The man looked at the money on the dashboard. Bob waited. Let the gravitational pull of logic do its work. Finally the man gave a heavy sigh. ‘He came over from south of the border some years back. Called himself Lobo.’
‘Wolf?’
‘As in lone wolf. Kept himself to himself, a real loner. But he might just as well have called himself Loco. He didn’t say much, but according to rumour he’d worked for one of the cartels down there, killed a lot of people, the police put a price on his head. Gang boss didn’t believe none of it, I mean, Lobo was just a kid, so he gave him an Uzi and told him to go shoot some of the competition. Lobo went straight to a Black Wolves party, shot the whole thing up.’
‘Hang on. You mean the Lobo?’
‘Well, I dunno, I only know one Lobo.’
Bob stared at the other man. Lobo. The Uzi man. Bob recalled the tales he had heard about the guy when he was starting out in the police, a ghost that showed up and vanished again in the mid-nineties and left nothing behind but a trail of blood. Since the blood in question was gang blood, MPD’s hunt for him had been a half-hearted affair. And when Lobo dropped off the radar MPD concluded that he’d probably been killed and most probably by one of his own and they dropped the whole thing.
‘Go on,’ said Bob.
‘After that Lobo was the security boss’s right hand. But he was too crazy, he had no discipline, he went ahead and mowed down people from other gangs, even when they weren’t even threatening our territory. So they had to take revenge, and that meant gang wars, people going down on both sides, bad for business for everybody. So the bosses took Lobo off the barricades and put him in charge of internal security.’
‘Entailing what?’
‘Checking that no one’s taking money from the counting room or dope from the cutting room, stuff like that. Lobo did a good job. He uncovered not just thieving but snitching too. We had to terminate a lot of guys we’d been trusting blind. Then some of our own people started getting it, Lobo said they’d drawn on him once they knew he was on to them. It happened a few too many times, so the bosses decided they couldn’t have Lobo in the gang no more. They threw him out.’
‘So they didn’t kill him?’
The man shrugged. ‘Lobo always said he was still on the payroll of that cartel he was working for back where he came from. Our bosses were scared to have them breathing down our necks. You said five minutes, pig. If I’m gone much longer the boss is going to think I’ve been giving you fucking state secrets.’
‘OK. So what happened to Gomez?’
‘How the hell should I know? Try south of the border.’
‘You know who Marco Dante is?’
‘No.’
‘Stupid question. You know who he is, and you know he got shot yesterday. Did you hear the news that it was Gomez that shot him?’
‘Like I told you, all I know is that Lobo was plumb crazy. Drive me back.’
‘Last question. Did Dante sell guns to X-11?’
‘I guess he must have sold to every gang that some time or other had the territory where his garage is. So yeah, sure.’
‘Well then, thank you. Lean forward.’ Bob unlocked the handcuffs. ‘You can walk.’
‘Walk?’
‘Do I look like a taxi driver?’
The pusher reached for the bundle of notes but Bob was quicker and grabbed it.
‘Hey!’
‘Just the top one,’ said Bob, pulling out the fifty and handing the bundle to the man, who sat staring down at the pile of newspaper strips in his hand.
‘What the fuck?’
‘You don’t think we’d pay two thousand for a little general information I could’ve got for a packet of cigarettes down at the MCF, or free from a snitch? You’d be better off reading these Situations Vacant.’ Bob pressed the bundle down into the man’s hand. ‘At least they pay minimum wage, unlike X—’
‘I’ll be coming after you and I’ll shoot you down, you fucking pig.’
Bob nodded slowly as he looked out of the windshield. ‘You know what? I have actually considered that possibility. But I decided you won’t be looking for revenge. Know why? It’s a question of economic behavioural psychology. Want to hear?’
Bob turned to the pusher, who now looked more surprised than angry.
‘Because your disappointment has its limits. Behavioural research shows that our reaction to not getting the dollar we’ve just been promised is less negative than losing the dollar we already have in our pocket. I haven’t stolen from you, so you have no economic or moral incentive to kill me. And you have no social motive, since I haven’t publicly humiliated you either, just here, between you and me. See, so you learned something new today as well! Have a profitable evening, amigo.’
He leaned across the man and pushed open the car door.
As Bob drove off he saw the man diminishing in his rear-view mirror. He stood there, arms dangling by his side, and seemed to be shouting something after the Volvo.
18
Milkman, October 2016
Olav Hanson pulled his fishing rod sideways, against the current. Stared out into the night-time darkness that descended over the Mississippi before it took the rest of the city. Sometimes it even felt as though the darkness rose up from the Mississippi and not the other way round. Because it was a river with a lot of darkness in it. A lot of dirt and devilment people dumped there in hopes the river would take it all away, far from where they were. And if it surfaced again it would be someone else’s problem. Hanson shifted the weight from his bad knee. Listened to the reassuring hiss from the cars on the freeway on the other side of the river. He came down here more and more often in the evenings now, went on fishing long after the others had gone. The bass bit well after dark, and of course he did sometimes come home with a couple of small fish; but that was mostly to show Violet he really had been fishing and not in some bar with Joe Kjos. He could think while he stood here. Get some respite from all her moaning about how ‘the kid’, the twenty-seven-year-old son from his previous marriage, still had the keys to the house, and came and went as he pleased, often in the middle of the night, usually high on something or other. She complained that the Ford Mustang was almost as old as she was, that the kitchen and bathroom needed decorating, that she had hoped to see things in general improving a bit, not sliding backward. Either he’d got miserly with age, or else he was worse off now than when she’d met him in the nineties. And it was true, she just didn’t know the reason.
Olav Hanson thought about a lot of things as he stood there by the river. There were just a few thoughts it was important to avoid. Things from the past. So he thought about the future. About how he would be able to retire in a couple of years. Be a free man again. Go fishing. Get Sean back on track. He would—
He heard a scraping sound from the fine river-sand behind and instinctively whirled round. Stood there staring into the trees on the steep incline.
‘Who’s there?’ he shouted.
He’d been on the alert for something like half his life and could never completely let it go. All that wasted energy, and still his hand instinctively went for the shoulder holster with the SIG Sauer which he always carried. Just then the moon slipped free of the clouds, illuminating the riverbank, and he caught sight of a black dog standing there. Olav picked up a stone and threw it in the dog’s direction. It disappeared soundlessly between the trees. Hanson cursed quietly.
He reeled in.
His phone rang.
He’d told Violet not to call him when he was out, but she was as unpredictable as Sean. This, however, was a caller unknown.
‘Yes?’
The voice at the other end breathed in before speaking in a low voice: ‘Milkman?’