“Look, you want me to wait for you to come in?” he asked.
“Why?”
“Your car’s still at that building, isn’t it?” Hadley asked me. “I could give you a lift over there to get it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I might hang out downtown awhile, see if any likely reports come in. I’ll pick up my car later.”
“Sarah, I know I said something like this earlier, and usually I wouldn’t repeat myself, but I really think you’re working this too hard.” Hadley paused. “Did you know this guy? Was that not your first time up there, when you came by?”
I am sick of lying to people. I just want to tell the truth to someone I like and respect, for a change.
“I was supposed to get evidence so we could charge him,” I said, evading the specific question. “If I’d moved faster, he’d be alive and in jail right-”
“No,” Hadley interrupted. “This is not your fault. Those kids just blew Ruiz out like a match they were done with. It pisses me off, too. I’m angry enough at them without having to think that they’ve caused someone I like to be sitting around a precinct house after hours, eaten up with guilt over what she might have done differently.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I won’t stay too late. I promise.”
I stayed at the precinct for two hours that night, drank coffee, talked with the midwatch people. Garden-variety crimes, or activity that might or might not be criminal, were reported over the radio. Along Nicollet Mall, a panhandler was harassing shoppers a little too hard. At the airport, a child who was supposed to be on a flight didn’t get off. On the 35W, a car was pulled to the side without flashers, the driver drunk, sleeping, or slumped behind the wheel. Eventually, I gave up and asked a patrol officer who was heading out to give me a lift to Cicero ’s building. Before I left, I checked out a handheld radio. Just in case.
The patrol officer and I didn’t talk much on the road, and we didn’t talk about crime at all.
“Funny, isn’t it?” he said. “Look, it’s after nine and the sun’s just set.” He took a hand away from the wheel to point at the bath of golden light in the west.
“Tonight’s the summer solstice,” I reminded him.
“I know,” he said. “But I still can’t get used to it. I’ve lived here almost all my life, and it still gives me a thrill to see the sun setting at this hour.”
When we got to the building, I didn’t look up at the empty eyes of the windows above me. “Thanks,” I said, shut the car door, and walked straight across the parking lot, where the Nova waited for me. I almost sensed a rebuke in its low-nosed posture: the Nova and I were getting separated a lot these days, a pilot and wingman out of sync with each other.
It was just as I was crossing into Northeast that the call came over the quietly crackling radio on the passenger seat beside me. In the careful language of over-the-radio communications, the dispatcher’s voice reported a request for backup, shots fired at a small liquor store up Central Avenue. Not very far at all from where I was heading now.
I pressed the accelerator down.
When I’d heard the dispatcher’s voice, a small shockwave had risen from deep in my body, heat rising to the surface of my skin. It was recognition.
The business wasn’t a pharmacy, but that didn’t surprise me. Whether or not Marc realized that Cicero ’s forged prescriptions were nonsense, he knew better than to try again to cash one in, at least not in the Cities. But Marc needed money, and so he was turning to a profession that he knew. Marc likes to think he’s thugged out, Lisette had said.
He had laid low until nightfall, and now he was moving. One score, and then he’d leave town.
The Nova’s front end bumped down and surged up as the car dove into a low parking lot. There was a single squad car outside.
I got out of the Nova, flashed my shield as I approached. “What’s going on?” I asked.
The officer looked up at me, and I saw that she was very young indeed. I knew her: Lockhart, from the drowning scene, who’d taken me downtown to have my statement taken. Roz had been with her then, but now she was nowhere in sight. Lockhart had graduated to working alone, but she didn’t look quite in control of the situation.
She was trying, though. She responded to my question with a clipped nod, just a lift of her chin, and then cut her eyes toward the store. “I think I’ve got an armed assailant in there,” she said. “The sole customer said he ran when the shooting started. Shooter was a young white male, he thinks.”
“Where’s the witness?” I asked.
“Across the street. I told him to stick around, then I yelled for everyone to vacate the parking lot and stay clear.”
She must have had a bigger voice than her size suggested, because while a small crowd of witnesses were watching us, none of them had tried to breach the territory Lockhart had put off-limits.
“The customer just saw it out of the corner of his eye, the guy drawing the gun, then he ran,” she went on. “He heard the shots as he made the door. Didn’t see the shooter come out.”
“What about the other customers?” I asked.
“He’s pretty sure he was the only guy in there,” Lockhart said. “Except the owner, who was behind the counter.”
“The owner didn’t come out?”
Lockhart shook her head. Her brown hair was clipped up against the back of her skull, but a small rooster tail was free enough to shake along with the movement. “Neither of them,” she said.
“There could be a back way out,” I said.
The store was a boxlike structure, with bars on the windows and posters for Minnesota ’s lottery games behind the bars, taped from the inside. Jostling with them for the attention of passersby were posters for cigarettes, for beer, for flavored liqueur, and for phone cards. I couldn’t see a goddamned thing that was happening inside. If anything was.
For the robber to flee through the back and not be seen again was one thing, but the owner should have made himself known to us, if he could walk.
Lockhart said it aloud. “I think the owner’s down. I want to go in.”
“No,” I said. “There are paramedics on the way, right? With the backup?”
“That could be too late,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “I’ll go in.”
“We’ll both go,” she said.
“No,” I said again. She was young and untried, and I didn’t want her on my conscience. “Just me.” Before she could protest, I said, “Stay here and cover the door. I’m going to check out the back.”
I was setting a lousy example for Lockhart, not waiting for the backup, but I took out my.40 and circled the building, slowly.
It was strange to think that we were coming up on ten o’clock. Even Venus hadn’t been able to break through the pale blue light of the northern sky, and the store’s neon sign seemed weakly lit, as though low on energy.
When I turned the corner, into the back alley, I saw a car parked there. An old blue sedan. I glanced down at the tag, the number unfamiliar to me. It wasn’t Marc’s.
The back door was open. This was the heart of it.
I stood to one side. “Sheriff’s officer!” I yelled in. “If anyone inside can hear me, please identify yourself!”
Only silence.
“Okay, I’m coming in, and I’m armed!” I went on. “I’m prepared to use deadly force if threatened. Last chance!”
I sounded like the training manual for deadly force situations. I felt like a teenager pretending to be a cop, sweat breaking out on those bits of skin that are the first to dampen, under the eyes, the back of the neck.
Still nothing. I moved inside slowly.
Immediately inside the back door was the inventory room, wooden shelves piled with cardboard boxes. There was no motion in my line of sight, no human forms. To my left I saw an open door. A bathroom, with a few cases of inventory piled up even in there, next to the dirty toilet and towel dispenser. A smell of cigarette smoke hung in the air. Otherwise empty. All this took only a second to register.