Heat Lightning

threw him the backpack, thanked Kate, climbed up on the dock, and pushed the plane off: Kate was heading back north.

Davenport asked, “You okay?”

“Tired,” Virgil said. “Still alive. Anybody talking to the Canadians? Anybody seen Mai and the other guy?”

“We’re talking to them, they went down and recovered the boat, they’ve got some guys working the other side. But not too much.”

“Goddamnit,” Virgil said. “We were too goddamn slow getting across.”

“Nothing works all the time,” Davenport said. “On the whole, you did pretty damn good. Knocked it all down, settled it. Now, if we can get the Republicans in and out of town without anybody getting killed, we can all go back to our afternoon naps.”

Virgil handed him the manila envelope.

“What’s this?”

“Something to think about,” Virgil said.

DAVENPORT LOOKED AT the photos as they walked out to his car. When they got there, he put them back in the envelope and passed them across the car roof. “Hang on to these until I can figure something out.”

They were meeting the two guys from Washington in a conference room off Rose Marie’s office at the Capitol. “They want to talk about Sinclair-that’s all we know,” Davenport said.

“Is Sinclair still in jail?” Virgil asked.

“No. We let him out this morning. Put a leg bracelet on him, told him not to go more than six blocks from his house. He’s at his apartment now,” Davenport said. “There are some very strange things going on there-I’m not quite sure what. Some kind of inter-intelligence-agency pie fight, the old guys from the CIA against the new guys in all the other alphabet agencies.”

“Who’s Sinclair with?”

“The old guys, I think, but I’m just guessing,” Davenport said. “The thing is, he hasn’t asked for an attorney. He’s actually turned down an attorney, though he says he might ask for one later. He thinks the fix is in.”

“Is it?”

“Well, we’re having this meeting-”

“You can’t just throw dirt on the whole thing.”

“Maybe you can’t-but maybe you can. Who knows? Not my call.”

“We got bodies all over the place.”

“And we got three dead Vietnamese. There’s your answer for the dead bodies. If nobody mentions the CIA, why, then, should anybody get all excited about mentioning them?”

Virgil looked at Davenport and asked, “Where do you stand on this?”

Davenport said, “Basically, at the bottom of my heart: if you do the crime, you do the time. And I don’t like feds.”

ON THE WAY across the Mississippi, Davenport said, “You need to get over to Sinclair’s place. If you look behind the seat, you’ll see that laptop that Mickey carried into the meeting with Warren.”

Virgil twisted in the seat, saw the laptop, picked it up.

Davenport said, “Take it with you. What I want you to do is, while we’re all real hot, I want you to go into Sinclair’s place with the laptop turned on. You can stick it in your pack with those photographs-they ought to distract him from thinking too hard about you being bugged-and talk to him for a while. He seems to like you for some reason. Find out what he wants. Find out what he’d do. What he’d admit to. Might get him, you know, at home, when his guard’s down a bit.”

“Is that why you turned him loose?” Virgil asked.

“Maybe.”

“Did they take the bug out of the truck?” Virgil asked.

“Not yet, but what difference would it make? There’s nobody to listen to it.”

“Mai’s still out there,” Virgil said.

“So yank it out-but go see Sinclair first.”

“OK.”

“Did that truck thing do any good?” Davenport asked. “You know, pretending you were still with the truck?”

“I think it killed three people,” Virgil said. “They bought the whole thing.”

“You are a shifty motherfucker,” Davenport said.

“Yeah, I know. I remind you of yourself when you were younger.”

“Not much younger,” Davenport said.

Virgil made a rude noise and they rolled through St. Paul to BCA headquarters, and Davenport dropped Virgil beside his truck. “The meeting with the Washington guys is in an hour, or an hour and fifteen minutes, so you don’t have much time,” Davenport said. “Do what you can.”

AT THE TRUCK, Virgil lay down beside the front fender, looked up at the transmitter. A couple of wires led into the turn signal box, and he yanked one of them out of the transmitter. That would kill it; creeped him out to think about the thing giving up Ray Bunton.

Ten minutes to Sinclair’s. He parked in the street, turned on the laptop recorder, slid it into the pack, put the envelope on top of it, threw the pack over his shoulder, and walked to Sinclair’s place.

He pushed the doorbell, and Sinclair answered immediately, as though he’d been waiting for it: “Who is it?”

“Virgil.”

The door buzzed and he went on through, and Sinclair was waiting at the open door to his apartment.

“What happened to Hoa?” he asked.

“Made it to Canada,” Virgil said.

Relief showed in Sinclair’s face. “I couldn’t help liking her,” he said. “What about the other guys?”

“Phem and Tai, whatever their real names are, are dead,” Virgil said. He was thinking of the recorder. “So’s another guy that I never met. Another guy got out. Either he’s wounded, or Mai is. We found a blood trail, but it was in Canada, and they had an exit route all set up. We called the Canadians with a description of the vehicle, but they haven’t seen it yet.”

“Phem and Tai. Not bad guys, actually, for a killer and a torturer,” Sinclair said.

“I’ll quote you when I write my article for the Atlantic,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, right. Fur ’n’ Feather is more like it… When did you get back?”

“Ten minutes ago,” Virgil said. “I talked to my boss on the phone, and he told me you were here.”

THEY’D MOVED through the apartment, talking, out to the porch. Virgil tossed his pack on the table, undid the quick-release buckles, pulled out the envelope of photographs, left the end of the laptop hanging out, one of the tiny camera lenses facing Sinclair.

He handed the envelope to Sinclair: “They left them for us. Deliberately, I’m sure.”

Sinclair slid them out of the envelope, thumbed through them, then looked at them carefully, one at a time. He looked up and said, “That’s bad-and they’re real. I’ve had some training in this stuff. If they’re not real, they’re better than anything we could do.”

“They’re real,” Virgil said. “We got some shots from the last guy they were looking for. Carl Knox. He took some right at the time of the shootings. The bodies look the same, the way they landed. No way to fake that.”

Sinclair leaned back and said, “What are you guys planning to do?” Virgil shrugged. “It’s not up to me. There’s a big meeting, forty-five minutes from now-I’ve got to go-with some guys from Washington.

I suspect we’re about to shovel a whole bunch of dirt over the whole thing.”

“That’s one way to handle it,” Sinclair said. “What about me?”

“Hard to avoid the fact that you were helping out,” Virgil said. “People already know… lots of cops, probably some newspeople. Gonna be hard to make it go away. I suspect what will happen is that you’ll wind up on trial in one of those intelligence courts, the secret-testimony ones, and then… what it is, is what it is.”