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.
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.
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,
