“Ah, man.”
“This is getting a little scary,” Sandy said. “This woman, Mai… do you know her?”
“Yeah, we’ve talked,” Virgil said.
“Does she seem pretty nice?”
“I guess,” he said. “Goddamnit, I was a fuckin’ chump.”
“Hey, how often do you deal with spies?” she asked.
Mai photos came in. She was nice-looking, round-faced, pleasant, and not the Mai that Virgil knew.
“Now what?” Sandy asked.
“Now I gotta go talk to somebody,” Virgil said.
“Let me tell you something sincere before you go talk to somebody,” she said.
“Okay…”
“You smell like a fish.”
FUCK A BUNCH of fish. Virgil was in the truck two minutes later, running with lights, rolling down to I-35 and then left on I-94 across town to Cretin, south on Cretin to Randolph and over to Mississippi River Boulevard, to Davenport’s house. There were lots of lights, and Virgil parked in the driveway and walked up and pounded on the front door. Davenport popped it open, standing there in a tuxedo with a satin shawl collar, his tie draped around his neck, untied, and he said, “There’s a doorbell, Virgil.”
“Man…”
“Come on in.”
They went and sat in Davenport’s living room, and Virgil laid it out: Sinclair and Tai and Phem and Mai. “They’re not here by accident. And I had to wonder about Sinclair, a couple of the things he said… I mean, he led me straight to them, making that phone call. What do you think if you’re doing surveillance on a guy, and he walks out to a cold phone and makes a call like that? You think he’s got something going on. And he calls right in to Phem and Tai… like he was pointing me at them.”
“Maybe not. I’ve had some dealings with these kinds of people,” Davenport said, “Their problem is, they’re smart, but they’re not smart enough to know that they’re not as smart as they think they are. It gets everybody in trouble.”
“What I can’t get over is that they used me, and the truck, to locate Bunton. At least Bunton. Maybe gave them a lead on Knox, maybe gave them a lead on Warren-Christ, they heard everything I said when we were setting Warren up.”
And the more he thought about it, the more pissed he got.
WEATHER CAME DOWN the stairs, wearing a frilly black cocktail dress that skillfully showed off her ass. She said, “Hi, Virgil… Say, you smell like a fish.”
“Ah, for Christ’s sakes.” To Davenport: “What do I do?”
“What do you want to do?” Davenport asked.
“Go beat the shit out of Sinclair,” Virgil said. “Find out what’s going on.”
“Well, God bless you, Virgil.”
“You think I should?” Virgil asked.
“Yup. That’s what I would do,” Davenport said. “I’ll have my cell phone with me-let me know what you find out.”
Weather had taken Davenport’s tie from around his neck, fit it around his collar, and began tying it. She said, “Give us a little time to party, though.”
Virgil said, “Even though you insulted me about my fish smell, I gotta say, that dress does good things for you.”
“I was afraid it made my ass look big,” she said.
“Ah, no, no,” Virgil said. Her ass was right at his eye level. “Not at all.”
Davenport nodded. “Virgil is correct. And observant.”
VIRGIL SLAPPED his thighs, stood up, and said, “Well, I’m gonna go chain-whip Sinclair. I’ll probably drag his ass down to the lockup. Mai, too. I gotta believe that Mai isn’t American, or even Canadian. She’s some kind of spy, and that means they gotta know something about these killings. We can hold them for a couple of days until we get something back from the State Department. Man, this is gonna hurt, picking her up.”
Weather finished with Davenport’s tie, patted him on the chest, and Davenport said, “Find Shrake and Jenkins-or see if Del’s around. Take some backup. Then go get these Vietnamese guys, too. Put them all inside until their status is figured out. They must be traveling on bad documents. We’ll get DNA from all of them. They’ll be a risk to run, so there won’t be any bail.”
“You think we need a warrant?”
“No. We’ve got probable cause,” Davenport said. “If they invite you in, you see anything lying around…”
“All right. Goddamnit. This-”
“Hey,” Davenport said. “You cracked it, man. Not even a week. What the fuck do you want?”
“Wash your hands before you go,” Weather said. “You don’t want to arrest somebody when you smell like a fish. There’s some Dove on the kitchen sink.”
“All right.” He moped off toward the kitchen.
Weather called after him, “Say, Lucas said you were taking a friend fishing up at the cabin. It wasn’t this Mai person, was it?”
“Ah, jeez…”
He started back toward the kitchen, heard Davenport mutter something to his wife, and he turned back and caught them suppressing smiles, and he asked, “What?”
“Nothing,” Davenport said.
“He said, ‘At least Virgil wasn’t the only one who got screwed,’” Weather said.
22
MAI AND PHEM sat in the back of Tai’s rented Toyota Sequoia, a huge tank of an SUV, and Phem unwrapped the rifle, pulling gently at the soft gray foam that had cushioned the weapon from road bumps and motor vibration.
Mai was looking at the target with a pair of night-vision glasses: there was enough ambient light to clearly illuminate the entire target area, and she could see the security men orbiting through the kill zone every few minutes.
“ Lot of guns,” she said in Vietnamese.
“Of course,” Phem said. “But they won’t expect our reach.”
Phem had the rifle free of its wraps: an accurized Ruger.338 bolt-action rifle in a black synthetic stock, with a twenty-four-inch barrel, and fitted with a new U.S. Army-issued third-generation starlight scope that had gone astray in Iraq.
Phem had worked up the gun himself, firing in a backwoods quarry in Michigan ’s Upper Peninsula. He could reliably keep the first round from a cold gun in a one-inch circle at two hundred yards, with the starlight scope. Not an easy thing.
The.338 was a powerful gun, chosen for its ability to bust through Level IV body-armor plates, the heaviest armor ordinarily worn. Phem had supervised the machining of the solid bronze slugs he’d be using.
Phem started to hum tunelessly, his body rocking a bit as he sat cross-legged in the dark, the rifle across his thighs.
Mai said, “Yama-you can do this.”
“Yes, but no more after this trip,” Phem said. “No more trips.”
“You know what these people did.”
“Of course. I wouldn’t have agreed if I hadn’t known; and also as a tribute to your grandfather. I would do anything he asked now,” Phem said. “In the future, maybe not. I might want to, but I think… sometimes, I think I couldn’t do it. My brain would boil up, and I’d be done.”
“Tai seems fine?”
Phem nodded and smiled. “Oh, Tai is always fine. He does his research and slips around like a ghost, and the life pleases him.”
“Well, be at peace,” Mai said. “You are working wonders.”
She went back to her glasses. At the bottom of the hill, past some oak trees and through a chain-link fence, three hundred and twenty-two meters away, as measured by a laser range-finder, she could see the front door of the country club: Republicans gathering to congratulate themselves on their preparations for the national convention.
“I haven’t seen Tai,” she said after a while, making conversation.
“You won’t until he gets back to the truck. He’s a ghost.”