Jack drove the Mercury Cougar through the curves of River Road. The windows were down and the hot air blew through the compartment as the car approached a speed bump. Jack accelerated and the car smoothly but loudly passed over the bump as the suspension absorbed the shock.
“Geez, Jack. Where’s the fire?” Ross asked as he braced himself and hung on with his one good arm.
“We have a lot to do and not a lot of time.” Jack accelerated again. “Hold on.” The car slammed over another speed bump. “That’s it for the bumps. Get out your phone. Call Sure Thing.” Jack kept up the speed down the hill into the lowest part of River Road that ran parallel to the Mississippi, honked his horn, and passed an older Volvo Wagon, its driver honking back at Jack for passing on the two-lane road. An Asian couple standing at the retaining wall fishing looked back from the river to see what was happening behind them on the road while their lines hung in the water eight feet below. The car’s transmission shifted as Jack pushed the car up the hill from the river flats.
“I’m getting his voice mail,” Ross said loudly to get Jack to hear him over the sound of the car and the wind. Ross held the phone to his ear with his good hand. “Can you roll up this window, Jack, so he can hear me?”
Jack rolled up Ross’ window and answered, “Give him the room numbers and tell him I need some tools for surveillance to keep them safe through the night. We’ll meet him there in a few hours to see what he has for us.” The turn-off of River Road was just ahead. Jack didn’t brake, but took his foot from the accelerator as he steered the car through the curve up and around to Franklin Avenue.
Ross leaned to the right to counter-act the force as he spoke into the phone to leave the message for Sure Thing.
There was a stop sign at Franklin Avenue. Jack looked back, accelerated onto the road, and drove across the bridge to the other side of the river. He honked his horn in a staccato pattern, swerved around the cars waiting at the stop light on the east end of the bridge, and headed south.
“Watch out for the St. Paul cops, Mario.”
“We’re still in Minneapolis, Junior.” Jack sped down East River Road. “The St. Paul border is a little farther south. After we go under the train tracks. We need to get you out so you know the city.” Jack pushed the button on his door and lowered Ross’ window again. “Hey, you know what Sure Thing drives?”
Ross raised his voice again to battle the hot wind blowing through the car. “Something with air-conditioning?”
“I think it has air-conditioning, but it doesn’t need much. It’s smaller than this car. It’s one of those Mini-Coopers.” Jack said.
Jack continued to push the Cougar south down East River Road while he and Ross yelled at each other over the sound of the winds that buffeted their hair, debating the benefits of air-conditioning and power controls versus open windows with manual cranks to raise and lower them.
Jack braked and drastically slowed the car down to a stop. Cars were lined up ahead of them on the road and not moving. “Junior, get out and see how long the line is.”
“You get out. I’m injured.” Ross flapped his elbow, his arm in the sling.
“My car, I’m driving. I have to move up with the traffic.”
Ross looked at Jack. Jack looked to the left at the large houses that faced the river. Along this part of the river the houses and yards on the St. Paul side were larger than their Minneapolis counterparts on the other side.
“What do you think these people do?” Ross asked.
“Doctors, lawyers, bank robbers, drug dealers.”
“And they say crime doesn’t pay.”
Jack looked ahead through the windshield. “We’re not moving. Hang on.” He cranked the steering wheel to the right and slowly drove the car to the curb. The front wheel hit the curb and the car stopped and rocked back. He accelerated the car again and the front wheels climbed up the curb with a lurch, first the right, then the left.
“Ow! What are you doing?” Ross’ head bounced off of the door frame. He braced himself in his seat, his good arm on the dashboard of the car.
“Anybody on the bike path?” Jack asked.
“What? No.”
Jack pushed the car ahead, the rear wheels bouncing up the curb, before he raced down the paved bike path. He tapped the horn, warning walkers to get out of his way.
“Watch out, Jack!”
Two coeds stepped aside and gave him the finger. Jack waved out the window in return. “This is much better. Don’t you think, Junior? We’re moving now.”
A St. Paul traffic cop stepped onto the path ahead of them and held out her hand, palm out. Street traffic was turning left at this point. Barricades placed across River Road and the biking path kept automobiles and pedestrians from continuing south from this point. Jack stopped the car on the path ten feet from the officer.
“Sir, what do you think you’re doing?” The St. Paul officer approached and stared at Jack through the window of his car, her eyes hidden behind her Oakley sunglasses. “The road and bike path are off limits right now. Do you live up here?”
“Special Agents Miller and Fruen with the FBI. We’re going to the site by the river to check it out.”
“Couldn’t wait in line, gentlemen?”
“We’re kind of in a hurry. Lots to do today. First thing is to try and catch the guy that shot at me from up here.”
The officer leaned over and looked through the window at Ross. “And you’re the guy that got hurt in the car accident.”
Ross nodded and Jack answered, “You should be a detective instead of pulling traffic duty.”
“You guys be careful. I’ll move the barricade for you. The road’s clear from here to the site. You’ll see where it is. Lots of cars parked in the road.” She stood up and yelled at a bike rider starting to ride around the barricade. She moved it out of the way and Jack bounced the car down the curb and accelerated down River Road.
Jack and Ross stood in the shade under the mature trees at the edge of a scenic overlook above the gorge and looked across the river. “You were running over there?” Ross pointed to the riverbank on the other side of the river.
“Yep. And he shot at us from down there.” Jack nodded down the bank to the area of sand where a dozen people were milling about. “Think you can make it down there with that bad arm? You could stay here.”
“Lead the way. I’ll be fine.”
There was a path worn through the vegetation that clung to the side of the gorge. Jack and Ross followed it down towards the river, carefully testing their footing so they wouldn’t lose their grip and slide to the bottom. By the time they reached the sand beach along the river, they were both sweating.
“It’s different down here, Jack. Like a nature reserve in the city.”
“That’s why I like to run down along the river in the morning.”
“And you can smell the river.” Ross wrinkled his nose.
“Part of nature, Junior.”
They slowly walked over to the group of people clustered around a dead tree lying in the sand. Their shoes sunk into the fine silt and sand deposited when the river was at a higher level in the spring, filled with winter snow run-off. Jack addressed one of the men in white Tyvek coveralls. The man was short and overweight. He looked like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man wearing a blue baseball hat on his head with FBI across the crown in gold letters. Sweat streaked the man’s cheeks and ran down his neck.
“Hey, Pete? Hot out here, isn’t it? You know Junior?”
Ross stepped forward and shook Pete’s hand. “Agent Fruen.” He discreetly wiped his hand on his pants to dry it.
Jack stood with his hands in his pockets, looking over the site. “What’ve we got, Pete?”
“This is ground zero, Jack.” Pete squatted down a few feet away from the tree so as not to disturb the area around it where the shooter had laid waiting. “You ran along the opposite bank, right to left, north to south. You can see the shooter was laying in the sand here, the rifle propped on the tree.” There was a large depression in the sand the length of a body, deeper depressions where the knees and elbows rested in the sand. The dead tree, half-buried in the sand, showed lighter marks on top where something had scratched its weathered wood. The scratches presumably came from the stock of the rifle resting on the tree for support. “We found a couple of slugs across the river. It was a hell of a shot to hit a moving target.”
Ross followed what Pete said and looked back across the river. “Jack, you know he was waiting for you. He wasn’t just taking shots at whoever happened to be running by this morning.”
“Yeah, he’s been watching me, that’s how he knew I’d be out for a run. He was waiting here in the shadows. The sun lit us up on the bank over there. He was trying to scare me off. Must’ve surprised him seeing two of us running.” Jack turned around in the sand and looked up the hill, then up and down the shore. “So where did he go?”
Wires with colored plastic flags were stuck in the sand, a different color running off in three directions.
“Guess.”
“Pete, come on. Where did he go?”
Pete grunted and stood up, pushing his body up by placing his hands on his knees. “You guys are detectives.”
“OK, we’ll play.” Jack looked at Ross. “Junior? Your case. What do you think?”
Ross stood back and studied the area.
“And don’t take too long,” Jack added.
“OK. My bet is he didn’t go downstream. The bank gets really steep and further downstream is the dam. He couldn’t go past there.”
“I didn’t ask where he didn’t go. Where did he go?” Jack asked.
Ross shook his head, smiled, and looked out to the river. A silver powerboat from the Sheriff’s department idled twenty feet out from the riverbank. Two deputies in life jackets were in the boat; one driving it and keeping it in place against the current, the second was manipulating something over the side, hanging from a rope.
“What’s up with these guys?” Jack asked.
“They’re looking for the gun,” Pete said. “It’s not here. He either tossed it or took it with him. Me, I think he threw it in the river and took off.”
“Good luck,” Jack said. “Junior, where did he go?”
Ross started walking along the flags and followed the blue ones to the storm sewer. “If he followed the other path up stream, he ran the risk of somebody seeing him. If people up above on the paths heard shots from the gorge, they would have been more alert to strangers. I think he disappeared into this storm sewer and came out a distance from here.”
“How’d he do, Pete?”
“Not bad for a new agent. That’s what we think happened.” Pete stepped up next to Ross and shined a flashlight into the dark sewer. “These things run all over under the city. Farther in there, we found tracks that look like they match. Looks like he came up in a church parking lot about three or four blocks from here. Abandoned his vehicle up in the lot up here. Just walked away. Maybe had another car.”
“Or a bike,” Ross added.
Pete thought for a second. “Yeah, maybe a bike. That would blend in here.”
“You couldn’t have told us that sooner, Pete?” Jack asked.
“If you just wanted me to tell you how he got away, you wouldn’t have walked down that hill through the brush dragging your injured partner along with you. You wouldn’t be standing here looking around to make sure we did the job right. You wanted to be here, see where he was when he shot at you. You wanted to get in his head.” Pete reflexively reached for a breast pocket and then the back pocket of his pants. “You guys don’t smoke, do you?”
Jack yelled out to the group of investigators standing at the edge of the river watching the sheriff’s deputies fish for a gun. “Who has a cigarette for my friend, Pete?” Jack caught the pack of cigarettes that one of the men tossed to him. He stepped forward and offered the pack to Pete. “Thanks, Pete. We’ll look for your report later. Figure out how tall he was from the impression. I want to make sure it was the Governor.”
Ross and Jack worked their way back up along the rocky path and through the trees to get back to Jack’s car. At the top, they stopped to catch their breath, sweat running freely down their faces. “Think Pete will make it up this hill?” Ross asked.
“If he’s lucky, the sheriffs will give him a ride back to the boat ramp. Otherwise it’ll take more than one of those guys down there to get him back up the hill alive.” Jack looked across the river where he’d ran that morning. The image of his morning run with Patty replayed in his mind. The path, the light from the rising sun, the smell of the river, the realization that somebody was shooting at them, that Patty had been shot. Patty was OK. He made it out of the situation a little wet and smelly. He couldn’t think of a thing he would’ve done differently. He didn’t know he was in the sights of a shooter. He needed to change up his routine. Somebody was waiting for him this morning. “Come on, Junior. Let’s go check on Patty.”