And one other thing I knew.
I knew I was dead.
3
Dinkytown, September 2022
I open my eyes again. I’m back in the taxi, back inside my own head. Now of course I can’t know for certain whether I was really in the killer’s head, really thought his thoughts as he made his way down Nicollet Mall six years earlier. If he thought that thought, that he was going to die. What I do know is that he was on Nicollet Mall at the precise moment in time, that’s a black-and-white fact, recorded by a surveillance camera and by means of binary code translated into a digital recording which places the matter beyond all doubt.
I tell the driver to take me to Dinkytown.
The sun is rising as we cross the river and glide on into the low-rise settlement. This is a world apart from Jordan. Dinkytown is where the students live. The people with a future. The ones who will occupy the shiny bank buildings, the granite blocks of a city hall, the school staffrooms and the 350-dollar seats at the US Bank Stadium. When my cousin and I were old enough we often came here to drink beer in the dives. For me there was something bohemian and thrilling about Dinkytown. The smell of marijuana and testosterone, the sounds of youth, good music and boy-meets-girl, the sense of some — but not too much — danger. The place to swing through that little arc of freedom that exists between being young and being adult, and not wild enough to stop the straights landing securely on our feet, the way I did. Once my cousin’s girlfriend brought a friend along with her, and she and I sneaked out the bar and smoked a joint in one of the alleyways before having what was probably a pretty forgettable bout of sex but which I always remember anyway because of that — to me at least — exotic setting.
Now I hardly recognise the place. It looks like something in an exercise book in which the teacher has corrected all the grammatical mistakes and removed all the obscenities. We pass the place that was once a coffee bar and where the owner swore blind that Bob Dylan had made his very first appearance when he came down from Hibbing to study. Now some vast building is on its way up. I ask the driver if he thinks the purple facade is a tribute to the town’s other great musical son, Prince. The driver just chuckles and shakes his head.
‘But Al’s Breakfast is still here,’ I say and point to the door of that little warren of a place where — if the empty seat was down at the front — you had to press your way between the customers crowded at the bar and the sweaty wall.
‘The day they try to close Al’s there’s going to be riots here,’ the driver says and roars with laughter.
I tell him to stop at the bridge over the railroad line. I get out of the car and glance down at the tracks. The occasional goods train used to run on that line, and judging by the weeds growing between the rusty tracks traffic hasn’t increased much since then. I cross the road and head toward the corner where it still says Bernie’s Bar on the wall, try the handle of the locked door, cup my hands against the glass next to the poster advertising that the premises are for rent and peer inside. The bar is still there, but otherwise there isn’t a stick of furniture left.
Now I have to get inside the policeman’s head.
So I try to imagine how it might have been, what was said and done in here on that morning six years ago.
4
Oz, October 2016
Bob Oz hissed through his teeth and put the empty shot glass back down on the bar. Looked up and saw his own reflection in the mirror between the bottles on the shelves. A new guy at work had asked him yesterday why the others called him One-Night Bob. He told him it must be because he always solved his cases in just one night.
Bob looked at One-Night Bob. He’d turned forty, but wasn’t that the same face he’d been staring at for the past twenty years now? He wasn’t exactly a good-looking man, but like his father he had the kind of face time didn’t seem to sink its teeth into. Well, OK, chewed up a little bit. At least chewed away the puppy fat of youth to reveal the mature man’s good or his bad genes, all depending on which way you looked at it. White skin of the type that only got sunburnt, never brown. A thick and unruly thatch of red hair on the kind of head that got Scandinavians nicknamed squareheads, back in the day when his ancestors emigrated here from Norway. A relatively healthy-looking set of teeth, a pair of blue eyes that had got more red in the whites since his separation. His eyes bulged slightly, but at least according to one of his one-night-stand ladies that was no bad thing since it gave the impression he was listening closely to whatever they said. Another had said that as soon as they met she had the feeling of being a Little Red Riding Hood and wondering why the wolf had such big eyes. Bob Oz rounded off the stocktaking by sitting up straight on his bar stool. When he was young he wrestled and swam. Though never a champion in either field it had given him a good body that the years had done little to change. Until now, that is. He put his hand on his shirt, beneath his trademark yellow coat. A nasty little pot belly. And this despite the fact he had never eaten less than in the three months that had passed since he and Alice had split up. And it couldn’t be the pills, because he wasn’t taking those any more. But he was drinking more, no doubt about that. A lot more.
The name One-Night Bob came from a colleague early on in his career, before he met Alice and became One-Woman Bob. It was back in the days when he and his colleagues celebrated every triumph, great and small — and, at a pinch, their defeats too — at the Dinkytown bars, when they were young enough to shake off the hangovers and Bob would more often than not wake up with a woman lying next to him. What especially impressed his male colleagues was the way this pallid, ginger-haired guy could pull women even when he was so drunk he could hardly stand up. Anyone who asked what his secret was always got the same answer: that he tried harder. That he didn’t give up. That some of these women pestered him to take them to bed. When you haven’t the looks, the money or the charm then you have to work harder than the competition. End of story.
‘Another?’
Bob nodded and looked up at the female bartender as she poured his whiskey. She reminded him of someone and now he knew who it was. Chrissie Hynde, the singer and guitarist with the Pretenders. Black hair, fringe cut straight. Sassy, self-assured, interesting-looking rather than pretty. High cheekbones, narrow, slightly slanting eyes. A bit too much mascara. Russian genes? Long, thin limbs. Tight jeans she knew she looked good in. A baggy T-shirt, meaning she had nothing there worth promoting. No problem there, Bob had always been more of a leg-and-ass man. Sure, the half-closed venetian blinds in the bar blocked out the morning sunlight, but he could make out the lines marking her face. She looked like she’d lived a bit. Mid-thirties going on forty. Good. Gave him more of a chance.
Bob took a sip and hissed through his teeth again. The sign on the sidewalk outside the bar advertised Happy Hour, but just for a handful of whisky brands, and you take what you can get. Bob coughed.
‘Liza. It is Liza, right?’
‘Whatever,’ she said and yawned as she picked up the empty beer glass of a customer who had just left the bar.
‘That’s what the guy who was just here called you.’
‘Well, that’s all right then.’
‘OK,’ said Bob and took another sip. ‘I know you’ve heard this before, Liza, but you know what? My wife doesn’t understand me.’
Liza came back at him without missing a beat: ‘And there was me hoping you didn’t have one.’
Bob smiled stiffly. ‘You get tips for that line of yours, honey?’
‘You get cunt for yours, honey?’