Exit Wound, October 2016
Bob took the Kojak light off the roof as he swung into the open space between the apartment towers of the Jordan projects. The brown-brick buildings around him towered into the sky on all sides, and as he passed into the shadows a breath of damp, cold air entered through the car window. It made him shiver. The whole Jordan project made him shiver. In other places—and that included even down in Phillips—it could be difficult for the untrained eye to see visible signs of the misery, to hear the creaking of bottled-up hate, to smell the testosterone just waiting for the right bad excuse. But not here. It started with a welcome graffiti gracing the side of the cement stairway leading to the road below. “BLOWJOB” it said, in gigantic lettering. Next to it was a badly drawn pistol aimed at the side of a head with what was obviously supposed to be brain mass blowing out the other side. Bob directed his gaze up at the towers. They made him think of termite mounds. There was somethingodd about this concentrated assembly of people in a place where there was so much space. He’d seen photographs from the time when his great-great-grandparents arrived from Norway, driven out by hunger and hard times. They’d come to a wide, open landscape with farms and people distant from one another. They built their simple houses and churches here. They never envisaged a city with a skyline, much less entire high-rise neighborhoods with people on welfare, people on the margins of society who sold everyday escape routes to each other, dug graves for one another and directed their hatred and frustration above all against people who suffered as much as themselves. What would Bob’s ancestors have said about Jordan and Minneapolis? According to his parents they’d been God-fearing, hardworking and thrifty. As well as conservative racists. Bob’s great-great-grandfather had fought in the Civil War, but when the liberated slaves started arriving from the South and settling in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, he’d come to regret it, his grandma said. People of Scandinavian and German heritage were still in the majority, but in the towns especially the ethnic mix of the population was much more varied. Latinos started to arrive after the Second World War, mostly Mexicans but some Puerto Ricans too. By the eighties the Vietnamese had arrived, though God knows why people from a coastal land would choose somewhere as far from the sea as this. The Vietnamese who ran Bob’s local liquor store explained it by saying that once you’d survived being one of the Boat people you kept well away from salt water for the rest of your life. When refugees from the war in Somalia began arriving in the nineties and settled in Phillips and on the south side of the city, a lot of people began predicting trouble. They’d read about traumatized child soldiers with Kalashnikovs in a war financed by the sale of narcotics, and they could see all this baggage making the journey over with them. But things had gone better than the pessimists feared. Naturally some had ended up in drug gangs, but it wasn’tas bad as up on the north side, where for the last six years there had been an average of ten shootings per week. Every time Mayor Kevin Patterson was confronted with a new report on violence he countered by saying that crime per capita in Minneapolis was at an all-time low, which was indeed the case for the other parts of the city. But here it had just gone up and up, especially after Patterson had slashed the police budget and forced them to let people go and start toprioritize.What priorities and which neighborhoods the mayor—who lived in wealthy Dellwood—wanted the police to concentrate on wasn’t hard to guess.
Bob pulled up beside an MPD police car outside the entrance to one of the towers and climbed out. A bowlegged, slightly overweight policeman in uniform was leaning against the car as his colleague inside spoke on his radio.
“Detective Oz, Homicide,” said Bob and flashed his badge.
“That was quick,” said the uniform.
“I was just round the corner. What’s the story, Officer…?”
“Heinz. Ambulance and technicians are on their way.”
“The body?”
Heinz led the way and opened the door. Oz saw the blood on the sidewalk outside and the trail of blood inside. They kept walking until they reached the body, which was lying on its back ten yards inside the hallway, past the elevator and the stairs.
“Why no crime scene tape?”
“Because we got witnesses that say he was standing outside and the shot came from a long way off, nobody saw anybody shoot. There’s no evidence here to mess up, Detective.”
“Really?” Bob looked at the trail of blood leading from the doorway to where they stood, and at the blood on the victim’s shoe. “Do we know who dragged him in here?”
“No.”
“Right. Get your partner off the radio and get the scene out there and in here taped off and do it now.”
Heinz disappeared. Bob looked down at the body. Noted that he’d been wrong, Bob Oz wasn’t the only man in Minneapolis who walked around in a mustard-yellow cashmere coat, just the only mustard-yellow cashmere coatwithouta bullet hole in it. The man had narrow lines of facial hair that framed his mouth and followed the line of his jawbone up to his temples. They were so neatly cut and black, probably dyed, that they looked like they’d been painted on. The corpse had piercings on the eyebrows and ears; the rings looked like gold.
Bob squatted down and carefully unbuttoned the coat. Only now did he realize how fat the man was. The body flopped out of the open coat and seemed held in place by no more than a slim-fit white shirt that was drenched in blood. The discreet emblem on the breast pocket announced that it was an exclusive Italian brand.
Heinz returned. “My partner’s fixing the tape,” he said.
“Okay. Help me turn this guy over.”
Heinz bent low with a grunt and took hold of the dead man’s hips. “I heard someone from your division say that the reason there’s so many murders here in Jordan is that it’s a food desert, that there’s only one decent food store here.”
“Is that a fact?” Bob said without interest as he lifted the corpse’s shoulders.
“He thought there was a connection between hunger and the level of aggression,” Heinz grunted. “But I don’t buy it. Take the average weight of the people around here and you can see the problem isn’t a lack of food.”
“You don’t say,” said Bob as he studied the victim’s back. No exit wound.
“It’s the fat. Fat makes us bad people. Just look at the folks that live around here.”
“Right, now lay him down again,” said Bob.
“They’re either skin-and-bone meth heads or fat diabetics who are going to die before they reach sixty. No one works andthey’re all sick. Obamacare means you and me and our children and grandchildren are paying to support these parasites.” Officer Heinz stood up, wheezing. He tucked his stomach back inside his belt.
“Got a pen on you, Heinz?”
Heinz handed him one with MPD’s logo on it, hunkered down close and watched with interest as Bob pushed the pen into the entry wound in the chest, like someone measuring the oil in a car engine. Bob searched his pockets for something square-shaped, rejected the condom and pulled out the appointment card from Guillaume’s clinic for anger management and held it more or less level behind the pen. Closed one eye and looked. First across the body and then along it. Drew a line along each side of the card.
“What’s that you’re doing?” asked Heinz.
“Trying to get some idea of the angle of the shot.” Bob saw Heinz’s nostrils dilate and guessed the officer was probably smelling the alcohol on his breath. Just then the body on the floor jerked.
“Jesus!” Heinz yelled.
