"Yes, yes, yes, the technical details. We had no time… But that's not what I'm talking about. You don't feel… depressed, or morose, or sick? Sick in your heart?"
"No. No, I really feel fine, Grandpa. It was sorta a head rush, you know?"
"I don't know what that means," Grandpa said. "Head rush."
"It means I felt like I was doing something important, you know, like, for the people."
"That's fine-but you may later feel some sorrow," Grandpa said. "If you do, remember then what Lenin said. He said that some people are like weeds in the garden. They destroy the work of others, they make progress impossible-they make the harvest impossible. Therefore, like weeds, they must be destroyed themselves. We shouldn't be happy with this, with this mission, but it's a mission that must be done. You are like a fighter pilot in a war; and we are in a war."
"I know, Grandpa."
Carl was a high school senior; he'd been fighting the war since kindergarten. Grandpa had brought him along carefully, teaching him the history, using scenes from Carl's daily life as examples.
"Think about what you see around you," Grandpa had said. "Your mother works her fingers to the bone and she never gets anywhere. If you analyze what she does, you can see that she's forced herself into a servant job. They don't call them that, but that's what they are.
"Look around your city. You can be a cook, a waiter, a miner, a truck driver, a salesman, but do you really have a chance against the capitalist? Against the people who own the companies, who hire the cooks, the waiters, the miners? Open your eyes, look around."
Carl had looked, and he had seen what Grandpa saw. Later, when he was older, he got the hard stuff: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin. People he could never name in school. All of it secret.
At the hospital, Carl had been sewn up, and the wound had healed cleanly. Three days after Moshalov was removed, Carl began patrolling Duluth, one night in his own beat-up Chevy, the next in Grandpa's Taurus, concentrating on the harbor areas, making nightly passes on the downtown saloons.
He and Grandpa agreed: he couldn't become a Duluth regular, somebody seen driving by every night. He had to make his runs at odd times, when he was less likely to be seen by the same person twice, less likely to be remarked upon. Good training.
The care had paid off. He'd finally spotted the woman, tracked her, guessed where she was going. He felt the same excitement he felt during hunting season, when he saw a deer threading its way through the woods, toward his stand.
He parked on a side street, and when the woman walked by, at the bottom of the street, he fell in behind her. She never noticed, never looked, just rattled along with her shopping cart banging down curbs, occasionally talking to herself.
When she turned the corner, she triggered Carl. He stepped out, camoed and ready, the wire strung between his fingers, the big nails in his palms as handles on the garrote; the garrote had been built by Grandpa.
"Nothing special, all the parts can be thrown away, and be perfectly innocent. But it's deadly effective," Grandpa had said, snapping the wire under the bare bulb in the basement workshop. They'd had gourds growing on the fence behind the house. Grandpa got one, and Carl practiced slipping the wire over the gourd, and then snapping the noose tight. The wire slashed through the yellow gourd like a straight razor.
"Works the same way with a neck," Grandpa said. His eyes came to life as they worked with the wire. The idea of killing with the garrote was interesting-it was a traditional tool used by resistance groups and revolutionaries, Grandpa said, and that was what they now were: a resistance cell, living underground.
Carl turned the corner and almost stumbled over the tramp. She saw him at the last minute, seemed to snarl, then to start away. "Run," she called, as though instructing her legs. "Runnn…"
He was moving fast and he threw the wire over her neck, put his knee in her back and pushed. He could smell her now, the same stink he'd smelled the first time they met. He bent her, felt the wire cut in, felt it tremble and sing. She didn't attack him as she had the first time. She flailed her arms, like a bird trying to fly, and they turned once or twice on the street, bumped into her shopping cart.
The cart jerked away and then began rolling slowly down the hill toward the intersection, bumping along, rattling, right through the intersection and on down the hill, picking up speed…
She was dead.
Carl felt her go and for the first time this night, felt something, a cold little thrill, unrelated to the people's cause. He lowered her to the pavement, unwrapped the wire, had to pull it out of her flesh, like pulling a piece of sticky tape off a wall. He could smell the blood in the damp night air; and in the light of the single visible streetlamp, saw a reflection from the whites of her eyes. They were unmoving.
He stood still for a moment, listening, trying to see into the dark; heard cars at the bottom of the hill, and the cart still rattling down the blacktop toward the street below. Time to move. He walked fifteen feet to the corner, turned toward his car, glanced back once at the lump on the sidewalk.
Stuffed the garrote in his pocket, felt a wetness. When he took his hands out to look, found them covered with blood. An imperfect weapon still, he wiped the blood on his pants. The woman had been a fountain…
He moved on, quickly. Had to clean up. Had to get rid of the garrote and the clothes.
Had to report.
Chapter 4
Jerry Reasons watched Lucas slide four feet down a pile of broken concrete-block chips to the lake. Reasons was a cop and a muscle-man, with a broken nose and a crooked smile and a chipped tooth. He wore a black golf shirt that showed off his ball-bat forearms and Mack-truck chest; his jeans looked like they were painted on his perfect, sculpted butt. He had a Glock on a belt clip under his right hand, and a badge in a belt clip over his left pocket. He said, "I hate the fuckin' Russians."
"Yeah?" Lucas stood with one foot on a chunk of eroded concrete, the other on the lake bank, stooped and stuck his hand in the water. The day was unexpectedly warm and windless, but Superior was as cold as ever, the color of rolled steel. He'd been on the lake a few times, but had never been easy with it. Fall overboard in Superior, you had fifteen minutes to get out before the cold killed you. He looked back up at Reasons. "Hate 'em, huh?"
They were at the end of a boat slip, one that must have been a half mile long and a couple of hundred feet across. The TDX grain elevator stood along one side of the slip, a series of off-white ten-story-high cylinders full of wheat, soybeans, and various kinds of agricultural pellets.
"Yeah. You ask them a question about one of their buddies bein' killed, and you can see them thinking it over, what to say. They're figuring out whether or not to lie. You see it all the time," he said. "You pick up a drunk Russian on the street, you ask, 'You been drinking?' and the guy thinks it over. He smells like a fuckin' distillery, he's got puke running down his shirt, he's got a bottle in his hand, he can't stand up, and he's thinking it over. What happens if I say yes? Fuckin' Russians."
"So you don't like Russians," Lucas said. He shook the water off his hand, patted his hand against his pants leg, and climbed back up the bank. They started back through the weeds toward the dirt track that led to the elevator. The ground was rough, hard to walk on. They'd followed what Reasons said was a chase path that had been crushed through the weeds, though there was no longer much evidence of the chase, if there had been one. Reasons thought that the victim had run from the gun, had taken a fall or two-the gunman may have fallen as well-and then, perhaps disoriented, he'd turned back toward the elevator. The gunman had caught him on the pad, and had killed him. Lucas thought that was possible, if a little strange. "You ever known one personally? A Russian?"