Afton pulled Max aside. “What are we going to do?” In all the planning and furor, they hadn’t received a definite assignment. In fact, they’d effectively been sidelined. Everything was now in the capable hands of the FBI and the MPD hostage and rescue professionals.
“We’ll go, too,” Max said in a low voice as they slipped down the hall. “We’ll tuck in behind the FBI and SWAT guys.”
*
DO you think the caller was the same guy from the other night?” Afton asked.
“Darden thought so,” Max said. He was driving his Hyundai, following five minutes behind the dark, unmarked car that carried Jasper, Thacker, and Bagin.
“So who is he? I mean, it’s not the doll lady and he’s obviously not the kid I tangled with, the one we suspect is the pizza guy.” Afton hung on for dear life as Max drove full bore down I-94. He was hitting speeds of almost seventy miles an hour, blowing past cars and trucks that crawled along tentatively on the snow-clogged freeway. Had they passed the unmarked car carrying Thacker and company? Maybe not. That car had been going like a bat out of hell, too.
Max’s knuckles were practically white from his death grip on the steering wheel. “There must be three kidnappers, working in concert.”
“Doesn’t feel right to me.” Afton fiddled with the radio equipment they’d been issued. Besides Max’s police radio, they had a special radio that was linked directly to Darden’s microphone. It would allow all parties concerned to listen in on any commentary that Darden made. More important, it would let them eavesdrop on his face-to-face confrontation with the kidnapper.
“Nothing feels right to me,” Max said. “Turn up those radios, see if anybody’s saying anything yet.”
Afton did. But Darden remained silent. And the police radio just carried the usual squeal. She peered through the windshield. “Damn, this snow just keeps coming down.”
“More tomorrow,” Max said. “Weatherman is predicting some kind of superstorm. They’re saying maybe eight more inches.”
“Think this will all be over by tomorrow?” She meant a resolution to the kidnapping, not the bad weather.
Max stared straight ahead, fighting the wind that buffeted his car back and forth, trying desperately to stay in his lane. “I don’t know.”
As they swept through Spaghetti Junction, the multifreeway tangle that cut through downtown Saint Paul, Afton said, “Thacker and Jasper and the rest of those guys probably got off at Sixth Street, right?”
“Had to,” Max said. “That would be the logical way. That’s how we’re going to do it anyway.”
They circled around the off-ramp and popped out on West Seventh Street. A Super America station was straight ahead; a warehouse sat directly to their right.
“Where are they?” Max asked. He scanned both directions, sounding surprised that they hadn’t bumped up on Thacker and Jasper’s tailpipe.
“Maybe we passed them. You were driving pretty fast.”
“Huh.”
“Darden was instructed to drive to Sims and Weide,” Afton said, consulting a hastily printed map. “In what’s known as East Saint Paul. That would mean a left turn. Here on West Seventh. Then heading across a couple of bridges.”
“I don’t know,” Max said. But he turned north anyway, heading toward Payne Avenue. They passed Red’s Savoy Pizza on their left and shot across a freeway bridge.
Afton couldn’t remember the last time she’d been over on this side of Saint Paul. The labyrinth of streets, the lack of sequential numbering, the lack of familiar landmarks made everything seem foreign. A former celebrity governor had once complained that Saint Paul’s streets had been designed by “drunken Irishmen.” His pronouncement—while crude and not terribly politically correct—wasn’t all that far off base.
“Where the hell are we?” Max muttered. His windshield wipers were struggling to keep up.
“Careful,” Afton cautioned. “We don’t want to overshoot anybody.” What she really meant was, We don’t want to overshoot Darden and blow everybody’s cover.
“Now what?” Max asked, clearly flummoxed. “You’re the one with the map.”
“Left. Hang a left right here. We need to go up Payne Avenue.”
Max made the turn and swept north again, the whole of Swede Hollow Park, dark and deep, just off to their right. “Now what?”
“Now pull over,” Afton said. “Because Darden just started talking.”
Max pulled over to a curb that was delineated only by a huge ridge of plowed snow. “Hope we don’t get stuck,” he grumped. Saint Paul snow removal was often sketchy at best.
Afton goosed the volume on their communications equipment. “Shush. Listen up.”
They put their heads together and listened.