Off the Grid (4 page)

“I’ll check in with the FBI up in Duluth, since they’ve been handling the kidnapping angle from the beginning. Maybe they have some info or persons of interest that can put us on a track down here.”

Half an hour later, Donnie Marek found the shoe four blocks away. They had three scent dogs coursing the street, but every one of them returned to the shoe and sat down next to it. The trail died there.

5

J
oe Hardy sat in the single chair with an innocuous blanket wrapped around his bare legs as if he were a passenger on the deck of an early-twentieth-century steamer crossing the cold Atlantic sea. This was how he’d spent every single morning of the past twenty days, and he wasn’t happy about it. Hospitals should close down on Sundays so people could watch the Minnesota Vikings lose another football game, or stay home and celebrate their birthday. Thirty-two years old today, Joe Hardy, and for your very special gift, we have another round of chemo.

They’d put him in the same room they always put him in. A slot, really, only as wide and long as an average man was tall, with no door—just an opening that looked out on a broad hallway, where healthy people passed on their way to the coffee station or the exit doors, pointedly looking straight ahead, so as not to see the doorless room or its current occupant. Maybe they slapped a sign on the wall outside after they dumped him.
NO CONTACT. NO NOTICE. IGNORE THE MAN IN THIS ROOM IN CASE WHATEVER HE HAS CAN BE SPREAD WITH A GLANCE.

“Now you just make yourself comfy for a few minutes until someone comes to collect you,” the nurse always told him, making him feel like a can on the curb on garbage day. His isolation was only broken when the next nurse would inevitably come in with a big smile and a pink plastic upchuck container. “Shall we go?” she would always say brightly.

But they’d left him alone in the small room too long today, because now he was beginning to think bad, rebellious thoughts, thoughts like anyone who would willingly go anywhere that involved an upchuck container was flat out of his mind. What had he been thinking? Letting them wheel him away all these months to a place where they shot poison in his veins and then let him throw up? Maybe he’d had enough. Maybe, by God, today he’d finally take his life back. He’d smile brightly right back at the nurse and say, “Gee, thanks for the invitation, but you know what? I’ve decided to skip chemo today. Just don’t feel like it.”

Yeah. That’s what he was going to do, because big bad Joe was finally, finally tired of fighting this particular fight.

When the next nurse came in she was wearing a little frown, as if she’d heard his naughty thoughts. She surprised him by saying, “There’s been a change of plans, Mr. Hardy. Dr. Pierce would like to see you first. Would that be all right with you?”

• • •

The great thing
about Tom Pierce’s office was that it didn’t look like it belonged in this building. Come to think of it, that was the great thing about Tom, too.

“Who decorated this place?” Joe asked him. He was sitting in the leather chair across from the desk, feet propped on a matching ottoman and his hands laced together behind his head, elbows akimbo.

Tom leaned back in his chair and pumped it around in a circle, gazing at the walls. Paneling everywhere, a life-sized skeleton on a pole in the corner that looked like it was smiling, and a twelve-pound walleye mounted on the back wall. “You don’t like it?”

“I like it fine. I just can’t believe they let you get away with it. The paneling’s all wrong. So’s the dead fish on the wall and the rug under my chair. Very unsanitary.”

Tom shrugged. “They cut us some slack in this wing. All of us are kind of cutting-edge brilliant.”

“Really. If you were so cutting-edge brilliant you’d design better gowns. You remember that old board game, Operation? The cartoon guy with the red lightbulb on his nose that lit up when you killed him had a better-looking gown than this.”

Tom was close to the ugliest man Joe had ever known. He had a wandering eye, a nose he had broken repeatedly in high school hockey, and a nowhere chin that slid right down into his neck. But when he smiled, he looked like God had just touched him or something. “Oh, man, I totally forgot that game. Used to love it, even though my little brother always beat my socks off. Don’t think I ever won, but I sure loved lighting up that bulb.”

Joe’s brow lifted. “Great. My surgeon never won a game of Operation. You could have told me that before you sliced me open the first time.”

Tom’s smile didn’t exactly disappear, but it changed. He sighed, pulled a decanter and two glasses from the bottom drawer of his desk, and loaded them up with something that looked expensive.

Joe made a face. “Oh God. Now I get why you pulled me out of chemo today. You want to cut into me again, don’t you?”

“No more surgeries, Joe. And you don’t need any more of this particular treatment. It was the last session anyway. I think we can skip it.”

Joe’s breath caught in his throat as if a hairball of hope he’d been holding under his tongue for months had finally slipped out. Swallow, or spit? That was the question. “The tests came back?”

“They did.”

“And they’re that good?”

Tom didn’t say anything for two seconds that felt like a hundred years to Joe. “Don’t leave me hanging, Tom. Are we celebrating here, or is this the first drink at my own wake?”

Tom took a breath. “There are a couple of new experimental drugs out there. Houston’s starting a blind study next week on something that looks promising . . . it’s a chance, Joey.”

Funny. When you finally heard the words you’d been terrified of hearing for so long, they weren’t all that terrifying anymore. In a strange way, it was almost a relief.

Joe took a sip from his glass, then gave Tom a little smile, because the man deserved it. They’d been friends for a long time.

He’d parked on the ramp that was a skyway away from Tom’s office. Halfway across the glass bridge he had to stop and catch his breath. He stood for a minute, looking out over the heat waves rising from the parking lot below. It was going to be a hot walk.

He stopped at the car and picked up the little cooler to carry along with him. His wife, Beth, always packed bottled water and juice and a few bland snacks for him on chemo days. Today she’d thrown in a celebratory candy bar because it was supposed to have been the last day of this treatment round. He wolfed the candy bar and drained the juice, figuring he’d need the energy, but left the rest of the goodies inside.

He walked out of the hospital complex ramp into the blast furnace of the hottest October day on record. Not that Joe put a lot of stock in that statistic. Pick a day, any day out of the whole damn year, and in this stupid state you were always breaking some record or other. Hottest, coldest, rainiest, whatever.

Riverside Hospital wasn’t in the best neighborhood. Maybe he’d get real lucky and someone would shoot him in the head for his wallet so he wouldn’t have to think about how to tell Beth.

His dad had brought him down here a lot when he was a kid, mostly because the only decent place to eat happened to be a bar with a kid’s menu, which meant you could call it a restaurant.
Took Joey down to Seven Corners today, Marsha. Bought him the cheeseburger plate you and I used to have when we went to the U, remember? Told him what you looked like in those wooden beads and that fringe vest you wore without a blouse.

His dad had been way past cheeseburgers by then, fulfilling his daily carbohydrate quota with as many frosty beers as he could fit into an hour, excusing his transgression with the cover of old memories. Impromptu street dances without a permit, hamburgers that dripped red juice down your chin, and onion rings fried in pure animal fat. Bell-bottoms and belly buttons and an impossible image of Joe’s mother dancing on asphalt, twirling, holding a tambourine in one hand and a joint in the other.

What’s a joint, Daddy?

Just a cigarette, son.

Mom smoked?

Only every now and then, and only at Seven Corners.

Wow. I can’t believe Mom smoked.

The memories had been sharp and clear to a father who had blanked out the rest of his life, as if Seven Corners had been the last thing he held in his mind, and everything that came after had been erased like a dusty blackboard. His father had died at thirty-five years old, arms slit and bloody from the wrist to the elbow, in the hospital Joe had just left, and today he was feeling the irony.

He walked all the way down Riverside Avenue to Washington Avenue, seeing the pictures his dad had painted instead of what was really there. On the way back, the hippie era faded and all he saw was cramped markets and coffee shops with exotic faces behind yellow, smoke-stained glass. Still pissed him off that the only place you could get away with smoking in this city was in a neighborhood where immigrants never had to consider the law, because the city fathers were constantly tripping over their dicks trying not to offend other cultures.

Still, he liked walking this street, liked the spicy aromas coming from the cafés and the jangle of a dozen different languages. There were some bad types down here—gangbangers of every nationality and some seriously angry people who could hate you with a look. Those were the ones that took him right back to Baghdad in those worst of days, when you kept your eyes out for that look of pure hate, because it usually meant somebody was about to take you down. But there were also shiny-faced university students, giggling kids darting around like energy was air, and tall, amazingly beautiful Ethiopian women in native dress that made everyone else look drab and ordinary. Mostly lambs afoot in a field with a few really bad snakes.

Most people were sheltering inside the air-conditioned shops today, but those few who passed him on the sidewalk looked at him curiously. He was getting used to that by now. The chemo had whittled his six-foot frame down to one hundred and fifty pounds, his head was bald, his skin sagged gray, and by now the sweat was dripping off him. One woman had even stopped to touch his arm. “Are you all right, sir? Do you need help?”

Joe stopped for a breath and mopped his forehead. The woman was wearing a long, bright red scarf with little beads all over it, and he thought that was terrific. “I’m fine, thank you, just a little overheated, but it was kind of you to ask.”

You walk out of a hospital where people are afraid to make eye contact and bump into a stranger concerned enough to touch your arm and ask after your welfare. That lifted him up, just a little, and he picked up his pace.

Halfway back to the hospital he came to the side street and took a left. The sweat was running into his eyes now, and his legs felt like overcooked pasta, but he kept going, down two blocks, over one, and there was the house with the unpainted porch, the wheezing, rattling window air conditioner, and the cheap venetian blinds pulled down tight.
Look out,
he said to himself.
Pay attention.

He walked up onto the porch like he belonged there, opened the door, went inside, and closed it behind him. Two startled men jumped up from a sagging couch when he walked in, then hesitated, looking at him closely.

“You sick?” one of them asked.

Kindness again? From these two? It almost stopped him. Almost.

Joe gasped and nodded, leaning against the doorframe, then reached into his cooler for the empty water bottle jammed over the barrel of his weapon.

Two quick, accurate shots, one in each forehead, and the men crumpled. The first shot had been barely audible; the second was louder, of course, with the bottle pierced, but the window air conditioner covered the sound nicely.

The walk back to the parking ramp took longer, partly because he was exhausted, partly because he wasn’t in any particular hurry to get home and tell Beth what the doctor had said.

6

D
etective Magozzi had cleared the door-to-door canvass with Bad Heart Bull’s sergeant, a twenty-four-year man who was happy to delegate as much responsibility as possible to his underlings while he coasted the few months to his pension.

Your beat, Bully, your canvass. Carve out the grids and I’ll get you the people you need.

Bully had picked a baby cop with less than a year under his belt to partner with on the back streets butting up to Riverside Avenue, mostly because he looked friendly and harmless. Dealing with the bad guys in this neighborhood, you wanted to look mean and dangerous, but when you were trying to get information from frightened Somali women who thought all cops were monsters, friendly and harmless worked better.

Brady Armand was the perfect choice, with his youthful good looks and ready smile, which made the door-to-doors easier than if it had just been him on his own—his dark, pockmarked face and imposing stature scared the hell out of most people when they saw him on their doorstep.

Trouble was, not many in this neighborhood spoke English, and even if they did, they rarely talked to anyone outside their ethnic group. Bully had a double whammy against him because he was a cop and an Ojibwe, and the Somalis trusted Native Americans least of all. The two factions had been competing for housing and resources ever since the North African population had jumped from a sprinkle to the clear majority, and to Bully’s way of thinking, his people had gotten the raw end of the deal. The friction was right out there in the open, but of course you never heard about that on the news, either, just like you never heard about the Native mob and the Somali gangs hooking up to share commerce in the sex trade.

And maybe that was a lesson—two warring tribes would never smoke the peace pipe, but they’d tolerate each other if there was money involved.

All the do-gooders kept preaching about how great it was when cultures mingled and interacted. And maybe that kind of thing would happen given enough decades. It was the time in between when they didn’t interact that got scary, when they crossed the street to avoid people with a different mind-set. It really hurt here in the heart of the Midwest, where people hugged strangers, smiled, and talked to everyone. You could only hang on to that sense that all people could come together for so long. You could only face so many rebuffs before it wore you down.

Brady stopped under the shade of an old elm tree, consulted his clipboard, and pointed to a ramshackle little box of a house. “This is our last house on the search grid,” he said despondently.

“Let’s do it,” Bully said, taking long strides across the badly cracked walk that was more weed than concrete. But his pace faltered when he saw the front door hanging open. His hesitation wasn’t exactly based on sound reasoning, it was more a gut feeling. But if you were a cop and didn’t follow your gut, you could end up a dead cop. He stopped abruptly and put his hand on the butt of his gun, scanning the yard and the front windows, which were all closed tight and covered by dirty venetian blinds. An old air-conditioning unit wheezed in one of the windows.

“What’s wrong?” Brady asked, stopping beside him.

“The door’s partially open.”

Brady frowned. “So? It’s a nice day.”

“You see an open door at any of the last fifteen houses we visited?”

“Uh . . . no. I guess not.”

“That’s because people don’t leave their doors open in this neighborhood, especially with the windows closed and the air-conditioning running. I don’t like it.”

Brady’s demeanor changed fast, and he was doing a poor job of trying to look like he wasn’t scared. Funny how a little thing out of place like an open door that should have been closed could make your blood run cold.

“Let’s take a look, Brady. Take it slow, keep your eyes sharp.” He glanced over his shoulder at the young officer, who looked like his shoes were glued to the sidewalk. “Come on, kid. This is what we do.” In the old days, he would have said that and meant it; now it sounded like false bravado, even to him.

Fifteen years ago, Bully had still been bench-pressing his own weight, he’d had abs like stone steps carved into flesh, and he wasn’t afraid of anything. But now the stone steps had softened into a wheelchair ramp of fat and inside he was shaking like a girl, although he’d never let Brady see that.

He hesitated at the open door, knocking on the frame, then took a breath, hating his sagging gut and the years of deep-fried onion rings that had probably turned his blood into Crisco, softening him too much for this job. He knocked again.

Silence.

“This feels wrong,” Brady whispered, “and something smells funny.”

Brady was young yet, fit as a fiddle, and now genuinely terrified that all his hours in the gym might not save him from whatever was on the other side of this open door. Funny how this new generation jogged and ate lettuce and thought this would let them live forever. Maybe in this case, Bully was the lucky one. You got to a certain age, watched your body start to deteriorate, then something inside with those spiny teeth that hung on to life so hard finally, finally let go. You didn’t know you’d figured it out until you felt the acceptance seeping into your soul. One day you’d stand in front of an open door like this one, knowing in your gut that something real bad was on the other side, and you took that first step inside anyway.

The interior of the house was dark, but you could still see the lifeless bodies slumped on the floor in front of a debilitated sofa. Bully aimed a flashlight at the human wreckage. Two young Somali men, each with a single bullet hole in the forehead. He squatted down, felt the carotids to make sure they were dead, then pushed himself to his feet. “Call it in, Brady. Then we’ve got to clear the house.”

Adrenaline had a way of warping your sense of time and space, and even though the house was little more than a small box, it seemed to Bully that he and Brady had been walking for hours back-to-back, through a never-ending maze of rooms with ominously closed doors that could conceal any number of deadly threats. The one he worried about most was a hidden perp who would have nothing to lose by killing a couple cops in order to flee the scene.

As they methodically cleared each room, Bully felt sweat bursting from every pore in his body, dripping down his torso and soaking his uniform. He didn’t know what kind of shape his heart was in, and didn’t much care to know, but right now, it felt like a wolverine was trying to claw its way out of his chest.

Don’t die of a heart attack now, you fat fuck. One last room, one last closed door. It’ll be over soon. And maybe you’re not so ready to die after all.

He signaled Brady, and they flanked the door, guns drawn. “Minneapolis Police!”

They waited, listening for movement, their chests heaving in fearful synchronicity. After a few moments of silence, Bully finally nodded and Brady tried the knob. He shook his head.

Shit.
Bully banged his fist on the door, announced himself again, but still no sound. It was time to go in.

In the split second it took for him to take a step back, rotate his shoulder, and shift his weight to turn his body into a battering ram, happy memories from his childhood he hadn’t recalled in years suddenly came flooding back: catching his first walleye on Elbow Lake; his first wild rice harvest; the elaborate regalia of the jingle dancers, and the hypnotic rhythm of drums and chants at his first powwow. He had a fleeting thought that this was a premonition of his impending death, the last gift of his own history before he took his final breath, and suddenly his fear left him. He didn’t know what was on the other side of that door, but the moment his shoulder hit, he felt the calming sense that he was ready for it.

But he’d been dead wrong about that, because crashing through that door was a stunner, the kind of moment that hammered into your soul and captured your breath; the kind of moment that would eventually coalesce into the most pivotal, important memory you’d ever keep. Life, not death, was on the other side, and it was so unexpected, Bully thought he might pass out.

He moved his flashlight beam across the small, putrid space where four little girls sat clustered together on the floor, barefoot, hands bound, hair matted. Their brown eyes squinted up toward the light, disoriented and terrified.

“We need two buses, Brady. Fast,” he whispered over his shoulder, then walked into the room with the flashlight trained more on his own face than the girls’, so they could see he wasn’t a faceless monster behind a blinding light—they’d seen enough monsters in this past week.

“Hello. My name is Bully. I’m a police officer and everything’s going to be all right.” He crouched down in front of one of the girls, a child, really, and gave her a gentle smile. “What’s your name?”

The girl recoiled a little, but some of the white around her eyes receded.

“Can I take these plastic ties off your wrists?”

She nodded warily, then started to cry. Bully’s throat tightened and he swallowed hard as he used his pocketknife to cut the stiff white bonds that were biting into her wrists, then moved back to give her space.

She rubbed at her eyes and nose and looked up at him. “I’m Taka,” she finally choked out. “Are you here to save us?”

He cleared his throat and tried to answer, but all he could do was nod.