by Thomas Laird
I stand up.
“Easter’s coming in just a few weeks, Pietro. You can smell it in the air. You change your mind and you allow us to handle Costello and his protection, you have my phone number. You really need to hire some younger broads with a little more verve in the way they toss their tits around, Pete. It’s depressing in here.”
I get up and retrace my steps out the front door.
*
After I visit my cousin I go back downtown, and I feel a little hungry, but I don’t want White Castle, and Doc has gone home early because his knee is killing him, he told me before I visited Pete. So I visit the small cafeteria we have in the Loop Headquarters. I get a Coke from the cooler, and I order the fried chicken, and then I take a seat in a booth as far away from the food line as I can find. I don’t feel much like talking to anyone—especially to another copper.
Rita walks up, from my blindside. She smiles down at me.
“Can I sit with you, Jimmy?”
“Of course you can.”
She plants herself across from me in the booth.
“How are you?” she asks.
“Good. You?”
“Well we got the small talk over with. Are you angry with me?” she wants to know.
“Yeah. I’ve always hated you, Rita,” I say with a thin grin on my lips.
“Are you?”
“No, I’m not pissed off at you. I miss you, that’s all.”
“I miss you, too.”
“Are you looking for a restart here, Rita?”
“I don’t think now’s the time for it. You’re busy with Tommy Costello, I hear.”
“You must have the same sources I do.”
“It’s a small world inside these headquarters. People say shit. You can’t help but overhear things.”
“How’s life with your partner, Al?”
“He’s a nice guy, and contrary to the crap circulating about him, he isn’t gay.”
“He bust a move on you?” I smile.
“He’s a gentleman—and he already has a lady.”
“Good for Al.”
“I never meant for this to turn out bitter, Jimmy.”
“Well, what are you gonna do?”
“I still care about you.”
“So that’s why we never talk, we never even see each other, even here in the building, right?”
“I’ve been busy, too. Caseload’s full.”
I breathe out softly.
“I’m sorry, Rita. It’s not your fault. You can’t help the way you feel. There’s nothing I can say or do, otherwise I would’ve said it or done it, and here we are.”
“Maybe things will be different. I just haven’t figured it out, yet. Maybe things’ll change when we’ve been separate for a while.”
“Time apart doesn’t make the heart fonder. That’s one thing you can know for certain.”
She rises.
“I hope we see each other soon. I’m not so certain I’m over you.”
Then she turns and walks away and out the entry of the cafeteria.
*
“You look sad, pal,” Doc pronounces.
“Yeah, I got the gout again.”
“I haven’t seen you limping.”
He smiles at me, and he knows about Rita. He knows it was hot and now it’s dead cold.
“You need to get out more. You’re too young to be alone. Get over it. Get in the game.”
“You should talk.”
“I see women all the time. I just don’t see them for very long. The cost of alimony taught me a very valuable lesson, Jimmy.”
“You ever see the ex?”
“I’d like to see her on a slab, for ID purposes.”
“You’re full of shit. You aren’t that mean.”
“You’re probably right, Jimmy. She’s probably the one who’d like to stick a pin in my chest to make sure I’m not breathing.”
We’re sitting together in a fluorescent-lit office that I call my own, and it’s the end of a four to twelve shift, and the drizzle outside continues. The radio says it’s still forty degrees outside, and I’m hoping the report’s accurate. I don’t want to slide all the way home. I keep telling myself it’s almost spring, but I don’t believe it when I look out the office window at Lakeshore Drive.
“I miss Erin,” I tell Doc.
I feel tears begin to well in my eyes.
“You’d be strange if you didn’t. I sort of loved her myself. She was a great woman.”
“I felt about the same with this other one, but I can’t understand how she can turn it off and on like she does.”
“Women are the bane of mankind—I mean the male half. They’re nothing like us, but they treat us as if they expect we understand what they really want. I understand them even less than you do.”
He looks out at the rain.
“I’m going to go home. I should’ve stayed there instead of coming back in here for two hours, but our paperwork is piling up, Jimmy.”
We’ve got seven current homicides we’re working on at the moment, and that’s not counting the five guys that Azrael extinguished all over the country, including two so far, here in the city.
“There’s only one case, Doc, and you know it as well as I do. Azrael’s coming, and he’s bringing hell with him. Just like in that Bible verse. There’s only the one case, and it’s moving right at us.”
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Interstate 80
I go back to the car and retrieve my .22 while Robin takes a shower back in the motel room. When I head for the door, the sun is going down behind me, and I suddenly feel very tired.
I walk up to the second floor and I unlock the door. When I shut it and bolt it behind me, I turn to see Robin naked in the middle of the room. She motions for me to come to her, and I’m too weary to argue or put her off. She pulls back the covers on the king-sized bed, and I’m standing next to her. Robin begins to unzip and unbutton me, and she helps lift the tee shirt off my shoulders. While we’re still standing next to the oversized bed in this off-highway motel room, I find myself in a very aroused state even though I had no such designs on this girl.
She might not be legal, age-wise, but I should hardly worry about the letter of the law at this point.
She flops down on the sheets, and then she throws her legs wide open so there can be no mistake what’s about to happen, and I find myself fully under her control. She’s a natural redhead, I observe, and her breasts are small and firm with delicate and small pink nipples that are standing tall at the moment.
When I’m in her, she moans. I don’t move because I’m a little too excited, and I don’t want it to end for a long while. This may be the last woman I ever have, and I’m going to try to elongate the feeling of the wet and the warm and of the pounding of my heart and the gliding and flowing into each other that we’re enmeshed in.
She starts to finish just before I do, and when it’s over, I collapse to her side, and the last thing I’m aware of is her red hair swathed across my sweaty chest.
*
I wake abruptly, and when I look over to find Robin, she’s not there. I reach for the .22 that I put under the bed while she was still in the shower, and I find the handle.
The keys for the Chevy heap are not on the nightstand where I left them. I hurriedly throw on my clothes and my shoes, and I grab my duffel because I know where she was headed. I just don’t know if I’ll be in time to beat her to the car.
The lobby is empty. It’s a little after one. I see the clock as I pass.
When I’m out in the parking lot, I see a figure standing at the rear end of my ride. I’m coming up behind her very quietly, and she’s too busy peering inside my trunk to notice me. Only when I gently place the barrel of the .22 against the back of her neck does she straighten up. I hear the air pump out of her mouth in surprise and shock.
“Get in the car,” I tell her.
I look down and see the bigger bag with the 80
K is wide open.
“I just—”
“Get in the car,” I repeat.
I walk her to the passenger’s side, and I watch as she gets in. She left her guitar case and her other baggage in the trunk. When I walk around to the driver’s side, pistol still in hand, I watch her until I’m sitting behind the wheel.
“I wasn’t going to…”
She doesn’t bother finishing her sentence.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she begs.
“We’re going for a ride. That’s all,” I tell her.
I get us out of the lot and back to the ramp for eastbound I-80.
I drive maybe thirty miles, both of us silent, and then I slow down and gradually pull to the side of the road. It’s after 2 a.m., and there are very few cars on the road with us.
“Take off your clothes,” I tell her.
“I’ll do whatever you want. Really, tell me what you want and I’ll do it.”
“Shut up and take off your clothes.”
She begins undoing and unbuttoning. She’s down to her bra and panties.
“Everything,” I tell her.
“What do you want me to do? I’ll do anything only don’t—”
“Get the rest off. Now.”
She undoes the hooks in her bra, and I can see those dot-like nipples, but they’re not erect.
Then she slides out of the red bikini panties.
“Now get out of the car.”
“What?”
“Out.”
“You can’t mean…”
“Get out or I’ll hurt you.”
She looks at me with a plea in her eyes, but she sees begging is futile.
“You wouldn’t leave me out in the middle of the road in the dark, like this.”
“You were going to leave me in that motel room all by myself, and you were going to relieve me of all my belongings, weren’t you?”
She tries to remonstrate, but her eyes drop to her lap.
“Now get out. It’s that, or I’ll shoot you and throw you out.”
She goes for the door handle, opens the door, and now she’s standing on the shoulder naked, without even the sandals she was wearing. I was going to ask her why she was wearing sandals in March, but I never got around to it.
“I’ll freeze,” she implores with the door open.
“Then I’ll shoot you instead.”
I put the .22 on my right thigh where she can see it.
She finally resigns herself, and then she closes the door.
When I pull away from the side of the Interstate, I never once look back in the rear-view mirror, and I’m headed east at 80 miles an hour.
*
I finally have to get off the highway about three hours later. It’s close to six in the morning, and dawn is still fuzzy and gray. I’m somewhere in Iowa, but I haven’t seen a sign in hours. But there is another motel sign up ahead, and that’s where I turn off. When I get in the lot, I find a trash can and I throw out all of Robin’s gear, including the guitar case. I feel compelled to open the case, and all I find inside is underwear, socks, tops, blue jeans and bathroom junk. No guitar.
*
I wake up around four in the afternoon, and I go down to the guy at the desk, and he tells me there’s a Burger King about two blocks away from the motel. So I drive there and eat whatever breakfast sandwich they offer, and I down three coffees, and then three cups of Coke (two refills), and then I go back to the motel and flop face first on the bed—queen-sized, this time—and I’m out until nine that same night.
I check out at ten after I took a shower, and then I drive to the gas station right next to the motel and I fill it up. I get back on the highway and drive in the dark all that way until the sign tells me I’m entering Illinois. When the sun comes up, I’m at the boundary for the city of Chicago.
*
I have no idea where to begin looking for Costello, and I’m still not sure that I want to kill Steven James any longer. But I understand that somebody in this city knows where Tommy is, so I make a call at a payphone in front of yet another motel in LaGrange, where I’m staying.
Greenberg answers on the third ring.
“Where are you?” he asks. “Wait. Don’t tell me. Tommy might have a tap going.”
“I need to know who his friends are.”
“Give me the number where you’re calling. I’ll use a payphone.”
I give him the number.
Fifteen minutes later, the telephone rings. I pick up, and it’s Greenberg, as promised.
“His connection in Chicago is Pete Parisi.”
“Parisi? Isn’t that the name of that Chicago cop I read about in the San Francisco papers, the one who’s involved in—”
“Yeah, William. They’re family, believe it or not, but from what I hear this Jimmy Parisi is not connected or fused at the hip to Pete or anyone else. He’s one of those freaks on the force who doesn’t take money, like that New York jerk, Frank Serpico, except Jimmy Parisi’s a homicide, and his old man was a hardass homicide before him. Keep your eyes open for him to be coming up behind you—Jimmy, I mean. The old man’s dead.”
I hang up after thanking Greenberg, but he refuses to let me send him some cash. He must be doing better than I thought he was.
I go back to my room and sleep for another six hours, and when it’s dark I hit another fast-food trough and I eat yet some more grease-drenched burgers and fries, and I begin to feel some pain in my belly. I stop at a drugstore, and I buy some stomach shit that’s supposed to relieve me of my gas, but when I pay for it, the girl at the register, maybe she’s twenty, gives me the fish eye, and I’m wondering if she made me from some newspaper photo or artist’s rendition, so I waste no time getting back to the motel.
I check out within an hour, and then I sign in at another flophouse thing in Lyons. It’s not far from the other motel, but I don’t want to chance anyone getting too long a look at me. Once I take care of Tommy, I don’t give a damn what happens next. But I won’t go to jail. I don’t want to live that badly. If I have to stop, it’ll be on my own terms.
Maybe this cop Parisi will help me out of my dilemma. A well-placed slug is a much better alternative than living it out in a cage with the kind of lowlife that Tommy Costello runs.
While I’m crashed in the western suburb they call Lyons, I ask the young guy at the counter at the motel if he knows where the local titty bars are. He smiles some nasty teeth, and his acne scars don’t make his twenty-something-year-old face appear any prettier.
He says there’s a strip joint not even a mile from here. The kid says it’s on LaGrange Road, the road that runs out front of the motel.
I’m figuring if it’s a strip joint, it’s run by Chicago’s Outfit, in which case they’d know about this Pete Parisi, because the Italians are deep into flesh, any kind of skin you prefer.
It’s called Midnight City, and I go inside around 11 p.m. The place is jammed because it’s a Friday night and all the titty bar cowboys are ready for action.
If you want information, you talk to the bartenders. I brought some hundred-dollar bills to entice some free flow of intelligence.
The man behind the bar is gigantic, maybe six-eight, and I figure he doubles as a bouncer, although they have another gorilla at the front door, almost as big as the ape in front of me.
I order a draught, and when he comes back with it, I put it to him. The noise in this dump makes me nearly have to shout, but no one at the bar is paying attention to me—they’re watching the flesh bob up and down, behind the barman. The stage behind him has six dancers, and all of them are carrying big loads in the bosom area.
“You know Pete Parisi?” I ask him.
“Who?”
He puts a hand to his left ear.
I show him the C note and lay it on the slab in front of me.
“Never heard of him.”
I look at him, but he hasn’t walked away from me, yet.
I lay another hundred-dollar bill on
top of the first one.
“You must be in a hurry to get killed, Mister,” he tells me.
I place a third bill of the same denomination on top of the other two.
“You want to get shot, and me along with you?”
I put two more hundreds on the pile.
“That’s the end of the line. Take it or leave it,” I tell the giant.
“You better not tell anyone where you got this from,” he says as he leans close in to me.
The noise of the music is pounding around us. The colors are garish and loud on stage, and what little they’re wearing is bright red and yellow and blue and green anyway.
“Well?” I ask him.
“Pete lives in Oakbrook, on 23rd and Keznior. You’ll make the house. It’s too big not to. And that’s all I can tell you. It comes back to me, and I’ll take a hammer to every bone in your body, little man.”
I punch him in the throat, and he grabs hold of his neck, but no one has noticed what we’re doing because the strippers are in the frenzy of the end of “Proud Mary,” the Ike and Tina Turner version, and their eyes are all planted on the mounds that are gyrating in sync—the big finale.
I get up from the stool, and I leave the money for Kong. He’s deserved it.
*
The next day I venture out to Oakbrook to see if the address was any good. There’s a huge lot with a house that looks more like a castle. The thing has a faux moat in front of the entryway, but there’s no water, and no crocodiles that I can see. There’s a guard at the wrought-iron six-foot fence that goes all around the two-acre spread, and I’m sure the owner has electronic surveillance inside and outside the property.
It won’t be easy getting in, and I’m still not certain Pete Parisi lives here.
There’s only the one way to find out. I park the beater across the street and then I amble over to the guard post at the front of this sprawling city estate. Oakbrook is a ‘burb, but it’s hard to tell where Chicago ends and where the suburb begins.
