“That’s why I have a cordless phone,” I heard him say as he left me. “So you don’t have to get out of your chair.”
When he brought the phone back to me, he set it down on the little table next to my chair and bowed. “Your highness,” he said.
“Thank you. Now go away.”
He shook his head and went back to the bar. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I said aloud as I punched in the numbers. An officer answered.
“Is Chief Maven still there?” I said.
“He’s just about to leave,” the man said. “May I tell him who’s calling?”
“This is Alex McKnight,” I said.
I heard some muffled voices on the other end and then Maven’s said, “McKnight, what do you want?” he said.
“Chief Maven,” I said. “I just called to thank you again.”
“The hell you did,” he said. “State your business. I’m on my way home to dinner.”
“I want to talk to Agent Urbanic,” I said. “Can you have him call me?”
“What am I, your secretary now?”
“I figured you’d know how to reach him,” I said. “They don’t seem to be staying here in town anymore.”
“All right, all right,” he said. “I’ll have them call you. Let me guess, you’re at the Glasgow Inn.”
“Not Champagne,” I said. “I want to talk to Urbanic.”
I heard him muttering something to himself. “Is there anything else you want me to do, McKnight? Come out and shovel your driveway for you?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I have a plow. Oh, but while you’re having the DA drop charges, how about throwing out Vinnie’s assault charge?”
“That officer came back to work today,” he said. “He looks almost as bad as you do. Good night.”
“Good night, Chief,” I said, but he had already hung up.
The phone wasn’t lying on the table more than two minutes before it rang. “McKnight,” I said.
“This is Champagne.”
“I wanted to talk to your partner,” I said.
“You’ll talk to me.”
“That’s what you think,” I said, and hung up.
The phone rang again a minute later.
“This is Urbanic. What the hell’s going on?”
“I wanted to talk to you,” I said. “You seem like you might be half human.”
“So talk.”
“Tell me about Molinov.”
“Why do you want to know about Molinov?” he said.
“Because he took her. We have to find him.”
“Who’s ‘we,’ Mr. McKnight?”
“You, me. I don’t care. Damn it, Urbanic. If you could have seen how scared she was that night…”
“We’re working on it,” he said.
“No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re looking for that stupid bag. I know how you guys operate.”
“The bag came from Molinov,” he said. “Find the bag and you find the man. Find the man and you find Dorothy. At least according to you. Am I right?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just.” I hesitated. “What’s your first name? I don’t want to keep calling you Agent Urbanic.”
“My name is John.”
“Okay, John. John Urbanic. Is that German?”
“Polish,” he said.
“John, you gotta tell me what’s going on. Who is this Molinov guy?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I sat there listening to the silence, watching the fire. “We don’t know that much about him,” he finally said. “The name is Russian, that much is obvious. Whether it’s his real name or not, we don’t know. Nobody has ever seen him, not in America anyway.”
“Bruckman said he saw him,” I said. “He said he stole the bag from him in New Jersey.”
“We heard that much,” he said. “We’ve been trying to catch up with Bruckman for about two months. We were about to put a move on him last week, but we weren’t sure where the bag was.”
“The football,” I said.
“That’s my partner talking,” he said. “He likes code words.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“It’s methcathinone,” he said. “It’s a synthetic stimulant, similar to methamphetamine.”
“Speed,” I said.
“It’s like speed,” he said. “Maybe a little worse. They call it ‘cat,’ or ‘wild cat’ if it’s got a little crack mixed in. It’s got the same energy boost on the way up, but sometimes it’s a hard ride down. Paranoia, hallucinations. Seizures, even.”
“So that powder they put in my truck,” I said. “That wasn’t from the bag?”
“No,” he said. “That was good old-fashioned cocaine. Not even good cocaine. I guess they didn’t want to waste any of the good stuff just to set you up.”
“If she took the bag, they must be running pretty low on this, wait a minute, did you say they call this stuff ‘wild cat’? Like the cat’s in the bag?”
“It sounds cute, I know, but believe me, this stuff is a killer. It’s been tearing up Russia for years.”
“It comes from Russia,” I said. “So Molinov…”
“Yes,” he said. “Whoever he is, it looks like he’s testing out the market, see if he can start a little import business.”
“And these two guys who work for him,” I said. “Pearl and Roman? What kind of names are those?”
“You got me,” he said. “They don’t sound like nice guys.”
“What was she doing?” I said. “Why did she take the bag? She should have just run away.”
“We’d like to talk to her about that,” he said. “We know she came to you on Friday night. On Saturday, we had no Bruckman, no Dorothy. Only Alex McKnight. You can see why we were interested in you.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “I was your only lead.”
“I’m sorry it… well, it didn’t turn out to be a very pleasant experience for you.”
“John, you’re moving up from half human to almost human here. Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because you had nothing to do with it,” he said. “I could see that as soon as we questioned you.”
“You should do something about your partner,” I said. “Make him shut up while you do all the talking.”
“He’s better with the guilty ones,” he said. “And believe me, they’re almost always guilty.”
“John, you’ve got no idea where this Molinov guy is now? Or these guys who work for him?”
“No idea,” he said. “But if they got the bag back, you gotta figure they’re not sticking around.”
“And if he has Dorothy?”
Another pause. An awful silence before he said what I already knew. “If they got to her, then I don’t like her chances.”
I squeezed the phone. There was not a word I could think of saying.
“Alex, are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“We’ve got the Mounties looking for Bruckman. If we find him, we’ll try to trace Molinov back to New Jersey or wherever the hell he is right now. You’ve had no involvement in this from the beginning, right?”
I said nothing.
“Alex?”
“Right,” I said.
“Okay, so now it’s time to let us do whatever we can do. Just let it go, Alex.”
“Let it go,” I said.
“Stay home and stay warm,” he said. “If we find out anything, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, if my partner sees you again, I think he’s going to kill us both. I can’t imagine what he’s going to say when he finds out I told you all this.”
“You mean he’s not right there, listening in?”
“No, I made him wait in the next room. I think I hear him tearing the drapes down.”
“Send me the bill,” I said.
“Take care of yourself, Alex.”
I thanked him and hung up.
Let it go, he said.
I picked the phone back up and dialed Leon’s number.
“He’s Russian,” I said.
“We figured that,” he said. “From the name.”
“Now we know for sure. He’s from Russia.” I told him everything Urbanic had told me, and then I gave him the punch line. “Any ideas on how we can find him?”
“Not that I know of, Alex. Not any way that the DEA couldn’t do a hundred times better.”
“No, I didn’t think so,” I said. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have bothered you. You’ve got me thinking you can do miracles now. The way you found Bruckman’s place, and then the way you found Bruckman himself.”
“That was just common sense and hard work,” he said. “With Molinov we don’t even know where to begin. I thought you said this was over, anyway?”