Heat Lightning

“He’s a psycho,” Virgil said. “You gotta stick a sliver under his fingernails. You got to get him to cook off a couple of wild shots.”

“I can get into my wise-guy mode, give him some shit about rapin’ dead women,” Andreno said. “But if this guy is really smart…”

“What if he just doesn’t buy it?” Shrake asked. “This is pretty thin stuff.”

“The photos aren’t thin,” Virgil said. “Knox sent him some xeroxes and didn’t hear anything back. So it’s him, and he knows it. And maybe they wouldn’t work in court, but if they got out there, started making the rounds, he’d be finished, socially, politically. You could stick a fork in him. We gotta hope they set him off.”

“I need to take a look at this restaurant ahead of time,” Andreno said. “If he’s really got top-end security guys, they’re gonna have some electronic gear. They’re gonna check me for a wire.”

“We’re not gonna wire you,” Shrake said. “We got something way more cool. We’ll show you downstairs.”

Andreno nodded, snapped his Juicy Fruit, and looked at Virgil. “What’s my story?”

THE STORY, they’d decided, was that Andreno had been hired by Carl Knox to provide security against whoever was killing the people involved in the bulldozer heist, who Knox suspected was Warren. But Andreno and Knox had a falling-out. Knox was at his cabin up north, and Andreno had been out in the woods with mosquitoes and black-flies and ticks all day, and that wasn’t his scene. There’d been an argument, and Knox had fired him and refused to pay his fee.

“So you knew where the pictures were, which was inside a fake book, and you took them on the way out. You want money for them-you were supposed to get five thousand bucks a week toward a guarantee of twenty-five thousand, plus expenses, and that’s what you want: thirty thousand. If he doesn’t want to buy the pictures, you’ll see if anybody else does.”

“You have to tell Warren that you know that he’s behind the killings, you have to make him believe that you believe,” Virgil said. “You have to convince him that you don’t care about that, that Knox doesn’t care, maybe even that Knox approves, to get rid of witnesses. Also, you gotta suggest to him that you’ll tell him where Knox’s hideout is.”

Andreno said, “What about the negatives?”

“You don’t know anything about the negatives,” Virgil said. “If Knox has negatives, then Warren ’s got another problem-but who knows if he’s got any? Warren ’s gotta solve the Andreno problem first. Get these pictures out of the way.”

DAVENPORT SHOWED UP as they were working out the details, had a backslapping reunion with Andreno.

“Don’t get my boy shot,” Davenport said to Virgil after Virgil told him how they’d work the approach.

“Yeah, don’t get his boy shot,” Andreno said.

“We should be okay-we’ll have it scouted, we’ll be inside, it’ll all be on tape,” Virgil said. “We’ll make movies of everybody coming and going.”

“What could possibly go wrong?” Jenkins asked.

20

THE “WAY MORE COOL” surveillance device was a laptop computer, brought in by the film guy, Dan Jackson. The computer had two battery slots, one of which had been replaced by a high-definition digital video recorder with four tiny cell-phone cameras, four tiny microphones, and a transmitter.

“The way it works is, you hit F-10. The computer doesn’t come up, but it starts the recorders and transmitter. It’ll pick up every word within ten feet, and it records wide-angle photographs in all four directions, and transmits,” Jackson said. “You’re gonna want to sit away from the kitchen… it really picks up plates and silverware. And you’re gonna want to set the computer so one of the lenses is looking across the table at Warren and one of them is looking at you. They got wireless there, so you could have it open and be working on it, so they know it’s really a working computer. When he shows up, you get offline, and close the lid, and shove it off to the side.”

“Why’s that better than a wire?” Andreno asked.

“Because everything is so much bigger, they can jam more shit into it. Get better sound, you get movies, you get a better radio, and a bigger battery,” Jackson said. “But the main thing is, a bug-detection device will pick up a computer every time. If they scan you, they’ll pick up the laptop. And they make an allowance for it. And the computer works, if they want to see it work. The trick is, it really is a bug.”

Andreno looked skeptical. “Maybe I should just take a wrist radio.”

Andreno would give Warren color xerox copies of the photos, saying that the actual photos were nearby. “He won’t believe it if you just hand over the originals,” Virgil said. “Or, if he does believe it, why would he give them back to you? It’s not like you’re gonna shoot him right there in the restaurant.”

ANDRENO PRACTICED with the laptop a bit, put in his own e-mail address and figured out how to call it up. When they were satisfied that he knew what they were doing, they headed out, across town, to the restaurant, a sandwich-and-pie place, and they all got coffee and a piece of pie and worked out the seating arrangements.

When they were done, Virgil asked, “You happy?”

Andreno nodded and said, “I am. It’s almost noon. Let’s make the call.”

They went out to Virgil’s truck, gave Andreno a clean cell phone, which Shrake plugged into the microphone attachment on the laptop, and Warren ’s cell-phone number.

Andreno sat in the passenger seat, hunched over the phone, cleared his throat a couple times, and dialed. The phone call lasted a minute, and they replayed it from the recorder.

ANDRENO: “Ralph Warren. I’m an ex-employee of a very old friend of yours, going back to the sixties. I need to talk to you.”

“What friend? Talk about what?” Warren had a high-pitched, reedy voice on the phone. “How’d you get this number?”

“We need to talk about all these dead people with lemons in their mouths. Your old friend figures that you might know something about it, and he’s very nervous. Therefore, he’s hiding out. The thing is, he took some pictures way back then, in that house, the one where the trouble started. He sent you copies. I had a little problem with your friend, and he canned my ass, so I lifted the pictures and here I am. All I want is my fee. Thirty thousand dollars. Then I go away.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, pal.”

“Okay. Well, then, don’t show up,” Andreno said. “I’m gonna be at Spiro’s Restaurant, which is three blocks west on University from your Checkerboard Apartments, at one o’clock. If you’re not there by ten after one, fuck it, I mail the pictures to the television people and go on back to Chicago. See you there, or not. I know what you look like… from the pictures. Oh-if you want to know where your pal is, I can tell you that, too. ’Bye.”

“Wait…”

But Andreno had hung up.

“He bit,” Shrake said from the backseat. “He’ll be there.”

JACKSON SET UP three hundred yards away with a camera lens as long as his arm. The rest of them stayed on the street, sitting in the backseats of plain-vanilla state cars, behind lightly smoked glass, each with a radio. For the first half hour, they saw nothing at all. Then the radio burped and Jenkins said, “Look at this guy. Red Corolla. He’s five miles an hour too slow and he’s checking everything.”

“Can’t see his face,” Shrake said. Virgil was at the end of the line, watched the Corolla as it passed, but was on the wrong side of the street to see the driver’s face. He watched as the car made an unsignaled right turn off University. They’d driven the neighborhood before taking their parking spots, and there wasn’t much down that street-a crappy old industrial street with no residential.

A minute later, the Corolla poked its nose back onto University and turned toward Virgil. “Corolla’s on the way back,” he said. “He’s probably our guy.”