“Excellent,” Sherwood said, taking the napkin off his lap and dropping it on the table. “Why don’t I stop by your place in the morning, say seven-thirty?”
“How about ten-thirty? Del will probably be out until one o’clock tonight, maybe two. He won’t be up before nine.”
“All right. But ten’s almost lunchtime back at my office…”
“One thing I oughta say,” Weather said. “Since I work in hospitals and this Russian person is in a hospital. Big ones, like Hennepin, have hundreds of people coming and going all day and all night, and hundreds of rooms. Are you sure these Russians can’t get to what’s his name, Solokov, in the hospital?”
“Sokolov,” Sherwood said. “Honestly, they’ve got FBI agents, theirSWAT guys, stacked up around him. I don’t know about their competence…”
“They’re pretty good. Their SWAT does tough stuff,” Lucas said.
Weather: “But, they’re not cops.”
“Yeah, there’s that,” Lucas said.
“Why aren’t they cops? They got badges,” Sherwood said.
“They don’t think like cops. Even the former cops, after they spend some time in the FBI, they stop thinking like cops,” Lucas said. “They don’t hang out. They don’t notice things. They go someplace, they do something…and they go back to the office and sit at the computer and enter their data. I don’t know if Del even has a computer. Or a necktie.”
“The point being…”
“If somebody looked good walking around a hospital, you know, scrubs, shoe covers, I’m not sure the FBI would smell the bullshit. A street cop might,” Weather said.
“How does a plastic surgeon know this?” Sherwood asked.
“Because ever since I got involved with Lucas, my house has been full of street cops. You just don’t know…” She looked at Lucas: “You should introduce him to Jenkins and Shrake. Or Virgil.”
“He’s not ready for that,” Lucas said.
Sherwood said, “Whatever. Maybe…we should take a look around the hospital?”
Lucas: “You think St. Vincent would let us?”
“Oh, probably, if I asked. I don’t know what we’d get, though, if we were just there for half an hour,” Sherwood said. “I don’t see us staking the place out.”
“Neither do I,” Lucas said. “Be nice to know the territory, though.”
“I’ll call St. Vincent. Tell him we’ll be dropping by in the morning. Let’s do nine-thirty.”
• • •
Lucas rolled outof bed at nine o’clock, did a hurried clean-up, got dressed, and ate a bowl of some kind of brown flakes that claimed to be organic, and had just gone to the front door when Sherwood pulled into the driveway.
“Let’s take the new Porsche,” Sherwood said. “We’re cleared to walk around the hospital. I got a name.”
On the way to Minneapolis, Sherwood said, “My researchers say you were a jock in college. Hockey.”
“I was. I still put the skates on occasionally,” Lucas said. “Senior men’s league.”
“I ran track,” Sherwood said. “Have you been reading about this NCAA name, image, and likeness? About paying jocks, football and basketball? The NIL deals? And the nonrevenue sports get screwed? The Olympic sports?”
“Of course they do,” Lucas said. “The NCAA has never been about anything but money, and that’s football and basketball.”
“Fuckers,” Sherwood said. “I get pissed reading about it, and I haven’t run in twenty years.”
“Were you any good?”
“Yeah, I was okay. High hurdles. Tier one recruit, never could quite cut the last quarter-second off my times.”
