“Wait four minutes for SWAT, send them right up,” Shrake said. Thinking about the warrant. “That gives it at least the appearance of desperation.”
LUCAS CALLED Peterson again and passed on the word from McGuire, which Peterson had just gotten directly.
“Get here,” Lucas said.
“We’re loading. We’re two blocks away. We’ll be there in one minute.”
THE SWAT team came right down the ramp, unloaded, and Lucas briefed them on the situation, and the manager drew a sketch of the interior of the apartment. “No chances,” Lucas told Peterson. “Blow the door down, flash-bangs, ready to rock.” He got on the phone again, to McGuire: “Clear that apartment.”
All but two of the SWAT team members started up and Lucas called the apartment on the other side, got no answer, and then the one across the hall, and outlined the situation: “Some policemen are on the way up, they’ll tell you where to go. Stay inside until your doorbell rings . . .”
The other two SWAT guys, both armed with automatic weapons, were stationed in the garage, watching the only entry. Lucas told Shrake and Jenkins to wait with the manager, in the mail room, where they could watch the lobby unseen through the glass fronts on the mailboxes.
“I’m going up,” Lucas said.
“Oughta be up there by now,” Jenkins said, looking at his watch.
A call from Operations, as he waited for the elevator: “You’ve got a warrant.”
“Great.”
He’d just stepped into the hall when he heard the door go down and then the flash-bang, and then the cops were inside: no gunfire, but a half-dozen doors popped open up and down the hallways, and he heard somebody shout, “Police, please go back inside!”
Lucas hustled past a woman with her hair in curlers, and a copy of Vanity Fair in her hands, and said, “Best to go back inside,” and she said, “No chance—this is too good,” and he went on down the hall.
Peterson was waiting behind the door, which was broken around the knob, but still hung from its hinges. “Nothing. If they were here, they cleaned up.”
“Ah . . .” Lucas said. “But—they might be coming back. We gotta have somebody wait for them. Close the door the best you can, settle down inside. Give me a guy who can watch things from the lobby, and keep those guys down in the garage.”
“Oughta wait for the crime-scene crew,” Peterson said. “We shouldn’t wait inside.”
Lucas shook his head: “I don’t have time to lay it all out for you, but we decided that they’re probably planning to go through with this job, whatever it is. There’s reason to think that they’re staying. This apartment”—he gestured around the empty rooms—“could mean anything. If they stayed, they’ve got to be close to pulling the trigger on whatever they’re doing. They could be planning to stop here on the way out. As far as they know, it’s still good.”
Peterson shrugged. “On your head.”
“Yup. It is. Have your guys check every inch of this place. We can’t afford to miss anything.”
“I’ll stay in touch,” Peterson said. “Been easier if we’d finished it here.”
LUCAS RODE back down with the SWAT guy designated to hang in the mail room, left him there like Third Class Mail, and collected Shrake and Jenkins.
“Dumpster dive,” he said, on the way down to the garage.
“Man, I’m wearing some high-end threads,” Shrake said. “Why don’t you ever get me when I’m wearing jeans?”
“Maybe it’ll be the first bag; maybe it’ll take one minute,” Lucas said.
“Fat chance. We’re gonna smell like rotten bananas, rotten tomatoes, or rotten eggs,” Shrake said. “It’s always one of those.”
“Not always,” Jenkins said. “Sometimes there are baby diapers, and then you smell like baby shit.”
“I don’t believe they brought a baby with them,” Lucas said. “You can sniff all the bags, and we can skip the baby-shit ones.”
“Terrific . . .”
THE BAG wasn’t first, second, or third, but they thought it might be the fourth, a regular black-plastic garbage bag with a pull-tie, and filled with fast-food remnants and pizza boxes and an unused box of plastic garbage bags. Why would anyone throw away a perfectly good box of trash bags, unless they were cleaning out an apartment, and had no further use for them? They took a closer look, and among other things, found a receipt for a wrench and a shovel and a box of garbage bags from a Home Depot in Hudson, Wisconsin.
“Sonofabitch. That’s one block from the motel where the Hudson cop was shot,” Lucas said. “I mean, one block. The store’s right there.”
“So this is them,” Shrake said, emptying the last of the trash on the floor. “What else is in here?”
A few things: receipts in paper sacks. A receipt for two golf shirts at Macy’s, size extra large, $69 each; a receipt from a sandwich shop on Wabasha Street a couple of blocks south of Macy’s; a receipt for a box of bonbons from the St. Andrews Hotel. All paid in cash. A pizza box from Perruzi’s, a higher-end Italian place down the street from the convention center. “It’s all right here, right downtown, except for the stuff from Hudson,” Shrake said.
“I gotta think the job is, too,” Lucas said.
“Got some cash pickups at the bars, by the O’Meara armored cars. That’s about the biggest cash deal downtown,” Shrake said. “The O’Meara warehouse is pretty well protected . . .”
Jenkins shook his head: “Maybe they finally broke, and took off.”
THEY LEFT the SWAT team in place: “You have to plan to stay until daylight,” Lucas told Able Peterson. “They may pull the job, whatever it is, and duck back here.”
“Why?” Peterson asked.
“Get their shit together,” Lucas said. “Maybe they’ve got a car stashed in the parking garage.”
Peterson was skeptical, but agreed to stay—which was what Lucas wanted in the first place. Cohn wasn’t coming back, but he might be around somewhere, and Lucas wanted the SWAT guys in his hip pocket, not out wandering around St. Paul.
He’d left Peterson, heading downstairs, when his phone rang: took it out, saw that he’d missed three calls, all from Weather, while he was in the underground ramp—no reception there—and answered: “Weather?”
“Lucas: where have you been?” She sounded frightened.
“Working—out of range, in a parking ramp.”
“Oh, God, I’ve been frantic. It’s Letty.”
20
RANDY WHITCOMB HAD CHECKED HIMSELF OUT of the hospital against medical advice, and they drove across town to the house, the asshole guy and his girlfriend trailing behind. They got the asshole guy’s cash at the house, and then Briar, leaking tears again—Whitcomb told Ranch that he’d beat it out of her eventually, dry her up—had gone off to the motel, with the assholes right behind her.
So Whitcomb had big money but no way to get downtown to spend it. Ranch woke up when Whitcomb came in with the money, and offered to walk downtown and find George, but there was no way that Whitcomb would trust Ranch with more than two dollars, and maybe not that.
So they waited, and stewed, and sweated, as hours crawled by, and Ranch even went down the hill where a pill seller sometimes set up, but the guy was not there, and he came back in a mood and he and Whitcomb had a screaming argument, because both of them were seeping back to a drugless world.
Ranch shouted, “You’re a tit. You’re gonna grab this cop’s kid, and what do we do? Nothin.’ Not a fuckin’ thing, you tit.”
“Gonna get her,” Whitcomb shouted.
“Bullshit, because you’re a tit,” Ranch shouted back.
“Gonna get her. Gonna suck some smoke, then we’re gonna get her. You’re gonna fuck her. I’m gonna beat her with my stick until she’s hamburger.”
“Maybe I’ll fuck her, if I say so,” Ranch shouted. “I’m not gonna fuck her because you say so, because you’re a tit.”
“This is my house . . .”
Then Ranch tumbled facedown in
to a beanbag chair and didn’t move anymore, though he snored every couple of minutes. Whitcomb rolled between the kitchen and living-room windows, looking out, looking out, looking out . . .
BRIAR GOT back after dark. Whitcomb had whipped himself into several furies, and had gone into a half-dozen emotional slumps, looking at the two thousand dollars, right there, and not a fuckin’ thing in the house, wouldn’t you know it, and when the van finally turned into the driveway, he could hardly believe it.
He met Briar at the door: “You fuckin’ moron, you, we needed that van. I’m fuckin’ crippled . . .”
“I got arrested by the cops,” Briar said.
RANCH WOKE in the beanbag chair. He was used to the disappearance of large parts of his life. Sometimes, he passed out at ten o’clock in the morning, and when he woke up, it was nine o’clock in the morning—some other morning. At first, the time changes were disorienting, but over the course of a couple of years, he got used to it. He simply gave up on time—now life was daytime and nighttime, strung along like beads on a string, and the minute, hour, and date were irrelevant.
When he woke up in this darktime, he could hear Whitcomb screaming in the kitchen, which wasn’t unusual, and wouldn’t normally have shaken him out. He pushed up, and a string of drool drained away from his lip. He wiped it off, heard the noise that woke him. Telephone, right under his head.
WHITCOMB HAD BACKED BRIAR AGAINST the wall, extracting details of her arrest, when Ranch wandered in from the other room and handed Whitcomb a phone and said, “I got George, scrote.”
“Who you callin’ fuckin’ scrote, you fuckin’ douche bag?” Whitcomb shouted, and then stopped, as Ranch’s words penetrated, and said, “George?”
Ten minutes later, Whitcomb was careening around the living room and kitchen in the wheelchair, waving his head-shop pearlescent-gold-twirl glass pipe over his head, shouting, “George is on the way.” And he whirled in the chair and chanted it, waving the pipe as though directing an orchestra: “George is on the way; George is on the way; George is on the way.”
He was rolling back toward Briar, pipe over his head, spasmodically jerking it back and forth, in time to the arrhythmic chant, and it slipped from his sweaty fingers in a long dangerous arc. Briar reached out to catch it, fumbled it, fumbled it again, and then it hit the side of the stove and shattered, and they all three stood looking at it, in all its pieces, scattered along the kitchen floor.
Whitcomb’s mouth opened and closed, and, stunned, he said to Briar, “My fuckin’ pipe. You broke my fuckin’ pipe.”
He looked around for his stick, saw it, looked back at her, hate in his eyes, but then Ranch said, “Fucked-up yuppie pipe anyway. You waste half the smoke; I can make a better pipe in eleven minutes, yo.”
Whitcomb said, “Make a pipe?”
RANCH HAD skills: there were a few ancient tools under the sink, left behind by a previous tenant. Included in the greasy, cobwebbed old green canvas bag was a pair of side-cutters and a rusty file. Ranch unscrewed a forty-watt GE Crystal Clear bulb from a sconce at the bottom of the stairs, and said, “A perfect bulb. Don’t even have to wash the motherfucking white shit out.”
“What white shit?” Whitcomb asked.
“Some bulbs got this white shit in them,” Whitcomb said. “Tastes terrible.”
They gathered at the kitchen table, and Ranch used the side-cutters to cut off the contact at the bottom of the bulb, and then carefully crack out the ceramic insulator that had held the contact in place. With the insulator gone, he broke the glass rod that held the light filament in place, and pulled the broken pieces of glass out of the bottom of the bulb by the wires that led to the filament. All that, he brushed onto the floor.
“This is the hard part,” he said. “This is where you can fuck up if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Using the edge of the file, he scratched a line across the glass of the bulb, then went back into the scratch and drew the file across it again, and again, slowly, carefully. In two minutes, he’d opened a narrow hole to the inside.
“Really careful now, so’s we don’t break the glass . . .” He was breathing his words, holding the bulb, working the file with some delicacy. In another two minutes, he had a hole an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide. “That’s where you load the shit,” he said. And, “I need some tape.”
They didn’t have any tape, but Briar remembered that one of the seats in the van had a piece of duct tape on it, patching a rip, and she went out and peeled it off and brought it back inside, and Ranch pronounced it perfect. Using pliers, he made five small cuts in the aluminum screw-in base on the bulb, pushed the ragged tabs across the width of the bulb until they formed a small hole, and pushed a McDonald’s straw into the hole and taped it in place.
“There you go,” he said, holding up the bulb. “Best pipe in the world. You’ll see.”
Whitcomb took it, his hand shaking, looked at it, and said, “That’s the greatest fuckin’ thing I ever saw.”
Even Briar was proud of Ranch.
Then George came.
George had the crank in little Ziploc baggies, and they bought three. Whitcomb, eyes narrowed, cracked one of the baggies, said, “Pretty fuckin’ yellow.”
“It’s right out of the coffeepot,” George said. He was a short fat man with short black curly hair, most of it sticking out of the neckline of a Vikings T-shirt; and he wore cargo shorts and Nike shoes. “Just come out that way, but I got no dissatisfied customers. It’s good shit.”
Whitcomb dampened a finger with his tongue, stuck the finger in the bag, picked up a schmear of the crank, tasted it and winced: the taste was bitter, cutting, perfect. No sugar, no salt, no baking soda.
“Okay.” He passed over the money; George looked at each bill, then tucked it in his side pocket. “Call me.”
“How’s business?” Ranch asked, his eyes on the baggies in Whitcomb’s hands.
“Shit. Republicans don’t want nothing from me,” George said. “They go for the high-end stuff, no fuckin’ redneck drippin’s.”
“This shit’s better than coke,” Whitcomb said. “It’s like somebody sticks a fuckin’ knife in your brain.”
George bobbed his head and said, “Party on, men,” and he was gone. George was a teetotaler.
CRANK—ENOUGH OF IT—affected Whitcomb the way a paddle affects a Ping-Pong ball. They loaded the GE crank pipe with a spoon of the stuff, melted it down with a Bic lighter, watched it bubble and then begin to smoke. Whitcomb took the first hit, closing his eyes, letting it scream into him . . . He and Ranch blew smoke at each other for a while, long snakes of black lung-leavings that held together in the air like dirigibles, and then, after a while, like the Hin denburg, fell apart. Then Ranch ripped off his shirt, backed against a wall and sat down, his eyes going goofy and red, into zombie mode, shaking with the intensity of it; but Whitcomb began crashing around in the chair, pumping with one arm, then the other, and then both, crashing into walls, chairs, the table, singing, “Oh, Black Betty, Bam-a-Lam,” the words all screwed up, “Black Betty got fat lips, Bam-a-Lam,” the “Bam-a-Lam” punctuated by a variety of impacts as he ricocheted around the two rooms and the bathroom that he could get at.
They went back to the pipe again, and again, and again . . .
THEN LETTY called.
Ranch got the phone again, because, again, it was under his head, as he lay facedown on the beanbag chair; he had death in a corner, and was pushing on it, hard. Then the phone rang, and his life was saved.
“’Lo?”
Whitcomb, the comet, hurtled out of the kitchen and shouted, “Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you . . .”
Ranch listened for a moment, then said, “. . . this ain’t Randy . . .”
He gave Briar a peculiar look and struggled to his feet, got in front of Whitcomb and caught the chair and when Whitcomb screamed at him, he put his face an inch from Whitcomb’s and howled back, until Whitcomb stopped, and then he said, “Bitch needs to
talk to you, and you needs to talk to her.”
“Yeah?” Whitcomb took the phone and said, “This is me? Who’s this?”
He listened, then looked at the phone, and then at Briar, then tossed the phone in the corner and said to Briar, “Bitch says you been talking to Davenport.”
“No,” she said, but there was a lie in her eyes, somewhere, and Whitcomb saw it.
“Don’t tell me ‘no,’ bitch, I can see you lyin’.” Whitcomb’s face was purple with rage and the crank. “Get down. Get down, bitch. Ranch, don’t let this bitch out, she been talking to the cops . . .”
They shouted at her, made her confess, though the confession didn’t make any sense, and Randy got his stick and made her get naked on her hands and knees like a dog and he beat her until she collapsed, her back red with blood, and then he said, “Ranch: fuck her in the ass, fuck her in the ass, fuck her in the ass . . .”
“Randy . . .” She was in a haze of pain and blood, and tried to crawl away and felt a foot on her back. Not Whitcomb; Whitcomb’s feet didn’t work.
“Fuck her fuck her fuck her . . .”
LETTY RODE up the hill, saw lights at the house, ditched the bike, walked across the yard past the van, and listened; and heard the screaming: “Fuck her fuck her fuck her . . . ,” ran back to her bike, down the hill and to the pay phone and she called 911.
“I think somebody’s being murdered,” she said. “I can hear the woman screaming . . .”
RANCH PULLED up his Jockey shorts and Briar crawled across the kitchen to her dress, and Whitcomb, exhausted, said, “We need to get George. Everybody in the van.”
Ranch: “George,” and he started toward the door, but missed the door and cracked his head on the doorjamb and fell down.