Dory gave a bitter laugh. “Hilarious, Bob.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But he was the one who was going to fight for you, Dory. Not me.”
In the silence that followed he could hear her sobbing. He waited until the sobbing stopped. The chink of ice cubes on glass. She cleared her throat and then spoke in a slightly deeper, natural register.
“Enjoy your bowling, Bob.”
—
Bob Oz drove.
He didn’t know where he was going, only that it wasn’t home to Phillips. And not to Alice in Cooper. He was tired of the music and turned it off. The radio took over. Bob gathered it was a public debate when he heard the sonorous tones of the mayor of Minneapolis, Kevin Patterson, declaring that the right to own a gunwas about the right to defend one’s family, one’s children, in the same way his position on abortion was about the right to defend the fetus.
“But, Mayor,” said the chairperson, “are you aware that in this country, where there are more weapons than adult human beings, figures from 2010 show that a child or young person is getting shot at the rate of one an hour? That more children’s lives are lost from shooting accidents in the home—as many as one every two days—than are saved by all the guns in this country put together?”
“Yes, sure, I know the statistics, Simon. But in the first place, they are produced by freedom haters—”
“The figures are from Congress’s own survey—”
“—and in the second place, that’s not the point. More people die in traffic, but I haven’t yet heard anyone suggest we ban cars.”
“But theoretically perhaps one ought to consider it, if the deaths from traffic accidents get high enough?”
The mayor laughed. “I guess ‘theoretically’ is the key word there, Simon. And as you know, I’m a practical mayor, I think and act on practical grounds. And I think the principle through. If banning the use of guns means depriving our citizens of the right to defend themselves against criminal elements, then what’s next? The right to vote?”
“Is that why you’ve accepted the invitation to open the NRA’s annual conference? Or is it because of the $40,000 they’re contributing to your campaign?”
“I have a number of viewpoints in common with the NRA and it was natural for me to accept the invitation, for that reason, and because the conference attracts a lot of people to Minneapolis, and the publicity is good for our city.”
Bob turned off the radio and called Kay Myers.
“Yes, Bob?”
“Sorry to be calling so late, but do you feel like a coffee?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Talk about the Gomez case. If you have the keys, I could take another look around his apartment. Maybe he’s been back.”
Kay Myers’s sigh sounded like a drip in a well. “Even if I did have the keys, you’re suspended from duty. What are you up to, Bob?”
“That,” said Bob, “is one helluva good question.”
They hung up.
Bob searched his memory. It was his habit to use a system of associations to store information. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, like with Dory. An actor who plays the part of an insane captain, plus a man who really is insane. Gregory Dupont. Simple.
24
Recoil, October 2016
It was starting to get dark as I watched Cody Karlstad walk through the parking lot. In the half hour I’d been waiting up there on the roof there had been a lot of activity down below, cars coming, cars going. Through the telescopic sight I followed Karlstad until he reached the big blue pickup, unlocked it and climbed in. My pulse rate was low, even though I hadn’t taken the beta-blockers as I had considered doing yesterday. I’d worked out that the reason I didn’t hit Dante properly was because my pulse rate had been too high.
The interior light came on.
I knew that gave me seven seconds. I knew because this was the fourth day I’d been there at the same time, and each time he had carried out exactly the same ritual. He put his briefcase on the floor in front of the passenger seat, slipped the key in the ignition, fastened his seat belt and turned on the ignition.
Cody Karlstad was a white middle-class part owner of an agricultural machinery dealership. He had three children and a wife who worked in the local church. Cody Karlstad was a frugal man. Despite the fact that his car was worth $50,000 he parked it every morning in the free parking spot at Southdale Center. That was seven o’clock, before the mall opened; he had five thousand vacant parking spots to choose from but he always picked the same one, just about in the center of the desert. After that he headed over to the machine outside the mall to buy a pack of chewing gum. I guessed he did that so he could tell himself and any parking attendant who checked that he was a customer at the mall and qualified to park there free. But, of course, it could also have been just that he liked chewing gum or had chronic bad breath. Then Cody Karlstad headed over toward the building where he worked. It shared a parking lot with the women’s hospital, and he’d have had to pay a monthly fee of $155 to park there. I knew this because the prices were posted on a yellow metal sign outside the main entrance. I had no idea why the sign was made of metal—did they maybe think the price would never go up?
