Inside the club,Bernie told one of the dancers that he’d be back in a minute, don’t go anywhere, and he reached out and pinched her nipples, which she didn’t like, but before she could register her displeasure, Bernie was headed back toward the short hallway that led to the men’s room.
Where he didn’t hesitate, but kept walking. He’d done a little psychological prep on the feds when he dropped his coat with the coat-check woman, because who’d go out that night without a coat?
Bernie, wrapped in long underwear, would: he banged through the club’s back door into the alley and started running. He wasfast. He’d run five miles a day back at the Farm, without breathing hard.
Haskins was still holding up the bar with his Diet Pepsi, but Droll saw Bernie pass the hall to the men’s room. He was across the dance floor, the other side of the pack of dancers, and he shouted at Haskins and started shoving his way through the crowd. He had an angle that let him see Bernie disappear out the back door.
When Haskins was close enough, Droll shouted, “He went out the back, he went out the back…”
“Why? I don’t think he had any marijuana.”
They went out the back door, and saw Bernie forty or fifty yards away: “He’s running, he’s running…”
Haskins had his radio handset and he shouted into it, “Mark, Mark, Bernie’s running, he’s running down the alley in back, we’re in pursuit…”
• • •
A man anda woman were standing outside the back door, vaping weed, which was illegal in Minnesota, but nobody paid any attention to the legalities, because the weed horse was already out of the barn.
White watched them with a little curiosity, because there was nothing else to do in her alley, until Bernie pushed past the two vapers and started running. White said, “Uh-oh” and fumbled her phone out and tapped the little star for “favorites,” then Lucas’s number, and Lucas came up one second later as two FBI agents pushed out the door, looked both ways, saw Bernie, and began running after him.
Lucas came up on the first ring and White sputtered, “Bernie justran out the back door going east in the alley and the two feds are chasing him, but they’re way behind. They’re running like crazy.”
“East? We’re on the wrong side, we’re going, we’re going…”
• • •
On the frontside of the club, a Cadillac sedan suddenly burst off the curb and miniature flashers set in the grille began winking into the night, and the Cadillac, which the feds had acquired in a drug bust, roared past Capslock, who got on the phone to Lucas and said, “I think the feds in the Bernie box just blew past me…”
“Bernie’s running,” Lucas said. “Ran past Shelly with his escorts running behind, but he had a head start, she says he’s moving faster than they are…We’re trying to get into it, but we’re three blocks away on the other side of the club.”
“What do you want me to do?” Capslock asked.
“Hell, you can go home,” Lucas said. “We’re out of this.”
“We’re not completely out,” Sherwood said. “He won’t run in a straight line. He’s gotta know he’d be chased, he’ll go into some kind of evasion routine. This wasn’t a last-minute decision: the hit team is out there to pick him up. He knows the route he’s running, and it’ll include some surprises.”
“Then drive faster,” Lucas said.
“I’ve got four cylinders and tires that are made out of toilet paper,” Sherwood said. “I’m going as fast as the car will handle.”
“C’mon…”
“I don’t want to run over any old ladies.”
“The world has plenty of old ladies,” Lucas said. “One or two fewer won’t make any difference.”
• • •
Sherwood was correctabout the evasion route. Bernie ran out of the alley and down Hennepin Avenue toward the bridge over the Mississippi, but before he got to the bridge, dodged into a side street and past a Catholic church and around a curve, then right on University Avenue, across Central Avenue, dodging cars, another side street to Holmes Park, which he’d seen on a satellite map, and diagonally across it, past patches of barren trees, to Fifth Street and one more jog onto Fourth Avenue where Abramova and Nikitin were waiting in the pickup.
Bernie had gained ground on his escorts and they were seventy or eighty yards back but had the pickup in sight when they rounded the last corner onto Fourth Avenue and Droll lifted his radio to his face and shouted, “Black pickup! Black pickup!” and saw the two right-side doors of the pickup pop open and Bernie vault inside. Abramova saw all of them coming and shouted at Nikitin, “They’ll shoot us, like the first time!” and Nikitin said, “No.”
Nikitin popped his door and stepped out on the street, with one of the Berettas, and as Bernie leapt into the pickup, he began firing three-shot bursts down the street at the two lawmen and saw both of them go down. He jumped back inside the truck and said, “Go! Go!”
Abramova hit the accelerator, kept her foot down for a block when a sedan suddenly turned on the street behind them, flashers winking on the grill, and Abramova said, “More of them!”
“We can’t let them follow us to Titov,” Nikitin said. “Put me on the ground again. Gimme your gun.”
