The jam knife paused for two seconds: “I tend to bring out the violent streak in women. Let me think about it.”
• • •
At ten minutesafter eight, they loaded into Lucas’s Porsche and headed across town. The north side of the Minneapolis loop had once been the city’s warehouse district, later invaded by condos, apartments, steakhouses and bars, ferns and potted palms, with the rare warehouse holding on.
Traffic was dense, coming to a dead stop on the I-94 bridge across the Mississippi, and they arrived at the apartment building at 8:45. They went inside the front door, where they talked to an FBI agent, who called another, higher-ranking agent. The ranking agent was friendly enough, and asked about Sherwood’s wound, but also said that nobody knew that they were coming, and that they weren’t really invited to take part in the move.
“Well, okay then, good luck,” Lucas said. “We’ll watch from a distance.”
“Thank you.”
Lucas and Sherwood walked back to the Porsche and Sherwood said, “Let’s cruise the neighborhood. Maybe we could follow them to Saint Paul.”
“We could do that,” Lucas said. “Was Weather right? Did you hurt more this morning than you did last night?”
“Yeah, but I took a pill, and it’s not so bad. Itches. I keep trying to scratch.”
“Don’t do that.”
They did a slow loop around the apartment building, looking up and down streets, hoping, but not expecting, to see a black JeepCherokee. They crossed the Mississippi, looked toward the apartment building from the other side, couldn’t see it, because another building blocked their line of sight. After the third wider loop, they decided to circle back toward the apartment to watch the FBI’s caravan depart. They’d crossed back to the west side of the river, on the Plymouth Avenue bridge, and turned down Second Street, when they saw an older Chevrolet, a long block ahead, back into the street. “Hey, is that—”
“Yeah, it is.” Lucas had been cruising, taking it easy, looking at everything, and now he accelerated and was only a couple hundred feet away when they saw a figure in the back seat of the Chevrolet jerk, possibly from recoil, and Lucas said, “I think they fired a shot!” and the Chevrolet pulled out of sight down the side street.
Farther down Second Street, they could see FBI agents swarming around their vehicles and looking down toward their Porsche, some of them with guns out. Lucas pushed his foot to the floor and then almost immediately braked and they fishtailed at the corner, following the Chevrolet and he was back on the gas again when they saw the Chevrolet pull up and over a curb and Sherwood said, “What are they—”
The woman jumped out in the street and bullets, a lot of them, began banging and pinging off the car and Lucas shouted, “Jesus!” and jammed on the brakes and he and Sherwood both went low, trying to get behind the engine block, but the seats were too tight to get all the way down. A burst of slugs took out the windshield, showering them with glass fragments. Lucas tried to get his phone out of his pocket, but couldn’t, because he was lying on it.
The shooting stopped and they poked their heads up to see the woman getting back in the Chevrolet. As the other car began toaccelerate away, Lucas hit his own gas pedal, but the car went womp-womp-womp and he said, “Got no wheels…got no wheels.”
He jammed on the brakes and shifted into “park” in the same half second, rolled out in the street and got his pistol loose. He fired five fast shots at the side of the Chevrolet as it turned the corner down the block. It was the best part of a hundred yards away, and he thought he might have hit it once or twice, but wasn’t sure about that. The Chevy was moving, swerving, and the bullet drop with his ammo was as much as fourteen inches at a hundred yards, and he wasn’t certain of the range.
Sherwood had bailed out of the passenger side and was running toward the corner where the Chevrolet had disappeared. He was fast, faster than Lucas, and when he got to the corner, he stopped, arms akimbo, then bent to catch his breath. When Lucas caught up with him, he said, “Turned the next corner. They’re gone, unless the feds are on them.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Lucas said. “Though they must have heard the gunfire. You’d think they would have donesomething.”
He fumbled his phone out and called 9-1-1 and got the Minneapolis cops looking for the old Chevrolet and the woman who was driving it. “I might have marked it: there should be at least a couple of bullet holes in the side,” he told the operator.
Sherwood was jogging back toward the corner where they’d abandoned the Porsche, and Lucas followed, talking to the 9-1-1 operator as he ran.
• • •
Lucas ran pastthe abandoned Porsche, catching up with Sherwood, and from there they hustled around the corner into SecondStreet and jogged toward the FBI cars that were still sitting behind the apartment. The agents saw them coming and two broke toward them with drawn guns and they both put their hands in the air and Lucas shouted, “Marshals Service,” but the agents didn’t put their guns away until they got close enough to see Lucas’s badge.
Lucas and Sherwood trotted up to the cars, and the agent in charge asked, “Where’d you come from?” A half-dozen agents were gathered around Sokolov’s body on the ground, while Bernie knelt next to his father, his hand pressed to the older man’s heart.
Lucas: “We were cruising. Is he dead?”
“No, but he’s hurt. We’re waiting for an ambulance. The guy hit him right in the middle of the plate covering his heart. He might have a piece of bullet in him, and for sure has pieces of the plate. If we hadn’t armored him up, he’d be as dead as Genghis Khan.”
“Good move, then,” Lucas said.
“Hell of a shot,” Sherwood said. “How long was he exposed? One second?”
“Not long. The guy shot past two of us, threaded the needle.”
“We knew he was good,” Sherwood said.
• • •
