by Stephen Frey
I jump from my truck and dash across the snowy, junk-littered yard as fast as I can, then tumble behind an old railroad car that’s thirty feet from the shack’s front door. It’s a perfectly good Soo Line boxcar that’s probably storing something illicit. The closest rail line is five miles away, but around here it isn’t uncommon to see cars like this one in people’s yards even farther away from a railroad line. I don’t know how people get them. It seems like a dumb thing to steal if you ask me, because it would be pretty easy for the railroad to point out that it was theirs, but then we’ve got people around here who couldn’t spell IQ if their lives depended on it.
“Hold your fire!” Wilson shouts at the top of his lungs from behind his truck. He raced back there and took up a defensive position as fast as his bad knee would carry him. Justin ran off into the woods and is probably long gone. “Now! Or I shoot back!”
Wilson’s already got that .44 Magnum out and God it’s a big gun. It’s hard to get a real appreciation for how imposing the thing is when it’s nestled in its leather holster on his hip, and I find myself thinking about getting one for myself even in the middle of the chaos. Just then a shot ricochets off the boxcar above my head with a nasty ping and my attention snaps back to the house.
“Caleb, it’s me!” Wilson yells. “What in the hell’s wrong with you?”
I pull out my pistol, lean cautiously around the side of the railcar, and spot somebody moving inside the shack. It doesn’t look like Jenkins; in fact, it looks like a young guy, a kid in his midteens maybe. Whoever he is he’s holding a revolver that looks like it’s aimed right at Wilson. I can’t let him pop off a shot at my fellow lawman so I fire. There’s a surprised yelp and a howl as the sound of my bullet echoes away, then a second later there’s a shotgun blast from the window next to the one I just shot into.
Wilson curses at the rude response and unloads four ear-splitting rounds through the window the shotgun blast just came from. His bullets shatter what’s left of the glass and most of the wooden frames and that does it for the guys inside. They’ve had enough that fast and it’s a good thing for them they have.
“Okay, okay!” somebody yells from inside. “We give, we give!”
“Then get out with your hands up,” Wilson orders. “Throw those guns through the windows first, then move out the front door with your hands as far above your head as you can get ’em. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
A pistol and a shotgun come sailing through the broken windows and bury in the snow, but I don’t bring my gun down yet, not like Wilson does. A moment later he’s out from behind his SUV holstering that monstrosity of a weapon, but I’m still tight behind the railcar with my barrel aimed squarely on the front door. In my humble opinion, Sheriff Wilson’s too damn trusting. You’d think he would have learned after what happened to him.
Two boys stumble out of the shack with their arms raised, and I notice right away that the first one has a bloody hand. It looks like I nailed him in the thumb. I didn’t take kill aim like we’re trained to in these situations. I just wanted to scare the hell out of him. I just wanted to get that pistol out of his hand so he didn’t hurt Wilson—or me.
“Down on your knees, boys,” Wilson yells, “and lock your fingers behind your heads. Is there anybody else inside?”
“No, sir.”
When they’re down in the snow with their hands behind their heads, I move out from behind the boxcar, gun out in front of me as I move cautiously across the yard. Am I really supposed to believe that there isn’t anyone else inside the shack just because the older-looking of the two kids said so? Wilson’s limping quickly toward them and he hasn’t even gone for his cuffs yet. He’s either dumb as dirt, suffering from a bad case of an invincibility complex, or he’s crazy brave. It’s probably a combination of all three, but I think most of it’s the crazy brave thing. So does everyone else.
“What in the hell are you boys shooting at me like that for?” he snaps. “These are Caleb’s kids,” he explains as I get close. “Mitch is the older one on the right and Grady’s the one you nailed in the thumb. Nice shot, by the way.”
“Not really,” I admit.
“What are you talking about?”
“I was aiming for his wrist.”
“Oh.” He looks back at Mitch. “Where’s your dad, Mitch?” he asks the older boy.
“Gone, but we don’t know where he went. He wasn’t here Sunday morning when we woke up and we haven’t seen him since.”
“Well, why’d you start shooting when we drove up?”
“Um, we uh … it’s because we—”
“You boys got drugs in there?” I interrupt, pointing at the shack. They seem doped up to me. I saw a lot of this in downtown Minneapolis so I recognize it fast. “Come on, boys, come clean.”
“No,” Mitch says indignantly, starting to stand up, “we don’t have anything in there.”
He kneels back down again quickly when I take two steps forward and press the barrel of my gun to his nose. “I’m gonna go look around inside, Sheriff,” I say, seizing an opportunity that just dawned on me. “You watch them.”
“Okay,” Wilson answers deliberately, like he’s not sure how to react to my taking control of the situation in his county. Then he shrugs. “Have at it.” He looks back at the boys and starts delivering a good old-fashioned tongue-lashing.
Wilson’s voice fades as I head inside the shack, gun leading the way. It smells like dry dog food in here and I’m ready to shoot right away if I come face to face with an angry mutt—most of these backwoods guys have some kind of dog for hunting and protection. But nothing takes a leap or a growl at me.
The first room past the front door—a door that hangs at a tilt by one bent hinge—is the kitchen and the sink’s piled high with dirty dishes. It’s disgusting, even worse than a normal bachelor pad, which I suspect this is, because I can’t imagine a woman would live here. But I don’t see anything out of the ordinary, at least, nothing illegal.
There’s a cluttered living room beyond the kitchen, and, thanks to a roaring fire in the hearth that’s spitting embers onto a tattered rug, it’s actually warm in here despite the blown-out windows and wide-open front door behind me. At least ten cellophane bags are spread out on a table in front of an old leather couch that’s in terrible shape. They’re the size of small Fritos bags and they’re full of what looks like dried grass. I pick one up and sniff. Pot, no doubt, and probably why Wilson and I got the bullet-riddled reception. I’m pretty sure those kids outside weren’t planning on smoking all this stuff. In fact, I’d wager that they were going to sell most of it. They’re probably the last link in the chain to people who do smoke it, the last link of a chain that at this time of year started in Florida or California or even farther away, then somehow made its way through Chicago and ended up in Hayward. Bags delivered by somebody like the guy who shot Sheriff Wilson out on Route 91 that winter night.
When I drop the bag beside the others I notice some smaller bags filled with pills. I pick one up and see through the thin plastic that there’s a design imprinted on each pill. It has to be XTC, the drug that makes everyone want to get naked wherever they are and with whoever they’re with. I shake my head. I heard that stuff was getting into the north-country, but I haven’t seen any yet in Dakota County. XTC is dangerous. Not necessarily because of the sex-inducing effect it has but because it makes the user hallucinate, too. As a state trooper I’ve seen the kind of traffic wrecks this thing can cause and what it can do to the innocent driver coming the other way. Now I definitely know why we were fired on when we pulled up. Possession of this stuff means serious jail time.
I make my way through the clutter toward the hallway on the other side of the living room after repositioning the screen in front of the fireplace so the place won’t burn down while I’m in here. Based on the wall posters of mostly naked girls and rock bands, the first room on the right in the hallway is either Mitch or Grady’s room. But the first
room on the left seems more likely to be Caleb’s, which is the room I’m looking for. There’s an unmade king-size bed that takes up most of the room, no posters at all on the wooden walls, three rifles standing in one corner, and a small desk positioned in another. On the desktop are about fifty empty shotgun and rifle casings lining one of the walls the desk is pushed up against and two small videotapes. On the corner of the mattress nearest the desk is a small video camera. It’s probably stolen, because it’s the most expensive item in the room by far except for the rifles. Which are probably stolen, too. Based on the state of the house, I don’t see how Caleb would have the money to buy much of anything. I don’t think his electrician business can be doing very well.
“Paul! You all right?”
Wilson’s voice takes me by surprise. It sounds like he’s in the living room and heading this way. I scoop up the two tapes, stick them in my pocket, and head back out just as he appears in the doorway.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Looking for anyone who might be hiding in here.” I grab him by the upper arm and pull him back down the hall toward the living room. The damn tapes feel like they’re going to fall out of my jacket. “Did you see what was on the table in the living room?”
“No, what?”
I point at the table as we come through the doorway. “That’s at least five to ten years for each of those kids in the front yard. On top of whatever they get for shooting at us.”
After I showed him the bags of pot and pills, Sheriff Wilson reluctantly took Mitch and Grady into custody. I helped him cuff them and load them into the back of his truck, then I followed him to his precinct in Hayward where two of his deputies met him. I took off with a wave once I saw his deputies come out of the precinct and trot down the steps toward the truck. I didn’t want a lot of people to notice me and I needed to get south to Minneapolis, anyway. I’ve been in Brower County a lot longer than I wanted to be.
It’s strange to say, but I don’t think Wilson would have given those kids anything but a warning and a pat on the back if we hadn’t found drugs in the house. I almost think he wouldn’t have arrested them for the drugs if he’d found the stuff and not me. He told me the kids weren’t really trying to hit us when they were shooting. He tried to convince me that they were just scared and that the bullets and shells didn’t come anywhere near us or damage anything so where was the harm. I didn’t tell him how that one bullet hit the railcar right above me, no more than a few inches away from my head.
I’m worried about Sheriff Wilson. I’m worried he’s gone soft again since that incident out on 91 a few years ago. He’s too good a man to lose to a couple of punks like Mitch and Grady—or their supplier. I tried to warn him as we were loading the kids into the truck to be more careful, but he told me to mind my own business.
So I will.
This is a long shot, I realize, as I pull into the second filling station, but what the hell. I know Jack Harrison didn’t fill up in Bruner after surprising Cindy at the estate last week. Bat remembers everyone who comes in and, even if he didn’t, he’d remember that Porsche. You don’t see many shiny black Porsches in Dakota County, especially in February. But Bat didn’t remember a Porsche coming in last week when I asked him this morning and Jack would have had to refill his tank somewhere after his three-hour trip up from the Twin Cities. I don’t think he could have done a round trip without a pit stop and he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to push his luck between towns. It was cold and it could have been a long walk if his engine had stalled.
Hayward has two gas stations, a Chevron in town I stopped into after leaving the precinct and an old independent station out near the Steelhead Saloon. I didn’t get much out of the guy at the Chevron—he grunted that he hadn’t seen any black Porsches and he certainly hadn’t seen a Minnesota congressman—and I’m not expecting much more than that from this short, gray-haired old guy I’m staring down at right now. He’s the only person here at the independent station.
“Hi.”
“Hello.” He nods back at me from behind the counter, then glances at the Dakota County Sheriff block letters on the side of my truck. “What can I do you for?”
“You the owner?” I ask.
“Yep.”
The guy has no lower teeth and I think that grit beneath his fingernails must be permanent, it’s so black. Like Bat’s, this guy’s station has a two-bay service garage. Unlike Bat’s, there’s only one lift in use and no cars waiting for service in the lot. Bat’s place is almost always busy. It was busy this morning even though the storm hadn’t been gone for long. “Are you here most of the time?”
“Yep.”
“Were you here last Friday?”
His eyes narrow. “Why?”
Chances are he knows that Cindy was murdered. He doesn’t impress me as a man who reads much in the newspaper other than the sports and the used-car sections, but most retail owners hear everything that’s going on in the area from their customers. So chances are good that either he heard about Cindy’s murder from a customer or he’s connected to Mrs. Erickson. He’s wearing a scratched-up wedding band and it’s a better than fifty-fifty shot that Mrs. Erickson gets into a home in these parts if there’s a woman in the house. Way better, and it’s more likely that I’ll get help from him if I’m open, so I’ll lay out what happened.
“My name’s Sheriff Summers. I’m sheriff of Dakota County.”
“Okay.”
“We had a murder outside Bruner last week. Maybe you heard about it.”
“Involved one of the River Families, didn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“So why do you want to know if I was here last Friday?”
“Well, were you?”
“Maybe.”
Sometimes it can be a real struggle to get people in the north-country to talk. “Look, I want to know if you saw a Porsche that day. I want to know if a black Porsche came in here and filled up.”
“Maybe.”
My eyes race to his. I’d been looking over at his vintage soda machine thinking about how thirsty I am and how good a Pepsi in a tall glass bottle would taste. “Oh, yeah?”
The old man nods. “It was a real flashy car. We don’t get many cars like that in here.” He pauses. “I couldn’t see much of the guy who was driving it, though. He was wearing his hat pulled way down over his eyes and the collar of his coat was pulled up.”
“What time was he here, sir? Do you remember? Do you have a receipt, maybe?”
“I don’t have a receipt because he paid cash, but I can still tell you what time he was here on Friday because he was my last customer of the day and I always shut down at eight o’clock on Friday nights. He filled up at around quarter to eight. Rude son of a bitch he was. Real rude, so I don’t mind telling you anything you want to know about him. Like I said, I figured he was with one of those River Families.”
My heart skips a beat. Quarter to eight. I was gone from the Prescott estate Friday afternoon by five o’clock, but I didn’t see Jack Harrison anywhere around the place while I was there. I didn’t see his car, either, so I figured he’d already headed back to Minneapolis. Cindy acted like he was long gone when I drove up to the estate the second time around four o’clock. It wouldn’t take more than thirty minutes to get from the estate to this guy’s filling station, so where was Jack for those three-plus hours?
“Do you remember which direction he went when he left?” I ask.
The old guy points south. “That way, toward Minneapolis.”
20
EDINA IS AN old-money neighborhood located a few miles southwest of downtown Minneapolis. It’s got all the typical trappings of a blue-blood neighborhood with its three-story stone homes, sprawling oak trees, expensive cars, and quiet, shaded streets. It also includes Lake Calhoun and Lake Harriet, two of the largest inland lakes in North America that lie less than ten miles from the center of a major city. These beautiful lakes—a couple of hundred acres each�
��provide the wealthy families with lots of outdoor activities, including swimming, sailing, skating, and fishing just a few feet from their front doors and only a few miles from the city’s soaring skyscrapers. It’s a wonderful place to live—and it’s where Lewis Prescott built his compound.
Prescott owns what were once three separate mansions occupied by three different families near the center of Edina on its most desirable street. The Prescott clan originally lived farther south of Minneapolis in Bloomington. But, when Lewis was named CEO of Prescott Trading at the relatively young age of thirty-eight, he decided it was time to move the family closer to its downtown business headquarters and upgrade its home address.
The rumor was that Prescott bought his first Edina mansion on the up-and-up with every intention of forcing the families on either side of his new home to sell to him as soon as possible using pretty much any means necessary. Whether the rumor was true or not, he owned the other two mansions within a year. Then he connected the places with tunnels and skyways and built a fifteen-foot-high brick wall around all three homes despite major objections from his neighbors and the community association. Any way you look at it, building the wall was an amazing accomplishment, because, as Cindy told me, the community association had the legal right to stop him—but didn’t.
The story didn’t end there. A few years later another rich guy bought two homes next door to each other a half mile away from the Prescott compound and tried to put up his own wall around his properties—but couldn’t. The police showed up and stopped construction literally as the first brick was being laid and that was that. Prescott was going to see the wall every day from his limousine on his way into Minneapolis and he didn’t like that. He wanted to know he had the only compound in Edina, not just the biggest.
Ever since, Cindy’s told me, Prescott brags that, in fact, he was a nice guy to his neighbor for stopping construction when he did. After all, he tells people at cocktail parties after a few scotches, he could have sent the police in when the wall was almost finished and made the guy pay to tear it down, too. The story’s become a legend in Minneapolis over the years.
