“I don’t want to be a doctor,” Barakat had said. “I don’t want to be in St. Paul. This is not Lebanon, Pops, this is like the North Pole. It was minus twenty here the other day.”
“Men have to work. That’s what men do. Finish the residency, then go where you like. Move to Los Angeles. What I know, is, I’m cutting back. You live on five thousand a month, or you go hungry.”
But Barakat couldn’t live on five thousand; couldn’t feed the habit for five thousand. The financial problem had led to his involvement with the Macks, a solution he’d suggested himself. The whole thing had seemed so simple.
Now this.
And the blond woman.
If the blond woman was the same one he’d seen in the elevator—and he’d have bet she was, she had to have been coming down from the parking ramp, and the timing was right—then he had a problem, too. He had no reason to be back there at that time of day—the emergency room was at the far end of the hospital, and nothing at the back end was even open. If she’d picked out one of Lyle Mack’s guys, and was asked if she’d seen anyone else ...
HE DROPPED in an armchair and propped his head up with his hand. Thought about the blonde, and about the goods: Lyle Mack said he had the goods. Fire in the blood; needed the goods, despite what he’d said. Why had he said he’d get them some other time? He needed them now ...
Think about the blonde.
Arriving at that time of the morning, she had to be staff, and medical staff, not administrative. If she’d been an emergency case, she would have gone down the street, instead of up the ramp. If she was a nurse, she had a rich husband—nurses didn’t drive Audis.
A doc? Maybe. There were lots of women docs.
His brain switched tracks again. Mack had the goods. All he had to do was pick them up. They were right there. Like a fat man thinking about a doughnut, he thought about the heft and feel of a big bag full of powder cocaine.
The keys to the kingdom of glory. He’d been sober for three days, and he didn’t like it. Though he’d read that there was no real physical dependency—he wasn’t shaking or seeing snakes—the psychological dependency was just as real. Without the coke, without money for the coke, he was living a drab, colorless existence, a life of shades and tints. The coke brought life, intelligence, wit, excitement, clarity: primary colors.
He looked in his wallet. Nine dollars, and he hadn’t eaten in a day. Had to eat. Had to get the goods.
THE MINNEAPOLIS police department is in the city hall, which is an ungainly, liver-colored building that squats in the Minneapolis glass-and-steel loop like an unseemly wart. Marcy Sherrill was slumped in her office chair, door closed to a crack. Lucas poked his nose in, called, “Hello?” He got what sounded like a feminine snore, so he knocked and tried again, louder this time. “Hello?”
Marcy twitched, sat upright, and turned and yawned, disoriented.
“Ah, jeez ... come on in. I dozed off.” She half-stood, then dropped back in her chair, dug in her desk drawer for a roll of breath mints, popped one.
Marcy was a tidy, athletic woman, forty or so, who’d never had a problem jumping into a fight. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, she and Lucas had once, pre-Weather, spent some time together—or as Marcy said, forty days and forty nights. She’d later had a lengthy, contentious affair with a local artist, then married a medium big shot at General Mills.
And quickly produced James.
James was just back to preschool after a bout with the flu, she said, as Lucas and Weather settled into visitors’ chairs. “I’ve been getting about two hours of sleep a night,” she said. “As soon as he got better, he started running again. He never stops. He starts when he gets up, he runs until he drops, he sleeps like a log, then he starts running again.”
“Same with Sam,” Weather said. “Sam is starting to learn his letters now ...”
They one-upped each other for a minute or two, on their respective kids’ looks, intelligence, vigor, and overall cuteness. When they were done, Lucas scored it as a tie, though, of course, Weather was correct. Sam was the superior kid.
“SO WHAT do you think about this Don Peterson guy?” Lucas asked. “What’d you get?”
“The killing was pretty straightforward,” Marcy said. “The killer probably didn’t mean to do it. Kicked the guy a few times. According to Baker—”
“Baker’s the nurse,” Weather said.
“Yeah. Dorothy Baker. She was doing inventory on the drugs. She couldn’t see anything, or say anything, because they taped her up, but she could hear everything. Peterson got a hand free, somehow, tried to slip his cell phone out and call nine-one-one-Baker heard the robbers talking about it—but he fumbled it and got caught. One of the guys kicked him a few times, in the back, and in the chest. That broke him up. He bled to death, internal bleeding around his kidneys. They got him to the emergency room before he died, but he only lasted a few more minutes. He was on Coumadin; there was no way to stop the bleeding.”
“So this Baker—”
Marcy held up a hand, cutting him off. “You know what Peterson did? Took some balls, but he did it on purpose. When the guy started kicking him, he grabbed him, probably on his leg, and scratched him. He told Baker what he’d done, and on the way down to the ER, he came to and told one of the docs. That he scratched this guy. He had blood on his hands, skin under his nails.”
“DNA,” Lucas said. He’d never met Peterson, but he was suddenly proud of the guy. “That’s terrific ... if we can find the guy who did it.”
“Yeah: we find him, we’ve got him,” Marcy said.
“She hear anything else? Baker?” Lucas asked.
“Yes. Interesting stuff. These guys were talking as they cleaned the place out, and she said they sounded kind of dumb—like street guys,” Marcy said.
“Black, white?”
“White, four of them. She saw their hands—hands of three of them, anyway. Big guys, wearing ski masks. Their hands were rough, like they worked outside. They sounded dumb, but they knew exactly what they were doing. More interesting is the fourth guy, and what she didn’t hear. Or see.”
“What didn’t she hear?” Weather asked.
“She didn’t hear anybody knock on the door, because nobody did,” Marcy said. “The door just popped open and there they were, all over Baker and Peterson. The fourth guy stayed out of sight until they were on the floor.”
“That door should have been locked,” Weather said.
The door was locked, Marcy said. It locked automatically, and to prevent that, it had to be deliberately disabled. Peterson was already inside when Baker got there, and she used her key to get in. “She’s absolutely sure the door was locked, because when she put her key in, she didn’t turn it far enough, didn’t click it, and when she tried the handle, it was still locked and she had to twist the key harder. So it wasn’t disabled.”
“The robbers had a key,” Weather said.
“Yes. Plus, the fourth man stayed out of sight until both Baker and Peterson were blind. Baker said he came in and pointed out specific lockers ... and she thinks she might have heard his voice before. She said he sounded like a doctor, but she didn’t know who. If so, that’s why they taped their eyes—they would have recognized the fourth guy. Maybe even if he wore a mask. He’s the inside guy, who got the key for them.”
“Interesting,” Lucas said. “You’re pushing that?”
“Of course. We’re pushing everything,” Marcy said. “We looked like goofs this morning. All the TV stations were there, a couple cable networks, for this operation on the twins—and we had to cancel it because our hospital gets knocked over? It’s like when the I-35 bridge fell in the Mississippi: people ask, what the hell are you doing, your bridge fell down? Now they’re asking, ‘Your hospital gets held up? Your hospital? What’s going on up there?’”
“Hard to believe it’s a doctor,” Weather said.
“Why? I’ve known a couple psycho doctors,” Lucas said.
Marcy nodded: ?
??Don’t even get us started on nurses.” She stood up and said to Weather, “Let’s get you going on that drawing. I’d like to get it on the noon news.”
As they were walking down the hall, Marcy added, “I want you guys to take it a little easy until we’ve got them locked up.”
“Why’s that?” Lucas asked.
Marcy said, “Well, Weather saw them—so they probably saw her.”
Lucas stopped in his tracks: “I never thought of that.” He looked at Weather. “I’m so dumb. That never occurred to me.”
HONEY BEE had once been a professional hairdresser, so she offered Joe Mack a choice of styles: greaser, punk, industrial, skater, Mohawk, or military sidewall.
“We don’t want a rearrangement. We want something so different that nobody’d dream that some long-haired guy might have been him,” Lyle Mack said. “Cut it all off. Right down to the scalp.”
“Ah, man ...”
But she did it, using a couple of plastic attachments on a barber’s clipper, and took his hair down to a quarter-inch, Joe Mack sitting on a toilet with a towel around his neck. That done, she lathered him up and, using a straight razor, gave him the most sensuous shave of his life, not only because he was scared of the razor, which added a certain frisson to the proceeding, but because either her left or right tit was massaging his either left or right ear, depending.
“You think Mikey meant to kill that man?” Honey Bee asked.
“No way,” Joe Mack said. “He’s just ... dumb.”
Honey Bee nodded. Mikey was dumb. And violent. Unlike Joe Mack, who was just dumb. Mikey might not have meant to kill the old man, but he probably enjoyed it. Give him a month or two, and he’d be bragging it around, just like Shooter and the black dude in California.
When she was done with Joe Mack, he washed off his face and looked at himself in the mirror. Christ: he looked like a German butcher, big, red, wind-burned nose sticking out of a dead-white face.
“What do you think?” Honey Bee asked.
“Ah, man ... Not your fault, though.” He rubbed his head. “Bums me out.”
She went to the back door, peered through it. Lyle Mack was in the back, moving stuff around. She turned back to Joe Mack, hooked the front of his jeans. “You could come upstairs, later, if that’d make you feel better.”
Joe Mack’s eyes cut toward the door. Lyle would be really upset if he found out that Joe was screwing his girlfriend. Maybe.
“He’s way in the back,” she said.
“Yeah, but still ...”
“I don’t mean right this minute.”
“Well ...” He stepped close to her, slipped his hand up under her skirt to her underpants. She wore white cotton underpants, and for some reason, that really wound his clock. “That’d help, Honey Bee. I mean, I’d really appreciate it. I’m feeling kinda low.”
THEY BACKED away from each other when they heard Lyle Mack coming back. Lyle pushed through the swing door, took in Joe and said, “Whoa.”
Joe Mack rubbed his head again and said, “I look like I just got out of the joint. I look like they been sprayin’ me down for head lice.”
“Better’n taking a fall on the old guy,” Lyle Mack said. “You know, you look about ten years younger.”
“Yeah?”
Lyle Mack turned to Honey Bee and said, “I need you to run out to Home Depot and get some stuff. I got a list.”
“I gotta get the wieners started,” she said.
“I’ll get the wieners. I want you out of here,” Lyle Mack said. “Like, now. Don’t come back for an hour.”
She looked at him for a minute, then said, “More trouble.”
“I don’t want you to know about nothing, ‘cause then you can’t get hurt,” Lyle Mack said. He followed her around, being nice, gave her a squeeze—she was in a huff—and got her out the door and on the way.
When she was gone, Joe Mack asked, “What was that all about?”
“Cappy’s coming over,” Lyle Mack said.
CAPRICE MARLON GARNER dreamed of flying alone out of Bakersfield, up through the mountains, straddling his BMW, wind scouring his shaved scalp, sand spitting off the goggles, slipstream pulling at his leathers; and then down the other side, in the night, toward the lights of Tehachapi, then down, down some more and boom! out into the desert, running like a streak of steel lightning past the town of Mojave, blowing through Barstow to the 15, then up the 15 all the way to the lights of Vegas, coming out there at dawn with the lights on the horizon, the losers heading back to LA in the opposite lane ...
Pulling up to the city limits, getting gas, sitting there with the BMW turning over like silk, and then boom! back down into the desert, the BMW hanging at 120, the white faces of the people in their Audis and Benzes and Mustangs, like ghosts, staring out at the demon who whipped by them in the dawn’s early light ...
The ride was the thing. The world slipped away—work, history, memory, dreams, everything—until he was nothing more than a piece of the unconscious landscape, but moving fast, a complex of nerves and guts and balls, bone and muscle and reaction.
And he dreamed of sitting up on a high roof in Bakersfield and looking out over the town, the roofscape, the palm trees and mountains, the hot dry wind in his face. Sitting up there, it felt like something might be possible. Then you’d smell the tar, and realize it wasn’t.
And he dreamed of the men he’d killed, their faces when he pulled the trigger. The BMW had come from one of them. He’d put the shotgun to the man’s head as he signed the papers, whining and pleading and peeing himself, and when the papers were in Cappy’s pocket, boom! another one bites the dust. The Mojave was littered with their bones.
He’d killed them without a flicker of a doubt, without a shred of pity, and enjoyed the nightly reruns ...
SOMETIME IN THE early morning, the Minnesota cold got to him, and he stirred in his sleep. Eventually he surfaced, groaned and rolled over, the images of California dying like a match flame in a breeze. He’d kicked off the crappy acrylon blankets, and the winter had snuck through the ill-fitting windows, into the bed. He’d unconsciously pulled himself into a fetal position, and now the muscles of his back and neck cramped up like fists.
He groaned again and rolled over and straightened out, his back muscles aching, pulled the blankets up to his chin, and listened: too quiet. Probably snowing again. Snow muffled the sounds of the highway, of the neighbors. He caught sight of the alarm clock. Nine o’clock. He’d been asleep since six, after a three-day run on methamphetamine and maybe a little cocaine, and work; they were all mixed up in his mind, and he couldn’t remember.
He was still tired. Didn’t want to get up, but he swung his feet over the side of the bed, found the pack of Camels, lit one in the dim light that came through the window shade. Sat and smoked it down to his fingers, stubbed it out and trudged to the bathroom, the old cold floorboards flexing under his feet, the room smelling of tobacco and crumbling plaster and peeling wallpaper.
THE ONLY bathroom light was a single bulb with a pull string. Cappy pulled on it, and looked at his face in the medicine cabinet mirror. Picked up some new lines, he thought. He was developing a dusty look, with a slash from the corner of his nose down toward his chin. Didn’t bother him; he wasn’t long for this world.
Today was his birthday, he thought. One more year and he could legally buy a drink.
He was twenty years old, on this cold winter morning in St. Paul Park.
AFTER COMING BACK to Minnesota, he’d stopped in his home-town, looked around. Nothing there for him. He looked so different than he had in junior high, that it wasn’t likely that even his father would recognize him.
But one guy had. A kid he’d grown up with, named John Loew. Loew had come into the SuperAmerica as Cappy was walking out. Cappy had recognized him, but kept going, and then Loew had stopped and turned and said, “Cap? Is that you?”
Cap turned and nodded. “How ya doin’, John.”
“Hey, man ... you re
ally ...”
Cappy gave him the skeleton grin. “Yeah?”
“... look different. Like a movie guy or something. Where’ve you been?”
“You know. LA, San Francisco, West Coast.”
A woman got out of a Corolla and came walking over and asked, “John?”
Loew said, “Carol. This is Cap Garner. We grew up together, went to school together.”
The woman was Cappy’s age, but he could tell she was also about eighteen years younger: a woman that nothing had ever happened to, a little heavy, but not too; a little blond, but not too; a little hot, but not too. She looked at Cappy with utter disdain and said, “Hi, there.”
Cappy nodded, threw his leg over the BMW, and asked Loew, “So what’re you doing? Working?”
“Going to Mankato in business administration. Finance.” He shrugged, as if apologizing. “Carol and I are engaged.”
Cappy pulled his tanker goggles over his eyes and said, “Glad it’s working for you, John.”
John said, “Yeah, well,” and stepped toward the store. “Anyway...”
“Have a good day,” Cappy said.
Riding away, he thought, Isn’t that just how it is? This guy grew up next door, he’s going to college, he’s got a blond chick, he’s gonna get married, he’s gonna have kids, and not a single fuckin’ thing will ever happen to him. Except that he’ll get married and have kids. For some reason, that pissed him off. Some people go to college, some people go to work throwing boxes at UPS.
MINNESOTA WAS GRINDING him down. Before the last cold front came through, he’d taken the BMW for a ride down the highway, and in fifteen minutes, even wearing full leathers, fleece and a face mask, he’d been frozen to the bike like a tongue to a water pump.
He needed to ride, he needed to do something, but he had no money. None. His life couldn’t much be distinguished from life in a dungeon: work, a space for food and drugs, sleep, and work some more—with nothing at the end of it.