Two Nights Page 8

  “Don’t move!” Harvey commanded. Fix was having no luck with the handset.

  “I can remove it, but I’ll have to lower my arm,” I said.

  “One finger.”

  I lifted the Glock as directed. Harvey pointed toward the floor. I set the Glock down and kicked it toward his feet. He picked it up.

  “Are you bleeding?” Fix had switched to his own mobile to contact the desk.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said into the mouthpiece. A pause, then, “ASAP. We got a probable DOA up here.” Fix disconnected. “Cruiser’s en route and there’s a bus on the way.”

  “I’m feeling a little woozy,” I said.

  Harvey pointed to the sofa. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  I sat. Fix moved into position beside his partner. Both eyed me. The scar. The black nails. The red hair, unbound, haloing my head like a lion’s mane. I could tell Fix was pumped about the tale he’d be sharing that night.

  “All right.” Harvey was taking the lead. “What happened here, ma’am?”

  “I’m an investigator from out of state,” I said. “I’m working a case involving a bombing and a kidnapping.”

  “You got ID?”

  “Around the corner in the hall.” I hoped. “A purse, a backpack, and a plastic bag.”

  Fix left, returned in seconds. I produced my driver’s license, retired police ID, and gun permit. Harvey scanned the documents, then handed them to Fix.

  “Okay, South Carolina. We know who you are. Who’s the guy you just burned?”

  “I’m guessing he didn’t like me reopening the case.”

  “How’d you know he was in your room?” Sherlock Harvey.

  “I’m a pro,” I lied.

  “With no clue who you just popped.”

  He had me there. “My shoulder is pretty uncomfortable.”

  “An ambulance has been dispatched,” Fix said.

  “For him?” Cocking my chin toward the door.

  “For you.” Fix thought I was serious. “ME’s en route for him.”

  “Good call.” The pain was getting sharper, my responses less than snappy.

  Time passed. Then, down the hall, I heard an elevator open. Voices. Hurried steps. A gurney clanking, wheels humming across wool plush.

  “Could you make one more call?” I was finding it harder to talk.

  Harvey and Fix said nothing.

  “Could you contact Roy Capps or Bernie Clegg?”

  “Lawyers?” Harvey couldn’t have made his disgust more apparent.

  “Detectives. Area Three.”

  Approximately four minutes later I was screaming toward the infamous Cook County ER.

  Twelve Days

  She’s found a place in the vacant lot. A patch of bare ground surrounded by trees. Sounds are muted inside her tiny cocoon. Blunted by their worming journey through needles and embryonic leaves.

  She’ll be punished if they learn she’s ventured from the yard. She takes the risk. Sneaks across the alley whenever she can. She’s even smuggled a quilt from the house.

  She lies on her back, legs flexed, and gazes up at the latticework of shapes overhead. She imagines reasons the branches might be reaching out. To hold hands. To dance. To pray.

  To brand her. To gouge her eyes from her head.

  The scabs on her knees have reopened. They ooze and burn. Unconsciously, her fingers go to them. Explore. Tease tiny hunks of salt from her flesh.

  Sun and shadow dapple her face. She forces her mind calm. She loves calm.

  Too much new is coming at her of late. The move. Talk of another. Endless discourse on the Crossing. But always in code. Buzzwords she doesn’t understand.

  Endless Testing. Endless pain.

  His eyes. His hands. His hot onion breath on her face.

  Everyone seems on edge, their movements sharp, their eyes jumpy. No one tells her what’s up. Or when it will happen. But she knows something is coming. She feels powerless. Flawed. Afraid that she’s afraid. Terrified they will learn of her weakness.

  She’s jittery all day. Prickly lying in bed at night. Her skin is a watercolor in red. Her ribs throb. She thinks one may be broken.

  Her mother visits in the dark, face tight, gaze lingering far too long. Thinking what? Your brother and I love you? Be brave? We will be together forever?

  It’s a mirage, of course. She knows she’s making it up in her head.

  She tries to detach from the past. From the way it used to be. Tries to balance things. To keep the good and shove the bad to a far back corner of her mind. To bury it all with the pain.

  The clearing is good. And hers alone. When in it, the sense of foreboding recedes. It’s not here. Not now. Not real.

  But it is real.

  She breathes the spice of bark, moist earth, and sun-warmed needles. Last time it was rain-soaked needles. She’s uncertain which she prefers.

  Beyond the green silence she hears a siren wailing, a dog barking, a garbage truck rumbling and grinding. Sounds of normal life. Not hers.

  Bees whine close by. Maybe wasps. She can’t see them, but their presence reassures her. She thinks of pollen. Of honey. There were bees at the farm. She pictures the fields, the barn. Less than a day’s drive, but a lifetime away.

  Enough, she tells herself. They are living here now. She doesn’t like this place but dreads another move. The known is better than the unknown.

  The unknown.

  People have disappeared. She has no idea why. They’re not allowed to talk to one another now. Not like they did. They weren’t strong?

  She is strong. She will endure. She will accomplish the extraordinary.

  A puff of wind noses through from outside. It feels nice on her ravaged skin. Feathery.

  Across the alley, a voice calls her name.

  Her heart explodes.

  Blood buzzes below her ribs like the wasps.

  It’s no longer called Cook County. The monster beside the Eisenhower Expressway is now the John H. Stroger, Jr., Hospital. All 1.2 million square feet of it. And it’s not the ER. It’s the Department of Emergency Medicine.

  I didn’t care about names. Or the chaos swirling around me. The guy yelling obscenities. The baby screaming. The phones ringing. The sirens announcing the delivery of yet more carnage.

  Through the cacophony of misery, I was trying to make out what Roy Capps was saying. I could hear him barking on the far side of the privacy curtain. Hadn’t a clue who was taking the hit.

  I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the table. Felt a moment of vertigo. Dropped my chin and did some deep breathing. I’d blacked out briefly in the ambulance, been wide awake to enjoy the X-raying, disinfecting, probing, and stitching. Not a big deal. I’ve been patched up before.

  The curtain whipped back and the doc who’d done the heavy lifting strode into the bay. Long legs, long neck, made me think of the cranes at the Ritz. His name badge said DR. TEDESCANI.

  Behind Tedescani was Capps. Behind Capps was a guy in his fifties with a big square head and hair well on its way to a comb-over. His eyes were small and blue-gray and never stopped moving. I assumed this was Clegg.

  Tedescani crossed to me and adjusted the sling cradling my left arm. “You burned a good hunk of karma today. And you owe thanks to that jacket.” Indicating the puffer, which lay in two pieces, cut up the back.

  “And to my blistering speed,” I said.

  “The bullet nicked muscle, tumbled, then stopped, causing no major damage. I assume you weren’t sitting still. That or your assailant was the world’s worst marksman.”

  “Have you seen bullets do that before?” Sounded like complex physics to me.

  “I’ve seen everything before.” Tedescani handed me a printout. “I’ve written you a script for Vicodin and an antibiotic.”

  “Better living through chemistry.”

  “Fill them, don’t fill them. It’s your shoulder.”

  “Thank you.”

&nbs
p; “Keep the wound dry. Change the dressing every twenty-four hours.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No fastballs or sliders.”

  “Can I go?”

  “These gentlemen would like a word with you.” Indicating C-squared. “I don’t know about the uniforms out in the hall.”

  Tedescani withdrew to serve the next lucky customer.

  “You want to tell me what the fuck just happened?” The flush on Capps’s face matched the stains on what was left of my turtleneck.

  “I shot a guy at the Ritz.”

  “No shit.”

  “He meant to shoot me.”

  “Bully for him.”

  “Did you speak to Mutt and Jeff?”

  “If you mean Harvey and Fix, they gave us their version. We want yours.”

  “I assume this is your partner?” I indicated Clegg, who was standing with arms folded, feet spread, looking like he’d exited the womb a cop. He was taller than Capps, but who wasn’t.

  Clegg just stared.

  “So who was this guy?” Capps asked.

  “I never got a good look at his face.”

  Capps tossed me a red fleece jacket that looked like it might have been rejected by the homeless.

  “Now’s your chance. He’s taking callers right down the street.”

  —

  The Cook County Medical Examiner facility was minutes away. Which made me wonder about survival rates at ole John H. Stroger, Jr.

  A tech met us in reception and led us to a gurney in an empty autopsy room. On the gurney was a body bag. The tech unzipped it and withdrew to lean against a wall. C-squared and I stepped close.

  The bag held a male still wearing the tracksuit in which he’d died. He was white and had a scraggly blond mustache.

  I got Opaline Drucker’s four photos from my purse and selected the three men. C-squared and I looked from the photos to the corpse. The man in the bag had been driving the Subaru Forester at Bnos Aliza.

  “Cha-ching,” Capps said.

  I looked at him.

  “Furr told us you’re paid by the head.”

  “This kid can’t be out of his twenties.” I found Capps’s insinuation offensive.

  “And he won’t be celebrating the big three-oh.”

  “How much you getting for him?” Clegg’s vowels were nasal and flat, Chicago all the way.

  “Twenty-five grand,” Capps answered, before I could deflect the question.

  “This fuckwad came gunning for me,” I snapped.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’re out of line. I didn’t ambush him.”

  “How’d you know he was in your room?” Clegg asked.

  I explained the motion detector.

  “So you kicked the door open, then waited in the hall.”

  “Yes.”

  “How long?”

  “A few hours.”

  “Tenacious.”

  “I’m famous for it.”

  “And the wigs?”

  “That too.”

  For a few beats we all studied the man in the bag. He looked pale as uncooked fish. And far too young to be hosting rigor mortis.

  “Here’s the thing,” Capps said. “Drucker grease or not, we can’t have you running around our town shooting people you think might or might not hate Jews enough to blow up their kids.”

  “And collecting twenty-five bills a pop.” Clegg seemed irked as much by the money as by the death.

  “I’m not an assassin. I was hired to close a case you and your colleagues left open. I didn’t shoot this guy for profit. I shot him because he shot me.”

  “And the ads you ran online and in the Trib? That wasn’t a lure?”

  So C-squared were keeping tabs on me. I said nothing.

  “Let’s talk about the wigs,” Capps said.

  “I prefer the blond look.”

  “You need disguises because…?” Capps let the question hang.

  “One of them may be able to ID me.”

  “ID you.”

  “Recognize me.”

  “I understand the term. I want to know how that could be.”

  “I think I was tailed yesterday.”

  “You’re in contact with them?” Capps’s whole little body bristled.

  “Someone left a note for me at the Ritz. Maybe the bombers, maybe not.”

  “To arrange a meet?”

  I didn’t want C-squared mucking up that night’s rendezvous. Perhaps sending those who’d arranged it scurrying back underground. Perhaps getting Stella Bright killed.

  “Nothing like that. I think the idea was to eyeball me. See who I am, assess me as a threat. Thus the impulse to tweak my appearance.”

  Capps and Clegg exchanged a look. I got the sense neither was buying my story.

  “They’ll ink and roll this guy in the morning.” I flicked a thumb at the gurney. “I’m guessing he’ll be in the system.”

  “Names part of your deal?” Clegg asked.

  “No,” I said.

  Capps gestured to the tech that we were done.

  The tech hesitated, then, “You might want to check his hands.”

  “Do we?”

  The tech shrugged. Uninterested, though he’d clearly been listening.

  Capps rotated an impatient wrist.

  The tech pushed from the wall, joined us at the gurney, and angled the man’s right arm up and onto his belly. When he loosened the paper bag covering the hand, visible at the base of his thumb was a crude monochrome tattoo.

  “You got a magnifier?” Capps asked.

  The tech produced a handheld lens. One by one C-squared and I peered through it.

  “I’m seeing a couple of J’s hooked together,” Clegg said.

  “Looks amateur, maybe a prison tat,” Capps said.

  “Are you familiar with the symbol?” I asked.

  “No,” they both said.

  Capps took out his phone and shot a few pics. The tech rebagged the hand, closed the zipper, then rolled the mustachioed corpse toward the cooler.

  “Finally a lead,” I said.

  “Break out the bubbly,” Capps said.

  Down the hall, a door whooshed, clanged. The tech returned. “You need anything else?”

  “We’re good,” Capps said.

  “You able to find your way out?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  The tech took his leave.

  “How about my piece?” I asked Capps, already knowing the answer.

  “We’ll be keeping that for now.”

  “The guy was packing a Beretta.”

  “Same as half the gangbangers in America.”

  Clegg had me there.

  A wall clock said 10:43. Analog, with old-fashioned black numerals and a sweep second hand. I had to hurry.

  “How about a ride to the Ritz?” I smiled my most charming smile. Which contracted a multitude of muscles and reoriented the scar just so. Move number three. I had a whole repertoire.

  They dropped me with an order to stay in touch. Reminded me of Beau at the Charleston airport. After watching their taillights disappear around the corner, I hurried to the Tremont.

  Tossing my purse and the wig bag onto the bed, I took off the fleece, then the sling. Teeth gritted against the pain, I wriggled out of the bloodstained, newly one-sleeved turtleneck and pulled on a clean one. Then I retrieved the Glock 17 from the safe and shoved it into the empty holster on my belt.

  Using mostly my right hand, I managed to don the black wig. After maneuvering back into the fleece, which involved a lot of cursing, I checked myself in the mirror. A bit Natasha Fatale, but the look would do. Different enough from yesterday that they might not spot me right off.

  11:17. I checked the motion detector, descended to the lobby, and flagged a taxi.

  Riding north on Lake Shore Drive, I thought about the people I was going to encounter. They were smart. And they were ruthless. They’d bombed a school. They’d arranged to meet me at midnight, all the while plan
ning to shoot me in the afternoon. Did they know how that had gone down? They must. What would happen now? Would they even show up?

  Did they have Stella? Had they already killed her?

  Were the would-be assassins and the Foster Beach people one and the same? If not, who wanted me dead? If so, would they try again at the underpass? Should I go? Should I have told Capps and Clegg? Probably a big yes there.

  Should I have taken time to fill the prescription for Vicodin? The local anesthesia was wearing off. My shoulder felt as though I’d walked it into an industrial fan.

  I had to go. Other than the guy in the morgue, the meet was the only lead I had. Opaline Drucker had asked if I’d see it through. I’d given myself five stars out of five.

  Again the flash images. The silhouette in the gore. The shock on the face of the female bomber. The autopsy photos of Bowen Bright.

  Though irrational, my gut insisted that Stella was alive. If not, these people might know where her body could be found.

  I leaned back. Unwise on two levels. The ratty upholstery snagged at the wig. The pressure on my spine triggered pain from my shoulder to my wrist.

  I sat forward, left arm in my lap, right elbow on my knee. Outside the taxi, streetlights whipped by as disjointed peach vapor strips. Beyond the lights, the lake, a dark and forbidding void in the night.

  I spotted the Sox cap while still twenty yards north of the rendezvous point. Rookie move. The full moon turned the white logo neon.

  The woman was by an oak, on the lake side of the trail, just past the pedestrian underpass. I saw no one else around. But there had to be others. Others with guns. I guessed they were positioned in the trees and the underpass.

  I cut east toward the beach and, keeping to the shadows, circled to a point behind the woman. I was the only human afoot and didn’t want to test the effectiveness of my disguise.

  The woman was looking south. She hadn’t gotten pics at the Ritz, so only she could ID me. Though I guessed the others had been given a verbal description. I knew them only from the video stills, which were far from clear. If these were the people who’d bombed the Bnos Aliza School.

  So we waited. She was nervous, scanning for me, for cops, for any sign of a setup. I was keeping her in my sights. And looking for her cohorts. And trying to keep the damn wig in place. An icy breeze off the lake was making that hard.