Also by Jo Nesbo
The Bat
Cockroaches
The Redbreast Nemesis
The Devil’s Star
The Redeemer
The Snowman
The Leopard Phantom Police
The Thirst Knife
Killing Moon
THRILLERS
Headhunters
The Son
Blood on Snow
Midnight Sun
Macbeth
The Kingdom
The Night House
Blood Ties
The Jealousy Man
Translated from the Norwegian by Robert Ferguson
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First published by Harvill Secker in 2025
First published in Norway by H. Aschehoug & Co. (W. Nygaard), Oslo, in 2025 with the title Minnesota
Copyright © Jo Nesbo 2025
Published by agreement with Salomonsson Agency English translation copyright © Robert Ferguson 2025
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‘A ND WHAT IS THE P u RPOSE of your visit, Mr Holger Rudi?’
The CBP officer looks at me without interest as he scratches his upper arm just below the emblem of the US Customs and Border Protection service. His eyes are tired.
‘Research,’ I answer.
‘And what do you intend to research?’
I’ve just flown from Oslo to Minneapolis via Reykjavik, a sevenhour time difference, and my body is telling me I should have been in bed long ago, so instead of following my instinct to reply ‘murder’ and end up in an interrogation room I tell him that I’m writing a novel about a policeman with Norwegian heritage.
‘So you’re a writer?’
I feel like telling him I’m a taxidermist. I stuff things. That I’m here looking to clothe a character, someone in a story I already
have clear in my mind. It’s an image that has haunted me these past few months, a title I like to give myself. But as I say, I’m tired.
‘Yes,’ I reply.
‘Interesting. As it happens I was baptised in the Norwegian Lutheran Memorial Church.’
‘Really?’
‘We’re all over Minnesota.’ The CBP officer chuckles as he hands me my Norwegian passport.
On the taxi ride into the city I can see at once that everything has changed. New roads and buildings that weren’t here last time I was in Minneapolis eight years ago. The downtown skyline looms up ahead of us as we turn off the freeway. Between the skyscrapers I see the afternoon sunlight reflecting off the angles of a gigantic structure.
‘What’s that glass thing?’ I ask the driver.
‘That? It’s the US Bank Stadium. That’s where the Vikings play.’
‘Wow.’
‘You interested in football?’
I shrug. ‘I’ve seen the Vikings play. At the old stadium. Maybe I’ll get myself a ticket.’
‘Good luck with that.’
‘Good luck?’
The driver, a black man who looks to be in his fifties, glances at me in the rear-view mirror through his almond-shaped glasses.
‘Very hard to get hold of. I was offered a ticket yesterday, very ordinary ticket, they wanted 350 dollars.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, really. A football game in the old days used to be
something you could take your kids to. Now it’s like everything else in this country. For rich folk only.’
I look out of the window. When we used to visit my uncle and aunt we rarely went downtown. Anything we wanted we bought at the corner store or else in the Southdale Mall. Even so, I’m struck by how quiet it seems, how few people there are about. Eight years ago – when my cousin took me to a rooftop restaurant on Hennepin Avenue – the streets were full of bustling life. Especially around the next avenue we cross, Nicollet Mall.
‘Where is everybody?’ I ask.
‘The people, you mean?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Aw, things haven’t been the same since all that stuff happened.’
All that stuff happened. For me, all that stuff happened means the murders six years ago; but for him and for everybody else in Minneapolis it means the murder of George Floyd two years back. Just on the drive in from the airport we’ve passed three murals depicting the black man who was killed by the Minneapolis police.
‘That’s a long time ago,’ I say.
‘Don’t feel like it,’ says the driver. ‘Some people thought maybe it would bring the people of this city together. Everyone against the racist police, right? But my view is, it tore this town apart. It came right at the same time as the pandemic, so it was what you might call a perfect storm . . .’
We pull up in front of the Hilton, and I pay cash and give him a good tip. Before he leaves I say I need someone to drive me around the city and ask if he’s interested. We agree on an hourly rate, and he gives me his phone number and says I can call him when I’m ready.
There are only a few people in the hotel’s large lobby area and the restaurant. Behind the paper face mask the receptionist probably gives me a smile and I hand her my passport. When she notes that I’m booked in for more than a week she informs me that the room will only be cleaned every fifth day. Then she gives me the keycard to room 2406, almost at the top of the hotel, as requested.
‘Nosebleed floor?’ A man in a cowboy hat smiles at me as I press 24. He says it in that kind of cool and jokey but all the same friendly way that I’ve only ever noticed in Americans and people from the far north of Norway. I try to think of an equally cool comeback, but I’m from the south of Norway. So instead I work on trying to even out the pressure in my ears.
The bed is big and soft and I fall asleep at once.
When I wake up I need to go to the bathroom. As I don’t want to wake myself up too much I don’t switch on the light. I can just glimpse the toilet bowl in the dark as I start to sit down and find myself almost falling backward before my rear end lands safely on the ring of the plastic seat. I’d forgotten that toilets in the USA are built lower than in Norway. And at the same instant I recall how, when I was a kid, that made me think of America as a place where they were more fond of children. That, and all those TV channels with cartoons and series for kids, all those endless metres of shelves with sweets in Southdale, the amusement park Valleyfair, where my uncle always had some new attraction to show us when we arrived for our summer holiday. This was a wonderfully childlike country, I thought. In short: I loved America. And even though I gradually came to understand that it wasn’t perfect, I understood too that I would love it for the rest of my life.
It’s still dark outside when I next wake up. I get up, call the taxi driver’s number and ask him to meet me at Nicollet Avenue by South 10th Street, and then leave the hotel. Dawn is already breaking over the twin city of Saint Paul on the other bank of the Mississippi. On the sidewalk I pass a homeless man asleep with his body pressed up against the facade of a skyscraper bearing the logo of one of the USA’s biggest banks, as though he thinks there might be some warmth for him there. A police car is parked on Nicollet, but the windows are smoked and I can’t see whether anyone is sitting inside. After about fifteen minutes my taxi pulls up next to the sidewalk. I climb into the back seat.
‘First let’s go to Jordan.’
The driver looks at me in the mirror. ‘The town?’
‘No. The neighbourhood.’
I can see he’s reluctant.
‘Something wrong?’
‘No, sir. But if you wanna score dope then you best get yourself another car.’
‘No, that’s not it. I want to see the projects.’
‘In Jordan? They don’t exist no more, sir.’
‘No?’
‘Pulled down the last one five or six years ago.’
‘Then that’s where we’re going.’
We glide through a city still sleeping. You have to study the details to find out what kind of neighbourhood you’re passing through, whether it’s affluent or poor. If the lawns in front of the small houses are cut, if there’s garbage lying around, what makes of car are parked along the roadside.
We drive by a 24/7 Winner Gas station. Four black youths watch as we go by.
‘Is that where people score their dope now?’ I ask.
The driver doesn’t reply. A few blocks later he stops.
‘Here,’ he says. ‘This is where they stood. The last tower blocks in Jordan.’
I see a sign – NO GUNS PERMITTED BEYOND THIS POINT – and behind it a low, newish-looking building. It’s an elementary school. In the half- dark two squirrels dart about in nervous, jerky sprints across the lawns, their big bushy tails following with a strange softness.
And what is the purpose of your visit, Mr Holger Rudi?
The purpose is to try to get inside the head of a killer. To retrace the steps from that time back in 2016. It’s for a book. I’ve already made a start on it. The working title is The Minneapolis Avenger. I expect the publisher will have an opinion on that, although they might be less sure exactly how to market it. True crime is the hottest genre in the book market right now. People just can’t get enough of stories about bloody and preferably spectacular murders – there’s the air of mystery, unexpected turns of events, villains and heroes on both sides of the law, and, if possible, an uncertain denouement that leaves plenty of room for wide-ranging conspiracy theories. My book will have all of these, apart from the last. The answers are all there, there’s no question about where the guilt lies. What remains is the business of trying to understand how and why what happened did happen. And to achieve this I need to get inside not only the killer’s head but the heads of all the players in this story. Use everything I already know plus a bit of my own imagination to see the world, see the sites where it all happened, see it all played out through their eyes. Find the human in among all the inhuman. Force the reader – and myself – to ask the question: could that have been me?
I’m giving these field studies eight days, so I don’t have all that much time. I need to make a start. And that means starting with the guy who was where I am now, also at dawn, on that morning six years ago.
I close my eyes and look. I can see the tower blocks rising up from the ground. Blocking out the sky. There, on the sixth floor, is an open window. I fly up there. Right now I’m him. I look out. I can see in all directions. Height means overview.
T HE HEI g HT g A v E PERSPE c TI v E . F OR a while I could be a dispassionate observer, or at least pretend I was. Pass what I felt to be an objective judgement on society, human beings and their lives down there. I’d been sitting at that sixth-floor window since seven o’clock looking down on that antheap. At the people emerging from the doors of the apartments of the Jordan projects. It was Tuesday morning. Eleven minutes past eight. I saw cars that pulled away from the kerbside, and the parking lots behind the blocks. The white smoke from the exhausts. Yellow school buses, picking up kids – bars on the windows, like mobile jails, like some kind of prelude to the lives that lay ahead of them. Other buses that ferried people to work. Some to the factories, most to the service industries, at the bottom level. But here at the Jordan projects there were plenty of people who didn’t have
school or a job to go to, and a lot of them were still in bed. Some lay staring up at the ceiling, having lost any of the hope that came with the country’s first black president eight years ago but who, in three months’ time, would be leaving the White House, along with everything else in the removal van. So they lay there and tried to come up with an answer to the question that never really went away: Why? Why get up?
One of those who had found a reason emerged from the door now. An interesting feature at Jordan was the way the entrances opened inward, not outward. People said it was because it was harder to break in with the crack protected by the frame, and because in Jordan you were in more danger of being killed during a break-in than you were of being burnt to death inside your apartment, even though Jordan had, statistically, more arson attacks than anywhere else in all Minneapolis.
Thirteen past eight. A pale autumn sun struggled to penetrate the morning haze. I put my eye to the gunsight and adjusted the cross hairs until they focused on the door to Block 3. Yesterday he emerged from that door at exactly 08.16. Yesterday was Monday, today was Tuesday; people are creatures of habit and there was no reason to suppose he wouldn’t be heading out to work at about the same time today. And yet, I’d been sitting there since seven o’clock. After all, he was self- employed, so maybe he gave himself a bit of a lie-in on Mondays, but left home earlier on every other weekday.
I rubbed my hands together. There was a frost last night and a cold wind blew in between the drapes. I had taped them to the glass, so they wouldn’t blow about and disturb my aim. I had seen the pushers take their places on the street corners, seen the first deals made. Most of the customers were black, a few
Latinos, but a few cars pulled up with white hands sticking out the windows. Quarter past eight. I inhaled the harsh odour of cooking oil, garlic and cigarette smoke. I’d scrubbed this oneroom apartment for the last time, but the stink from that old wallpaper was still there. It’ll still be there when they pull this block down in a little while.
Sixteen past eight. My thighs had started to ache. I squatted back on my heels again to relieve them. The position was not optimal. I knelt on the couch, which I had pulled over to the window. I leaned the barrel against a chair back. A distance of 330 yards. A little further than ideal, particularly with those gusts of wind. Just one shot to the head and get it over with would be best. But that was too risky, I could miss and spoil the whole thing. So the plan was first a shot to the chest, to bring him down, then reload and give him the kill-shot. The rifle was an M24. I’d bought it six days ago for nineteen hundred dollars. Obviously, I didn’t buy it from a gun store, I bought it from a local dealer who used front men, mostly junkies with no criminal record who needed money quick. The dealer sent them into some ‘easy’ gun store, some place where the owner didn’t ask a lot of questions, even though the whole business reeked of a front man, he just checked the application up against the register, and then calmly sold twenty potential murder weapons to some dope fiend who didn’t know one end of a gun from the other. The dealer paid the junkie at most twenty dollars for each weapon, then sold them on for one and a half times the price in the store. His name was Dante, a fat peacock of a man, born and raised in the country outside Minneapolis but he dressed like an Italian, ate Italian and talked with a fake Italian accent. And, of course, cheated like an Italian in the business he ran out of a garage just two blocks
away from here. His customers were all people with criminal records. Not small-time crooks who sent their girlfriends into the gun store or walked in themselves carrying a fake ID , but people who were willing to pay that little bit extra for a professional service. Pay in the certain knowledge that if they lost the weapon at a crime scene there was no way the police were going to be able to trace the gun back to them.
Dante paid little attention to his weight and his health, but he made up for it with the care he took with his appearance. His hair and beard looked as though they’d been trimmed with nail cutters, and his clothes always matched. And he loved gold. He had gold in his eyebrows, gold in his ears, gold around his neck. And – not least – gold in his teeth.
Those gold teeth of his were the first thing I noticed that day I went to his garage. They blinged wetly at me as he told me he hoped I was going deer hunting and the gun he was selling me wouldn’t turn up at some crime scene, because this particular weapon he had bought himself, he hadn’t used a front for it.
‘I’m just saying, you don’t have to tell me, amigo.’
He didn’t really have to say that as I hadn’t spoken a word since entering the garage. Anyway, what could I have said? That he was the one I was going to be hunting? That he was standing there and selling me the very weapon that was going to be used to kill him? He was alone at the time, but even so I was careful not to remove my sunglasses or pull back the top of the hoodie I was wearing. I just nodded, pointed to the one I wanted – the rifle plus two hand grenades – counted out the money and when he dug out the holster that came with the gun I wrapped it up myself in bubble wrap and put it down beside the telescopic sights and the two hand grenades. He had stared at my hands. Stared and
stared at my hands. Maybe he was noting the pentagram on my wrist. Maybe he’d mentioned it to someone. Didn’t really matter. No more than that goodbye he had called after me in what he probably thought was a passable Spanish accent – Hasta la vista. ‘See you later.’
He had no idea how right he would be. The street door opened.
Dante.
He stepped out and stopped. Just like he did yesterday morning, he looked right and then left. He hit his bunched right fist into the palm of his left hand. As though every day was a fight. As though a man had a choice each day, to head right or left. How naive we are.
His car – a Maserati – was in the parking lot behind the block. It wasn’t exactly brand new, but all the same, it was a little miracle a car like that was allowed to stand untouched in a neighbourhood like Jordan. The explanation was pretty straightforward: the car was protected by his gangland customers, and everybody in Jordan knew it.
I focused the cross hairs on his chest. I had worked out the distance and the angle and adjusted the sights down, since he would be so far below me. I held my breath, tried to exert an even pressure on the trigger but knew that my pulse was faster than it ought to be. The trigger moved. Kept moving. But the shot didn’t come. My pulse raced. I tried to tell myself not to be impatient, not to think that, in one more second, he would move on and the target would be much harder to hit. Don’t jerk. Just a steady, even pressure.
The man down below shivered inside his coat. He blew into his cupped hands. Like a gambler blowing on dice.
He turned right.
In that same instant the rifle jerked. I must have been holding it firmly because he never left my sight. I saw him stiffen, as though he suddenly realised he’d forgotten something. From inside the long coat something or other dropped to the sidewalk. The first association I got was when Monica and I were standing in the bathroom when her waters broke, splashing against the tiles, and the pair of us almost fainted, terrified and happy, terrified and happy.
It was blood. Dante fell. Backward, into the door. It swung open and inward. He lay there in the darkness of the hallway with his feet sticking out in the daylight. There were no screams, no shouts, no running footsteps, no slamming of doors from down there. Only the steady, uninterrupted rumble of the morning rush hour from the highway just beyond. And then, suddenly, hip hop music. Somebody still lying in bed had got up and opened the window to see what was happening.
I felt myself start to tremble, felt nauseous, made myself think of Monica and the children. Think hard about them, as I loaded another shell. Took aim. Eye up against the telescopic sights. Saw him lying there, motionless, and thought how expensive his shoes looked. That it would be a while before the police showed up here in Jordan and that in the meantime maybe someone would steal those shoes. I got something in my eye and had to blink it away. When I looked down again I saw the shoes moving. Someone down in the darkened hallway was dragging him inside to safety. I was about to pull the trigger again but the thought of shooting a neighbour who was only doing what any decent human being ought to do made me pause a moment. And by the time I decided to go ahead and shoot anyway because
no one – absolutely no one – is wholly innocent, the door had swung shut.
I stood up and had to steady myself against the kitchen counter because my foot had gone to sleep. Wrapped the gun inside the bubble wrap. Wiped the counter, the arm of the couch, the back of the chair. Then I went into the bathroom and I put on my gear. Plucked an unruly strand of hair from one eyebrow and held it between two fingers before placing it on my tongue and swallowing. It stuck in my throat, like it didn’t want to go down. I put on my sunglasses and zipped up the hoodie. Shrugged on the rucksack with all my stuff inside, grabbed the flowerpot with the yucca plant, took a last glance around the apartment then let myself out.
I took the stairs up two floors to Mrs White. Knocked on the door. Heard the shuffling of slippers inside. They stopped, everything went quiet. I guess she was looking at me through the fisheye lens. Then the door opened. I’d never asked, of course, but Mrs White had to be at least eighty years old. A sweet, grey-haired old black lady who smelled of something that wasn’t exactly apricot jelly or honey but something in between.
‘Tomás,’ she said. ‘Well now, it’s been a long time since I last saw you. Did you hear that bang too?’
Without a word I handed her the yucca plant.
‘For me?’ She smiled in slight surprise.
I nodded.
She put her head on one side. ‘Is there something wrong, Tomás? You look so . . . dead. Is it the cat? You miss it, don’t you? Did he say when he would be finished? You know, you have to be patient.’
I nodded again. Then I turned and walked away. Heard that
she didn’t close the door but stood there, watching me walk away. Something on her mind. Maybe she was thinking, maybe she felt it deep in her bones, that it was the last time she would ever see me.
The elevator took me down, down, down.
Outside the air was clear and the morning haze lifting. The sun was going to win through today. I walked at a steady pace, heading downtown.
It took me forty minutes.
Downtown Minneapolis always made me think of cars from Motown in the eighties, trapped in a limbo between the past and the future. Everything clean and neat, conservative and dull, practical and boring. There were skyscrapers and bridges, but no Empire State Building or Golden Gate, and if you asked someone from London, Paris or New York what he thought of when you mentioned Minneapolis, he would probably say lakes and forests. OK , so if he knew a little bit more then maybe he would know that the city has the largest connected network of skyways in the US . On the way to the intersection at Nicollet Mall and 9th Street I passed beneath one of them, a glass- and-metal bridge that linked shopping malls and office complexes, a place where people gathered to seek shelter when the temperature dropped to below zero in the winter or rose into the nineties in the summer.
I entered the little pet store. A customer was being served. Sounded like he wanted a bigger cage for his rabbit. Sometimes you still overhear something that restores your faith in human nature. I stood in front of one of the aquariums and when the assistant came over to me I pointed to one of the little fishes swimming about inside and said, that’s the one I want.
‘Dwarf pufferfish,’ he said as he scooped up the green fish in a little hand net. ‘A good aquarium fish, but not for the beginner. The water quality must always be tip-top.’
‘I know,’ I said.
He slipped it into a plastic bag full of water and tied it closed. ‘Mind your cat doesn’t eat it. And don’t eat it yourself. It’s a hundred times more poisonous than –’
‘I know. You take cash?’
Then I was back out in the street again.
A black- and-white car came cruising in my direction. On the door was the MPD emblem and motto – To protect with courage, to serve with compassion. Maybe they got some kind of feeling about me, the policemen sitting behind those darkened windows. But they wouldn’t stop me. After all the criticism in the media for the unmotivated and ethnically biased cases of stop- and-search, MPD police chiefs had announced a change of policy, and from now on, gut feeling was no longer a valid reason for stopping a man like me.
The car passed, but I knew they’d seen me. Same way as I knew I’d been picked up by all the surveillance cameras along Nicollet Mall and 9th Street, more of them around here than anywhere else in town.
And one other thing I knew.
I knew I was dead.
I OPEN m Y EYES A g AIN . I’m back in the taxi, back inside my own head. Now of course I can’t know for certain whether I was really in the killer’s head, really thought his thoughts as he made his way down Nicollet Mall six years earlier. If he thought that thought, that he was going to die. What I do know is that he was on Nicollet Mall at the precise moment in time, that’s a blackand-white fact, recorded by a surveillance camera and by means of binary code translated into a digital recording which places the matter beyond all doubt.
I tell the driver to take me to Dinkytown.
The sun is rising as we cross the river and glide on into the low-rise settlement. This is a world apart from Jordan. Dinkytown is where the students live. The people with a future. The ones who will occupy the shiny bank buildings, the granite
blocks of a city hall, the school staffrooms and the 350- dollar seats at the US Bank Stadium. When my cousin and I were old enough we often came here to drink beer in the dives. For me there was something bohemian and thrilling about Dinkytown. The smell of marijuana and testosterone, the sounds of youth, good music and boy-meets- girl, the sense of some – but not too much – danger. The place to swing through that little arc of freedom that exists between being young and being adult, and not wild enough to stop the straights landing securely on our feet, the way I did. Once my cousin’s girlfriend brought a friend along with her, and she and I sneaked out the bar and smoked a joint in one of the alleyways before having what was probably a pretty forgettable bout of sex but which I always remember anyway because of that – to me at least – exotic setting.
Now I hardly recognise the place. It looks like something in an exercise book in which the teacher has corrected all the grammatical mistakes and removed all the obscenities. We pass the place that was once a coffee bar and where the owner swore blind that Bob Dylan had made his very first appearance when he came down from Hibbing to study. Now some vast building is on its way up. I ask the driver if he thinks the purple facade is a tribute to the town’s other great musical son, Prince. The driver just chuckles and shakes his head.
‘But Al’s Breakfast is still here,’ I say and point to the door of that little warren of a place where – if the empty seat was down at the front – you had to press your way between the customers crowded at the bar and the sweaty wall.
‘The day they try to close Al’s there’s going to be riots here,’ the driver says and roars with laughter.
I tell him to stop at the bridge over the railroad line. I get out
of the car and glance down at the tracks. The occasional goods train used to run on that line, and judging by the weeds growing between the rusty tracks traffic hasn’t increased much since then. I cross the road and head toward the corner where it still says Bernie’s Bar on the wall, try the handle of the locked door, cup my hands against the glass next to the poster advertising that the premises are for rent and peer inside. The bar is still there, but otherwise there isn’t a stick of furniture left.
Now I have to get inside the policeman’s head.
So I try to imagine how it might have been, what was said and done in here on that morning six years ago.
B OB Oz HISSED THRO ug H HIS teeth and put the empty shot glass back down on the bar. Looked up and saw his own reflection in the mirror between the bottles on the shelves. A new guy at work had asked him yesterday why the others called him OneNight Bob. He told him it must be because he always solved his cases in just one night.
Bob looked at One-Night Bob. He’d turned forty, but wasn’t that the same face he’d been staring at for the past twenty years now? He wasn’t exactly a good-looking man, but like his father he had the kind of face time didn’t seem to sink its teeth into. Well, OK , chewed up a little bit. At least chewed away the puppy fat of youth to reveal the mature man’s good or his bad genes, all depending on which way you looked at it. White skin of the type that only got sunburnt, never brown. A thick and unruly thatch of red hair on
the kind of head that got Scandinavians nicknamed squareheads, back in the day when his ancestors emigrated here from Norway. A relatively healthy-looking set of teeth, a pair of blue eyes that had got more red in the whites since his separation. His eyes bulged slightly, but at least according to one of his one-nightstand ladies that was no bad thing since it gave the impression he was listening closely to whatever they said. Another had said that as soon as they met she had the feeling of being a Little Red Riding Hood and wondering why the wolf had such big eyes. Bob Oz rounded off the stocktaking by sitting up straight on his bar stool. When he was young he wrestled and swam. Though never a champion in either field it had given him a good body that the years had done little to change. Until now, that is. He put his hand on his shirt, beneath his trademark yellow coat. A nasty little pot belly. And this despite the fact he had never eaten less than in the three months that had passed since he and Alice had split up. And it couldn’t be the pills, because he wasn’t taking those any more. But he was drinking more, no doubt about that. A lot more.
The name One-Night Bob came from a colleague early on in his career, before he met Alice and became One-Woman Bob. It was back in the days when he and his colleagues celebrated every triumph, great and small – and, at a pinch, their defeats too – at the Dinkytown bars, when they were young enough to shake off the hangovers and Bob would more often than not wake up with a woman lying next to him. What especially impressed his male colleagues was the way this pallid, ginger-haired guy could pull women even when he was so drunk he could hardly stand up. Anyone who asked what his secret was always got the same answer: that he tried harder. That he didn’t give up. That some of
these women pestered him to take them to bed. When you haven’t the looks, the money or the charm then you have to work harder than the competition. End of story.
‘Another?’
Bob nodded and looked up at the female bartender as she poured his whiskey. She reminded him of someone and now he knew who it was. Chrissie Hynde, the singer and guitarist with the Pretenders. Black hair, fringe cut straight. Sassy, self- assured, interesting-looking rather than pretty. High cheekbones, narrow, slightly slanting eyes. A bit too much mascara. Russian genes? Long, thin limbs. Tight jeans she knew she looked good in. A baggy T-shirt, meaning she had nothing there worth promoting. No problem there, Bob had always been more of a leg and ass man. Sure, the half- closed venetian blinds in the bar blocked out the morning sunlight, but he could make out the lines marking her face. She looked like she’d lived a bit. Mid-thirties going on forty. Good. Gave him more of a chance.
Bob took a sip and hissed through his teeth again. The sign on the sidewalk outside the bar advertised Happy Hour, but just for a handful of whisky brands, and you take what you can get. Bob coughed.
‘Liza. It is Liza, right?’
‘Whatever,’ she said and yawned as she picked up the empty beer glass of a customer who had just left the bar.
‘That’s what the guy who was just here called you.’
‘Well, that’s all right then.’
‘OK ,’ said Bob and took another sip. ‘I know you’ve heard this before, Liza, but you know what? My wife doesn’t understand me.’
Liza came back at him without missing a beat: ‘And there was me hoping you didn’t have one.’
Bob smiled stiffly. ‘You get tips for that line of yours, honey?’
‘You get cunt for yours, honey?’
Bob looked thoughtfully at her expressionless, stony face. ‘If you want a ballpark figure, and by cunt you mean the whole way, then we’re talking –’
‘Forget it,’ she interrupted. ‘Let’s just say never mind about the tip so long as I don’t have to be . . .’ She mouthed the word cunt, then turned her back on him to rinse out a cloth in the sink.
‘Fair enough, Liza. But just for the record, my wife really doesn’t understand me. For a long time she understood everything, and then it stopped. Suddenly she couldn’t make me out at all.’
Liza gazed longingly in the direction of the tables where the only other two customers were sitting, as though hoping they would give her something else to do other than have to stand and listen to this. Bob moved his right hand toward his jacket pocket. The No Smoking law had been in place for the last ten years, but after a drink or two old habits took over and he could still find himself reaching for the cigarette pack that wasn’t there. It hadn’t been there since that evening twelve years ago when they’d met. He’d been sitting there, minding his own business, listening while a colleague hypothesised about what turned the ladies on; it was Bob’s French inhaling, the way he slipped the smoke out of his mouth and at the same time drew it up into his nostrils. That showed muscular coordination at the same time as there was something vulgar about it, he said. Something suggesting an unbridled and dark sexuality. That was the moment another colleague entered the bar with this woman. He’d introduced her, her name was Alice, she was a psychologist, a couple of inches taller than Bob and insanely good-looking. So good-looking Bob
immediately crossed her off his list. Another of his pickup rules involved setting realistic goals, and Alice was obviously way out of his league. On top of that – and this was a practical rather than a moral hindrance – she was on a date with a colleague. And anyway, this colleague had already warned her about him, she knew his nickname was One-Night Bob, and even before Alice got the first drink down she’d asked him straight out about it. Not, like the guys, asking him how he did it, but asking him why. Why did he have to have all these women who he didn’t really want? Because she was a psychologist, and because anyway he’d already made up his mind she was out of his league, he decided to tell her as honestly and openly as he could, and not give a damn about how bad it would make him look. He said it probably came from having a weak bond with his mother, that he hadn’t been loved enough as a child, and that this gave him a compulsion to seek out intimacy and recognition, at the same time as he didn’t dare to risk a closer relationship for fear of being rejected. And that, as well as all that, it was exciting and pleasurable to fuck new women. He asked her what she made of this. She said he seemed self- obsessed and radiated a deep loneliness, and that she didn’t like men who smoked and had it never occurred to him that the smell would get into the fibres of his cashmere coat? Bob then embarked on an intense lecture on the subject of the difference between the goat hair of his coat and camel hair generally, segueing into an equally intense lecture about how ‘Purple Rain’ was so much more than the clichéd rock ballad people thought it was, that when the last verse was over the song wasn’t even halfway through, after that came five minutes of a brilliant, howling guitar solo, an implosion, followed by two minutes of beautiful, delirious anarchy. He got the bartender to put the record on and
sang along with it, doing the guitar parts too, dancing like Axl Rose. Alice looked as though she didn’t know whether to laugh or throw up. A month later they were a couple. And from that day on Bob hadn’t cast so much as a glance at other women, she’d transformed him, she’d kissed the frog. Until three months ago. Now – twelve years on – the frog was out hopping again.
‘If you really want to know, she’s left me,’ said Bob.
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘No, well, now you know anyway. Isn’t that actually part of your job? To listen and pretend to understand?’
‘No. But OK , she’s dumped you and I can’t say I’m surprised.’
‘No?’ Bob took hold of the lapels of his cashmere coat and parted them, heard how his speech was a little slurred. ‘Do I look to you like a guy ladies would dump, Liza?’
‘Dunno. But when someone comes in here in the middle of the morning and drinks like an amateur then it’s a good guess they’ve been kicked out either by their lady or by their boss. And from the way you’re dressed you look like a guy who has a job to go to.’
‘Jesus, you ought to be a detective.’
‘You trying to tell me I don’t make it as a bartender?’
Bob laughed. ‘Tough lady.’ He held out his hand. ‘The name’s Bob.’
‘Hello, Bob. No offence, but I don’t touch the customers and they don’t touch me.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Bob and withdrew his hand. ‘What about you, Liza? You ever had your heart broken?’
‘I’m a bartender, that’s all you need to know about me.’
‘OK , but at least tell me this. A man with a broken heart: in your eyes, does that make him more attractive or less attractive?’
She raised one eyebrow. ‘Are you asking me what your chances are of fucking me?’
‘What makes you think I want to fuck you?’
‘You mean you don’t?’
Bob thought about it. ‘If what people say is true, that fucking other people is a good remedy for a broken heart, then Christ, yeah, I do.’
Bob couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw the ghost of a smile on that hard, closed face.
She pulled a wine glass from a rack dangling above the bar and began polishing it. ‘Helps about as much as pissing in your pants when it’s cold, I should think. Does you having a broken heart mean I fancy you? No. For all I know she dumped you because you’re no good in bed.’
Bob slumped forward with one hand held to his stomach. ‘Ouch, you got me there, Liza. Pour me another drink.’
Liza filled his glass. ‘OK . So do you really have a broken heart?’
‘Will you fuck me if I do?’
Bob was sure of himself now; she was smiling.
‘Come on, Liza, being here bores you as much as it bores me, so let’s just entertain each other a bit. The question is hypothetical and your answer will not be used against you in a court of law.’
‘I’d like it better if you entertain me with the story of your broken heart.’
‘Her name’s Alice.’
‘You have kids?’
‘No.’
‘Hard up?’
‘No.’
‘Someone else?’
‘No.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘She stopped loving me.’
‘But she did love you once, you think?’
‘Yes,’ said Bob. ‘She did.’
‘Then why d’you think she stopped?’
‘It’s . . . complicated.’
She returned the wine glass to the rack and started polishing another, looking at him while she did so.
‘I thought you wanted to talk about it.’
‘Your turn now,’ said Bob, and forced a smile. ‘Could I have had a date with you?’
‘No.’
‘Hypothetically,’ he said. ‘If you didn’t work here.’
She shook her head slightly, and then added, with an exasperated look, like someone humouring a troublesome child: ‘It depends.’
‘Depends on what?’
‘What you have to offer a single mom.’
‘Ah, single mom.’ Bob smiled broadly. ‘I can offer her security. I’m a public servant, it’s almost impossible to fire me. And . . .’
Bob put his hand into the pocket of his cashmere coat and tossed a small, rectangular plastic package onto the counter.
Liza leaned forward reluctantly for a closer look. Made a face. ‘A rubber?’
‘Safe sex. This is the best money can buy.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re scared you’ll have a kid?’
Bob shrugged. ‘I’m scared of a premature ejaculation. And with that thing there my prick hardly feels a thing.’
Liza laughed out loud. And from her laughter he could tell
she’d smoked her fair share of cigarettes. ‘Dammit, Bob, you really are cute.’
‘Cute enough to let me buy you a cup of coffee some place else?’ Bob pulled the condom back over to his side of the counter. She shook her head. ‘Is that the way you usually do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘First the full-frontal assault, then the retreat, then the siege?’
Bob thought about that. ‘Yes. Does it work?’
‘Sure. Just not on me.’
‘Why not?’
Liza rolled her eyes.
‘Oh, come on,’ said Bob, ‘I’m out of training. I need a little constructive feedback here.’
Liza spotted a gesture from one of the other customers, an elderly man still wearing his overcoat. She picked up a glass and unscrewed the top of a vodka bottle. ‘Well, OK then. I couldn’t be less interested. You come in here, I’m the first woman you see, the first living being you see. You sat there for about five minutes before suggesting a fuck. A fuck to make up for the fact that your lady’s dumped you. Let’s say – hypothetically – that I’d been up for it and you and me ended up in the same bed tonight. Does that really sound to you like the start of a quality relationship involving two quality people?’
‘Ah, but . . .’
‘But?’
‘Isn’t quality in general a bit . . . eh, overrated?’
Liza looked at him and slowly shook her head. She licked her lips a couple of times.
‘Then what do you mean by quality, Liza?’
Liza screwed the cap back on the vodka bottle. ‘Staying power.’
‘Staying power? As in . . .?’
‘No. As in, a man who sticks around.’
She placed her hands on the counter and Bob Oz met her eyes. Then she picked up the vodka glass, emerged from behind the bar and walked across to the old man sitting at his table. Bob watched her. She put the glass down in front of him and spoke to him as she picked up the crutch that had fallen to the floor and leaned it against the chair.
The phone in the inside pocket of his jacket began to vibrate. He took it out, saw that the caller was Superintendent Walker. He hesitated before taking the call.
As expected, Walker sounded pretty pissed off. ‘Where the hell are you, Oz?’
‘Dinkytown, chief.’
‘Why aren’t you at work?’
‘I am. I’m checking the licences at a couple of dodgy premises.’
‘You are a homicide detective, Oz.’
‘Then let me guess. There’s been a murder?’
Pause.
‘Have you been drinking, Oz?’
‘Any address for that murder, chief?’
Walker sighed heavily before giving the address.
‘No surprises there then,’ said Bob as he wrote in his notebook. They ended the call and he stood up and buttoned his cashmere coat just as Liza came back round behind the bar again.
‘Duty calls?’ she asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Bob as he put some dollar bills down on the bar.
Liza held one up to the light to make sure it was legit. ‘Will we be seeing you again, Bob?’
‘Do we hope so?’
‘If you keep on tipping like this then definitely.’
‘When do you close?’
‘Nine o’clock. But maybe you need a bit of a break from the drinking. Heart, liver – it all adds up, you know.’
‘Thanks for the advice.’ Bob smiled. ‘Ha det bra.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Norwegian. Be well.’ Bob turned and headed for the exit. Could feel he was a little bit unsteady on his feet. Stopped in the open doorway and walked back to the bar where Liza was standing with her hand out and a grin on her face. Bob Oz grabbed the condom from between her fingers, gave an exaggeratedly gallant bow and then left.
Bob sat behind the steering wheel of the car parked by the sidewalk on the other side of the railroad bridge. Like the majority of the cars in the police service fleet it was a Ford, but it was unmarked and in the state he was in he couldn’t give any guarantees about his driving. So he took the Kojak light from the glove compartment, opened the window, pressed the magnetic foot down onto the roof and checked that the blue light was on. This part of Dinkytown was mostly barflies and white farmers’ sons come to town to study and to party, but even here the police would never risk stopping a cop car on call- out and ordering a DUI test. Bob took the route through Marshall Street and Broadway Bridge across the river – it shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes anyway. Tucked in behind a car with a blue bumper sticker. GUN OWNERS FOR TRUMP 2016. Donald Trump was entertaining, give him that, but then Hillary Clinton and the Democrats had rejoiced when the Republicans managed to nominate an unelectable lunatic as their candidate. Something the opinion
polls now, just before the presidential election, seemed to confirm they had good reason to. Bob pulled out his cell phone, navigated to the last number called and pressed the call button. Listened to the female voice on the answering machine.
‘Hello, you’ve reached Alice’s answering machine. Will you please stop calling me, Bob?’
Bob waited for the beep so the recorder would pick up everything he said before he began speaking. ‘OK , that was new, Alice, I’ll give you that. I’m calling to say I’ve changed my mind, I’m not going to let you have the house, and definitely not at that price. And to inform you I fucked a girl of twenty-six last week. Says she’s an aerobics instructor when she isn’t studying law at U of M and that her grandfather was an Ojibwe chieftain. I take that with a pinch of salt, women lie, we all know that, or don’t we, Alice? Anyway, I’m not telling you this to make you jealous or anything like that, after all, we are – as you said – adult human beings.’ Bob stopped at a red light. He was pleased that he was managing to keep his voice under control. ‘I’m only calling to tell you that she called me last night and told me I’d given her a sexually transmitted disease, one I’d never heard of, apparently a new one just arrived from the West Coast. So this is just a bit of friendly, grown-up advice to get yourself checked. Because it’s only natural to wonder if the source was Stan the Man, and that you, contrary to what you told me, were actually screwing him before I moved out, and passed it on to me that last time we fucked, on Hidden Beach.’
Bob could hear now that his voice was no longer under control and that he had actually yelled the words fucked and screwing since they happened to be very well suited to being yelled.
‘Because you remember that fuck, right? Yeah, you damn well
bet you do, because I guess you’ve never been fucked so well since. Or have you? Have you, bitch?’
Bob threw the phone at the windshield and it bounced around the car before disappearing somewhere. Put both hands against the wheel and breathed out heavily. Became aware of the zebrastriped car in the lane to his left, and the man in the passenger seat staring at him through the open window. Glazed eyes and slack mouth. Like he was in the bloody zoological gardens. Bob knew he shouldn’t but he couldn’t resist it; he lowered the window.
‘What the fuck are you staring at? Never seen anyone go berserk before?’
The man’s eyes remained glazed, his mouth stayed slack, and Bob wondered if he was a bit simple, but then the guy put his hand out of the window and pointed upward and said in a slow, toneless voice:
‘Why stop for a red light when you’ve got one of those on the roof of your car?’
Bob opened and shut his mouth several times, but his brain came up with nothing. The zebra-striped car next to him pulled away and he heard a horn blaring behind him. Bob cursed under his breath and hit the gas.
B OB TOO k THE kO j A k LI g HT off the roof as he swung into the open space between the apartment blocks of the Jordan projects. The brown-brick buildings around him towered into the sky on all sides, and as he passed into the shadows a breath of damp, cold air entered through the car window. It made him shiver. The whole Jordan project made him shiver. In other places – and that included even down in Phillips – it could be difficult for the untrained eye to see visible signs of the misery, to hear the creaking of bottled-up hate, to smell the testosterone just waiting for the right bad excuse. But not here. It started with a welcome graffiti drawn down the side of the cement stairway leading to the road below. BLOWJOB it said, in gigantic lettering. Next to it was a badly drawn pistol aimed at the side of a head with what was obviously supposed to be brain mass blowing out on the
other side. Bob directed his gaze up at the blocks. They made him think of termite mounds. There was something odd about this concentrated assembly of people in a place where there was so much space. He’d seen photographs from the time when his great- great- grandparents came out here from Norway, driven out by hunger and hard times. They’d come to a wide, open landscape with farms and people distant from each other. They built their simple houses and churches here. They never envisaged a city with a skyline, still less entire high-rise settlements with people on welfare, people on the margins of society who sold everyday escape routes to each other, dug graves for each other and directed their hatred and frustration above all against people who suffered as much as themselves. What would Bob’s ancestors have said about Jordan and Minneapolis? According to his parents they’d been God-fearing, hard-working and thrifty. As well as conservative racists. Bob’s great- great- grandfather had fought in the Civil War, but when the liberated slaves started arriving from the south and settling in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, he’d come to regret it, his grandma said. People of Scandinavian and German heritage were still in the majority, but in the towns especially the ethnic mix of the population was much more varied. Latinos started to arrive after the Second World War, mostly Mexicans but some Puerto Ricans too. By the eighties the Vietnamese had arrived, though God knows why people from a coastal land would choose somewhere as far from the sea as this. The Vietnamese who ran Bob’s local liquor store explained it by saying that once you’d survived being one of the Boat people you kept well away from salt water for the rest of your life. When refugees from the war in Somalia began arriving in the nineties and settled in Phillips and on the south side of the city,
a lot of people began predicting trouble. They’d read about traumatised child soldiers with Kalashnikovs in a war financed by the sale of narcotics, and they could see all this baggage making the journey over with them. But things had gone better than the pessimists feared. Naturally some had ended up in drug gangs, but it wasn’t as bad as up on the north side, where for the last six years there had been an average of ten shootings per week. Every time Mayor Kevin Patterson was confronted with a new report on violence he countered by saying that crime per capita in Minneapolis was at an all-time low, which was indeed the case for the other parts of the city. But here it had just gone up and up, especially after Patterson had slashed the police budget and forced them to let people go and start to prioritise. What priorities and which neighbourhoods the mayor – who lived in wealthy Dellwood – wanted the police to concentrate on wasn’t hard to guess.
Bob pulled up beside an MPD police car standing outside the entrance to one of the blocks and climbed out. A bow-legged, slightly overweight policeman in uniform was leaning against the car as his colleague inside spoke on his radio.
‘Detective Oz, Homicide Division,’ said Bob and flashed his badge.
‘That was quick,’ said the uniform.
‘I was just round the corner. What’s the story, Officer . . .?’
‘Heinz. Ambulance and technicians are on their way.’
‘The body?’
Heinz led the way and opened the door. Oz saw the blood on the sidewalk outside and the trail of blood inside. They walked on till they reached the body, which was lying on its back ten yards inside the hallway, beyond the elevator and the stairs.
‘Why no crime scene tape?’
‘Because we got witnesses that say he was standing outside and the shot came from a long way off, nobody saw anybody shoot. There’s no evidence here to mess up, Detective.’
‘Really?’ Bob looked at the drag-trail of blood leading from the doorway to where they stood, and at the blood on the victim’s shoe. ‘Do we know who dragged him in here?’
‘No.’
‘Right. Get your partner off the radio and get the scene out there and in here taped off and do it now.’
Heinz disappeared. Bob looked down at the body. Noted that he’d been wrong, Bob Oz wasn’t the only man in Minneapolis who walked around in a mustard-yellow cashmere coat, just the only mustard-yellow cashmere coat without a bullet hole in it. The man had narrow lines of facial hair that framed his mouth and followed the line of his jawbone up to his temples. They were so neatly cut and black, probably dyed, that they looked like they’d been painted on. The corpse had piercings on the eyebrows and ears, the rings looked like gold.
Bob squatted down and carefully unbuttoned the coat. Only now did he realise how fat the man was. The body flopped out of the open coat and seemed held in place by no more than a slim-fit white shirt that was drenched in blood. The discreet emblem on the breast pocket announced that it was an exclusive Italian brand.
Heinz returned. ‘My partner’s fixing the tape,’ he said.
‘OK . Help me turn this guy over.’
Heinz bent low with a grunt and took hold of the dead man’s hips. ‘I heard someone from your division say that the reason there’s so many murders here in Jordan is that it’s a food desert, that there’s only one decent food store here.’
‘Is that a fact?’ Bob said without interest as he lifted the corpse’s shoulders.
‘He thought there was a connection between hunger and the level of aggression,’ Heinz grunted. ‘But I don’t buy it. Take the average weight of the people around here and you can see the problem isn’t a lack of food.’
‘You don’t say,’ said Bob as he studied the victim’s back. No exit wound.
‘It’s the fat. Fat makes us bad people. Just look at the folks that live around here.’
‘Right, now lay him down again,’ said Bob.
‘They’re either skin- and-bone meth heads or fat diabetics who are going to die before they make sixty. No one works and they’re all sick. Obamacare means you and me and our children and grandchildren are paying to support these parasites.’ Officer Heinz stood up, wheezing. He tucked his stomach back inside his belt.
‘Got a pen on you, Heinz?’
Heinz handed him one with MPD ’s logo on it, hunkered down close by Bob and watched with interest as Bob pushed the pen into the entry wound in the chest, like someone measuring the oil in a car engine. Bob searched his pockets for something square-shaped, rejected the condom and pulled out the appointment card from Guillaume’s clinic for anger management and held it more or less level behind the pen. Closed one eye and looked. First across the body and then along it. Drew a line along each side of the card.
‘What’s that you’re doing?’ asked Heinz.
‘Trying to get some idea of the angle of the shot.’ Bob saw Heinz’s nostrils dilate and guessed the officer was probably
smelling the alcohol on his breath. Just then the body on the floor jerked.
‘Jesus!’ Heinz yelled.
Bob stared down at what he was no longer quite so sure was a dead body. The chest wasn’t moving, but when Bob held three fingers against the neck he could feel the beat of a slight pulse.
‘First aid,’ said Bob.
‘Eh?’
‘You take the first- aid course, Heinz?’
‘Sure, but –’
‘Then on you go.’
‘OK , OK . Then help me to –’
‘No, no,’ said Bob as he stood up. ‘He’ll help you.’
Bob nodded in the direction of Heinz’s partner who was standing in the doorway with the roll of crime scene tape in his hand.
‘Enjoy the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,’ said Bob as he straightened up.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m a homicide detective, so unless this guy dies then my business here is done.’
Bob walked around the bloodstains on the sidewalk. A halfdozen curious onlookers had gathered outside the tape that extended three yards out from each side of the doorway. In the distance he could hear the wailing of the ambulance. He glanced up at the surrounding blocks. Held the appointment card up to his eyes and checked, first along one line, then the other. Let his glance glide down the block on his left. Caught sight of the open window on the sixth floor. The black drapes were slightly parted, and inside that gap was the only place they moved, as