Pinkerton looks at the houses they are passing and indulges in a moment of optimism. He’d like a big house someday. That’s for sure. Maybe start a private security company. Everybody seems to be doing it. Escort the executives to the helicopters, close off roads for the VIPs, clear the rooms, take home the big money, tips in cash, and attract the honeys. Today could be day one in making that dream come true. Just last night he’d found a Maserati on eBay for under $30K.
This is going to be F-U-N, fun.
If it weren’t a workday, Irv thinks, this gentle cruise on the lake would be really nice. He hasn’t taken a boat ride in . . . man, a while anyway. He’d forgotten how pleasant it is. Back at the office, the idea of riding a boat around a lake with no particular place to go might have once seemed pointless. It was not the sort of activity he would have chosen for himself. He would never have seriously considered a cabin on a lake. That’s real money. These were, however, the kinds of things his ex-wife wanted him to do. Not just do them, but understand the intrinsic value of wanting to. She wanted him to want to take boat rides on lakes and daydream with her about a porch overlooking a body of water at sunset where they could sip champagne for no particular reason and maybe drop strawberries to the bottom and watch those little bubbles form on the dimples.
The entire vision seemed expensive and sappy at the time.
That and the bugs. You never see that on TV. The gorgeous brunette leaping up from her Adirondack chair and running around like a lunatic with thrashing arms trying to keep the mosquitos off. The smell of DEET overpowering the lemon sole and Chardonnay. And of course the asshole across the lake who decides that ten o’clock at night is exactly when he needs to get to work on that downed tree with his chainsaw.
Hopefully a tree, anyway.
But out here, two fingers dipped into the chill water while they chug along—his fingers being a little water-skier that he moves back and forth as they zip along—he feels . . . good. He has a sense that maybe he made a mistake in that relationship. Maybe these irrational and quiet moments she wanted in a place like this are actually what God wants for us by commanding us to keep the Sabbath Day holy. To stop. To rest. To pause from acts of creation and actually admire it and revel in the joy of the thing for one-seventh of a week. Maybe if he’d kept the Sabbath holy he’d still be married.
Maybe. But she was such a monumental pain in the ass and waterfront property is so friggin’ expensive. Honestly. How hard should a guy need to work?
Now, though, there’s this Norwegian woman. A crazy lady with a guitar who has turned out to be a portal to another world. Maybe he can look past her firebombing of upstate New York and qualification as a terrorist. Maybe, together, they can bring this whole thing to a successful landing the way Charlie’s Angels always seemed able to do with giant passenger planes after the pilots had disappeared. He never could quite remember those plots.
Alfonzo, the low-wattage SWAT commander with little to say, sits across from Irv on the boat. Unlike Pinkerton, Alfonzo has no tattoos on his forearms and he wears a wedding band on his left ring finger. His hair is short but not cut to military standards. He has a calming effect on his men and they all seem relaxed on the boat despite their annoying habit of giving the thumbs-up to virtually everything that is said about anything.
“You got a call?” Irv asks.
“Pinkerton.”
“I’m sorry about him,” Irv replies. “He came with the job. Like the hat.”
“It’s OK,” says Alfonzo. “I understand how it works. Are we actually expecting trouble?”
“No. And I want to avoid escalating something that is actually under control at the moment, despite appearances. I know the woman who set us on fire. She’s scared for her brother, whom I suspect is harmless. I want to go in first. You can hang back a bit. You have a radio I can borrow?”
Alfonzo hands Irv a Motorola and tunes it to the proper channel. They perform a radio check and Irv clips it to his belt on the left side, which counterbalances his .357 rather nicely.
“My thinking,” says Irv, wiping his wet fingers on his pants, “is that I go into the forest and have a chitchat with Marcus. You guys hang back a little. I’m guessing Sigrid will be there too. Once I have a sense of what’s what I’ll call you and give you all a sitrep. My idea is for Sigrid to come out first so you’ll see her and know things are OK, then Marcus will come out—and you won’t shoot him—and I’ll take up the rear. If there’s no trouble we can probably avoid the cuffs, but it’s your call, Al. The thing is, if we cuff him we have to arrest him, and I’m not sure I want to do that, because we’re trying to avoid the catch-and-release scenario here.”
“That all sounds fine to me,” says Alfonzo. “But I’m a little worried about Pinkerton and your team. If he gets there first everything’ll be out of our control.”
“No. I sorted that out. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“I don’t
