Wolf Hour

33 Porn, October 2016

I had my face turned to the sky and my eyes closed against the bright morning sun. It was still warm, but at sunrise there had been a thin layer of ice on the puddles. I inhaled the air, felt my lungs expand, felt that my body was ready. Felt the slight pressure of the hypodermic with its long point in my breast pocket. I opened my eyes again.

US Bank Stadium.

It looked like a ship. No, a submarine. Or a black iceberg. I was standing on Medtronic Plaza, beside the big Viking ship, and looking up at the black zinc facade. Behind it 60,000 seats waited to be filled. The stadium had a glass roof which kept the NFL fans from freezing. There had been mixed reactions to it, both while they were building it and afterward, once it had opened in the summer. Some hated it and said they should never have pulled down the old Metrodome stadium, but it was always like that with places people had good memories of. I had slept well in the woods that night, with my memories. I needed it, needed it to keep me steady.

I saw the WCCO-TV and the KSTP buses, the cables being unfurled and getting ready for live coverage of Mayor Patterson’s opening of the NRA convention tomorrow. I had made a circuit of the stadium and the security looked unimpeachable. It was impossible to get into the stadium without proper accreditation, and there were security cameras above every entrance. Especially here in Medtronic Plaza, which was where most of the audience would be queuing the following day.

I closed my eyes again.

Saw the mayor standing there, all eyes on him, all cameras focused on him. The way his facial expression kind of freezes when he gets hit. The chaos. The anarchy. Running footsteps. Sirens. That whole apparatus we trust in, that we believe can protect us, and save us, and the lives of those we love, is set in motion. But mixed in with the certainty that no matter what any of us do now, it’s already too late. My despair had finally become theirs too.

Kay Myers sat in Walker’s office looking at the superintendent’s back as he stood in front of the blind.

‘How d’you like this city?’ he asked.

Kay thought about it. It hadn’t seemed all that different from the place she’d come from. Pretty similar climate, the lakes, same mix of people, same flat landscape. It had taken her a while to notice all the small differences in the social codes, like Minnesota nice, a friendly, polite surface obscuring a conflict-averse and passive-aggressive undercurrent. But even though they were a little more closed and a little less direct than where she came from, the people she met were, in general, decent and righteous people. Of course, that didn’t include those she encountered in most of the murder cases that came her way — but then she suspected that was true of any city.

‘Basically I like it just fine,’ she said.

‘Good,’ said Walker without turning round. ‘It may not be as attractive as Chicago, but I see this city as being oriented toward the future. It’s a city where people are willing to think new thoughts. A city where someone like you can enjoy a good life and a rewarding career.’

Kay moved uncomfortably in her chair. It wasn’t that she had expected the turn the meeting appeared to be taking, but at the same time it wasn’t completely unexpected. She’d picked up on the signals, as people say.

‘I’ve learned that I’m being considered for the post of leader of the Investigative Division,’ said Walker. He parted two strips of the blind with his fingers. ‘That means that someone will have to take over this office. The post will be advertised, and others will have the responsibility of deciding who gets the job. But if I offer an internal recommendation then that will obviously count for something. Count for quite a lot, I guess we could say.’

Seeing no reason to respond Kay remained silent.

‘Now of course there’s a certain risk attached when a departing head offers a recommendation,’ said Walker. ‘If in due course it turns out that there’s something shall we say untoward about the person recommended, then obviously that will reflect badly on the one who offered the recommendation. Right now, for example, I’ve got the chief of police on my neck following these problems with Detective Oz. What I need to know, Myers, is that you won’t be giving us any surprises.’

‘I understand,’ said Kay.

Walker turned to her. ‘You understand?’

‘Yes.’

Walker smiled broadly. ‘You’ve come far, Myers. Not bad for a girl from Englewood. But you’re not finished yet. You can be an example for other girls from places like Englewood. The way ahead lies open for you. The only thing that can get in the way is if you mess up and fall.’

Kay nodded.

‘I won’t keep you any longer, Myers. You look like someone who wants to get back out there on the job.’

As Kay walked back to her desk, she wondered which had been more important for Walker to convey, the promise or the warning. On her way she glanced into the office that was being decorated. The painting wasn’t finished yet, paint pots still standing there, but the painter obviously had the day off. On a chair she saw something that looked like a furry brown rodent but was probably a mitten. She almost asked at reception if they knew when the painter would be back, but she didn’t. Approaching her desk she saw Olav Hanson pulling on his jacket as he hurried out from behind the divider separating their desks.

‘Where’s the fire?’ she asked Joe Kjos, who she could see was playing poker on his computer screen.

‘The video centre,’ he said. ‘Gomez has been seen at the US Bank Stadium.’

Kay grabbed her jacket and ran toward the elevators.

‘Hey!’ she called as the doors were about to shut. ‘Wait for me!’

A hairy arm shot out between the shiny surfaces and the elevator doors slid back open.

She stepped in, nodded her thanks to the man with the hairy arms and fixed her eyes on Olav Hanson, who was standing at the back of the elevator. She moved next to him.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about Gomez?’ she asked quietly.

‘I tried, but you weren’t at your desk,’ he said, his voice equally low.

She nodded slowly and tried to read his flushed face. ‘Well, I’m here now, Hanson.’

‘Good,’ he said.

By the time Kay and Olav Hanson jumped out of the car by the Viking ship outside the US Bank Stadium three police cars had already arrived.

‘Well?’ said Hanson to the police officer who stood waiting for them.

‘He isn’t here.’

‘Which cameras picked him up?’

‘All the external ones round the whole stadium. It looks like he did the circuit twice before he lit out.’

‘Twice?’ said Kay. ‘He’s planning something.’

Kay looked at the two TV buses parked outside one of the entrances. She spoke the thought aloud almost before she’d finished thinking it:

‘Patterson.’

‘What?’ Hanson stared at her.

‘Patterson is due to open the NRA conference here tomorrow. Gomez is going for the mayor.’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘I think Gomez is crazy,’ she said and pulled out her phone. ‘Think about it. There’s a pattern here. He starts small and gets bigger. Like ripples in a lake.’

‘Who’re you calling?’

Before Kay could answer she got a reply.

‘Minneapolis City Hall.’

‘This is Detective Kay Myers, MPD. Can I speak to the person in charge of security at the mayor’s office?’

As she waited, she saw Hanson had just taken an incoming call.

‘New sighting of Gomez,’ he said to her. ‘Not far away.’

I heard the sirens getting closer. The street I was standing on consisted of low, two-storey buildings on both sides. On the sidewalk across from me was a man wearing a fur cap with a cart and a sign that said he was selling kielbasa starowiejska — Polish sausages. When I was here earlier checking out the area I had bought one of those U-shaped sausages from him. It came served with kapusniak, a kind of sauerkraut, and it was delicious. Behind the cart was the entrance to a movie theatre with a large, vertical sign in red neon, RIALTO. The sirens were closer now. One or two of the cars had turned them off. Maybe they thought they could surprise me. I breathed in the smell of sausages, boiled cabbage, exhaust fumes and testosterone. Then I crossed the street.

Officer Fortune drove and listened to the female voice in his earpiece as it gave him a running appraisal of where the facial recognition program had last located Gomez. He knew she could also switch to an individual security camera to see where Gomez was headed as long as he was in frame.

‘Thanks, we’re there now,’ said Fortune as he came to a screeching halt at the kerb beside a steaming sausage cart and the startled street seller. Fortune turned to the two detectives in the back seat and saw that both had drawn their service pistols.

‘The camera has just seen him enter this building here, but we... eh, I guess we should wait for SWAT?’

‘No,’ the detectives replied in unison as they opened the doors and jumped out.

When Betty Jackson, the ticket seller at the Rialto, saw the two people with their guns and MPD badges approaching her booth she got a feeling of déjà vu. She was the only member of staff who had worked at the theatre since way back in the seventies, when the king of Minneapolis pornography, Ferris Alexander, took over the run-down Rialto and started showing blue movies there. The place wasn’t licensed to show porn, but the police raided only when the city council specifically demanded it, because so many of their own were regulars there. Ferris Alexander’s porn empire finally collapsed, and he ended up doing time on tax evasion charges, but the Rialto managed to survive without him, and in spite of the fact that theatres specialising in pornography all over the country had to close, as home movies and the internet gradually took over the market. The Rialto didn’t make much money, but it was enough to keep the wheels turning. And there were no longer any applicable laws the authorities could make use of to close down movie theatres like they could do in the seventies. The most they could do was insist the theatres be located outside certain designated porn-free zones of the city. The Rialto showed mainly Swedish, Danish and German pornography from the sixties and seventies, mostly classics and some underground. Things you wouldn’t find on the net. But nothing extreme, no animals, underage, defecation, no hard S&M. Straightforward fucking. Generally for the same audience of white men aged sixty plus, probably family men who didn’t want to watch porn on the internet at home. Or just lonely men who didn’t recognise their dream woman among the slick pornography on the internet. Here they could still see Scandinavian girls with pubic hair and no silicone, the way they remembered girls from their own youth. A mixture of the smutty from the days before pornography became a legitimate business, and innocence from a time when a shred of modesty still existed. So this was in every way a respectable theatre showing adult movies, with a geographical location that put it in a grey area, as half the building lay within the city council’s porn-free zone and the other half outside it. The part containing the screen was, unfortunately, within. But Betty soon realised it had nothing to do with this. She saw a slight uncertainty in the eyes of the two officers as they realised exactly what kind of establishment they were about to enter.

‘Excuse me,’ said the black policewoman as Betty tried to recall the last time she’d heard someone from MPD open a sentence so politely, ‘did this person just come in here?’

The woman had lowered her pistol. She held up a cell phone in front of the ticket booth.

Betty looked at the picture on the screen. Normally she didn’t look at the patrons, they didn’t like it. Instead she concentrated on the hands that shoved the money in through the little window. Only if they looked like a child’s hands rather than an adult’s did she look up and decide whether to turn them away or ask to see some ID. But the person in the photograph had done something that was almost unheard of: he had actually spoken to her. Told her she ought to try the Polish sausages being sold right outside. As though he wanted her to look up and see him. And since Betty, in her seventy-eighth year, no longer suspected men of trying to hit on her, she had looked up. It was the same man as the one she now saw on the screen the policewoman was holding up in front of her. No doubt about it.

‘He’s inside,’ she said with a nod toward the door leading into the theatre itself. It was a swing door with no handles on either side. Not as a fire precaution but because a swing door can be opened with a foot, or a shoulder, so you didn’t have to touch a handle that you might suspect with good reason had just been touched by a hand that had just been touching something you didn’t want any contact with at all, not even secondary contact.

‘Turn the movie off and put the lights on in there,’ said the police officer.

‘Without a search warrant I can’t...’ Betty stopped when she saw the look in the woman’s eyes. Behind her were now three uniformed policemen, all with weapons drawn. Betty pressed the intercom in front of her, another relic of the seventies, and said with a sigh, as though this were a daily but regrettable occurrence:

‘Mel, stop the movie and turn the lights on. The police are here.’

Kay pushed open the door into the auditorium with her foot, continuing to hold the pistol with both hands. In the security cam footage Gomez hadn’t looked to be carrying anything, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t armed. From where she was standing at the rear left of the auditorium she had time to register a pale and hairy couple going hard at it on the screen before switching her attention to the isolated silhouettes of men dotted about across the hundred or so mostly empty seats in front of her.

‘Police!’ she shouted as loudly as she could. ‘Everybody stay where you are!’

At that exact moment the movie began to slow down, the slaps and groans of pleasure sank in pitch and intensity, as though the people involved had suddenly lost interest. But, strangely, there was no reaction from the audience. There were no groans of displeasure, no cries of frustration and anger. But in the dark two seconds between the projector being turned off and the overhead lights going on she spotted movement. A rectangle of light slid into the room to the right of the screen. A door opening. A green EMERGENCY EXIT sign above it. Then closing.

Kay responded immediately. She ran down the stairs, with Hanson right behind her. She crossed between the front row and the screen, past a man still struggling to button up his pants, pushed open the emergency exit and tumbled out into daylight.

She caught a glimpse of a back disappearing round the corner of a house. Took up pursuit. Round the corner, into an alley, round another corner, another glimpse of the same disappearing back. Ran. Ran like she used to in the alleyways around their old house in Englewood. Running from all the other kids. Running to school and back. Running like she did that night when she was eleven years old and her father had broken into the house to steal their money, but she’d been quicker, taken her mother’s money from under the bed and jumped out the window, running, her father running after her. Running as fast as she could but still she could feel how, like some lurching zombie, he was gaining on her. And when they came to the dog yard at the back of the Jenkins house he was right behind. She could feel his fingers clutching at the soles of her shoes as she swung up and over the wire-net fence that was luckily only six feet high or she wouldn’t have made it, because as strong as her legs were, her arms were thin and weak. But she did make it, and as she landed on the other side the dog, which looked like a cross between a pit bull and an Alsatian, came charging out of its doghouse, salivating and snarling. It leapt at the intruder with teeth bared. Not at her, who so often called in on her way home from school and gave it something from her lunch box, but at the wire fence and the man on the other side, the one threatening her. She saw her father back off to a safe distance. And through the furious barking of the dog she heard a stream of curses she tried to blank out, because even though she knew he was half crazy from the need for a fix and she hated him, the words were like acid, they burnt through her skin and could not be washed away. There they stood, daughter and father, one on each side of the face, with another man’s dog between them. She was crying. She heard him change his tune and start to beg for money, and when that didn’t work he gave up and started crying. Lights went on in the Jenkins house, and he turned and ran off. The strange thing was that later, when she looked back over her childhood, she couldn’t remember a time when she had ever felt closer to her father than she had that night, when they stood there face-to-face, each with their own despair.

Kay had once again lost sight of the running back ahead of her, but she heard a crack. The sound of a man jumping up at a wooden fence. She cleared the corner, saw sure enough there was a wooden fence surrounding a property and caught a glimpse of a pair of hands as they disappeared over on the other side. She adjusted her stride and jumped. Got hold of the top of the fence with the tips of her fingers and tried to pull herself up but lost her grip and fell back down. As she scrambled to her feet she heard another crack a little way off. Another fence. Swearing. Must be a higher fence. Olav Hanson ran up, his face contorted.

‘He can’t get over the next fence,’ said Kay. ‘If we can get over this, we’ve got him! Give me a leg up.’

‘Easier if I take him,’ said Hanson. He pushed his gun back into the shoulder holster, measured his six foot four up against the fence, gripped the top and tried to jump. He scarcely even left the ground. With a groan of pain he collapsed against the planks.

‘Goddamn knee,’ he hissed between clenched teeth. He sounded so desperate that for an instant Kay almost felt sorry for him. She caught sight of a frail-looking fruit crate next to the wall of the house, tipped out the plant pots inside it then stood it, long side up, against the fence.

‘I’ve got this!’ said Hanson. He pushed Kay aside and stepped up onto the box. It brought him so high Kay realised he could see over the top to the other side. Abruptly the box began to creak and sway.

‘Steady it!’ Hanson shouted to Kay as he pulled out his pistol.

‘OK, but get the hell over!’

‘Keep it steady! He’s got a gun!’

As Kay bent and put her weight against the crate she heard Hanson fire three shots in quick succession.

‘Don’t shoot!’ came a voice from the other side. ‘In the name of God, don’t shoot!’

Kay stood back from the crate and gave it a kick. Over it went, Hanson with it.

‘What the hell?’ he growled as he lay on the ground.

Kay righted the crate and climbed onto it. On the other side was a yard, boxed in on all sides. She gripped the top, swung herself over, and got down on all fours, like a cat. Pulled her gun and shouted ‘Police’ twice, then walked toward the trembling man who lay hunched up against the wooden fence, directly beneath a piece of Black Wolves graffiti. Both arms were up and protecting his head.

‘Police!’ Kay repeated, keeping the gun on him. ‘Show me your hands! Now!’

The man raised his arms above his head as though in prayer, but his head was still turned in toward his body.

‘Let me see your face!’ Kay stopped six feet from the man, far enough away that she’d have time to shoot him if he attacked, close enough to be sure she couldn’t miss.

The man looked up. Tears rolled down his cheeks. ‘Please!’ he sobbed. ‘Have mercy, and the Lord shall have mercy on you!’

Kay stared. She recognised him immediately, even though she’d only seen the face on the TV screen and in pictures. She cursed quietly, pulled out her phone and called the number she’d been given in the police car. The call was picked up at once:

‘Fortune.’

‘Myers here. You still in control at the theatre?’

‘Yep.’

‘OK. Don’t let anyone leave, you hear me?’

‘You didn’t get him?’

‘Oh yeah.’ She drew a breath. ‘But it isn’t him.’

‘Not Gomez?’

‘No, it’s...’ She looked at the face again. White man, fifties, boyish quiff, big glasses, sort of shiny suit. Not that she saw too many TV evangelist shows, but this face was almost as well known as Jim Bakker. ‘Someone else. We’ll be right back.’

She squatted down in front of the man. ‘Will I find a gun if I search you?’

The man shook his head.

‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘But disobeying police orders during a raid in connection with an illegal movie show is an indictable offence, you do know that? Or don’t you, pastor?’

The man’s Adam’s apple shot up and down and he looked terrified. But when he opened his mouth to speak the words poured out of him.

‘We are all sinners, sister. But Jesus Christ Our Lord has given us the power and the mercy in our hearts to forgive. I have been put here on earth to do God’s work. Like Jesus Christ Our Saviour, I go to sinners in the very places where they sin.’ It was the same smarmy, chanting, almost hypnotic voice that disgusted her so much on the TV. ‘But we know that not everyone out there will realise and understand this. So I beseech you to let me go and not to mention my name to the er... media, so that I may continue my work in the service of God. And I will remember the names of you two good citizens in my prayers and in my conversations with Our Lord this evening. And He will open the doors to paradise for you.’

‘Thanks, but I’m not a believer, pastor.’

‘N-not? I understand. Then how about a more tangible contribution to the work you’re doing? Our Church has means.’

Kay looked at the bullet holes in the wooden fence a few inches above where the pastor was now lying curled up.

‘I suggest instead a mutually acceptable agreement,’ she said. ‘You never mention to anyone about how we fired a couple of shots at a fugitive we had reason to believe was armed, and we say nothing about you being found at a jack-off movie theatre. How does that sound?’

The TV preacher winked at her, and she could see his business calculator had already weighed up the offer.

‘Deal,’ he said and held up his right hand.

Kay made a face. Guessing the images that instinctively passed through her head, he withdrew it and offered her his left instead. She took it and hauled him up onto his feet.

Kay and Olav Hanson stood in front of the Rialto and watched the preacher drive off in a taxi.

‘He wasn’t armed,’ said Kay.

‘No?’ said Hanson. ‘He pointed something in my direction, but the sun was in my eyes. Anyway, they were just warning shots.’

Kay thought about those holes in the fence. But now wasn’t the time to argue about it, they had more important things to do. When Kay returned to the theatre she found Fortune standing in front of the screen. He took his index finger away from his earpiece when he saw her.

‘The video centre hasn’t come up with any images of Gomez on any cameras after he came in here.’

‘OK,’ said Kay. She looked out across the rows of seats. Fifteen to twenty men, all seated in such a way as to maximise the distance between them, the same way she’d heard men automatically do at the urinal trough or round the poker table. ‘Everyone still sitting in the same seats?’

‘Yep,’ said Fortune.

The eyes of the men — all of them were men — were fixed on the floor, the walls, or their phones and watches. Only one met her gaze, a big black man in the second row from the back wearing a red bowler hat and smiling, as though he was enjoying himself. Maybe it was stereotyping, but her first thought was pimp. She made her way up to the back row where a thin white man sat. He was wearing a flat cap and looked like a family man. Another stereotype, she thought.

‘Excuse me, sir, but did you see anyone come in just before we did? I mean a maximum of five minutes before we did?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No one.’

‘If someone had, you would have seen it, right?’ She nodded toward the door leading to the foyer.

‘That’s correct,’ said the man. He seemed more curious than actually anxious, as though he was still a spectator, which of course he was. Kay wondered what it was that caused men to gather — and yet not gather — in this way.

‘What’s in there?’ she asked and pointed to the paper bag on the seat next to him.

‘It’s my daughter’s birthday today.’ The man smiled as he held up the bag. Kay recognised the logo of the toy store — a little boy wearing a mushroom as a hat. ‘She wants a Marlin’s princess dress that makes you invisible to grown-ups.’

Kay looked at the bag. She was back in Englewood. It was her twelfth birthday, and her father was kneeling at the foot of the steps down to the street. His eyes were crazed, he was badly strung-out. He told her he had a present for her and she had to go with him to the place where he was keeping it. He pointed to a car waiting on the other side of the road. She saw the man sitting in the car. And she did what she was best at doing: she ran. Sometimes she wondered if she’d ever stopped running.

‘Happy birthday then,’ said Kay. Then she cleared her throat and called over to Fortune. ‘OK, they can go!’

‘Excuse me,’ came a voice from one of the seats, ‘but actually we paid to see this movie and it isn’t finished.’

Kay didn’t respond, she just hurried out through the door to the foyer. She stopped directly outside and heard, before the door closed, Fortune’s voice:

‘Sorry for the interruption, folks. Kill the lights and roll the film!’

Kay stared at the door to the men’s room that was next to the entrance to the auditorium. She had no reason to suppose the woman in the ticket booth had been lying, but it would have been impossible from her position to see which of the doors Gomez had gone through.

Hanson appeared beside Kay.

‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.

‘I’m thinking he went in here,’ she said, pointing at the door to the men’s room. ‘Can you check if it’s empty?’

Hanson went in, reappeared a couple of seconds later and beckoned to her. She went in. A weak trickle of water dribbled down the urinal and the mirror on the wall was cracked. But the air inside was fresher than she had expected. She looked up and saw why. A window high up at the back was wide open. She groaned.

‘Aha,’ said Hanson, who was now obviously seeing the open window for the first time.

‘What’s outside?’ she asked.

Hanson stretched up on tiptoes and peered out. ‘An alleyway.’

‘Shit!’ Kay slapped a hand against the wall and made a mental note to wash it first chance she got. ‘That’s why none of the cameras picked him up. He’s using backstreets, he might have got all the way down to the river by now without being seen. He’s playing with us. Why is he playing with us, Hanson?’

Her blond-haired colleague looked at her like he was giving the matter some thought. Then he said: ‘Maybe he... likes to play?’

Kay closed her eyes. She needed someone else. She needed Bob Oz. But when she opened them again it was still Olav Hanson standing there.

They couldn’t see me. But I could see, hear and imagine them. How they were all still chasing around like headless chickens after the suddenly so famous Tomás Gomez. I had made it from the movie theatre down to the riverbank, and was now sitting there, my heart pounding in my chest, watching the water flow. Like time, it took everything away with it. That ought to have brought some comfort. Like those old words of wisdom, ‘This too shall pass.’ But it didn’t. Sooner or later, the same atoms in the molecules of water that ran by here yesterday would return, and history would repeat itself, it was just a matter of time. I took the hypodermic out of my breast pocket. Thought about how he jerked when he felt the prick, how he turned and stared at the seat back. Guess he must have thought a spring inside the seat had gone. I pressed the plunger down so what was left of it arced out into the water. For water it was, and unto water shall it return.