Back on the street, Rae said, “Suits, but not uninteresting suits. We might actually get something done.”
“If they can find a way to cover their asses while they’re doing it,” Bob amended.
O’Conner asked, “You’re friendly with Deputy Director Mallard?”
Lucas said, “Yeah. We worked a couple of cases together, and we did okay.”
“I’d like to hear that story sometime,” O’Conner said. “The rumor is, Mallard has the AG’s balls in his pocket.”
“Since the AG’s a woman, that would be unusual,” Rae said.
“You obviously haven’t met our beloved attorney general,” O’Conner said. To Lucas, as they waited for a car to arrive for O’Conner and Forte: “Remember: Aggressively cautious.”
Forte: “Or cautiously aggressive. Try not to get them confused.”
13
Weather Karkinnen, Lucas’s wife, was driving her dark blue Audi A5 convertible, the top down, in the soft summer evening, but with the windows up because she didn’t want to tangle her freshly coifed hair.
A bag of groceries sat beside her on the passenger seat, as she drove home from the Lunds supermarket on the Ford Parkway in St. Paul. She was a small woman, her shoulder reaching barely to the bottom of the car’s side window. She enjoyed the curvy ride down Mississippi River Boulevard; the A5 wasn’t a hot car, but it was very driveable.
Weather was thinking about her kids, Sam in particular. Sam was in elementary school, and, unfortunately for a kid enrolled in school in these modern times, engaged in the occasional fight. He wasn’t a bully—all the teachers said so—but hewasthe kid who stood up for the picked-upon, a role he may have enjoyed too much, according to those same teachers. Lucas had talked to him about it, and needed to talk to him more about it, she thought.
Weather caught a boy on a skateboard in her headlights, carefully arced around him, and continued on down the street to Randolph, still thinking about Sam, and...
WHAM!
She never saw it coming.
—
THE AUDI WAS BROADSIDEDby an elderly Toyota Tacoma, accelerating out of the intersection of Randolph and Mississippi River Boulevard. The A5 jumped three feet sideways, the door crushing inward, all the air bags firing simultaneously.
Weather’s head collided with the passenger-side window as it shattered, shards of glass sliced into her scalp, and then her head ping-ponged to the left, but she wasn’t aware of that because consciousness had left the building. The violence torqued her neck, and the smashed-in door broke her arm and drove her elbow into her ribs, cracking several, sending the broken end of one of them into her right lung.
There were four witnesses: a couple out for an evening stroll, who were on the walkway that paralleled the boulevard; a St. Kate’s student, heading back to the school on her bike after getting off her shift at a Ford Parkway restaurant; and the skateboarder.
All four saw the driver of the pickup, a fat man in a loose, short-sleeved black shirt and a bright gold ball cap, jump uninjured from the truck, stop for a second in the pool of light cast from a pole on the far side of the intersection, and run back up Randolph, across the street from the Temple of Aaron, and down an alley.
No one thought to chase him, during the first minute after the crash; they were all gawking, reaching for their cell phones, running to look at Weather. The skater had dropped his board when the driver ducked into the alley and had run after him, but never saw him again.
The St. Paul cops had a car there in two minutes; an ambulance arrived in six. Weather was still in the car, unconscious, when an EMT and a cop wrenched open the passenger-side door, slipped in the end of a stretcher, cut the safety belt still looped over Weather’s chest, and eased her on the stretcher.
A moment later, she was on her way to Regions Hospital, the EMT advising the driver, “Drive fast, man... Let’s get her there... Drive faster...”
A patrol sergeant recovered her purse and had opened her wallet, looking for an ID, when another cop hurried up to him and asked, “You know who she is?”
The cop looked at the driver’s license. “Weather... Karkinnen.”
“Yeah, and I ran the plates. The car’s registered to her and her husband, Lucas Davenport.”
“Ah, shit,” the sergeant said. “Listen—get onto the BCA, get a phone number for Davenport. If they don’t have it, get one for a Del Capslock. Tell him what happened. He’s a friend of Davenport’s.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Get more cars here. Lots of cars. The guy’s on foot; we’re gonna track him down if it takes all night.”
—
