Highway 61 (10 page)

It occurred to me at that moment with agonizing clarity that I had made a monumental mistake. I didn’t know if the second man was armed. If he had been—but he wasn’t. He stood there, a kind of stunned expression on his face, staring at his partner. I set my kicking leg down, turned my hip toward him, and executed a side thrust kick, driving my foot hard against his rib cage—he never saw it coming. He fell against the rear quarter panel of the Audi, bounced off, and hit the ground.

I quickly searched for the gun, found it, and snatched it up. It was a wheel gun and heavy, a .357 Magnum Colt King Cobra—a fucking cannon. Blondie rose quickly to his feet, his left elbow pressed against his side. He was getting ready to take a run at me. He stopped short when I pointed the gun at him. Enough of his face was visible for me to see that he was weighing the odds. I thumbed back the hammer. It wasn’t necessary. The Colt had a double action; it would fire just as easily hammer down. The gesture had the proper dramatic effect, though. He took a breath, drew back.

“Get the hell out of here,” I said. “Go on. Go on.”

He turned slowly and started to move across the lot. I heard his partner moan, and out of the corner of my eye I saw him writhe on the pavement.

“Wait a minute,” I said.

Blondie halted. I gestured at his partner.

“Take this asshole with you.”

Blondie hesitated before carefully making his way to the aisle between the two vehicles. I stepped backward, avoiding the gunman, holding the revolver steady in front of me with both hands, keeping my distance, pretending my back didn’t hurt like hell. Blondie reached an arm under the gunman’s shoulder and pulled him up. They both groaned with the effort.

“Have you done this often—find someone to sneak your shit into the country for you?” I asked.

They didn’t answer.

“Why did you pick me?”

The gunman spoke between clenched teeth.

“I’m going to fuck you up,” he said.

“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley, an’ lea’e us nought but grief and pain.”

“Huh?”

“Robert Burns. Get the hell out of here. Both of you. Don’t ever let me see you again.”

The two of them moved with surprising quickness to a battered Buick parked on the street. Blondie helped his partner into the passenger seat before limping around to the driver’s side. He opened the door. Before getting in and driving off, he glared at me across the roof of his vehicle.

“Hey, shithead,” he said. “No one flushes thirty-five thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine. They either call the cops or they keep it for themselves. You steal from us? From us? We’re gonna get you. We’re gonna get you good.”

I should have shot him right then and there. The Colt had more than enough oomph to go through the SUV, through him, and probably through the building across the street. I didn’t. Shoot someone in the parking lot of Rickie’s? Nina would never have forgiven me.

SEVEN

Highway 61 sliced through St. Paul as Arcade Street, a busy thoroughfare that was nearly as old as the city itself. It served the East Side, an area reputed for its crime, drugs, low-income housing, and rough-and-tumble sensibilities. A lot of people argue that the reputation is undeserved. They point to the area’s diversity, to the many neighborhoods, each with its own distinct identity and charm, and to the devoted fifth-generation families that would never live in any other part of the city. They might even convince you, until a couple of street gangs take exception with each other, or there’s a raid by a joint task force on a drug operation, or the latest crime statistics are revealed.

Jason Truhler sat nervously on a bench at the bus stop at Arcade and Orange Avenue. He clutched his cell phone and a brown lunch bag in the same hand. There were four hundred and ninety-nine twenty-dollar bills in the bag. The other hand he kept pressing against the receiver in his ear like a TV reporter chatting with the anchor desk from a remote location.

“Would you stop doing that,” I said. “Anyone watching will know you’re wired.”

Truhler dropped his hand to his lap and gazed anxiously around. The sun was behind him, yet he shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand and gazed down the street to where I was parked.

“Stop that, too,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t done anything like this before.”

“Just relax. Everything’s under control.”

I hope,
my inner voice said.

We were communicating with single-channel FM in-ear receivers and miniature transmitters with an eight-hundred-foot range. My transmitter was in my hand as I watched Truhler over the steering wheel of my silver Audi. His was concealed in the inside pocket of his jacket. I had leased the devices that morning from a pal who sold sensitive surveillance equipment—some of it legal—out of a secret room in the basement of his pawnshop. He told me that he was considering getting out of the snoop business because the pawnshop was doing so well. Profits were up over 18 percent because of the latest economic downturn, with cash-poor clients using collateral to get short-term loans that banks would never accept and with shoppers more inclined to buy secondhand goods at a decent price rather than pay top dollar to buy new. I would have bought an espresso machine myself while I was there except I already had two.

Afterward, we waited in a coffeehouse until the blackmailers called with instructions. I kept stretching my stiff and bruised back while we drank. Not once did Truhler ask what was ailing me.

The instructions, when they came, weren’t particularly original, according to Truhler, nor did they vary much from the previous demands. I followed Truhler at a discreet distance while he went to the bank to gather the money and then to a supermarket to buy a brown paper lunch bag to put it in—he was forced to purchase a package of twenty-five. He sat in his car in the parking lot of the store until the blackmailers called again, this time with directions to the East Side. At the time, I was in the Audi eight cars down and two rows over from Truhler. If someone else had followed him, I hadn’t noticed, either at the supermarket or later at the bus stop, where we’d been planted for nearly an hour.

Truhler continued to fidget on the bench. I didn’t mind. He should be nervous; the kidnappers who sent him to the bus stop and told him to wait until they called would expect him to be nervous. I just wished he’d stop touching his ear, stop talking; stop giving away my position.

“Pretend you’re alone,” I told him.

“I was less nervous during the other money drops when I was alone,” he said.

I stretched and squirmed, stretched and squirmed, trying to find a position that comforted my ailing back and failing, all the while watching for vehicles that cruised past the bus stop more than once. It was a tough job. Traffic was heavy and getting heavier. It was nearly 3:00
P.M.
, and just up the street the kids were being let out of Johnson Senior High School. The school was founded in 1897 and called Grover Cleveland High School until it was renamed after John A. Johnson, a former Minnesota governor whose only claim to fame was that he died in office. We played Johnson in hockey back when I was at Central, which was founded in 1866 and named after nobody. Johnson kicked our butts, but then, who didn’t?

The kids flooded Arcade, some of them using the street as their own personal drag strip. A couple of teenagers joined Truhler at the bus stop. A young lady sat next to him on the bench; a few others took shelter in the Plexiglas booth behind him, although there was nothing to take shelter from. The sky was clear blue, the air about sixty-eight degrees, and the wind nonexistent. Minutes passed. A bus came. The kids got on, leaving Truhler alone on the bench.

He lowered his chin to his chest so he could speak into his pocket. “Now what?” he asked.

“Now nothing,” I said. “They said to sit and wait until they called, and that’s what we’re going to do. And don’t lean into your chest when you talk. Act naturally.”

“I’m sorry.”

I flicked the transmitter off so I could curse aloud and then turned it back on.

“Relax,” I said.

“I’m relaxed, I’m relaxed,” Truhler said, his fingers pressed against the receiver in his ear.

Oh, brother.

Minutes passed, and then a few more. It seemed longer. I kept squirming in my seat, kept stretching my back. A passenger plane flew overhead. It wasn’t on one of the usual approaches to the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, and for a moment I wondered if it was off course like the Northwest flight that flew 150 miles past the Twin Cities before the pilots realized they were heading in the wrong direction. Finally Truhler’s cell phone rang. He answered. I could hear only his end of the conversation.

“Yes … Just leave it on the bench?… Okay, okay.”

He turned off his cell.

“They said to leave the bag on the bench, walk to my car, and drive away.” This time he actually looked straight ahead when he spoke. “They said they were watching.”

“Do exactly what you were told,” I said. “I’ll take it from here.”

Truhler set the bag down, rose from the bench, and walked in the direction of his car. He didn’t speak. He didn’t press his fingers against his ear. He didn’t look for me.

Good for him,
my inner voice said.

I stopped watching Truhler and instead concentrated on the brown paper bag. Sitting alone on the bench, it looked like it could have contained someone’s forgotten lunch. I heard Truhler open his car door, slam it shut, and start his engine. “Good luck,” he said. A few moments later, he was out of range. I turned off the transmitter and removed the receiver from my ear. No one approached the bag. Still, I thought, the blackmailers were taking a helluva risk, leaving the money in plain sight like that. What was to stop a bus rider from stumbling over it and either reporting it to the cops or taking it to the nearest Indian casino, depending on how closely they adhered to the maxim “Finders keepers, losers weepers.”

Again minutes seemed like hours.

Finally a little girl crossed the street at the light. She was wearing a sweatshirt that suggested she was a student at Farnsworth Elementary School just down the block and carrying a backpack emblazoned with a Disney character. She sat on the bench, which I found odd. Didn’t elementary school kids have their own school buses? Wasn’t there a phalanx of teachers to make sure they got on them? Certainly there had been enough of the yellow behemoths cruising Arcade in the past half hour.

It wasn’t long before the girl opened the brown paper bag. It took just a moment before she fully realized what was inside. She looked carefully around her, then stashed the bag inside her backpack. I waited for someone to rush up to her and demand the bag’s return. No one did. I thought for a moment that I should retrieve the cash, then thought better of it.

The girl was meant to find the money,
my inner voice said.

Nice, I thought. Very nice. The blackmailers had probably anticipated that someone—the cops, let’s say—might be conducting a stakeout. If the cops rushed the girl now, what would they get? A tearful child claiming she found the money and was taking it to her parents, brother, sister, cousin, friend, teacher, or coach to ask what to do with it. If they followed the girl, like I was about to do, until she actually gave the money to her parents, brother, sister, cousin, friend, teacher, or coach and then moved in, what would they get? More tearful people, all saying the same thing.
The girl found the money and brought it to us. We were going to turn it over to the police, honestly we were.
Or:
The girl found the money and brought it to us and we decided to keep it
—finders keepers, losers weepers. In any case, no crime was committed. Nice. My estimation of the blackmailers had increased immensely.

’Course, I wasn’t a cop anymore. I wasn’t interested in building a case. My job was merely to identify the blackmailers and ask them, politely, to take what they’d gotten from Truhler so far and move on. Or something like that. I wasn’t even carrying. My weapons were locked in the safe embedded in the floor of my basement. The Colt I took off the gunman the evening before was resting at the bottom of the Mississippi River where I tossed it on my way home—it’s never wise to keep a gun if you don’t know where it came from or what it was used for.

I was parked on Hyacinth, across from the First Covenant Church, the nose of my Audi facing Arcade. The position gave me a clear view of the bus stop but nothing up the street, so I didn’t know if a bus was approaching or not. I just sat there and tried to mollify my growing impatience—if you’ve ever waited for a bus, you know exactly what I’m talking about. When it finally did arrive, it caught me by surprise, rumbling past the intersection so fast I might have missed it if I had been looking down to select a CD or change the radio station. It stopped for the girl and a couple of high school students before flashing its turn signal and sliding into the traffic lane, not giving a damn if it cut off the vehicles behind it or not. I had to wait for oncoming traffic to pass before turning onto Arcade, and then I was caught at the light at Maryland. That was okay. I preferred that the bus had a nice head start. I knew where it was going—straight down Arcade. I just wanted to make sure that I was nearby when it let the girl off.

You’d think that following a city bus would be easy, but it isn’t. The problem was that it moved slowly and stopped frequently for unpredictable lengths of time. Eventually you had to pass it or risk looking as conspicuous as the mole on Cindy Crawford’s upper lip. I made my move when the bus let out a couple of senior citizens at American Legion Post 577, Bar Bingo Thursdays at 7:00
P.M.
I sped ahead, pulling into the lot at The Work Connection, an employment center on Jenks Avenue. I carefully monitored the bus’s progress until it rumbled past, then got on its tail again. Soon we were passing the Seeger Square strip mall and fast approaching the bridge that spanned the Bruce Vento Regional Trail.

That’s when they hit me.