He had no idea how right he would be.
The street door opened.
Dante.
He stepped out and stopped. Just like he did yesterday morning, he looked right and then left. He hit his bunched right fist into the palm of his left hand. As though every day was a fight. As though a man had a choice each day, to head right or left. How naive we are.
His car — a Maserati — was in the parking lot behind the block. It wasn’t exactly brand new, but all the same, it was a little miracle a car like that was allowed to stand untouched in a neighbourhood like Jordan. The explanation was pretty straightforward: the car was protected by his gangland customers, and everybody in Jordan knew it.
I focused the cross hairs on his chest. I had worked out the distance and the angle and adjusted the sights down, since he would be so far below me. I held my breath, tried to exert an even pressure on the trigger but knew that my pulse was faster than it ought to be. The trigger moved. Kept moving. But the shot didn’t come. My pulse raced. I tried to tell myself not to be impatient, not to think that, in one more second, he would move on and the target would be much harder to hit. Don’t jerk. Just a steady, even pressure.
The man down below shivered inside his coat. He blew into his cupped hands. Like a gambler blowing on dice.
He turned right.
In that same instant the rifle jerked. I must have been holding it firmly because he never left my sight. I saw him stiffen, as though he suddenly realised he’d forgotten something. From inside the long coat something or other dropped to the sidewalk. The first association I got was when Monica and I were standing in the bathroom when her waters broke, splashing against the tiles, and the pair of us almost fainted, terrified and happy, terrified and happy.
It was blood. Dante fell. Backward, into the door. It swung open and inward. He lay there in the darkness of the hallway with his feet sticking out in the daylight. There were no screams, no shouts, no running footsteps, no slamming of doors from down there. Only the steady, uninterrupted rumble of the morning rush hour from the highway just beyond. And then, suddenly, hip hop music. Somebody still lying in bed had got up and opened the window to see what was happening.
I felt myself start to tremble, felt nauseous, made myself think of Monica and the children. Think hard about them, as I loaded another shell. Took aim. Eye up against the telescopic sights. Saw him lying there, motionless, and thought how expensive his shoes looked. That it would be a while before the police showed up here in Jordan and that in the meantime maybe someone would steal those shoes. I got something in my eye and had to blink it away. When I looked down again I saw the shoes moving. Someone down in the darkened hallway was dragging him inside to safety. I was about to pull the trigger again but the thought of shooting a neighbour who was only doing what any decent human being ought to do made me pause a moment. And by the time I decided to go ahead and shoot anyway because no one — absolutely no one — is wholly innocent, the door had swung shut.
I stood up and had to steady myself against the kitchen counter because my foot had gone to sleep. Wrapped the gun inside the bubble wrap. Wiped the counter, the arm of the couch, the back of the chair. Then I went into the bathroom and I put on my gear. Plucked an unruly strand of hair from one eyebrow and held it between two fingers before placing it on my tongue and swallowing. It stuck in my throat, like it didn’t want to go down. I put on my sunglasses and zipped up the hoodie. Shrugged on the rucksack with all my stuff inside, grabbed the flowerpot with the yucca plant, took a last glance around the apartment then let myself out.
I took the stairs up two floors to Mrs White. Knocked on the door. Heard the shuffling of slippers inside. They stopped, everything went quiet. I guess she was looking at me through the fisheye lens. Then the door opened. I’d never asked, of course, but Mrs White had to be at least eighty years old. A sweet, grey-haired old black lady who smelled of something that wasn’t exactly apricot jelly or honey but something in between.
‘Tomás,’ she said. ‘Well now, it’s been a long time since I last saw you. Did you hear that bang too?’
Without a word I handed her the yucca plant.
‘For me?’ She smiled in slight surprise.
I nodded.
She put her head on one side. ‘Is there something wrong, Tomás? You look so... dead. Is it the cat? You miss it, don’t you? Did he say when he would be finished? You know, you have to be patient.’
I nodded again. Then I turned and walked away. Heard that she didn’t close the door but stood there, watching me walk away. Something on her mind. Maybe she was thinking, maybe she felt it deep in her bones, that it was the last time she would ever see me.
The elevator took me down, down, down.
Outside the air was clear and the morning haze lifting. The sun was going to win through today. I walked at a steady pace, heading downtown.
It took me forty minutes.
Downtown Minneapolis always made me think of cars from Motown in the eighties, trapped in a limbo between the past and the future. Everything clean and neat, conservative and dull, practical and boring. There were skyscrapers and bridges, but no Empire State Building or Golden Gate, and if you asked someone from London, Paris or New York what he thought of when you mentioned Minneapolis, he would probably say lakes and forests. OK, so if he knew a little bit more then maybe he would know that the city has the largest connected network of skyways in the US. On the way to the intersection at Nicollet Mall and 9th Street I passed beneath one of them, a glass-and-metal bridge that linked shopping malls and office complexes, a place where people gathered to seek shelter when the temperature dropped to below zero in the winter or rose into the nineties in the summer.
I entered the little pet store. A customer was being served. Sounded like he wanted a bigger cage for his rabbit. Sometimes you still overhear something that restores your faith in human nature. I stood in front of one of the aquariums and when the assistant came over to me I pointed to one of the little fishes swimming about inside and said, that’s the one I want.
‘Dwarf pufferfish,’ he said as he scooped up the green fish in a little hand net. ‘A good aquarium fish, but not for the beginner. The water quality must always be tip-top.’
‘I know,’ I said.
He slipped it into a plastic bag full of water and tied it closed. ‘Mind your cat doesn’t eat it. And don’t eat it yourself. It’s a hundred times more poisonous than—’
‘I know. You take cash?’
Then I was back out in the street again.
A black-and-white car came cruising in my direction. On the door was the MPD emblem and motto — To protect with courage, to serve with compassion. Maybe they got some kind of feeling about me, the policemen sitting behind those darkened windows. But they wouldn’t stop me. After all the criticism in the media for the unmotivated and ethnically biased cases of stop-and-search, MPD police chiefs had announced a change of policy, and from now on, gut feeling was no longer a valid reason for stopping a man like me.
The car passed, but I knew they’d seen me. Same way as I knew I’d been picked up by all the surveillance cameras along Nicollet Mall and 9th Street, more of them around here than anywhere else in town.
And one other thing I knew.
I knew I was dead.