Read Heat Lightning for Free Online

computers.”
    Shrake nodded. Virgil said a few more words to the mayor, gave his card, with a couple of spares, to Brandt, and told him to call if anything turned up. “The guy had to get here somehow. If anybody even thinks they might have seen a car, or a guy . . .”
    “We’re doing it all, man,” Brandt said.
    The mayor said to Brandt, “And good for you . Good for you, by golly .”
    On the way back to his car, Virgil asked Shrake if he knew anything about a veterans’ center on University Avenue.
    “Sure. Something going on there?”
    Virgil told Shrake about Sanderson and the therapy group, and Shrake said, “Sounds right. That’s what they do there.”
    “E-mail me an address or something,” Virgil said. “I gotta get some sleep before I go back out.”
    “Me, too,” Shrake said, and yawned.
    Virgil felt somebody step close behind him and then a small hand slipped into his back pocket, tight inside the jeans. He twisted and looked back over his shoulder: Daisy Jones, blond, slender, a little tattered around the eyes, glitter lipstick with tooth holes in it.
    “Virgil Flowers, as I live and breathe,” she said, moving close, letting the pheromones work on him. “I was laying in bed tonight . . .”
    “Laying? Really? Not lying?” Virgil said. She did smell good. She only used the choicest French perfumes, which reached out like the softest of fingers.
    She ignored him, continued: “. . . when I felt a kind of feminine orgasmic wave cross over the metro area. I said to myself, ‘Daisy, girl, that fuckin’ Flowers must have come back to town.’”
    “That was me,” Virgil admitted.
    “I got my sap,” Shrake said to Virgil. “We could whack her, throw her body in the lilacs.”
    “Shrake, you gorgeous hunk, I get so aroused when you talk about my body,” Jones said. She pressed her hand against Shrake’s chest, lightly scratching with long nails, and made him smile. “Is it true that this murdered man had a lemon in his mouth, and was shot twice, an identical killing to the one in New Ulm?”
    “Goddamnit, Daisy, we don’t need that lemon stuff out there,” Virgil said.
    “Oh, horseshit,” she said. “The killer knows he does it. You know he does it. I know he does it. The only people who don’t know he does it are the stupes. So I’m going to put it on the air, unless you give me something better.”
    “Okay, here’s something better,” Virgil said. “Yes.”
    “Yes, what?”
    “The killings are virtually identical,” he said. “The same guy did them both.”
    “Can I quote you?” she asked.
    “You can say that you spoke to me briefly, and that I acknowledged that there were striking similarities between the two,” Virgil said.
    She stuck out a lower lip: “I’m not sure that’s enough to kill the lemon angle. The lemon has a certain . . . interest about it.”
    “A lemon twist,” Shrake offered.
    “Oh, shit! That’s my lead,” Daisy said. “Thank you, Shrake.”
    “Okay. You’re gonna use it,” Virgil said. He stepped toward the TV lights. “I’ll go over and go on camera with these other guys, and give them my opinion about the killings. . . .”
    “Virgil—don’t do that,” she said, hooking his arm.
    “Daisy ...”
    “ All right . But if anybody else squeals lemon , I’ll be five seconds behind them.”
    “If you use my name on the air,” Virgil said, “mention that thing about the orgasmic wave, huh?”
     
 
AS THEY WALKED away from her, Shrake said, “I think she’s getting better as she gets older.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Did you ever . . . ?”
    “No, I did not, for Christ’s sakes. I don’t . . . Never mind.”
    “You mean, fuck everybody?” Shrake was enjoying himself.
    “Shrake ...”
    “Davenport tried to do that, you know, before he got married. You guys are somewhat alike.”
    “Bullshit. I’m a lot better-looking.”

4
    VIRGIL WAS staying at the Emerald Inn, made it back about a hundred feet in front of the first