says.”
“Hmm. Well, better them than me. I’ll stick to murder and theft,” Lucas said.
Back at his office, Lucas said to Sandy, “All right: the Syrian woman.”
“You heard the biggest part of it: that she exists,” Sandy said. “Everybody who cooperated with me-not all of them cooperated, but of the ones who did, I couldn’t find any buying pattern. I can’t figure out where she’ll show up next. All I could think of is that you get ahold of all the different police departments, and we get the gold dealers to tip us off, and we get a squad car around to the dealers-”
“To do what? We don’t even know that she’s committing a crime,” Lucas said.
“They could talk to her,” Sandy said. “Get a look at her. Check her ID. Maybe get some fingerprints. Uh, I remember seeing these signs that say you can’t bring more than ten thousand dollars into the U.S. without registering, and she’s got all this money.”
“Okay, there’s something in there,” Lucas said. “Start calling the dealers, see who’ll agree to tip us.”
“I thought we might need your weight behind it.”
“Sandy, I’m a goddamn voice on a telephone,” Lucas said. “So are you. Tell them that you’re Rose Marie, that you’re the public safety commissioner.”
“That’d help my career,” Sandy said.
“Sooo … figure something out,” Lucas said. “We need this woman.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m gonna jack up Turicek. They know we’re coming, so we might as well show up.”
Albitis was about to drop her phone into a trash barrel at EWR, when it rang. Had to be Kline, Turicek, or Sanderson, since they were the only ones with the number for that phone, but when she looked at the screen, it said, “Delta Airlines.”
“Oh, fuck me with a phone pole,” she muttered. A man walking just ahead of her turned and looked at her, bewildered. She punched up the text message that said that her flight had been indefinitely delayed. She kept walking, through security, down to the gate, where a Delta attendant told her that the plane was broken, though she didn’t use that exact word.
“So what are we doing?” Albitis asked.
“We’re bringing another plane in from Atlanta,” the attendant said. “It should be here by eight o’clock.”
“Eight o’clock? I won’t be in the Twin Cities until midnight,” Albitis said.
“We apologize for any inconvenience….”
Albitis thought the woman sounded insincere, but she turned away and punched up Turicek and told him what had happened. Turicek said, “The cops talked to Kristina. Some of the Mexicans turned up at her apartment. She’s scared shitless.”
“So what do you want to do?” Albitis asked.
“Let me think. I’ll call you.”
Turicek called Sanderson, who was holed up at her apartment, and told her to get down to the bank. “Perfectly safe,” he assured her. “You’re inside your own parking garage, you drive straight to the bank’s parking garage, you call me just before you get here, and I’ll meet you in the garage. But you gotta take over for me. I’m really sick-I say no more.”
She recognized the “say no more.” It was part of a Monty Python sketch that Kline and Turicek, when in nerd mode, could do in endless variations:
“I’ll come,” she said. She added, “I don’t want to go to prison.”
Turicek couldn’t think of how to answer, so he said, “Good.”
When Sanderson showed up, an hour later, Turicek took the elevator down to the Skyway and walked over to Macy’s, looking in windows and mirrors for familiar faces. Was he being watched? He had that familiar creepy feeling at the back of his neck, familiar from the old days back in Lithuania, when he was a fifteen-year-old school kid dealing in American cigarettes and British pornography.
In the Macy’s men’s store, he bought a pair of athletic shorts, a T-shirt, a pair of white socks, a black ball cap, and Nike cross-training shoes. He paid and carried the bag back out of the store, went to the office-supply store next door, bought a backpack, the kind kids wore to school. When he walked across the bridge between Macy’s and the IDS Center, he risked a quick glance back and picked up a large man ambling along behind a fat woman, as though he were using her as a blind. He thought he’d seen the face earlier.
They were, he thought, tracking him.
Of course, they hadn’t grown up in Vilnius.
He carried the clothes down to the security center, changed in the men’s room, put his work clothes in the backpack, slipped his arms through it, and pulled the cap down over his eyes. “I’ll be a couple of hours,” he said, quietly, to Sanderson.
“Be careful…”
“If anybody asks, tell them I’m out jogging.”
He walked out in the running gear, and when he hit the door-the first place the watchers could see him-he was running.
Jenkins was up in the public parking ramp where he could watch both Turicek’s car and the street entrance to the bank, and Shrake was loitering in the Skyway. Jenkins had recently bought a chunk of blue goop that came in a plastic egg and was meant to be squeezed, to strengthen hands and forearms. It also had some bubble-gum-like qualities: a pinch of it could be stretched almost indefinitely, into long gummy strings, and doing that was oddly engrossing.
He was pulling out one of his longest strings when Turicek burst through the door and started running down the street. Jenkins shouted into his handset, “Shit, I think he’s running, but I’m not sure it’s him. He’s on the street running south.”
“Watch him,” Shrake called back, and thirty seconds later, Shrake burst onto the same street and looked south, but Turicek was far down the next block, and Shrake couldn’t see him through the people on the street. Jenkins shouted into the handset, “He turned left … he’s gone.”
Shrake ran that way, and Jenkins got the car, and they cruised, looking for a man in running shorts, but they never saw him again. Jenkins called the bank and asked for him, and the woman who answered the phone in the systems division said he’d gone jogging.
“Goddamnit,” Jenkins said. He got on his cell phone and called Lucas. “I got bad news and bad news. Which do you want first?”
Lucas asked, “What happened?”
“Turicek must have spotted us, and then he ran. We never had a chance,” Jenkins said. “He either knew we were here, or he assumed it.”
“Goddamnit,” Lucas said.
“That’s just what I said.” He described the circumstances, and Lucas asked, “You think he’s really jogging?”
“Not unless he’s practicing for the hundred-yard dash. He came out of there like he was being chased by the hound of the coupe de villes,” Jenkins said. “What do you want us to do?”
“Drive around. Hang there. Call the cab companies, see if they picked up a jogger. Quit when it’s quitting time. I mean, I don’t know.”
“All right. I’m sorry, man.”
“Call me if anything changes. Goddamnit, again, we need to know where that guy goes,” Lucas said.
Turicek ran four blocks, swerved into the Pillsbury Center and took the escalators up, watching the doors, then turned and walked quickly down toward the Government Center, ninety percent sure he’d lost the men behind him.
