“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 her butt and legs had weighed on him. Not a tease, because she hadn’t been wiggling around or anything, but the feeling was there, and lingering.
He thought about Janey, probably home alone and lonesome. And he thought, That would be wrong, Virgil.
But would it really be wrong to bring a little warmth and comfort to a lonely woman? To help someone out who needed . . .
What a load of self-serving, hypocritical BS.
Mai Sinclair, he thought. Pretty damn good.
9
THE SCOUT sat in the back of a two-year-old white Chevy van, in a cluster of cars under a spreading oak, on Edgecumbe down from the corner at Snelling, watching John Wigge’s house.
Waiting for the lights to go out. Waiting to go to bed. He’d been there waiting, for four hours, since Wigge got home.
The house was a single-story brick-and-shingle affair surrounded by a close-cropped lawn. A tough nut to crack. Wigge was an ex-cop, now the vice president of a high-end private security agency, and he’d taken advantage of the job: there were motion detectors, glass-break alarms, magnetic window sensors that would start screaming with any movement at all. The security panel, set into the wall near the back door, looked like it could launch the space shuttle.
Wigge had taken part in the meeting at Sanderson’s, with Sanderson and Bunton and the unknown man in the backseat of Wigge’s car. With Bunton on the run, Wigge was the next target—but he’d have to be taken outside the house. Inside the house, he had too many advantages.
Now, if he’d just go to bed, they could start again tomorrow.
THE SHOOTER was two blocks from the scout. He sat in silence, not moving. No iPod, no headphones, no book, though he couldn’t have read in the dark anyway. He needed none of that, the artificial support, when he could simply run his memories, smile with them, cry with them, and all the time, all five senses could reach out over the landscape, looking for targets. . . .
Though, when he thought about it, had he ever used taste? He reached back through his memories . . . and was still there when the light came on in Wigge’s garage.
That was one weakness in Wigge’s security, and the scout had noticed it earlier and brought it to the shooter’s attention. The garage was connected directly to the house, so Wigge could get out and into his car without being seen. But he had a garage door opener with an automatic overhead light. As soon as he touched the button to lift the door, the light went on. If he did that from the garage, rather than from inside the car, he’d be exposed, if only for a moment or two.
The shooter was in the back of the van, in a legal parking space, with the rifle on the floor beside him. When the light came on in the garage, he reacted instantly, dropping the window with one jab of his finger, swiveling the gun up . . .
The cell phone burped: no sign of life in the garage. The shooter picked up the phone, and the scout said, “He’s in the car,” and “He’s moving.”
And here it came, a big black GMC sport utility vehicle with a ton of chrome and gray-tinted windows of the kind popularized by the Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq. Wigge backed out, paused, watched the garage door all the way down, then backed into the street, aimed at Snelling, and drove away. The shooter waited until it tu
rned the corner, then started after it.
His cell phone beeped, and he put it to his ear, and the scout said, “Straight up Snelling.”
The shooter saw the truck again as it turned down the ramp onto I-94, headed east. He was ten seconds behind it.
JOHN WIGGE was a big red-faced man, bullet-headed and bullet-brained. He’d retired with a full pension from the St. Paul cops, where he’d spent most of his career working Vice. His nickname had been R-A, pronounced “ARR-AYY,” which stood for Resisting Arrest. Sell dope in his territory without Wigge’s okay, run a hooker without a nod from Wigge, and there was a good chance that you’d resist arrest and get your head busted, or an arm or a leg. He’d walked right up to the edge of criminal charges a few times, but he’d always walked away again.
A different proposition than Sanderson or Utecht. Sanderson was like a banty rooster, but a banty rooster was still a chicken. Wigge was not.
Still, the shooter could take him. There was no question about that. If he could get Wigge alone for thirty seconds, or even ten seconds. He had a gun, a lead-weighted sap, a roll of duct tape. Sometimes you had to take calculated risks; and sometimes, if you work at it hard enough, you get lucky.
Wigge merged left, leaving I-94 to take I-35 north, staying in the left lane, picking up speed. Going somewhere. The shooter settled in one lane to Wigge’s right, and fell back until he could see only the top of Wigge’s truck, and let the ex-cop pull him up the highway.
And they kept going, out of the metro. The shooter got on the phone, said, “He’s past 694, still going north,” and the scout came back: “I’m coming up behind you. I’ll take it for a while.”
The scout was in a new rented Audi A6, gave the shooter a wave as he went past. A minute later on the phone: “Okay, I’ve got him.”
They rolled in the loose formation, through the night, then the scout came up again, “He’s slowing down, he may be looking—I’m going on past.”
The shooter slowed, slowed. The scout called, “I’m past him, still going away. He’s definitely looking, he’s going maybe fifty.”
The shooter slowed to fifty, wondered briefly if Wigge had a trailing car. Well, if he had, there was nothing to be done.
The scout: “I’m off. I’ll let him get past me. . . . Okay. He’s still up ahead, still slower than anything else on the road. Look for a trailing car ...”
The shooter couldn’t see a trailing car. Couldn’t see Wigge, either.
The scout: “I’m back on. I can see him, way up ahead. . . . I’m gaining on him, again.” Then: “Okay, he’s picking it up. He’s picking it up. Really picking it up . . .”
They played tag, letting Wigge out of sight between exits, a delicate task made easier by the GPS video/map screens in the Audi. Thirty miles out of St. Paul; forty miles; coming up to fifty. The scout: “He’s getting off. He’s getting off at the rest stop. I have to go by, it’s over to you. I’ll come back quick as I can.”
The shooter slowed again, back to fifty, and then moved onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped. He didn’t want to pull into the parking lot, then have to sit in the truck without getting out. Wigge would be watching the vehicles coming in from behind, which was why the scout kept going. If the shooter waited, he might lose him, but he had to take the chance.
He made himself wait three minutes, then pulled back onto the highway. Another minute to the rest stop, two lanes, one for eighteen-wheelers, one for cars. The rest stop pavilion was a round brick building, sitting in a puddle of light, with a bunch of newspaper stands out front. A couple of kids were wandering around, and a couple of adults, killing time while somebody peed.
And there was Wigge, out of his truck, walking down the sidewalk, away from the pavilion, under a row of dim ball lights. Farther on, sitting on a picnic table, was the Indian, Bunton.
Jackpot.
THE SHOOTER called the scout: “We’ve got Bunton.”
His mind was racing. There were a number of techniques for capturing two men, but the conditions here were difficult. He would need to run a dialogue on them; he would need to convince them that they might save their lives with cooperation. . . .
As he watched, looking at Wigge’s back as Wigge strolled down the sidewalk, Bunton got up, stretched, and wandered away from him. The land east of the rest stop fell off into a ravine, and the edges were heavily wooded, oaks and a few maples. The two men moved at a leisurely pace toward the tree line, and Bunton turned his head, looked back, and disappeared into what must have been a trail.
A moment later, Wigge went in after him. The shooter waited, fifteen seconds, thirty seconds, then climbed out of the van. Behind the cover of the door, he tucked his pistol into the waistband of his pants, pulled on a University of Iowa baseball hat, and started after them, ambling along as easily as Wigge had.
Fifteen cars were spotted up and down the rest area, people coming and going, one whining kid, overtired, his parents urging him back to the car: “Only an hour to go,” the father said as the shooter passed them.
The shooter walked past the point where Wigge had left the sidewalk, continuing all the way to the end of the parking area. He wasn’t sure, but there appeared to be another pavilion back in the trees; not sure, but then a cigarette lighter flared. That’s where they were. The shooter stepped into the trees, paused, watched, then began moving, quiet as a mink. Four steps, stop. A dozen more, always with a tree between himself and the targets. He heard voices then, two men talking, the sound low and urgent. He could take them both, right here. Have to be careful about Wigge—a former cop, a security guy, there was a good chance he’d be armed and know how to use the weapon. Another step . . .
“Hey!”
The voice came from behind and to one side, sharp, demanding, and hit the shooter like a thrown rock. He twisted and saw a tall man there, and the man had a gun in his hand and the gun was pointed more or less at the shooter. Without time to think, the shooter snapped the pistol up and fired four times, aiming at the man’s eyes.
The shooter was a professional, shooting by instinct, and the man went down like a sack of gravel. But the gun, silenced as it was, wasn’t silent, and the shooter heard “Jesus Christ!” and then Wigge was coming, and the shooter ran to meet him, needing to get the first shot, Wigge lifting a gun from his pants pocket, and behind him, Bunton had launched himself into the ravine.
The shooter shot Wigge in the knee and Wigge went sideways and fumbled the gun, tried to recover it, and fumbled it again, and then the shooter was there, the sap in his left hand, and he whacked Wigge behind the ear and Wigge went flat, groaning, and the shooter dropped on his shoulders and pressed the muzzle of the gun against Wigge’s head and said, “Bunton. Who are the others? Two names. Who are the others?” As he asked, he could still hear Bunton, his footfalls diminishing, circling back toward the lights of the rest area. And he thought about the dead man, lying on the trail—anyone could look in here . . .
“Fuck you,” Wigge said, and he tried to push himself up, a one-handed push-up, and the shooter’s running tactical assessment took over and he half stood, lifted the sap, and hammered Wigge again, and the big man went flat and stayed there, his body slack.
The shooter ran back toward the rest area, hurdled the dead gunman, heard a motorcycle start, slowed to a stroll as he came out of the trail, saw Bunton firing out the exit lane. He hadn’t tried to rouse the other people, hadn’t tried to call the police. He’d simply fled. . . . The shooter watched him go, then put his head down and lifted the cell phone. “Where are you?”
“Just got back on, south of you, heading your way.”
“When you get in, get all the way down to the end of the parking area. Car parking area. I’m back in the trees. I’ve got Wigge, but the Indian is on the loose, and if he calls the police, we’ll have trouble.”
“Three minutes . . . ”
The shooter hurried back down the path, caught the dead man under the armpits, and dragged him into the heavies
t clump of brush. He stepped back out on the trail and looked toward the body: almost, but not quite, invisible. Saw the dead man’s gun, kicked it off the trail. If Bunton didn’t call the police, he wouldn’t be found until morning.
He continued back to Wigge, knelt next to him. Wigge was moaning, a quiet, steady sound, almost like a meditation vowel. The shooter stooped, grabbed him behind the shoulders, rolled him up and over, and then lifted him in an unsteady fireman’s carry. He was fifty yards from the end of the parking area, through the brush. He walked steadily toward it, Wigge’s weight crushing his shoulders and chest, but he kept going; and as he arrived, he saw the lights of a car rolling past the rest stop pavilion and continue to the end of the parking strip. He stood behind a thin screen of weeds until he saw the scout’s car, then called, “Open the back door on your side.”
His partner hurried to do it, and the shooter turned his head up the parking strip. He couldn’t see anybody watching, not that there might not be somebody. Decision time, and a necessary risk. With Wigge still draped over his shoulders, he took five big walking steps across the grass verge to the car, stooped, and slipped Wigge into the backseat.
Stepped back, slammed the door, slapped his hands together, as if dusting them off. “I don’t know how badly he’s hurt. We might have to hold him for a while.”
“If he dies ...”
“Then we’re in no more trouble than if he died here. We need to talk to him. Take him to the barn. I’ll meet you there.”
WHEN HIS PARTNER was gone, taking Wigge, the shooter walked back to the van. He’d killed an outsider, and that had broken the protocol. There’d been no choice—he’d fired in self-defense—but that might not make a difference. The unknown man was still dead. That meant that time was running out: if the unknown man wasn’t found until morning, and if they hadn’t connected him to Wigge until tomorrow afternoon . . .
They had to move on the Indian. They needed the last two names.
The whole game now shifted into the high-speed lane.
Heat Lightning Page 9