I sat in the same chair as on the previous visit. Schroeder righted himself, crushed the cigarette in a crowded ashtray, opened the bottom drawer of his desk, and removed a half-filled bottle of Booker’s and two glasses of doubtful cleanliness.
“You look like you could use a beverage,” he said.
“I thought it was a cliché, private eyes sitting in their offices drinking bourbon.”
“How do you think it got to be a cliché?” He poured us both a shot and slid my glass toward me. “Besides, it’s good for you.” He downed his shot in one gulp. I thought it was only polite to do the same. “Studies from several prominent medical institutions prove conclusively that two ounces of alcohol each day helps prevent heart disease.”
“I wonder what it does for the liver.”
“I didn’t read that far ahead. So, McKenzie.” Schroeder leaned back in his chair and returned his feet to their perch on his desktop. “I notice the Kevlar vest you’re wearing.”
So much for concealment, my inner voice said. I tapped my chest. “I’m starting a new fashion trend.”
“Just out of curiosity, exactly how much trouble are you in?”
“There’s a contract on my head. People have already tried to collect on it.”
“So I’ve guessed. How much?”
“Fifty thousand dollars.”
“Fifty—that’s nuts. You can kill a president for fifty thousand.”
“It’s nice to know I’m highly valued.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“I want you to keep me alive while I track down the man who issued it.” “How are you going to do that?”
“One punk at a time.”
“Or we could stash you someplace safe and I’ll do the looking.”
“No.”
“No?”
“What can I tell ya, Greg? I’m a manly man doing manly things in a manly way.”
“Uh-huh. In that case”—Schroeder righted himself again and reached for the Booker’s—“you had better get those two ounces in now. Who knows if you’ll ever get another opportunity.”
Schroeder poured, I drank. While I drank he pulled a contract out of the top drawer of his desk and pushed it across to me. “Sign this,” he said.
As my dear old dad always advised, I read it first. “What the hell?” I said.
“Something wrong?”
“Five hundred a day plus expenses.”
“That’s standard.”
“I know, still—one thousand dollars if you use your gun? Five thousand dollars if you actually kill someone?”
“It’s not that I don’t count that as part of the service,” Schroeder said, “but there’s a certain emotional jolt involved, as you know. Besides, they’re your enemies. They should be cheap at twice that price. Also, if we get arrested, it’s up to you to hire the best lawyer that money can buy. Remember, I get two fifty for every day I spend in jail up to one hundred thousand dollars. This is nonnegotiable.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything, just stared with my mouth hanging open and my eyes wide. Schroeder gestured at the paper in front of me. “It’s my rich-guy-gone-bad contract. You are rich, aren’t you, McKenzie?”
“Not as rich as I used to be,” I said.
“Sign, sign.”
I thought about leaving. Then I thought about the four slugs he put into a man who was this close to shooting me one cold and dark night. I signed.
“Now I get to watch you play private eye,” Schroeder said.
“Something like that.”
“Do you have a lead?”
“Dude calls himself Dogman-G.”
“Really? Think he gets much street cred with a name like Dogman-G?”
“Who knows? Maybe it was a choice between that and Trevor.”
“Personally, I think Trevor sounds scarier. What do you know about him?”
“He’s a North Side gangbanger.”
“That’s it?”
“I have some contacts in St. Paul that might be able to help.”
“I hate St. Paul.”
“Who asked you?” Schroeder wasn’t the first resident of Minneapolis who treated St. Paul with disdain, but at these prices I didn’t want to hear it.
“Let me try something,” Schroeder said. He picked up his phone, checked a number, punched it into the keypad, waited, and said, “Hi, Sarge,” when someone answered. “It’s Greg Schroeder… Not bad, not bad, you…? It could be worse, Sarge. She could be a lesbian.” I didn’t know what Schroeder was talking about, but he and the Sarge thought it was awfully funny. “Say, Sarge, what do you have on a banger calls himself Dogman-G…? That’s it? Seriously, that’s all you got…? I appreciate it’s hard to keep track. What is it they say, there’s an asshole born every minute…? Do you have his straight name…? No, no, I appreciate the effort… Put it on my tab… You know it. Thanks a lot.”
Schroeder hung up his phone. “I have some sources over at the MPD that I pay for information when I need it,” he said. “This one, the sarge, he says that the gang unit suspects that this Dogman-G’s been moving product in North Minneapolis. That’s it. They don’t have a sheet on him. They don’t even know his real name. All they know for sure is that he’s into dogs. Pit bulls.”
“So we’re back to St. Paul,” I said.
“Bite your tongue.”
A half-dozen years ago, Officer Willie Buckman was responsible for one of the most colossal animal-abuse cases in Minnesota history, resulting in four felony convictions and forty-seven misdemeanor citations. The way Buckman told the story, it had been an accident. He was patrolling for the Minneapolis Police Department when he caught a domestic. When he arrived at the scene, instead of abusive spouses going at it, he discovered nearly fifty suspects watching a dogfight inside a garage. He called for backup. Arrests were made. Dogs were seized.
If it had been a drug bust, not much would have been made of it. But, it’s a curious characteristic of society today that citizens are more intensely outraged over the mistreatment of dogs, cats, horses, and other animals than they are of humans. The arrests made Buckman a hero to the viewers of every local TV news program in the Twin Cities. Not to mention CNN and Good Morning America. Soon after, he was offered a position as an investigator for the Minnesota Animal Humane Society. Now he wears a brown and tan uniform with a gold badge and a sidearm and investigates cruelty-to-animals complaints and conducts training and workshops for the humane enforcement industry.
“The thing is,” he told us, “we never did learn who called in the domestic. I always thought it was someone’s ex-wife or girlfriend. Maybe a neighbor who wanted to remain anonymous. Most of the complaints we get, there aren’t any names attached to them.”
“You get a lot of those?” Schroeder asked.
“Oh, yeah. That’s where we get most of our intel. Someone’s pissed at someone else and they’re looking for payback, they call in. Doesn’t do us much good, though. You need hard evidence, and that’s difficult to come by. Professional dogfighting is a very secretive, very suspicious world. It’s hard to get close. I know who’s out there; I know what they’re doing. Proving it in court—dogs aren’t real good at giving testimony, if you know what I mean.”
“You should have stayed with the MPD,” Schroeder said. “Jacking up kids smoking dope on the street corner or giving college chicks a chance to work off their DWIs.”
“Or I could’ve become a PI,” Buckman said. “Shooting pictures through the windows of hot-sheet motel rooms with digital cameras, negotiating with the babes over what they’ll give you for not showing the pictures to their husbands.”
“Don’t knock it,” Schroeder said. “That’s how I met my third wife.”
“How did that work out for you?” Buckman asked.
“You know how that worked out,” Schroeder said, and the two men slapped hands. Boys just being boys.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know anything abo
ut a banger who calls himself Dogman-G?”
Schroeder threw a thumb in my direction. “You’ll have to forgive McKenzie,” he said. “He’s got a lot on his mind these days.”
“Oh, I can tell he’s a fun guy,” Buckman said. “Must be the Kevlar. And the fact that you haven’t slept in twenty-four hours, am I right?”
“What can I say? They were broadcasting a Charlie’s Angels marathon on TV Land.”
Schroeder and Buckman both thought that was funny. Finally Buckman said, “Dogman-G, huh? Yeah, I know him. A wannabe tough guy deals drugs in North Minneapolis. He’s a dabbler. He wants to be a real dogman, breed pit bulls and fight them on the circuit. Except he also uses pits to intimidate his competition, to mark his territory. Instead of flashing a nine-millimeter, he’ll use a nasty-looking dog on a leash to frighten off his rivals. The real dogmen, the professionals, they don’t care for that kind of behavior.”
“Sure.”
“Gotta remember, real dogmen, they don’t see what they’re doing as a brutal, cruel activity. They view dogfighting as a legitimate sport— they trace its roots back to seventeenth-century En gland. They’re very traditional. They have a code. Rules. Protocols. You break them… It’s hard to get into the club if you break the rules, and Dogman-G breaks the rules.”
“The other children won’t play with him?” Schroeder asked.
“Nope.”
“How sad.”
“Brings tears to your eyes, doesn’t it?” Buckman said.
“Where can we find Dogman-G?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” Buckman said. “You might try… There’s a dogman up in East Bethel. Dogman-G’s been spending a lot of time with him these days. I think he’s trying to rehab his rep, get in with the right crowd.”
“Where in East Bethel?”
Buckman gave us directions to an isolated farm house that were obscure at best. “I’ve been trying to get enough for a search warrant. No luck so far,” he said. “If you guys stumble upon anything interesting, you’ll let me know?”
Schroeder promised that we would. “In the meantime, you can go back to rescuing frightened kittens from trees,” he said.
“Hey, don’t knock it,” Buckman said. “A lot of those frightened kittens have grateful women as owners.”
“I hear that,” Schroeder said, and they slapped hands yet again.
Oh, brother, my inner voice said.
Like a lot of rural towns in Minnesota, East Bethel claimed a small population—about thirteen thousand—yet a lot of size, approximately forty-eight square miles of lakes, wetlands, farms, and prairies. We found it thirty minutes north of the Twin Cities along Highway 65. We hung a right on Viking Boulevard and followed Buckman’s vague directions more or less northeast until we came upon a small farm house at the top of a gentle rise. The house was surrounded by acres of brush, sun-packed dirt, and prairie grass. Just beyond the house was a large pole barn, and beyond that was the beginning of a thick forest. There were no plowed fields anywhere that I could see, no pens or corrals for animals. But there was a suspiciously large group of cars parked along the narrow county blacktop, and even more cars that lined a quarter-mile dirt driveway leading to the farm house.
“Think we’re in time for the show?” I asked.
“Try to blend in,” Schroeder said. “Kick the dirt, spit a lot.”
We parked on the blacktop at the end of the line of cars. Schroeder left the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition. He popped the trunk, found a weathered knee-length duster, and put it on. “Who are you supposed to be?” I asked. “Jesse James?” He didn’t say. There was a leather gun case in the trunk. Schroeder unzipped it and pulled out a short, black, boxy, and extremely ugly Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine gun. It was about thirteen and a half inches long, weighed four and a half pounds, and fired a thirty-millimeter-long bullet. The Germans designed it to pierce high-quality body armor. Like mine. Aficionados classified it as a “personal defense weapon.”
Schroeder checked the forty-round magazine and slapped it into the pistol grip. “Too bad you’re not paying me by the bullet,” he said. I didn’t know if he was joking or not.
Schroeder hid the MP7 beneath the duster. “Give me a couple of minutes,” he said.
I watched as Schroeder cut a diagonal path across the field to the top of the dirt driveway, then past the driveway toward the barn. I started following as soon as I lost sight of him.
Moving along the driveway, I passed a man with a wooden, wedge-shaped tool in his hand standing next to a battered pickup truck. He didn’t see me at first because he was busy kicking a pit bull that he held by a leash with the other hand. A blanket had been draped over the animal’s head. I stopped, and he grinned at me.
“Damn cur,” he said. “Ain’t got no fight in him. Gotta toughen him up.”
I thought how much I would like to “toughen” him up, but my inner voice admonished me. Keep your eyes on the prize, it said.
I continued along the road until I came across three rottweilers chained to a stake in the ground between the house and the pole barn. They were agitated and angry. I circled them cautiously, well beyond their reach, and walked up to the entrance of the barn. I expected to be stopped—I remembered what Buckman had said about secrecy and suspicion, and besides, didn’t they charge admission to these things? But there was no one at the door. Instead, I found forty, maybe fifty men— white, black, Hispanic, Asian. Many were dressed like guys who worked outdoors, others in suits and ties. I was surprised by how normal they all seemed.
Most of them were hovering around a twenty-foot ring deep inside the barn. The ring was empty; I didn’t know if we were late or early for the fight. I went searching for Schroeder. I couldn’t find him, and then I did. He was standing in a corner of the pole barn where someone had set up a half-dozen folding tables surrounded by folding chairs. There were two metal tubs filled with ice and beer behind a counter built from saw horses and wooden planks; the planks supported a dozen bottles of hard liquor and a cash box. The man behind the cash box was doing good business. I moved toward the makeshift bar, and Schroeder moved away. As we passed each other he whispered, “The reader.”
Sure enough, I found a young black man dressed in a dark blue hoodie sitting at one of the tables. He had a shaved head, a close-cropped beard and mustache, a silver hoop hanging from his left ear, and a silver tooth that he sucked while reading a paperback edition of The World of the American Pit Bull Terrier by Richard Stratton. There were several other black men in the bar area, and I wondered how many of them were on his side.
I sat at the table in front of him, my hands in my pockets. He looked up from his book. “Wan’ sumpthin’?” he asked.
“Dogman-G?”
He sucked on his tooth, then closed his book, using his finger to hold his place. “I know you?” he asked.
“Word is that there’s a contract on some pinhead named McKenzie.”
As I was speaking, a black man took up position behind Dogman-G’s left shoulder. Another black man took the seat at the table to my immediate left. Both of them looked like they weren’t sure what to do with their hands.
“Wha’ zat got to do wi’ me?” Dogman-G said.
“I heard you were handling it,” I said.
Dogman-G eyed me suspiciously. “You a cop, man? You soundin’ like five-oh to me,” he said.
“I’m not a cop.”
He studied me some more. “Why you come to me?” he asked.
“I was given your name.”
“By who?”
“Pat Beulke.”
Dogman-G glanced over his shoulder at the man standing behind him. “We know that boy?” he asked.
The man said, “We know ’im.”
“Well ’nuff he can drop my name careless like that?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
My inner voice said, Tsk, tsk, tsk, poor Pat, but I knew sarcasm when I heard it.
Dogman-G looked across the tab
le at me. His face had the bemused expression of a man who made his living catering to the vices of others. “Wha’ you wan’ know?” he asked.
“Fifty large is a lot of money. I want to make sure I heard the price right.”
“It’s cool. Fifty is the number.”
“Are you buying the hit?”
“Nah, man,” Dogman said. “I jus’ the messenger. I know who gots the presidents, though.”
“Who would that be?”
“Why you wan’ to know?”
“It’s personal.”
“Zat right? Who are you?”
“I’m McKenzie.”
Suddenly the two black men knew what to do with their hands. They began reaching for weapons. Except I was quicker. My hands came out of my pockets. In my right was the nine-millimeter Beretta that I pointed at the dude standing behind Dogman’s shoulder. In my left was the .380 that I leveled at the chest of the black man sitting between Dogman and me. They raised their empty hands without being told to, although I didn’t think they were surrendering.
“Gentlemen,” I said, “I do not want to die, but if I do I’m not dying first.”
I spoke loudly enough to spook the spectators who were milling about, waiting for the dogfight to begin. When they saw my guns, most made a rush for the door. About a dozen crawled under a gap in the back of the pole barn and fled toward the woods.
“Are you crazy, man?” Dogman-G wanted to know.
“Let’s just say I’ve thrown caution to the wind and let it go at that. So, what do they call you? Dogman, or G?”
“You are crazy.”
“G—I’m going to call you G. Listen, G, I’m really pissed off. Now you are going to tell me what I want to know or I’m going to shoot all three of you.”
“Fuck you are.”
“What’s going to stop me? Fear of dying? I’ve got a fifty-thousand-dollar contract on my head.”
“Fuck you, man.”
“Have it your own way. Which one of your pals do you like the least? Know what? I’ll choose.”
I sighted down the .380 at the black man on my left, gritting my teeth as if I were about to squeeze the trigger. He recoiled, his hands splayed in front of his face. “No, no, man,” he said.
Madman on a Drum Page 20
