Unidentified Woman #15 (18 page)

Mitch and the older man spoke earnestly, only I couldn’t hear a word that they said. And then I did. Nina was moving slowly toward them.

“No, no, no,” I chanted.

The two men ceased speaking.

“Excuse me,” Nina said.

She fondled a couple of sweaters and moved on.

“What are you doing here?” Mitch said.

His voice was clear over my smartphone.

“Damn, Nina,” I said. “Good move.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” the older man said. “Karl Olson is dead. Someone shot him.”

“Yeah, I heard,” Mitch said. “What has that got to do with us?”

“You could’ve told me.”

“All I knew about Olson was his name. The Boss paid him to hang around during the sales to make sure nothing went sideways; he wouldn’t even talk to us. Which made me think he wasn’t here to watch the customers, he was here to watch us. Only he didn’t show yesterday.”

Mitch threw a thumb at the bodyguard.

“Now we have this guy,” he said. “Are you hearing everything okay? Are you sure you don’t want to stand a little closer?”

The bodyguard didn’t move, didn’t even acknowledge that Mitch had spoken to him.

“What’s your name, anyway?”

He didn’t reply.

Mitch lowered his voice and spoke to the older man. “What’s his name?” he asked.

“Peter Troop, I think, but I don’t know. I barely knew Olson. You could’ve told me about him. Why did I have to read about it in the
Star Tribune
?”

“It’s not my job. Look, John. We had an arrangement.”

John,
my inner voice said.
His name is John.

“Yes, we did,” John said. “I handle the outside and you handle the inside. Except you’re not doing a very good job with your part.”

“We’re doing fine.”

“Hell you are. You think I don’t hear the complaints? You haven’t brought in any merchandise worth selling in over a month, and that’s starting to affect my side of the business.”

“Whose fault is that? Everything was fine until you got greedy.”

“It wasn’t me. How many times do I have to say it? I’m just doing what I was told.”

“Sure you are.”

John jabbed a finger in Mitch’s face.

“The Boss says—”

Mitch pushed the finger down. “Don’t do that,” he said.

“The Boss says to get that so-called expert crew of yours back into the stores. If there isn’t an improvement by next week, there’ll be consequences.”

“Fuck the Boss.” Mitch’s voice was defiant, yet I noticed he glanced over his shoulder at the bodyguard when he spoke. “As far as I know you’re the Boss. You invented this unseen persona to keep me in my place.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“We were doing fine before the Boss came along.”

“C’mon, Mitchell. That’s not true either. We were driving around the Midwest working flea markets—and only when it wasn’t winter, and when isn’t it fucking winter up here? Now look at us. The Boss got us working together—”

“The Boss that I’ve never met. How ’bout you?”

“I never met him either. Dammit, Mitch. We went from penny ante to big time.” John gestured at the large crowd rubbing elbows in the garage and driveway. “Business is good.”

“Except now we’re in a different line of business, aren’t we? That’s why you’re really here. Not to deliver a message. You’re here to claim another victim for the Boss.”

“I’m doing what I’m told. You should do the same.”

“This was supposed to be a three-way partnership. Do you feel like a partner? Cuz it looks like you’re an employee.”

“Whatever, it has nothing to do with you.”

“Hell it doesn’t. El was right about that.”

John started pointing fingers again.

“I don’t want to hear her name again,” he said. “She’s gone. And good riddance, too, bitch trying to ruin our lives.”

“Is that how you justify what happened? By blaming her?”

“If she had just … kept … quiet.”

My hands gripped tightly to the binoculars. I forced them to relax.

“You should do the same,” John said.

“Is that what the Boss says?” Mitch asked.

“You get the same e-mails that I do.”

It was as good an exit line as any, yet John didn’t exit. Instead, he moved out of the garage and down the driveway, stopping in front of the young woman who tried to sell the vacuum cleaner to Nina. Peter Troop moved with him, again maintaining a respectful distance. The young woman watched Troop as he donned a pair of sunglasses. She seemed uncomfortable in his presence. If the security guard noticed, he didn’t care.

“Mitch,” a man said.

I angled the binoculars to look back inside the garage. The young man who had been demonstrating the remote-controlled toys in Arden Hills was now also standing next to the cashmere sweaters.

“What did Kispert want?” the young man asked.

Kispert,
my inner voice said.
The man’s full name is John Kispert.

“Hell, Craig. What do you think he wanted?”

Ella’s Craig?

“We should never have gone into business with these people,” he said.

“They made us an offer we couldn’t refuse, remember?”

“I remember that we were doing better on our own. At least we were happier.”

Disgruntled employees,
my inner voice said.
You can use that.

“I know, I know,” Mitch said. “Sometimes I wish we had never left Rochester.”

Ms. Bosland came from Rochester.

“Got that right,” Craig said.

“Look at him. He’s here to claim another victim for the Boss, I know it.”

“Yeah, and sooner or later it’s going to come back on us.”

“Like it hasn’t already?”

“Did Kispert ask about Olson?”

“That was topic number one.”

“What did you say?”

“I said Olson wasn’t our problem.”

“Not anymore, anyway. Did he say who he thought killed him?”

I could see Mitch shaking his head through the binoculars.

“I thought he might blame El because of what happened,” Craig said.

“He thinks she’s long gone. I don’t know, maybe she is.”

“What about the other kids? Do you think they went home?”

“My sister would have told me if they had.”

“We need to replace them. We need to do it soon.”

“I know. It won’t be easy, either. How long did it take us to teach El and them their trade? And now we have to start over?”

Craig didn’t speak for a long time, and when he did, he said, “How could things go so badly?”

“Maybe we should get out—like the kids,” Mitch said.

“Do you think the Boss will let us?”

“If we found someone to take our place … I don’t know.”

“It might not matter.”

“What do you mean?”

“Olson. If Kispert and the Boss think he was killed because someone is trying to move in on our business, they might fold it up. We could become free agents again, just like we talked about.”

“That’ll take more than Olson getting shot, I think.”

The two young men stopped chatting and simply stood next to each other, comfortable in the silence that followed the way that good friends sometimes are. I started searching for Nina. I found her in the driveway, squatting next to an eighteen-inch-by-three-foot high hexagon-shaped glass terrarium with a hook on top so you could hang it from the ceiling. She was examining it as if she were actually planning to buy it and I thought, C’mon, Nina. Where in our condominium do we have room for a terrarium, and who’s going to take care of it anyway?

A woman moved past Nina to the mouth of the garage. Despite the springlike weather, she was dressed in a black wool coat buttoned to her throat, black gloves that disappeared beneath her sleeves, black boots, and a black short-brimmed cloche hat with a red-ribbon hatband and side bow. She reminded me of a femme fatale from a 1930s gangster movie. It was difficult to make out her features even with the binoculars, yet her body language suggested there wasn’t a place anywhere on earth that she wouldn’t rather be than where she was.

Kispert approached her. He locked his hands behind his back and rocked on the balls of his feet as if inspecting an ice sculpture at the St. Paul Winter Carnival. She put her hand in her pocket. He shook his head and spoke slowly. His words made her flinch. He walked off. The expression on his face gave me the impression that, like the woman, he wished he were somewhere else, too.

The femme fatale looked around, saw the table piled with silk blouses, grabbed one in a gloved hand without bothering to check the size, and returned to Kispert. He took the blouse and folded it neatly, frowning all the while. She reached into her pocket and produced a white number-ten envelope. Kispert took the envelope and stuffed it into his own pocket. At the same time, he returned the blouse. She gripped it as if it were something she used to dust her knickknack shelves and walked away—walked as if she wanted to run but was afraid people would notice.

The woman headed down the block to a gray car. She opened the door, tossed the blouse inside, and climbed in after it. From the angle where I was parked, it was impossible to make out the license plate—or the make and model of her vehicle, for that matter. Given the cookie-cutter appearance of automobiles these days, it could have been anything manufactured in the past decade, both foreign and domestic.

I retrained the binoculars on the garage sale. Kispert had moved to the mouth of the driveway. Peter Troop joined him there. Kispert spoke; the security guard listened. Mitch and Craig had separated, and both were now assisting customers. I found Nina. She had drifted back into the garage.

“All right, sweetie,” I said. “Time to go.”

As if she had heard me, Nina started walking down the driveway. I could see the blue forget-me-not pinned to her lapel. She reached Mitch and said, “Send me an e-mail about your next sale. I’ll bring friends.”

“You and your friends are always welcome,” Mitch said.

It was because I was watching her that I didn’t see the car that drove up in a hurry until it filled the lenses of the binoculars.

I heard gunshots—over the cell phone they sounded like the pop-pop-pop of someone playing with Bubble Wrap.

The car drove off. The lenses cleared. I saw half the customers flinching and ducking at the unexpected noise. The other half turned their heads and looked around as if wondering what they had missed.

Another car passed in a hurry, yet I didn’t follow that one either. Instead, I kept the binoculars focused on the driveway.

Kispert was lying across a mound of snow at the entrance and looking in the direction the two cars had gone. He seemed to be fine.

Troop was also down, sitting on the concrete apron, his hand gripping his thigh just above the knee.

Nina was standing twenty yards behind him.

Broccoli,
my inner voice said.

I left the Lexus in a hurry and started running toward the garage. At the same time, I reached for the SIG Sauer holstered beneath my zippered coat. My feet became tangled and I slipped on the ice. I fell, shoulder first, and skidded next to a parked car.

I cursed and pushed myself to my knees.

I didn’t realize I was still carrying the cell phone until I heard Nina’s voice.

“What are you doing?” She might have been asking if I was putting extra peppers in my spaghetti sauce for all the emotion that she displayed.

I looked up. Even from that distance I knew she was looking directly at me.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “Seriously, what’s going on?”

My answer was to brush the snow off and return to the Lexus, although I wasn’t happy about it. I retrieved the binoculars.

Kispert was up now. He and Mitch were helping the security guard walk the length of parked cars until they reached a Honda Accord. They opened the door and helped him sit, his leg outstretched.

Craig was speaking to his customers.

“What was that?” someone asked.

“I don’t know,” Craig said. “Kids with their car stereo up too loud, or maybe a backfire.”

C’mon,
my inner voice said.
When was the last time you actually heard a car backfire? It’s become so rare it’s almost an urban legend now.

“The guy was startled and slipped on the ice,” Craig added. “He’ll be all right.”

Nina was looking directly at the Lexus when she said, “Huh.”

Once I assured myself she was safe, I trained the binoculars on Craig. He moved along the parked vehicles until he reached the Honda. Mitch said something, and Craig hurried to a second car, popped the trunk, and retrieved a red and gray satchel. The soft-sided bag contained a wide array of emergency supplies including jumper cables, folding shovel, tools, tape, fuses, flares, flashlight, and survival blanket, plus a forty-five-piece first aid kit—I had carried one just like it in my dearly departed Audi. Craig gave the bag to his friend. Mitch wrapped the blanket around Troop’s shoulders and began ministering to his leg while Kispert looked on.

Craig returned to the driveway to pacify his customers some more, although none of them seemed terribly concerned. The crowd was thinning out, however. He spoke to his assistants, and they quickly began packing up merchandise and collapsing tables.

Mitch finished attending to the security guard. He patted his shoulder; Troop nodded in reply. Kispert slipped behind the steering wheel of the Honda and drove off, leaving Mitch standing in the middle of the street.

Nina reached the Lexus, opened the passenger door, and slipped onto the seat.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I’m fine. Are you? I saw you fall. What was that all about?”

“You don’t know?”

“I heard a noise, I saw a man slip and fall, I saw people trying to help him up, and then I saw you running toward the driveway. Well, actually, I saw you tripping—what happened?”

I started the car. Several white panel trucks had appeared. They stopped in front of the driveway. I drove around them.

“McKenzie, what happened?”

I explained.

Nina closed her eyes and rested her head against the back of the seat.

“Well, that was unexpected,” she said.