Chapter 26
Lucas, riding shotgun with Sherwood, called Capslock and told him that Bernie was on his way to the club.
Capslock, sitting in his piece-of-crap car with the heater on high, checked his weather app: two below zero, cold enough that he really didn’t want to get out, but he had to.
He had brought along a hunter’s foam tree-stand seat that strapped around his waist and dangled below his butt, under the parka, so he had that going for him.
He climbed out of the car and stumbled down the block, the tree-stand seat banging on his butt.
He found a doorway a half block from the White Ducks club and wedged himself into it.
He pulled his arms out of the parka sleeves, and sank down into the parka, like a tent, so nothing froze but his face.
He had his iPhone in one hand with the neck of the parka unzipped just enough that he could stick his phone up in front of his face if he needed to answer it or make a call.
He made one call, to Lucas: “I got a spot across the street from the club and down a bit, maybe twenty-five or thirty yards. Shelly should be on the back door by now.”
Lucas: “She’s calling me now. I’m going to take her call.”
Capslock tucked his phone back in the tent; Lucas took White’s call, which was the same as Capslock’s, reporting that she’d found a doorway to sit in, in an alley behind the club, and she was close, no more than ten yards from the club’s back door.
She was warm for the time being. “I’m wearing electric socks.
They must not allow weed inside the club, because there are three people outside the door passing a joint, and a couple more just went back inside. ”
“All right. Sherwood and I are doing stop-and-go’s, we’ll be moving a lot, but we won’t be more than a block or two away. If you see anything, yell.”
“Where are the feds? The surveillance guys?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Two of them are with Bernie, but the four guys in the box, I think they’re parked. I haven’t seen them.”
“This cold, you should see some engine exhaust,” White said.
“Yeah, but we haven’t. I dunno, maybe they’re cruising.”
They all settled in to wait. Lucas and Sherwood were on a side street, and Sherwood asked Lucas, “You ever been to Moscow?”
“No.”
Sherwood looked out the window: “This is what it’s like in winter, except Moscow has snow.”
“We usually have snow, just not this year,” Lucas said.
“You got the cold, though. Like Moscow.”
“Yeah, we got the cold.”
· · ·
Bernie arrived at the club. It was his third visit in a week, so he was somewhat known, and known for buying drinks for friendly women, and since the drinks were not cheap, the women tended to be friendly.
There was a coat check just inside the door, and he peeled off his leather jacket and handed it to the woman behind the counter and took the claim chit. His two escorts kept their coats on.
The club was large, navy blue walls covered with cartoon characters from underground comics, the paint starting to rub off on some of them.
Several women wore dancing dresses, but the weather had pushed most of them into pullover turtle-necked tops and wool pants, and the men were mostly dressed the same way, so White Ducks looked more like a ski resort than a dance club.
The music was loud, the love child you’d get if hyperpop knocked up disco, with lights flickering to the beat.
Bernie elbowed his way to two women dancing together and got it going with them, as his escorts went to the bar where they both ordered Pepsi, on the rocks. The bartender knew they were feds, said nothing, pushed the drinks across the bar, no charge.
Bernie was hot, circulating, buying drinks, throwing cash on the bar. He’d taken his father’s stash, since his father was no longer there to object, and he had eleven thousand dollars in his pants pocket.
At five minutes to eleven o’clock, he told Droll and Haskins, “I’m gonna disappear for two minutes.”
“Where to?” Droll asked.
“Gotta pee. You wanna come watch?”
“Let’s face it, Bernie, you ain’t got that much to watch,” Droll said, one of the rare times in recorded history when an FBI agent said “ain’t.”
Bernie poked a finger at him: “Ha. Jealousy is always ugly.”
“Go pee,” Haskins said.
· · ·
Capslock had his face down in his parka when he felt the car stop at the curb, and the flashers come on. He looked up as a Minneapolis cop came around and poked him with a toe and shined a flashlight on his face and asked, “You all right, partner?”
Capslock said, “I’m not only all right, I’m a BCA agent staking out the White Ducks, and you’re stepping on my act. Take that fuckin’ light outa my face.”
The light went sideways. “You sure about that, partner?”
“Yeah, I’m sure about it,” Capslock said. “Step between me and the club so they can’t see you looking at my ID.”
The cop stepped between Capslock and the club and Capslock fished his ID out of a shirt pocket and stuck it out the neck hole, and the cop bent to look at it with the flashlight, then backed away and said, “Better you than me.”
“Go away,” Capslock said, and the cop walked back around his car, turned off the flashers, and went away.
Two couples had come out of the club and had seen the cop checking Capslock, and now they walked over and a man asked, “You all right?”
Capslock: “I’m all right.”
A woman said, “Give him some money, Jim.”
Jim fished in his pocket and gave Capslock a one-dollar bill. Capslock said, “Why don’t you keep it; you can’t buy a fuckin’ thing with a one. You can’t even buy a fuckin’ candy bar, for Christ’s sakes.”
The woman said, “He’s right, Jim. Give him a five.”
Capslock said, “A ten would be better.”
The man was thumbing through his wallet and said, “All I got is tens and twenties.”
“Give him a ten, the poor thing,” the woman said.
The man handed Capslock a ten and the two couples went on their way.
Capslock would have laughed if he wasn’t so fuckin’ cold.
· · ·
Shelly White was not quite as cold as Capslock, because she was backed up to a metal door, and though she hadn’t known about it, behind the door was a collection of HVAC machinery and plumbing that kept the interior temperature in the 80s.
Some of that heat warmed the metal door and seeped into her parka.
Her feet would be warm as long as the sock batteries held out.
Her biggest problem was a lack of light: there was one small flickering lamp over the club’s back door, but that was it.
· · ·
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 was fast. 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 and a 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 just ran 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 front side 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.”