As they weretalking, Abramova and Nikitin were already lying in the back of the red Ford that appeared to be driven, slowly, by an entirely unremarkable man, who said over his shoulder, “What the fuck happened back there? Did you get him?”
“Hit him in the chest,” Nikitin said. “Good shot, perfect. Then some asshole came after—”
Abramova cut it: “This doesn’t seem to me to be real, but I saw one of the men when he was shooting at us, when we turned thecorner. He hit the Chevrolet twice, but I swear to God, it was the man who shot us at Sokolov’s house, and that I saw at the motel,” Abramova said. “I knocked the car out with the Beretta, but this man is everywhere. A marshal, I think.”
A cop car flashed by a block away, on a major street, lights and siren, and then they were on a freeway ramp. They took I-94 to I-35, and back to Iowa, a hundred miles of barren soybean and corn fields, and were never threatened.
• • •
Lucas told theFBI agents about how they’d happened on the shooter’s car as the shot was being fired, about the short, ugly pursuit, gave the agent a quick description of the shooter’s car, driven by a woman, and told him that the Minneapolis cops were already looking for it.
“I can’t believe they’ll be driving very far in that car, it looked like a beater,” Lucas said. “They probably have another car ditched somewhere, possibly a black Jeep Cherokee.”
The agent went away to speak to somebody on his own cell phone as sirens were breaking out around the neighborhood. Two or three minutes later, an ambulance arrived, with a cop car. The paramedics lifted Sokolov off the ground, the agents circled tightly around him to block a view of the body. Sokolov’s face was too-white and clenched with pain, and possibly frightened, his son helping with the move. They put him on a gurney and moved him into the ambulance, his son hanging over him. “Papa, Papa, you’ll be okay…Papa, please…”
The ambulance took off, with Minneapolis patrol cars and FBI vehicles front and back, lights flashing all around. The third FBI car remained at the scene. Lucas and Sherwood walked back to thePorsche, and on the way, Lucas called 9-1-1 to tell the operator what had happened during the pursuit, and to suggest that a Minneapolis crime scene crew come pick up bullet casings from the street where the woman had stood shooting at them.
The message, he was assured, would be relayed.
At the car, they walked around it once, and then Sherwood started laughing and Lucas asked, “What’s funny?”
“Gonna need new wheels, big guy. She mangled this thing. Good God, look at that. I haven’t seen anything like this outside an infantry junkyard in Iraq.”
He was right. The windshield and back window were entirely gone, the interior roofing was shredded, every piece of sheet metal on the front and the driver’s side of the car showed irreparable bullet holes, and three of the four wheels were flat. There were many holes going into the engine compartment, and if the engine wasn’t wrecked, it would be seriously compromised. “My insurance agent is gonna pass a kidney stone,” Lucas said.
“It was damaged while in pursuit of the enemies of our nation,” Sherwood said, in a phony portentous tone. “The U.S. government will recognize its obligations to make you whole.”
“I don’t think so. The Service keeps trying to get me to drive a service car, and I keep driving my own.”
“Well, in that case, you’re fucked,” Sherwood said. “Look at this: my finger fits in the bullet hole.” Then, “I’m starting to get scared.”
“I started getting scared five minutes ago. They got a machine gun.”
“So now what?” Sherwood asked.
“You call your boss, I call mine, then we wait for Minneapolis to show up. We make statements and…”
“Call an Uber?”
“We’ve fallen low,” Lucas said.
• • •
Lucas walked aroundthe Porsche, fuming; got a gym bag out of the truck and filled it with personal stuff from the car—sunglasses, iPad, parking meter coins, garage door opener, hideout Ruger .357, four hundred dollars in small bills, like that. Thought about the hit team.
Two Minneapolis detectives showed up, and Lucas and Sherwood both made brief on-the-spot statements, and promised to email complete statements later in the day. The detectives helped push the Porsche to the curb, where Lucas locked it. That done, he took a last look at the car and said to Sherwood, “We gotta try to blow these people up. The hit team.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“St. Vincent doesn’t like me. I’ve got an idea of what we could do next, but it would ramp up the hate, if he ever found out.”
“I believe my reaction to that would be, fuck him,” Sherwood said. “Tell me.”
“Look at the possibilities. The hit team may be on the run. If they are, and if they have good IDs, they could be in Mexico by tomorrow night. Driving. I’ve driven from the Twin Cities to Dallas in one stretch. They’d be moving slower, so they don’t attract highway patrolmen, but they could still make it to OKC without any trouble, tonight, three of them driving, and then…”
“OKC?”
“Oklahoma City. From there to the Mexican border is another dayor so, down through Texas, Brownsville, and from there…Back in the USSR.”
