“He had a pistol, a Glock 17, locked in the glove compartment.”
“I mean, is there any connection to gun dealing, directly or indirectly?”
“No. But he’s not exactly anti-gun either.”
“I get that when he has a pistol.”
“Yes, but I was thinking of the bumper sticker on his car.”
“Oh?”
“You didn’t see it?”
“Hanson chased me off.”
“An NRA sticker. The one with the two boxes you can tick as gun owner or victim.”
Bob nodded slowly. He had it now, where he knew the name Cody Karlstad from.
“We need more guns in the hands of the right people,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“That’s what Cody Karlstad said in theStar Tribuneearlier this summer,” said Bob as he tapped something into his phone. “He’s a spokesman for the NRA-ILA, they campaign against stricter gun laws. A classic more-guns-less-crime fan. Look, this is Cody Karlstad.”
Bob held up his phone to show Kay a photo of two men in suits posing together.
“Mayor Patterson,” she said. “So Cody Karlstad got to meet people in high places.”
“No great mystery for Patterson to pose for a picture when the NRA is donating $40,000 to his campaign.”
“They did? But Patterson’s a Democrat—I thought the NRA only supported politicians on the right?”
“The NRA doesn’t care where a politician stands on agricultural policy, all they care about is where they stand on the Second Amendment of the Constitution. They give politicians marks based on how positive they are about guns and, according to theStar Tribune,Kevin Patterson gets an A-plus there.”
“So you think gun control is the connection?” said Kay. “That what we’ve got here is someone fighting guns with guns?”
“It looks that way.”
“Is Gomez a solitary nutcase or a member of some political terrorist group?”
Bob shrugged. “How about a solitary, noncrazy political terrorist?”
Kay was about to say something but just then her phone rang. She took the call and looked quizzically at Bob as she listened.
“Gomez has been observed on a security camera at Track Plaza,” she said. She put the phone in her pocket and stood up.
26
Skyways I, October 2016
Olav Hanson was panting. He’d run all the way from where he’d parked his car at Track Plaza. He tried to ignore the pain in his knee as the escalator slowly moved him up to the second floor. He got to the top and there, a hundred yards away, he saw the pizza place. It was open toward the communal area, like a restaurant at an airport. He had his phone plugged into one ear and as he had driven from Southdale he’d been getting updates all the way from the MPD’s video center telling him Gomez was still at the restaurant. The video center received images from over three hundred cameras located indoors and outdoors in the downtown area and was a cooperative enterprise involving law enforcement and local businesses. It had either drastically reduced crime or—as some critics claimed—transferred it to other parts of the city. Concerns about secret surveillance had been dealt with by making the project open to all, using a glass wall behind which anyone could comeand sit and see the same pictures as the police. In a word, Olav had an audience. It also meant that what had to happen had to happen somewhere it wouldn’t be caught on camera. His shirt was wet with sweat, and he could feel the edge of his holster rubbing against his armpit. The plan was simple but sound. An arrest on camera in front of witnesses and everything done by the book, body search, reading his rights, the whole bit. Apart from the fact that he wasn’t going to handcuff Gomez. He’d deliberately left his cuffs in the car and would tell Internal Affairs afterward that he’d forgotten them. He’d take Gomez over to the elevators and order everyone out of the first one that arrived. Because there were no cameras in the elevators. He’d checked. He’d shoot Gomez before they reached the lobby, make sure his fingerprints were on the barrel and say Gomez had tried to grab the gun from him.
Olav put his hand on the butt of his pistol inside his jacket as his gaze wandered over the backs of those sitting at the counter in front of the pizza ovens. None were wearing the hoodie he’d seen on the video at the parking garage. Nobody had the raven-black hair he remembered on Lobo. But if Lobo had moved on, why hadn’t the video center passed on the message? He got his answer when he felt his phone vibrate, opened it up, heard Kay Myers’s voice and understood his twenty minutes were already up.
—
Kay’s Ford was held up in traffic. Bob—sitting in the passenger seat—had told her that if she’d had a Kojak light they would have been at Track Plaza inside fifteen minutes. It didn’t improve her humor.
