The neighbor, still pinned, was shouting, “You’re killing me, you’re killing me,” and Sherman, now on his feet, wild-eyed, said to Lucas, “It’s the fucking garage. It’s the fucking garage.”
Lucas had the two women separated, and he looked at Sherman and said, “You think you could hang on to your wife here?” Sherman hustled over and got his wife around the waist and walked her back to the porch, and then came back and shouted at the neighbor, still on the ground, “It’s the fucking garage, isn’t it? You called them because of the fuckin’ garage.”
They took five minutes to get the story. The two couples had never liked each other, and Sherman’s kid had been a high school football star, and the neighbor’s kid had been cut in tenth grade, and then Sherman built the Taj Ma-Garage in his backyard, looming over the neighbor’s backyard, throwing half of it into shadow.
“Where’m I supposed to grow my tomatoes?” the neighbor bleated at Lucas. “You can’t grow tomatoes in full shade. And he goes back there with that saw all the time and it used to be all peaceful back here and now he runs that saw at all times of day and night.”
And, he thought, Sherman was a dead ringer for the guy who killed the Jones girls and attacked Barker.
When the neighbor had calmed down, Del had let him up, and the two men were shaking grass off their clothes. The two women were standing with arms crossed twenty feet away from the circle of men, on opposite sides, throwing in an occasional word of encouragement.
Lucas finally said, “Look—no harm done at this point. Okay? You want to sue each other, that’s your problem. But I don’t want to take you downtown, and you don’t want to go. It’s really unpleasant. Okay . . .”
And they were nodding and muttering around, and Lucas suggested that they shake hands. Sherman stepped forward, and so did the neighbor, and when Sherman stuck out a hand, the neighbor hit Sherman flat in the nose, and the big man staggered and one second later they were at it again and the women were screaming, and Lucas ripped the neighbor off Sherman and threw him at Del again and said, “Cuff him, he’s under arrest.”
Two more neighbors from down the street came running in, and Lucas held up his hands and said, “Police . . . we’re police . . . stay off the lawn, stay off.”
One of the new guys said, “This is about the garage, isn’t it?”
Sherman was bleeding from his nose, but not too bad. He was trying to pinch it off, and Lucas said, “Go inside, lie down, put some ice on it. If it doesn’t stop, get your wife to take you down to the emergency room, okay? Got that?”
Sherman said, “Ah, I’b hab a bloody nose before,” and asked, “Wha’ ’bout Berg?”
“He’s going downtown,” Lucas said.
THEY HAD THE NEIGHBOR, whose name was Eric Berg, in the backseat of the Lexus when Lucas took a cell phone call from an agent named Jenkins, who shouted into his phone, over what sounded like a screaming car engine, “Where are you?”
“Up on Iowa Avenue, off Rice Street.”
“We’ll meet you at the corner of Rice and Maryland, in that tire company lot, lights and sirens, man. . . . Get down here.”
“What’s going on?”
“Just . . . just get your ass down here. We’ll be there in two minutes. . . . Fuckin’ get down here. Go.”
15
Marcy Sherrill missed Kelly Barker’s performance on the noon news, but heard about it, and then caught her on KARE at six o’clock. She’d known the Jones case was going to be a headache, and the headache had only gotten worse with Davenport working it.
She appreciated the fact that he had a personal stake in the investigation, and when that happened, it was usually like Sherman’s March on Atlanta: nothing stood in his way. Among other things, she believed, he was manipulating the media to put pressure on the Minneapolis PD to dig up every scrap of information they could find on the mystery man, John Fell.
Davenport really didn’t care about their other problems—though, to be fair, their problems weren’t all that bad. The murder rate was continuing to drop, rape and armed robbery were down, the gangs were continuing to fade. Part of that, she thought, was that coke and meth sales were down, while the quality of marijuana continued to increase.
In her humble opinion, a guy lying on his living room floor with a B.C. blunt, a bag of nachos, and
And, to be doubly fair, Davenport had generally played the media as much when he was a Minneapolis cop, as when he’d left for the BCA. In fact, Marcy thought, she’d helped him do it often enough. . . .
But, annoying. The chief was going to call her up and ask, in his sideways, we’re-all-pals voice, “Have you had a chance to talk to that Barker woman? I’ve seen her on all the channels.”
The chief spent a lot of time watching all the channels.
