“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.
