Free Heat Lightning by John Sandford

Starbucks, where he had an online account. He got a white chocolate mocha Frappuccino, found a table, and brought the computer up as he sipped.
    The photos of Bunton showed a hard, square-looking man, always in T-shirts. In one photo, he glared at the camera, a headband tight around his forehead, an eagle feather dangling over one ear. With his pale eyes, he didn't look particularly Indian, Virgil thought--more like an IRA dead-ender. Was Bunton an Irish name? Or maybe Scots? Didn't sound a hell of a lot like Ojibwa.
    Whatever.
    The rest of the Bunton file told him what he'd already guessed--Vietnam, hanging out, motorcycles, alcoholism, dope, and sporadic employment involving automobile parts.
    When he finished, Virgil shut down the computer, looked at his watch.
    Goddamn Bunton.
    He stood up to leave, but his phone rang. Carol. He sat down again, flipped it open, and said, "Yeah?"
    "Informally, the phone call went to the Minneapolis Hyatt. I've got the number, but not the room. . . ."
    THE MINNEAPOLIS HYATT is all tangled up in the Skyway system, and Virgil, operating on Kentucky windage, put his truck in the wrong parking ramp and debouched into the Skyway, not realizing that he wasn't where he thought he was. He spent ten minutes running around like a hamster in a plastic habitat, before he found a map and realized his mistake.
    The hotel's lobby was empty, but the Hyatt desk was being run by a young woman who was far too sophisticated and generally out there to be running a hotel desk. Virgil had the uneasy feeling that if he asked her to connect a phone number to a room and a name, she'd call a manager, who might want to see a subpoena . . . blah-blah-blah.
    He looked around and saw an elderly rusty-haired bellhop sitting on a window ledge, reading a sex newspaper called Seed, which, Virgil happened to know, was the publishing arm of an outlaw motorcycle gang.
    Virgil went over and sat down next to him. The bellhop looked like a model for the next Leprechaun horror film, with a nose the size of a turnip and a bush of red hair shot through with gray.
    He glanced at Virgil and said, "You look like a hippie, but you're a cop." He was wearing a tag that said George. "Looking for hookers?"
    "Nope. I'm trying to find out which room is connected to a particular phone number without having to go through a lot of bureaucratic bullshit," Virgil said. "The girl behind the desk looks like she lives for bureaucratic bullshit."
    The bellhop looked at the girl behind the desk and said, "Somebody turned me in for smoking in the stairwell last winter. It was about a hundred below zero, which is why I was there instead of outside. I think she's the one. She's like this no-smoking Nazi. When I was bitching about it, she said it was for my own good. I said, 'What, getting fired?' Bitch."
    "You think you could work this sense of anger and disenfranchisement into a room number? And a name?" Virgil turned his hand over; a folded-over twenty-dollar bill was pinched between his index and middle fingers.
    "What's the number?" George asked as he lifted out the twenty.
    "Atta boy," Virgil said. He wrote the number on a slip of paper and passed it over.
    The bellhop disappeared into the back and a moment later was back. "Got the number and the names. It's Tai and Phem, a couple of Japs."
    "Japs?" Virgil was puzzled. "The names sound Vietnamese."
    George shrugged. "Whatever. I'll tell you what, though, they are bad, bad tippers. The other night, Tai--he's the tall one--orders a steak sandwich and fries at midnight. They don't give those things away, that's a thirty-dollar meal. He gave me a fuckin' buck."
    "What else you got?"
    "Well--just what everybody knows," George said. "They're Canadian."
    "Canadian?"
    "Yeah. They've been here, off and on, mostly on, for three months.
    They're supposedly working on a big deal with Larson International to build hotels."
    "Larson," Virgil said.
    "Yeah, you know."
    "I know." The chain that Sinclair worked for. "So