“There’s nothing pussy about my accent,” Barakat said. “I’m Lebanese, I speak French, you know, I have a French accent in English.”
“You an Arab?”
“No. I am a descendant of the Phoenicians. The Arabs come from Arabia. My family, we were in Lebanon since Adam.”
“Whatever the fuck all that means,” Cappy said. He lit one of the Gauloises and added, “I just hope you don’t pussy out.”
Barakat stared at him for a second, then jumped out of his chair and stormed into the bedroom. Poured coke into his hand, pulled it through his nose in a burst that was as cold as an icicle. Snatched open the closet door, and found the gun. A minute later, he was back with the .45. “You think I’m a pussy?” he demanded.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Cappy said. He pulled his feet up on the couch. He’d always thought that he wasn’t long for this life, but he didn’t want to cut it any shorter than necessary.
“I’m not a pussy,” Barakat said. He wiped his face and nose with his free hand. “You fuckin’ American gangsters, you think you’re the only people who can do this. You know nothing at all.” He yanked the magazine out of the .45, tested the spring with his thumb, and slapped it back in the butt and jacked a shell into the chamber, pointed the barrel at the ceiling.
“You think—”
“Dude—”
Barakat pulled the trigger, and the gun went off with a deafening explosion, and a trickle of plaster fell from the ceiling. Stunned, they both stared at the small hole above their heads.
“Dude,” Cappy said, and then he started laughing. Barakat didn’t join in; he got angrier.
“Let’s go,” he said. He pushed the gun into the front of his pants.
“Gonna shoot your nuts off,” Cappy said. But he stood up.
Barakat frowned—an “Oh, yeah” frown. He took the gun back out, checked the safety. “This is, they say, cocked and locked. Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?” Cappy asked.
“You a pussy?”
“I’m smoking this fuckin’ cigarette, ain’t I?”
They took Cappy’s van, with Barakat behind the wheel. He’d taken a small baggie of coke, and he snorted another pile off the back of his hand and passed the baggie to Cappy. “Pussy,” he said, and he laughed, and turned north, and reached out, clicked the radio on, pushed the first tuning button and got a rock station. Cappy sat almost silently, except for the sniffing, and watched the streetlights go by. Two blocks before they would have gotten to the 1-94 entrance ramp, Barakat turned east, down the dark streets, toward St. Paul’s downtown.
Snow was filtering through the trees, and the streets were empty. Four blocks, five, around a couple of blocks, past a closed market and a couple of open bars, town houses, apartments, back through the residential area. They crossed Lexington, still going west, when they saw the man walking alone down the sidewalk. He was wearing a parka, and carrying some kind of bag.
“Pussy,” Barakat said. He stopped the van, pulled the pistol from his pants, undid the safety, got out of the van, shouted, “Hey, mister. Hey, mister.”
The man stopped, looked at him, slipping and sliding across the street; tall thin white man on ice.
“What’s up?” Black man with a briefcase. For some reason, the briefcase irritated Barakat. An unwarranted assumption of status.
He pointed the gun at the man’s chest and said, “This,” and pulled the trigger. There was a bang, and a lightning flash, and the gun jumped in his hand, and the man went down. Barakat ran back to the van and they were off.
Cappy was laughing hysterically. “You crazy fuck, you crazy fuck, you shot that motherfucker ...”
“Am I a pussy? Am I a pussy? Tell me ...”
They jogged out onto Snelling Avenue and idled back toward Barakat’s place. A block or so away, Cappy said, “That was cool, but you know what? I could use another bite to eat. I don’t know. Let’s go someplace else, get another sandwich.”
“I would like a doughnut,” Barakat said.
“You’re right. Let’s get a doughnut. We could go to Cub. They got good doughnuts.”
“Maybe two doughnuts,” Barakat said.
VIRGIL FLOWERS had the sense that things were out of control, that they didn’t know what was going on. He could see the same worry reflected in Lucas. Virgil had taken three pillows off the living room couch so he could sleep in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, where he could intercept any traffic coming into the house, from any direction. Weather thought that was ridiculous, and made Lucas help Virgil carry the couch to the same place, so he’d have an easier night.
Easier, but still not easy. He woke with the unfamiliar sounds in the house, and he woke when he heard a car turn into the driveway at four in the morning. He looked at his watch, in the dark—paper delivery. He rolled off the couch and peeked out the window, recognized the car, and then the paper hit the porch with a solid thunk, and the car was backing away. He sat for another two minutes, watching. Nothing moved, and he went back to sleep.
At six, he woke again when he heard movement: Weather was up and about. Virgil went quietly back to the guest bathroom, washed his face and brushed his teeth, then out to the front porch to get the papers.
Lucas and Weather came down together, quietly, not to wake the kids, and found him reading at the kitchen table. At the same moment, another car pulled into the driveway, and Virgil checked: “Shrake,” he said. He could see light snow coming down, in Shrake’s headlights. Still dark as pitch. “It’s snowing.”
“That’s great,” Lucas said. “I love getting up in the middle of the night when it’s snowing.”
Shrake came in: “Good morning, everybody.”
“Shut up,” Davenport said.
Virgil: “I’m gonna shave and take a shower.”
“Anything in the papers?” Lucas asked.
“Some poor bastard got shot off Snelling. He was walking home from his job. Somebody shot him in the chest. Paper says there was no robbery ... says he was an interior decorator guy, working late on some remodeling plans. St. Paul says it looks like a random shooting.”
“Poor guy,” Weather said. “Why would anybody do that?”
“Gangs,” Lucas said. He yawned, stretched, and said, “Doesn’t have anything to do with us, anyway.”
“And that’s a good thing,” Shrake said. “Are we talking coffee?”
12
WEATHER WAS HEADED out to the car when her cell phone rang. Gabriel Maret: “Go back to bed. Sara’s got problems again. I’ll be down in the cafeteria about nine o’clock, maybe you could come by.”
“Are you at the hospital now?”
“All night. They’re cycling. Sometimes they’re fine, and then they start to deteriorate. Blood pressure is a problem. I’m going to take a nap, and we can talk about what to do at the staff meeting.”
“I’ll see you at nine o’clock.”
LUCAS AND SHRAKE were looking at her: “They put it off?” Lucas asked.
“The kids are in trouble. We’re going to meet at nine. I’ll tell you what, we’re getting to the point where we’ll have to go no matter what. They can’t be hung up like this.”
Weather went to their home office to work on correspondence, Lucas went back to bed, Shrake went out to drive around the block, and Virgil turned on the TV Nothing to do but wait ...
GABRIEL MARET looked busted. He sat at the cafeteria table with a cup of coffee, talked with Mark Lang, one of the neurosurgeons, and Geoff Perkins, a cardiologist, and when Weather and Virgil came in, he waved and pointed at a chair. Virgil peeled off, taking a chair where he could see the room. Weather sat next to Maret, and he said, “Still have the gunslinger, yes?”
She sighed and nodded. “Yes.”
“He looks like a cowboy,” Maret said, watching Virgil. “He’s watching us, I think.”
“Probably. He’s a little obsessive,” Weather said.
“With those boots and jeans, he wou
ld do very well with French women,” Maret said. “Unless he’s gay?”
“No. He’s definitely not gay,” Weather said. “He does disgustingly well with American women. He sometimes has Lucas writhing in jealousy.”
“Ah, well. He will fall, sooner or later,” Maret said.
“He’s already fallen several times,” Weather said. “So: are we going?”
Maret shook his head: “Maybe late this afternoon—I’ve asked everybody to be ready. Tomorrow morning is more likely. But Geoff is saying that the kids are in a tailspin. Is that the word? Tailspin?”
“That’s right, but it’s not good,” Weather said. She looked at Perkins. “What’s happening?”
He shrugged. “The operation is putting too much pressure on Sara’s heart. To take the pressure off, we slow it down and drop the blood pressure. But that gets on Ellen’s heart, too, and she’s not handling it well.”
“So what are we doing?” Weather asked.
“We’re going to try a couple more things, try to balance out the chemistry, get back to stable,” he said. “This afternoon’s a possibility, but tomorrow’s more likely. Still not a sure thing.”
“We’ve got to wait it out,” Maret said.
“But the trouble is not going away,” Perkins said. “You might have to make a decision.”
Maret knew what he meant: “No. I’m not going to lose Sara. We can pull it off.”
A tear started in one of his eyes, and Weather thought, No way did this guy rob the pharmacy ...
THEY TALKED for half an hour, going over and over the possibilities and probabilities, until it began to seem pointlessly obsessive : they knew what the options were. Maret finally tossed his plastic coffee cup at a wastebasket, bounced it in, and said, “I’m going to look at the kids again.”
Weather went over to Virgil and said, “To reiterate, Gabe had nothing to do with anything, except helping the kids. You’re doing no good, sitting there staring at him under your eyebrows.”
“What next?” Virgil asked. “Back home?”
“There’s a small chance we could go this afternoon, so I have to hang around. When will you get that list of French people?” Virgil looked at his watch. “Now, I guess. They should be open.” “I’ll come along,” Weather said. “I’d like to look at the list.”
MARCY SHOWED UP at the BCA with two cops named Franklin and Stone. Lucas and Franklin knuckle-tapped, old pals. Stone was new to detective rank, but had spent five years with the Minneapolis SWAT; he and Franklin had brought SWAT gear. Shrake and Jenkins were planning to ride together, in a BCA truck. Marcy rode with Lucas.
“We’ll pick up the Washburn deputies in Shell Lake. The sheriff’s coming along—Bill Stephaniak,” Marcy said. “They’re set to pull the warrants, but won’t do it until the last minute, so word doesn’t get around.”
“They all set on a judge?”
“Stephaniak says the judge would sign a ham sandwich if you put it in front of him.”
“Always nice to have one of those,” Lucas said.
THE TRIP to Wisconsin took two and a half hours, north up I-35 to Highway 70 through Rock Creek, across the St. Croix River to Grantsburg, Wisconsin, through Siren, to Spooner, and then to Shell Lake; a convoy. The snow wasn’t deep, but had taken on a cold, gray midwinter edge, stark against the near-black evergreens and barren broadleaf trees. They filled the time catching up with each other’s lives; and Lucas was pleased that she seemed happy with hers.
“The kid is just way more than I ever expected,” she said. “I’m getting so I hate to go to work.”
“How many years you got in?”
“Eighteen—I’m a long way from retirement. James says if I want to quit, I can. It’s not like we need the salary.”
“But what would you do? Is being a mom enough?”
“That’s what I keep asking myself. Right now, it’s yeah—it’s enough. The question is, will it be enough in two years, when he goes to school?”
“And you don’t want to get your ass shot before he grows up,” Lucas said. “You want to be here to see that.”
“Yeah.” They looked out the windshield for a while, then she said, “But you’re not exactly backing off, and you’ve got Sam.”
“Might be different for a guy,” Lucas said. “Work is ... what we do. Like mom is what women do. Not to be a pig about it.”
“I’ll deny it if you ever tell anybody I said it,” Marcy said, “but I know what you mean.”
IN SIREN, Lucas said, “You can still see where the tornado came through.”
An F3 tornado had ripped the town in 2001, a half-mile wide at points, with winds up to two hundred miles an hour.
“I have a friend from Georgia,” Marcy said. “He was up here when it happened, saw some TV stuff about how the Siren warning siren didn’t go off. He says, ‘There was no sy-reen in sy-reen.’ ”
COMING INTO SPOONER, Lucas said, “I’ve got to take it easy through here—the place is a speed trap. They already got me once.”
Marcy got on the phone and called the Washburn sheriff. When she got off, she said, “They’re walking the warrants up to the judge.”
Shell Lake was five miles south of Spooner, and the Law Enforcement Center just off the highway. They collected Shrake, Jenkins, Franklin, and Stone in the parking lot, trailed inside, and hooked up with the sheriff, a bluff, former highway patrolman with a clipped gray mustache, pale green eyes, and a nonuniform rodeo belt buckle. “Dick’ll be back in a minute with the warrants. I told the judge we’d have something coming up to him ... You folks want coffee? We’ve got a Coke machine down the hall.”
Stephaniak said that Ike Mack was working—the sheriff had sent one of his office workers down to the store to take a look. “I suggest I have one of my boys go along and serve him copies of the warrant, and ask him out to the house. We’ll give ourselves about a fifteen-minute jump on him, so we can see what’s what out there.”
Marcy said, “Sounds good to me,” and Lucas nodded.
Shrake asked, “Is Ike going to be a problem?”
“I don’t think so. He’s ... tired. He’s turned into an old guy. I think he mostly wants to be left alone. With his stolen bike parts, of course.”
“But if Joe’s out there ...”
“That would be a whole ’nother problem. Though, I can’t say I remember Joe as being all that violent. Not that I doubt these things you got going. But I never saw it in him.”
“I can’t think of another way our woman would have gotten strangled,” Marcy said. “We’ll know for sure tomorrow. We’ve got a rush DNA going.”
“Well. People change. Maybe they get desperate,” Stephaniak said. “Now. Look at this. I printed this out this morning, and as far as I know, it’s up-to-date.”
He pushed an eleven-by-fourteen photo across his desk, and the Minnesota cops clustered around: a satellite view of an isolated house sitting off a blacktopped road. The photo had been taken in late September, with the trees in full autumn colors.
In the center of the photo, they could see the roof of a house, surrounded by a farmyard, more dirt than grass. A woodlot bordered the west edge of the house’s lot, with farm fields on the south and east, and the road on the north. Another building, probably a garage, stood on the west side of the house, with a narrow, silvery metallic roof extending out the back of it—probably a covered woodshed, or lean-to. Another, even smaller building stood on the south side of the house. An old chicken coop, or something like it, Lucas thought.
“Small place, nine acres. Two-story house, nothing much to look at. The garage there is good-sized-he uses it as a shop to work on his motorcycles. But it’s not gonna take long to go through it. What you see is what there is.”
“What we have to worry about is that Joe is laying up in there, and he’s got a deer rifle and starts blowing holes in us,” Shrake said. “So do we sneak up on him, or go in fast?”
“We send your two SWAT guys, with two of our SWAT guys, in th
rough the woods.” Stephaniak tapped the woodlot. “They check the garage. It’s heated, so Joe could be in there. If he’s not, they break through the side door—our guys have a crowbar—and get lined up at the front door. From there, it’s only about thirty or forty feet over to the side door of the house. I’ll call the house, and at the same time, they rush it. They’ll be inside before Joe can get a gun ... with any luck.”
THEY WORKED through the plan for a couple of minutes, then another, older, deputy came in. The sheriff said, “Hey, Dick. You get ’em?”
The deputy nodded. “We’re set.”
Stephaniak said, “Let’s rock.”
THE FOUR SWAT guys armored up and took the BCA truck, which was unmarked and had Minnesota plates. The rest of the crew staged in the empty parking lot of a barbeque joint four miles from Mack’s place.
Stephaniak had given radios to all five vehicles involved. Franklin called after a few minutes and told them that the roads were clear all the way out, and a few minutes later called to say that they’d left the truck and were about to make the approach to the back of the garage. “We’ve got a couple fences to cross, so we’ll be ten minutes,” he said.
They rolled out of the parking lot a couple of minutes later. Two miles down the road, Franklin called again: “We’re at the back of the garage. No cars inside. Can’t see anybody inside. Ron’s at the door, we’re taking the door out. Okay, we’re inside. Nobody here. No loft, we can see the whole place ... Make the call.”
Stephaniak, riding in the lead SUV, made the call as they turned into Mack’s driveway, and Lucas saw the SWAT guys rush the house, hit the door. A minute later, they were all out, on the snow, behind the trucks, and Franklin came out on the porch and waved.
“Nobody home,” Marcy said, disappointed.