Titov got out of the car and headed into town. The cold they’d had in Minneapolis had eased, even though they were a hundred miles farther north—he actually felt a little too warm in his parka. He still had time to turn around, but even though there was no breeze at all, he felt like he was being pushed, by a wind, or by a hand, by something in the middle of his back. He felt as though he werescurrying…as though his feet had finally made up his mind for him.
He’d been in the bar on other trips up from Chicago, stopped for the brats, stayed for the beer. When it popped up ahead of him, an aqua-colored sign that read “Musky Hunter’s Bar and Grill,” he hurried toward it, as if propelled by a force outside of himself.
In the van, Abramova scanned the crowd and, grinding her teeth in frustration, said, “This is nonsense.”
“Yes, but Titov is correct—nobody would pick us out of this crowd, especially if we wear our ski masks,” Sokolov said. “Half the people here have them on. Maybe walk around the block, stretch ourselves.”
Abramova said, “Around the block. No more. We come right back.”
31
Sherwood took a half-dozen phone calls from his office as he and Lucas drove north, with White and Capslock trailing behind. He punched up the speaker phone so Lucas could understand what was going on, and after the final call, he asked, “Are you starting to get an idea of how big a deal this is?”
“Starting to,” Lucas said. “I don’t know how we do this, other than to talk to this guy, whoever he is, and then let Bernie and the woman escape. I’m not inclined to do that—they killed two FBI agents and Masha Sokolov, with Bernie’s help. Bernie murdered his own father. You even got shot, and that poor damn motel clerk is seriously fucked up.”
“You gotta think about this like a war. People get killed in a war, and you don’t blame the individual soldiers,” Sherwood said.
“Bullshit.”
“Not bullshit. Lucas: we can work this out. We gotta work this out,” Sherwood said.
“I don’t know how we’ll do that.”
“Neither do I,” Sherwood said, settling back in his seat. “But we gotta.”
Lucas would never figure out how everything in the new Porsche worked, but he fiddled around with the satellite radio while he was driving and landed on the Chris Stapleton station and left it there. The trip was fundamentally boring, through a flat and low countryside, grim-looking oaks and drab pines and spruces, widely spaced small towns with nothing to recommend a stop except the need for gasoline.
Sherwood continued to vibrate, until Lucas said, “You gotta calm down.”
“I’m absolutely calm,” Sherwood said.
“If you don’t calm down, you could screw us up. You need to calm down and think about how we do this.”
“I’m thinking. I’m calm.”
Three hours after leaving Minneapolis, they rolled into Hayward to the sound of “Tennessee Whiskey.” The trip had taken longer than usual because of a thickening of traffic on the two-lane going into Hayward, and occasional snowpack in shady spots on the highway.
By the time they got inside Hayward, they were inching along and finally found parking spaces well out of the downtown area. As they walked the rest of the way in, Lucas told Capslock and White that they would play the part of barflies and stay well away from the conversation with Titov.
“You guys are the backup, if there’s a problem. We’ll talk to the manager when we go in, make sure he knows about all four of us, sowe can hang out,” Lucas said. “He’ll probably want to keep things turning over, so two people sitting at the bar drinking one beer for forty-five minutes won’t work, unless he knows what we’re doing.”
White asked, “Do we talk to the local cops?”
Three skiers went past on an improvised track just off the street, and then two more; they weren’t racers, and fifty yards ahead, they ran into a crowd that had trampled down the track they were using; the crowd was thick and confused, individual members moving in all different directions all at once.
“Not yet,” Lucas told White. “I was thinking about that on the way up. The locals wouldn’t be subtle. There are too many people in town, and if we tell them what we’re up to, that we’re dealing with a bunch of Russian killers, they’ll want to crush it as fast as they can. John wants to play it out, see what we can do here.”
Sherwood explained that, and Capslock said, “All I should do is dangle my tongue in the beer, but not drink it?”
“That’s about it, unless you see a fight start,” Lucas said. They were winding their way through the crowd into the downtown area, and Lucas pointed at a garish aqua-colored sign and said, “There’s the Musky Hunter. Let’s find the manager.”
• • •
The Musky Hunter’sBar and Grill was packed to the doors and out the doors, a ton of brats going by as the four of them shouldered their way inside. The manager was behind the bar, the bald guy, a waitress told them, so Lucas rammed through to the bar, throwing a vicious hip-check into a woman who tried to push by him, and stuck his badge in front of the manager’s eyes.
“Gotta talk,” Lucas shouted over the noise. “One minute.”
The manager, an average-looking, heavyset guy with an out-of-season tan, wearing a Green Bay Packers hat and a three-day beard, shook his head: “I can’t just walk away from the bar, man, I mean, look at this place.”
