Like to Die Read online

  “I know some people,” I said.

  Hell yes, you know some people. Bobby in Major Crimes. Harry in the FBI. Chad in the ATF. You know agents who work for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. And cops in the Minneapolis Police Department. You know the assistant U.S. attorney, for God’s sake. Call them.

  “When are you supposed to deliver the heroin?” I asked.

  “Tuesday, as usual,” Randy said.

  “Why Tuesday? Why not tonight? Why not sometime over the weekend?”

  “I don’t know. That’s just the way Reyes does things.”

  “That gives us some time, at least.”

  To do what?

  “Just so you know,” I said. “Whatever happens, there will be no more deliveries. None. You are officially out of the drug trafficking business. If you contact these people in any way, shape, or form from this moment forward, I’ll send you over. Do you know what I mean by that?”

  “You’ll tell the police on me.”

  “I might do it anyway. If I can’t figure out a way to get Erin and you out of this mess by Tuesday when Reyes expects his drugs, we’ll be forced to contact the cops to protect you, protect Erin from them. You’ll have to tell them your story and let them take it from there. Do you understand?”

  “I understand, but no. I won’t do that.”

  “Won’t do what?”

  “Tell them about—I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “Well, then we’ll just show them the film of you planting the bomb in Erin’s truck. That’s a federal crime, by the way. There’s no parole for federal crimes. Erin was right. You could get a twenty-year jolt in prison, not jail, and you’ll serve every damned day, so how ’bout it? Do you want to cooperate or not?”

  “Please…”

  “It’s time for you to grow up, Randy. It’s time for you to man up.” I pointed at Alice, who was watching her boyfriend with a mixture of encouragement and hope. “Be the person she needs you to be.”

  Randy thought about it for a moment. “I’ll try,” he said. He was smiling at Alice when he said it. I wasn’t sure she believed him. I knew I didn’t. ’Course, the real question was whether he believed himself.

  “Give me your key,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Your key to the Salsa Girl building. I need it.”

  Randy stood. He fished his keys out of his pocket and took one of them off the chain. He gave it to me.

  “McKenzie?” Alice’s voice was low and calm. For a moment, she reminded me of her boss. “Do you have a plan?”

  I tossed the key into the air and caught it.

  “First do no harm,” I said.

  * * *

  I excused myself from the apartment. Alice followed me outside to where my Mustang was parked. She hugged herself against the April chill.

  “This is all my fault,” Alice said.

  “None of this is your fault.”

  “McKenzie, do you need to tell Erin about this?”

  “About Randy? Yes, I think so.”

  “Do you need to tell her about me? About what I did?”

  “What did you do, sweetie?”

  “I lied to her. Erin asked me not to tell anyone about Central Valley International, and I promised her I wouldn’t, but I did. I told Randy.”

  “Why did you tell Randy?”

  “Because we … we started seeing each other just before Thanksgiving. We kept it a secret; Randy said that Erin might not like it. He’s older than I am and charming. He wasn’t like the person in my apartment. I had never met the person in my apartment until today. He cared about me, too. McKenzie, he did. I told you, I started to tell you about my prom, about the night after my prom. McKenzie, there hadn’t been anyone else between him and Randy. I was never confident enough to be with anyone else. My mother—I don’t want to blame my mother. I blame me. But McKenzie, Erin … I never meant to hurt Erin. She’s the best friend I’ve ever had. More than a friend. She taught me … I would never have had the nerve to be with Randy if it wasn’t for Erin. Please don’t tell her.”

  “I won’t, but I think eventually you will. You’re not the kind of girl who can carry something like this around with her. Sooner or later you’ll blurt it out because that’s the way you’re wired.”

  “No, I won’t. I’d be too afraid.”

  “You’re a good person, Alice.” I gestured at the apartment building. “Don’t let that jerk turn you into something you’re not.”

  “I don’t know what to do, McKenzie. Tell me what to do.”

  Kick him to the curb, my inner voice said.

  “All I know is that the guy up in your apartment has nothing to give you, and he’ll squander whatever you give to him.”

  I unlocked my car door and slipped inside. I rolled down the window. Alice continued to stand there, staring at her apartment building.

  “For whatever it’s worth,” I said, “I’m on your side. I’d bet quite a bit that Salsa Girl is, too.”

  Alice nodded her head as if she believed me.

  * * *

  I left Alice standing in the parking lot of her apartment building. My intention was to find Erin, either at Salsa Girl or at her home in Prospect Park. I didn’t think the kind of bad news I had was something that should be delivered over a cell phone. When I reached the intersection, though, I hesitated.

  Did I really want to disturb her nap? Did I really want to ruin her date with Ian?

  You’re kidding, right? my inner voice answered.

  Besides, what was I going to tell her?

  The truth.

  I’ll need to tell her everything eventually, but why now? Besides, as a wise man once said, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.

  Call the cops, call Bobby Dunston—how’s that for a solution?

  Erin might choose that answer, too, I decided. But Alice was right; it could ruin everything she’d worked for. Besides, I had an idea that would keep her out of it. If it worked, great. If not, it would be on me and not her.

  Are you sure about this?

  I turned right.

  * * *

  I drove to Salsa Girl Salsa and parked on Pelham Boulevard where I knew the cameras couldn’t spot me. It was well past three in the afternoon, and the parking lot was empty. I sat watching the place for ten minutes anyway.

  Eventually I popped the trunk and got out of the Mustang. Inside the trunk was a hoodie with the logo of the Minnesota Wild hockey team. I removed my sling, put on the hoodie, and pulled the hood up over my head. I walked a big circle around the building so the cameras wouldn’t see me until I approached the loading dock. I knew Randy’s key worked on the door next to the loading dock because I had seen him use it earlier in the week. I kept my head low so the cameras would record my figure but not my face.

  I unlocked the door and stepped inside. I knew the inside cameras could now see me, so I kept my head down as I made my way to the prep room. Just inside the prep room was a shelf. On the shelf was the box that Hector Lozano had placed there. I picked it up. It was heavier than I had expected, and pain shot through my shoulder. I pretended it didn’t hurt.

  I retraced my steps as I carried the box out of Salsa Girl, again keeping my head down. I stepped onto the loading dock and took the stairs to the parking lot.

  Now what, I asked myself. I didn’t want the drugs found on me any more than I wanted them found in Salsa Girl. The bombed-out truck was sitting in the corner of the parking lot, yellow police tape still surrounding it.

  Why not, I decided. I carried the box to the truck. I knew the cameras were now filming my back. I ducked beneath the yellow crime scene tape and moved to the wreck. I set the box down and opened it. The heroin was in the bottom of the box beneath the jalapeños, bell peppers, and tomatoes. It was sealed inside four reusable, resealable plastic bags. I bounced one in my hand and guessed its weight at a couple of pounds. Make that a kilogram since, unlike America, Mexico was on the metric system. A key equaled a thousand
grams of heroin with a street value of approximately fifteen to twenty dollars a gram depending on how it was cut. The content of the bags was white, not brown or black, which meant the heroin was high grade. I was sure it went for top dollar. Multiplying four kilograms by $20, I estimated the shipment was worth approximately $80,000. That’s $80,000 a week, every week. Four million a year plus change. Twenty million bucks’ worth of heroin sold on the streets of the Twin Cities since Randy started five years ago. Unless … I wondered if, like Salsa Girl’s, Reyes’s shipments increased or decreased according to demand. People who don’t use drugs call marijuana dope. People who smoke grass call heroin dope. How much dope did America use on Super Bowl Sunday, I wondered.

  I returned the heroin to the box, repacked the vegetables, and sealed it. I shoved the box behind the burned-out tire and stood back. You couldn’t see it unless you were looking for it, and I doubted the truck would be moved anytime soon; both the feds and cops were reluctant to disturb even old crime scenes.

  I left the wreck and moved in a straight line until I knew I was outside the range of the cameras. I pulled down the hoodie and pulled out Randy’s burn phone. There was only one number attached to it. I clicked on the number and pressed CALL.

  A man answered. He spoke in a vaguely Hispanic accent. “What?” he said.

  “Let me speak to Alejandro Reyes.”

  He hesitated, probably realizing that I wasn’t Randy.

  “Who?” he said. “You sure you got the right number?”

  “I don’t have time for this. Tell your boss that Nick Dyson called. Tell him that I just jacked his heroin shipment.”

  “You did what?”

  “Four keys separated into baggies. Tell him I’ll call later to ask what he wants me to do with it.”

  “Wait.”

  I ended the call and deactivated the phone. On the way to the condominium I nearly stopped the car on the Franklin Avenue Bridge and tossed the cell into the Mississippi River but decided, Where’s the fun in that?

  TEN

  There really was a career criminal named Nicholas Dyson. If you surf the right websites, you’ll discover that he specialized in robbing banks, jacking armored cars, and burglarizing the occasional jewelry store. What those files will not tell you, though, is that Dyson is currently doing time in the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. And what they absolutely will not tell you is that the photographs that accompany each of the files are not of him but of, well, me. In one I’m clean-shaven; in the others I’m wearing long hair and a scraggly beard.

  What happened, a couple of years back I was coerced by both the FBI and the ATF into going undercover as Dyson to search for weapons along the Canadian border that had been stolen from the U.S. government during a botched sting. The operation was off the books. The Feds were desperate to avoid the embarrassment of public disclosure, which is why they wanted a civilian to take it on, a civilian that could later be disavowed if things went sideways—you know, like in the Mission: Impossible movies. That’s how I met Assistant U.S. Attorney James R. Finnegan and why he now owed me a huge favor that I had been hoarding ever since. Although the case had long been closed and forgotten, the Feds neglected to update the files or take down the pictures. I never said anything about it because I figured there were times when a fellow might want to pretend to be someone else. In fact, I had used the Dyson disguise with some success just fourteen months ago.

  I unlocked the door to my condo. Nina wasn’t home; no surprise there. It was Friday, and Fridays were as big at Rickie’s as they were at Salsa Girl.

  I swung open the door that led to my secret room and stepped inside. I exchanged my IDs for those with Nick Dyson’s name, replaced the SIG Sauer with an unregistered nine-millimeter Taurus, and counted out the $40,000 before shoving the cash into a small soft-sided gym bag. I grabbed one of my burn phones and punched in a number. I recognized the voice that answered my call; he recognized mine.

  “You busy?” I said.

  “Naw, man. Not for you.”

  “How ’bout for Nick Dyson?”

  “Fuck.”

  “Is Herzy around?”

  “I’m lookin’ right at ’im.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  * * *

  Thaddeus Coleman, aka Chopper, was an entrepreneur. When I first met him he was running a small but lucrative stable of girls around Selby and Western, a neighborhood in St. Paul that used to be rich with prostitution until patrons became bored with it, as they eventually do with any so-called trendy hotspot, and moved elsewhere. Afterward, he moved to Fuller and Farrington and dealt drugs. Sometimes he sold the real thing; sometimes he passed laundry soap and Alka-Seltzer tablets crushed to resemble rock cocaine to the white suburban kids who drove up in Mommy and Daddy’s SUV. I busted him for that—representing and selling a substance as a drug, whether it is or not, is a felony—only the judge threw the case out. I blamed the prosecutor.

  The court might have been lenient with Coleman, but the Red Dragons not so much. They objected to his activities and pumped two rounds into his spine as a way to express their displeasure. I’m the one that scooped him off the sidewalk and got him the medical attention that saved his life. We’ve been friends ever since, even though six weeks after he was shot, Coleman wheeled himself out of the hospital in a stolen chair. A couple of days later, we discovered the bodies of three Red Dragons under the swings at a park near the St. Paul College of Technology. We never did find out who did the deed, although the ME reported that the bullet holes had an upward trajectory as if the Dragons were shot by someone who was sitting down.

  It was the wheelchair, which Coleman drove with the reckless dexterity of a dirt-track biker, that earned him the nickname Chopper. As Chopper he ran a crew of shoplifters that operated in the Twin Cities malls until the security guards began greeting him by name. Later, he smuggled name-brand cigarettes out of Kentucky and sold them to independent convenience stores, making a hefty profit by dodging the state’s cigarette tax. Now he was involved in the less criminal if not less reprehensible business of ticket-scalping, working out of a small office in a converted warehouse with a view of Target Field, where the Twins played baseball.

  I carried the gym bag into his office. He smiled at me from the other side of his desk. There was a computer on the desk and half a dozen more arrayed on tables along the wall. Chopper would have associates sitting at every terminal to grab concert and sports tickets when they became available online. Or he would use bots and other computer gadgetry to circumvent security systems to buy bundles of the best seats. Or he would hire guys to stand in line at the on-site ticket booths. Or he would tap insiders who had access to the events. Or, usually, all four simultaneously. That’s why he could get $700–$850 for tickets with a face value of $39–$147 for the Adele concert at the Xcel Energy Center.

  I asked him about that once.

  “Face value—what does that mean?” Chopper said. “It’s just an arbitrary number. What we do, we let the fan dictate the market price. You know, if people refused to pay what I charge, I’d have to charge less. Am I right? It’s called capitalism, the backbone of America.”

  He had me there.

  “McKenzie, you sonuvabitch,” Chopper said.

  He rolled his chair out from behind the desk and greeted me in the center of the office. We engaged in an elaborate handshake dance that didn’t end until I messed up. Chopper laughed when I did. Not Herzog. He just looked at me and shook his head like he felt sorry for me.

  “Herzy,” I said.

  “Fuckin’ McKenzie,” he said.

  “Good to see you, too, man.”

  Herzog was sitting in a chair along the wall, the largest man I had ever met in person; you could roller-skate on him. He was also the most dangerous. He had done time for multiple counts of manslaughter, assault, aggravated robbery, and weapons charges. He’d been out on parole for the past three years, with two more to go, and had been wor
king for Chopper ever since they released him from the halfway house.

  He tolerated me because we both liked old movies and listened to jazz, and because I had arranged through Nina to get him and his date the table closest to the stage when Cécile McLorin Salvant sang at Rickie’s.

  “What you doin’ here?” he asked.

  “I thought I’d take you guys to dinner. Pick a spot. Any spot.”

  “Dinner,” Chopper said. “Dinner means you want somethin’.”

  “What are you talking about? We’re old friends. Can’t a man take his friends to dinner?”

  “You maybe,” Herzog said. “But Dyson? Chop said you mentioned Dyson.”

  “I did.”

  “Last time I saw Dyson people was shot.”

  “Yes, but neither you nor I did the shooting, so…”

  “Don’t matter. I told you before, McKenzie, do I have t’ tell you again? I ain’t doin’ nothing that’ll break my parole. I ain’t hurtin’ nobody no more.”

  “There’s a few bucks in it.”

  “I’m doin’ just fine workin’ for Chopper.”

  I turned toward Chopper. He was smiling.

  “You was the one who got all hot and bothered when I took the man on,” he said. “A stone killer, you called him. Now you tryin’ to git him to go back to the life?”

  “I ain’t doin’ it,” Herzog said. “If it wasn’t that I like your girlfriend, I’d kick your ass outta here.”

  “You guys have me all wrong. I’m not looking to hurt anyone. I’m just trying to avoid getting hurt myself.”

  “Looks like you already there,” Chopper said. “What’s with the sling?”

  “That’s part of the story.”

  “You on another one of them fucking crusades, ain’t ya?” Herzog said. “Gonna save the world from itself.”

  “There’s this girl—”

  “Shit. That’s exactly what you said the last time.”

  I explained, making Salsa Girl sound a lot more innocent and vulnerable than she really was, ramping up Randy Bignell-Sax’s duplicity, exaggerating both the explosion and my injury, and tossing in Alice’s story of love and betrayal for good measure. The thing about Herzog, and Chopper, too, for that matter, is that despite their career paths, they both have kind hearts.