Want to Play?

by P. J. Tracy

  Espinoza glanced at the five names, then looked up at Magozzi. ‘You’re kidding, right? Roadrunner?’

  ‘That’s the name on his license,’ Gino put in.

  ‘No shit?’

  ‘No shit.’

  Espinoza looked down at the names again, head shaking. ‘And Harley Davidson? Tell me these are not the names they were born with.’

  ‘You tell us, Tommy. By the way, McLaren, Freedman, you’ve got MDL blowups of these people in your handout. Special eye out for any of them tonight. They’re not on the guest list. Gino?’

  ‘I’m done.’

  ‘Chief?’ He looked over at Chief Malcherson, who was still standing in exactly the same spot, deep into the cool-as-a-cucumber routine that fooled absolutely no one. His cheeks were too red, his eyes as busy as his body was still. Magozzi figured he’d blow a vessel in about five minutes. ‘Anything you want to add?’

  ‘Just that we’ve got a lot of media downstairs. They’re all over this angel thing. Avoid them if you can, refer them to me, Magozzi, or Rolseth if you can’t. I don’t want to hear a lot of “no comments” on the news tonight. Sounds bad.’

  17

  You wouldn’t know it to look at me, thought Wilbur Daniels, but in my heart, this is the man I have always been. A wild man. A risk-taker. A sexual adventurer, willing to try anything once, desperate to taste the thrills of the bizarre, the exotic, the near-perverted, if someone would only ask.

  And finally, someone had.

  Within the past ten minutes, Wilbur had decided that there was indeed a god, and that occasionally he smiled on paunchy, middle-aged men with lives as colorless as the few remaining wisps on their otherwise bald pates.

  There was pain involved, of course. These flabby legs that had spent the last twenty years in the cubbyhole of a desk were not used to the demands of this demeaning position. An under-used, flaccid quadricep was pinching, convulsing, threatening to knot, and yet he would not wish for the cramping to stop; would not move an inch to ease the pain that only seemed to heighten this sinful pleasure. If the gang could see me now, he sang in his mind, imagining the shock and revulsion on the faces of those who thought they knew him. The image pleased him, and an unmanly giggle bubbled from his lips. He apologized immediately, only to be told that one should never apologize for finding joy, no matter how dark the deed that created it. Oh, yes. Oh, God, that was so true.

  In the next second he bit down on his own hand to stifle a cry of ecstasy, and for a fleeting moment, wondered how he would later explain the wound. But then he was asked to assume a new, deliciously naughty position, and he forgot his hand, and the cramp in his thigh, and the whole of his miserable life at a sensation so intense he doubted that his heart would survive the experience.

  The gun didn’t frighten him when it appeared. Well, all right; it did, a little, but that was part of it, wasn’t it? Didn’t the omnipresent specter of death always intensify the pleasures one extracted from life? And it was certainly intensifying this one.

  As the barrel pressed against his temple in the ultimate threat, he felt a corresponding surge of pleasure so exquisite he thought he might explode.

  And then, to a degree, he did.

  Patrol Sergeant Eaton Freedman fastened his belt holster and shrugged into a pin-striped suitcoat that had been too tight before he tried to stuff a gun under it. You’d have to be blind not to see the bulge, but most people who looked at Eaton Freedman never saw the details, just a really big black man.

  Detective Johnny McLaren rapped on the door frame of Freedman’s office. ‘Stop preening, Freedman, we gotta go . . . ooh. Sharp.’

  Freedman looked critically at McLaren’s maroon polyester blazer. ‘You get that at Goodwill?’

  McLaren looked indignant. ‘Damn right. Five bucks.’

  ‘We’re supposed to dress like wedding guests.’

  ‘Hey, I wore this to my wedding.’

  ‘Which explains your divorce. Besides, it clashes with your hair.’

  ‘What a team. No one will notice us, no way. A big, black linebacker and a carrot-top Mick. What was Magozzi thinking, picking the two of us?’

  Freedman’s laughter rumbled like thunder. ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘ ’Cause we’re the sharpest, best guys on the force?’

  ‘How about because we both live ten minutes away and could get to our good duds faster than anybody else?’

  McLaren looked crestfallen.

  ‘And because we’re the sharpest, best guys on the force,’ Freedman added.

  ‘That’s what I thought. Let’s go. You get any prettier the groom’ll dump the bride and marry you.’

  When Freedman and McLaren nosed the unmarked up to the Nicollet’s access gate a half hour later, two bruisers in black suits came out of nowhere and flanked the doors. Freedman rolled down his window and looked up at a guy with no neck and a shaved head. ‘Berg, you son of a bitch, what happened to your hair, man?’

  The guy’s face remained expressionless. ‘Women kept pulling on it in the throes of passion, so I shaved it off. Get out of there, Freedman, so I can frisk your fat black ass.’

  ‘In your dreams, you fish-belly Swede.’ Freedman grinned, and then in a stage whisper to McLaren, ‘I had this guy walkin’ the Hennepin patrol a while back. He wanted me the first time he saw me. Was about to file sek-shu-al harassment when Red Chilton up and hired him away from us.’

  Berg ducked down and filled the window opening with his head, looking skeptically at McLaren’s slight form. ‘I don’t know about you new cops. You all look little.’

  ‘Yeah, but we got bigger guns,’ McLaren said, touching a finger to his forehead. ‘Johnny McLaren.’

  ‘Hey, Fritz, come on around here and meet Patrol Sergeant Eaton Freedman and Johnny McLaren.’

  The second bruiser bent to look inside the car, nodded once, then retreated.

  ‘Well, there’s a Chatty Kathy,’ Freedman rumbled.

  ‘He was ATF for a dozen years,’ Berg said. ‘And as you know those guys are a little short on conversational skills. I’ll do my best to keep him from shooting you by accident.’

  ‘That would be good.’ McLaren’s eyes followed the man as he hulked around the car suspiciously, probably looking for bombs or biological weapons or contraband cigarettes. ‘Man, he looks grim.’

  ‘That’s why we put him up front,’ Berg said. ‘Makes our clients feel real secure. The guy’s a puff ball, though. Raises cocker spaniel puppies.’

  ‘He probably eats them.’

  Berg laughed and rolled his hand at someone in the guard booth by the gate, and two hundred square feet of cyclone fence unlatched and started to hum open. ‘Red’s on board, waiting for you. Some doin’s tonight, huh?’

  ‘Might be,’ Freedman agreed. ‘This the only access?’

  ‘For cars, yeah. We check everybody against the guest list here, and sweep them before they get through.’ He raised a handheld metal detector.

  ‘Mayor’s going to love that,’ McLaren said.

  ‘Him, I’m doing personally. Always thought he was a shifty bastard. Good to see you again, Freedman.’

  ‘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 m
ustache 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.’

  18

  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 o
dd 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.