Want To Play (13 page)

‘You, too, Anton.’

McLaren waited until they’d pulled through the gate into the parking lot before whispering,
‘Anton?’

‘Don’t go there,’ Freedman told him.

The
Nicollet
rested at dockside, about ten times larger than anything McLaren had expected, three stacked decks gleaming white against dark gray clouds that were starting to shred in the middle. They’d be gone by dark, the weatherman had said, and clear skies would send the temperatures plummeting. Hell of a night to be on a riverboat.

‘Bitchin’ cold already,’ Freedman grumbled, picking up the pace. ‘There’s Red. You ever met him?’

‘Nope.’ McLaren looked at the man striding toward them across the parking lot. He’d expected a bulky, Minnesota homegrown kind of guy, but Chilton looked more like Clark Gable in his prime, right down to the little dark mustache and the million-dollar smile.

‘Lookin’ good, Red.’ Freedman gave him back a smile and pumped his hand. ‘Johnny McLaren, meet the fool who sold out the noble profession of public service for a measly few hundred grand a year.’

‘It’s always an honor to meet a man with real brains,’ Johnny said warmly as he shook his hand. ‘Especially when they saddle me with a guy like Freedman.’

Red gave a hearty laugh. ‘Pleasure to meet you, Johnny McLaren. You got a taste of gate security coming in, right?’

‘Looks tight,’ Freedman said.

Red nodded. ‘It is, but all that does is control vehicle traffic.’ He waved at the parking lot, which bled into adjoining riverfront property with no obstructions. ‘Anybody could walk in, so the real security is at the two gangplanks. I’ll have four men at each of them, and everybody gets swept again. No one boards with hardware unless they’ve got one of these.’ He handed Freedman and McLaren lapel pins with the Argo logo. ‘How many people have you got coming?’

‘We’ll have a couple squads and uniforms in the lot. Only six plainclothes on board, including us,’ Freedman said.

Red dug in his pocket and came up with four more pins, handed them to Freedman. ‘We already checked out the boat. I assume you’ll be doing a walk-through of your own.’

‘Right.’

‘Okay. We can double up checking in the crew and waitstaff and caterers; they should be showing up anytime now and there’s going to be a lot of them, plus the musicians, some asshole bunch called the Whipped Nipples.’

‘No shit?’ McLaren asked. ‘The Whipped Nipples?’

Freedman stared at him. ‘It scares me that you know who that is.’

‘Are you kidding? They’re incredible. All strings. Cello, bass, violins, dulcimer, some native instruments you never saw from countries you never heard of. You’re going to like this, Freedman.’

‘I am not going to like this because I do not like their name.’

Red grinned. ‘Neither did Foster Hammond. Paid ’em extra not to display it or say it.’

Freedman gave his big head a what’s-the-world-coming-to shake. ‘Don’t know why anyone would want a name like that.’

‘One of my boys told me they’re a bunch of faggots – for real. You take that wherever you want to go.’

McLaren shook his finger at him. ‘That was not politically correct.’

Red grinned at him. ‘Can’t get anything past you, McLaren.’

‘That’s the second time somebody said that to me today.’

‘Well then, it must be true and we’re all in good hands. Now on board we’ve got three cans. Six, actually. A men’s and women’s on each deck. Rolseth said you’d want your people to cover those, but I’ll leave one man stationary in each of those areas just as backup. You think of anything else you need, let me know.’

Freedman nodded. ‘Thanks, Red. Appreciate your cooperation.’

‘Cooperation, hell. Somebody gets blown away on this tugboat, doesn’t hurt to have the MPD around to share the blame. Why don’t you two come aboard and I’ll introduce you to Captain Magnusson. A real character, that guy. He’ll give you the nickel tour and then we can discuss tonight’s plan over tea and petits fours.’

‘I’d prefer a scotch,’ Johnny said.

‘Yeah, wouldn’t we all? This detail has been giving me nightmares for six months in the form of Foster Hammond. Didn’t think it could get any worse. How wrong I was. And so for our troubles, we get tea and petits fours. Not their job to feed us, of course, but as a courtesy . . .’

‘You were serious about the tea and petits fours?’ Freedman asked incredulously.

Red shook his head sadly. ‘There’s one thing I never joke about and that’s food. Stick with the pink ones – got a nice framboise custard in the middle. So just between the three of us, you really think this crazy s.o.b. is going to show tonight?’

Freedman shrugged. ‘If he does, we get all the credit.’

‘Sixty-forty. I just bought a place in Boca Raton, so I could use the extra business. Property taxes are killing me.’

Captain Magnusson was on the foredeck, standing by helplessly as he watched his ship being taken over by a lot of armed men in suits. He was a weathered-looking old man with ruddy, freckled cheeks and tufts of reddish gray hair poking out from beneath his cap.

‘They pick him for the job based on appearance alone?’ McLaren wondered aloud.

‘You could almost believe it,’ Red agreed.

‘Hey, another redhead, could be one of your relatives, McLaren,’ Freedman teased his partner.

‘Not a chance. He’s Viking stock, you can tell by the paunch.’

Freedman looked over at McLaren’s own paunch. ‘So you’re a Viking now?’

‘This is not a paunch. This is a Guinness gut, Freedman. You get a paunch from too much damn lutefisk.’

‘Nobody gets a paunch from lutefisk. It’s an emetic.’

‘You had it before?’

‘Hell no. But my mother-in-law makes it every damn Christmas. Makes the whole house smell like a three-day-old corpse.’ He let out a long, low whistle as they boarded the gangplank. ‘Nice-looking boat.’

‘That she is,’ Red said, waving to the captain. ‘Permission to board, Captain?’

Magnusson actually smiled. ‘Aye!’

‘So how do they get that paddle to move anyhow?’ McLaren asked.

‘Squirrels.’

‘Good. I’ll tell the little sons of bitches that are eating the insulation in my attic that they should get a job.’

Roadrunner kept his eyes front, focused on the asphalt a few feet ahead of his bike, alert for a new crack in the tar that could bite the narrow racing tire and send him careening into the traffic on his left.

He felt the burn in his thighs and calves from pedaling hard up the hill by the river, but it didn’t hurt enough yet. He should have done it twice, maybe three times or four, until the pain blossomed and the world turned orange and all the noise in his head abruptly, blessedly, stopped.

‘Watch where you’re going, asshole!’

He’d strayed over the yellow line that separated the bike lane from traffic, and was only inches from the sleek black finish of a late-model Mercedes. He turned his head slowly, put his light eyes on the red-faced man glaring at him from behind the wheel, and left them there. He kept pedaling to keep adjacent to the sedan, just looking at the man and nowhere else while bike and car moved side by side at twenty miles an hour down Washington Avenue.

A wave of uncertainty rippled across the anger in the man’s face, moving the little pockets of flesh under his eyes. He jerked his head front, then back at Roadrunner, then front again. ‘Crazy son of a bitch,’ he muttered, powering up the passenger window and increasing his speed, trying to pull away.

Roadrunner pumped harder and came abreast, kept his eyes on the man, his face empty as they sailed through the green light at Portland Avenue. He down-shifted to first gear to make it harder, almost smiled when he felt the burn in his thighs brighten and saw the uncertainty in the man’s face turn to fear.

Quit staring at me, you skinny freak, you hear me? Quit staring or by God I’ll make you sorry . . .

The voice in his head was so loud, so clear, it erased the years between then and now and slammed Roadrunner’s eyes shut so he wouldn’t see the hammer coming down, over and over.

When he opened them again the Mercedes was long gone and he was stopped at a red light, straddling his bike, breathing hard, staring down at the crooked, lumpy fingers of a hand that looked like a bunch of carelessly tossed Pick-Up Sticks. ‘It’s all right.’ His whisper was lost in the noise of cars and whistles and the grinding gears of a city bus. ‘It’s all right now.’

He turned right and headed down toward the Hennepin Avenue bridge, saw the sluggish, autumn flow of the Mississippi slipping beneath the concrete and steel on its journey south. The water looked gray here, which seemed odd to Roadrunner because it had been so blue earlier. Of course that had been downriver at the paddleboat landing, and maybe the clouds hadn’t rolled in yet – he couldn’t remember.

It was almost six o’clock by the time Grace pulled into her short driveway and butted the Range Rover’s nose up to the garage door. Less than an hour of daylight left; no time to take Charlie for his daily run down to the park on the next block. She wondered how she was going to explain it to him.

She keyed a code into a pad on her visor and watched the steel-clad door rise in front of her. Inside the small garage a bank of overhead floods turned on automatically and filled the space with light. There were no shadows, and there were no hiding places.

‘Be a lot cheaper if you just let me put the track for these lights on one of those crossbeams, miss. Hanging them up in the peak is going to be a bitch.’

Stupid man. He’d never thought that if you hung the lights below the crossbeams, the space above would be dark, and that someone could hide up there, crouched on a two-by-six, ready to pounce.

She’d been very restrained, and hadn’t told him what an idiot he was; she’d just smiled and asked him very politely to hurry with the garage; she had a lot of other electrical work for him to do before she could move in.

Once the Range Rover was safely in the garage with the door closed behind her, she pushed another button on the visor and turned off the floodlights. There was only one window in the small building – a narrow one by the side door that admitted a slice of the fading light from outside. Other than that, the darkness was almost absolute.

Drawing her weapon before she got out of the car was so much a part of her routine that Grace never thought about it. In the five years she had lived in this house, she had never once stepped out of the garage without the 9mm in her right hand, held close to her side in a rare gesture of consideration for neighbors who might not understand.

She made her way to the side door, looked out the narrow window at the patch of yard between the garage and her house, then pressed six numbers on a keypad next to the door and heard the heavy clunk of a releasing latch. She stepped outside and stopped for a moment, holding her breath, listening, watching, every sense alert for something out of place. She heard the swoosh of a passing car stirring up dry leaves on the street; the bass throb of a sound system somewhere down the block; the muted chitter of sparrows settling for the night. Nothing unusual. Nothing wrong.

Finally satisfied, she pulled the small door closed behind her and heard the soft beep of the alarm system signaling activation. Nineteen quick steps on a strip of concrete that led from the garage to the front door, eyes busy, palm sweating on the textured grip of the 9mm, and then she was there, slipping the red card into the slot, opening the heavy front door, stepping inside and closing it quickly behind her. She released the breath she’d been holding as Charlie came to her on his belly, head down in submission, the stub that remembered a tail trying to sweep the floor.

‘My man.’ She smiled, holstering the gun before she went down on her knees to hug the wire-coated wonder. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

The dog punished her with a spate of furious face-licking, then bounded away down the short central hall back to the kitchen. There were a few seconds of toenails scrabbling for purchase on linoleum, then Charlie returned at a dangerous gallop, leash in his mouth.

‘Sorry, fella. There isn’t enough time.’

Charlie looked at her for a moment, then slowly opened his mouth and let the leash fall to the floor.

‘It’ll be dark soon,’ she explained.

The dog gave her his best crestfallen expression.

Grace sucked in air through her teeth. ‘No walks after dark. We made a deal, remember?’

The scruffy, gnawed-off tail wiggled.

‘Nope. Can’t do it. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’

He never begged. Never whined. Never questioned, because whatever life Charlie had had before her had beaten those things out of him. He simply collapsed on the Oriental runner and put his head on his paws, nose nudging the discarded leash. Grace couldn’t stand it.

‘You are a disgraceful manipulator.’

The stub moved, just a little.

‘We’d have to run all the way down there.’

The dog sat up quickly.

‘And we couldn’t stay long.’

Charlie opened his mouth in a wonderful smile and his tongue fell out.

Grace bent to hook the leash to his heavy collar, feeling the excited quiver beneath her fingers and, stranger still, the seldom-used muscles at the corners of her mouth turning up. ‘We make each other smile, don’t we, boy?’

And what a wondrous thing that was for them both.

They literally ran the short block to the little park, Grace’s duster flapping in time with Charlie’s ears, her boots clicking hard on the concrete sidewalk.

The last feeble light of a cold sun flickered between the closely set houses as they ran, flashing in Grace’s peripheral vision with the distracting jerkiness of an old silent movie.

The neighborhood was quieting with the onset of cold and the dinner hour. Only two cars passed them on the way: a ’93 teal Ford Tempo with a young girl at the wheel, license number 907 Michael-David-Charlie; and a ’99 red Chevy Blazer, two occupants, license number 415 Tango-Foxtrot-Zulu.

They’re just people, Grace told herself. Just normal, average people heading home after a workday, and if they slowed a little when they saw her, if they looked a little too long out their windows, it was only because they weren’t used to seeing someone walk their dog at a dead run.