle, like the handle on a lawn mower starter-rope. He slipped the noose around Sanderson’s neck, twisted the handle until the rope was not quite choking the semiconscious man.

He knelt then, his knees weighing on Sanderson’s chest, pinning him, and he shined an LED penlight into Sanderson’s eyes. Sanderson moaned, trying to come back, then turned his head away from the burning light, his feet drumming on the ground.

“Listen to me,” the scout said. “Listen to me. Can you hear me?”

It took a moment. Though the shooter had been careful, even a mild concussion is, nevertheless, a concussion. “Mr. Sanderson. Can you hear me?”

Sanderson moaned again, but his eyes were clearing. The scout turned the choke rope so that Sanderson could feel it, so that he couldn’t cry out.

Slapped him, hard: not to do further injury, but to sting him, bring him up. He put his face next to Sanderson’s, while the shooter watched for cars, or another runner. The scout said, “Utecht, Sanderson, Bunton, Wigge. Who were the other two? Who? Who is Carl? Mr. Sanderson…”

Sanderson’s pupils narrowed: he was coming back.

“Mr. Sanderson, who is Carl?” The scout’s voice was soft, and he loosened the noose. Sanderson took a rasping breath. “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. Not me. Not me.”

“Who is Carl? We know Ray Bunton, we know John Wigge, but who’s Carl?”

“Don’t know his name…” The desperation was right there, on the surface. The scout could hear it.

“But you knew Utecht,” the scout said, persisting, pressuring. “Bunton and Wigge were at your house two days ago. I watched you argue. Who was the man in the car?”

“Some pal of Wigge’s. I don’t know, I don’t know.” He strained for air, feet beating on the ground again.

“There was a sixth man. Who was the sixth man?”

“Don’t…” Then Sanderson’s eyes reached up toward the scout’s and he seemed to recognize him, what he was, why he was there; with the realization came the knowledge that he would die. “Ah, shit,” he said, the sadness thick in the words. “Sally will be hurt.”

The scout saw the death in Sanderson’s eyes. Nothing more here. He stood up, shook his head. The shooter extended the gun and, without a further word, shot Sanderson twice in the forehead. He caught the ejected.22 shells in his off hand.

The shooter could smell the blood. The odor of blood sometimes nauseated him now. Didn’t happen before. Only the last couple of years. He slipped a lemon from his pocket, scraped it with a fingernail, and inhaled the odor of the lemon rind. Better. Better than blood.

Then he bent, pushed down Sanderson’s jaw, shoved the lemon into his dead mouth.

2

EVERY NIGHT, before he went to bed, Virgil Flowers thought about God.

The practice was good for him, he believed, and saved him from the cynicism of a cop’s life. Virgil was a believer. A believer in God and the immortal soul, though not in religions-a position that troubled his father, a Lutheran minister of the old school.

“Religion is a way of organizing the culture, your relationship to God and the people around you,” his father argued the last time Virgil went back home. “It’s not a phone booth to God. A good religion reaches wider than that. A good religion would be a value in itself, even if God didn’t exist.”

Virgil said, “My problem with that is I don’t believe God cares what we do. Everything is equally relevant and irrelevant to God. A religion is nothing more than a political party organized around some guy’s moral views, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, like conventional political parties are organized around some guy’s economic views. Like Bill Clinton’s.”

His father disdained Bill Clinton, but he took the shot with appreciation.

So they’d argued around the breakfast table in the kitchen, enjoying themselves, the odor of breakfast rolls lingering in the air, cinnamon and white frosting and hot raisins, and coffee; and mom humming in the background. Though he and his father had the usual growing-up troubles, they’d become closer as Virgil got into his thirties, and his father began dealing with sixty and the reality of age.

His father, Virgil understood, appreciated that his son believed in the immortal soul and that he actually thought about God each night. He may have also envied the fact that his son was a cop; the preacher thought of himself as a man of peace, and he envied the man of action.

The son didn’t envy the father. Virgil had been raised in a church, and the problems his father dealt with, he thought, would have driven him crazy. It’s relatively easy to solve a problem with a gun and a warrant and a prison; but what do you do about somebody who is unloved?

Better, Virgil thought, to carry a badge, and maintain your amateur status when it came to considering the wonders of the universe.

ON THIS HOT, close night, Virgil’s consideration of the wonders of the universe were discomfited by the proximity of Janey Small’s naked ass, which, in Virgil’s opinion, was one of the wonders of the universe. Like a planet. A small, hot planet like Mercury, pulling you both with its heat and its gravity.

Janey was asleep on her side, snoring a bit, her butt thrust toward him, which Virgil believed was not an