by Thomas Laird
Now we have to guard his hospital room until he’s able to go back to Pete’s to recuperate well enough to get on the bird to finally return his greasy ass to the Bay. It’ll be tense until Costello becomes the San Francisco PD’s headache.
Do I think the Ranger will try to whack him at St. John’s Hospital in the Loop? I don’t see why he wouldn’t go for it there if he tried it among forty thousand witnesses at Wrigley. Azrael doesn’t care if he gets killed, not when he won’t play nicely with a powerful man like Tommy Costello. Azrael is motivated in ways no one but he can completely understand. No one ever killed my wife and unborn child. If they had, I might have stormed Costello’s beaches, too.
Doc and I get shifts to watch the mafia slug, and it feels like we’re going over and beyond by trying to keep this swinging dick alive, but it’s our job to follow orders from above, no matter how unsavory those demands are to us. We don’t get a vote, anyway.
*
We’re here at St. John’s on our regular midnights’ shift on a Thursday night in early May, and Doc’s brought a portable radio so we can listen to the Cubs getting slaughtered by the Los Angeles Dodgers in LA—the game’s still in extra innings past midnight. Doc’s not much of a baseball fan, but anybody’s conversation becomes stale if you keep going at it long enough. So we sit on folding chairs outside Room 436. Costello will be in here for at least a week or until his unexpected infection clears up. They’re bombarding him with antibiotics, but he’s healing slowly, the attending surgeon told my partner and me yesterday, when we stopped in for a chat with him.
“I was hoping it was a staph infection and that he’d die and we could go back to ordinary murderers,” Doc cracked after we left the surgeon’s office. “But I always knew this creep wouldn’t help us out any.”
He says all of the above so deadpan that I’m not quite sure he’s jesting.
“All I ask is for a little accommodation once in a while,” he laments.
The game finally ends around one, and the Baby Bruins do their thing—they lose in extras, 4-3.
“What a waste of a battery,” Doc grumbles.
“I’ll buy you a pack of the goddam things. I know you just bring that radio for me, lover boy.”
The hospital is virtually a ghost town. Only occasionally do we hear a moan or a groan from one of the doors when a nurse goes inside to stick something in them or take something out of them.
“I’m hoping for a major infarction.” My partner smiles. “Massive heart attack, and I go down on my face in the inverted V in whoever is being kind enough to fornicate with me at the moment.”
These folding chairs are lethal on our asses. I’m thinking of buying fanny pads for us from some store that ends in “mart.”
Doc goes suddenly quiet.
“What?” I say in an almost stage-whisper.
He raises his hand to silence me.
“Sounded like somebody was walking our way,” he says.
“Let me go look. You stay here. We don’t need to get separated from our much-beloved charge in there.” I motion toward Room 436.
“I’d like it better if we both stayed put,” Doc replies.
“Call downstairs for a couple of uniforms to come up from the lobby,” I say.
“Why not? Maybe it’ll wake them up. I’ll use Costello’s phone. I’m sure he won’t mind… Look, be careful. You hearing me?”
The look on his face is anything but humorous.
I walk down the hall to where the hallways intersect. When I arrive at that intersection, I look both ways and I listen. I think I hear the treading of footsteps off to the left. I remember clearly how Azrael led us away from the johns at Wrigley so that he could circle around and commence to make one of the nation’s most wanted criminals piss his own pants.
He wouldn’t try the same move twice. Would he?
But here I am pounding the white, glaring tiled halls of St. John’s Hospital, well after the witching hour, looking for another kind of spook. This ghost is trained vapor; he’s smoke. He evaporates before your very eyes.
Then I hear the sound once again. There’s someone around the corner, on my left. I hear the squeak of gym shoes, it sounds like.
I speed up my pace, and now I take out my .38, and I let my right arm and hand dangle with its heavy added weight.
I come around the corner and almost pile into a male nurse who’s got his eyes planted on a clipboard. My immediate reaction is to raise the gun at his nose, and the nurse stops cold and drops the clipboard. The look on his blonde-topped face is of sheer unanticipated terror. He yanks his hands high, like it’s a stickup.
I show him the badge and I lower the cannon.
“Oh my Christ, I think I peed myself!”
I’m thinking he sounds a bit effeminate, but what the hell do I know? I begin profuse apologies, and he takes off to someone who needs his attention immediately.
I reverse my course and head back to 436, only to find two uniforms waiting warily outside Costello’s room. I show them my ID because I don’t recognize their faces, and then I see the tension leave them.
“You guys head back downstairs. False alarm. Thanks for getting here so quick,” I tell them.
Then Doc comes out of the hospital room.
He raises his palms at me askance.
“Nothing. But I scared the wee-wee out of a male nurse.”
“There’s a lot of that uncontrolled pissing going on lately.”
We sit back down on the folding chairs. I look at my watch and see that twenty-three minutes have elapsed since I heard the footsteps down the hall.
“You remember the hospital scene in The Godfather, the first one?” Doc asks.
I nod.
“The babe I was watching it with at the State and Lake Theatre levitated out of her goddam seat. I don’t know where that goddam nurse came from who snuck up behind Pacino. You remember that part?”
I nod again.
“That lady was extra romantic that night, I recall. Wouldn’t let me leave her alone the rest of the evening. I think I took her to every damn horror movie that came out that winter. It was just after New Year’s Day. Nineteen seventy-something.”
We sit in silence. It’s just before two.
“I hate midnights,” he says. “It’s uncivilized. It needs to go the way of the sweatshops.”
I listen until my ears literally hurt. I force Doc to keep talking so I don’t have to deal with the quiet.
“I really, really hate midnights,” he repeats.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Orland Park, Illinois, 1985
I watch her read the newspaper across the table from me on a Wednesday morning in the second week of May. There’s still a chill in the air, but it’s supposed to rise to the mid-seventies by the afternoon, and she wants us to go to the forest preserves north of here to have a picnic. She made all the food last night, and the cooler is full of sandwiches and pop and beer. She doesn’t drink much, and neither do I, but we like a brew occasionally together. She calls them “adult beverages.”
“It says that gangster who almost got killed in the baseball park is recovering from appendicitis and an infection, and that he’s finally showing some improvement. I guess the infection was pretty serious.”
“What gangster?” I ask her.
“That guy … Tommy Costello, from San Francisco—you know, he was on the TV news the other night.”
“Never heard of him.”
She looks at me and smiles.
“Sure you have. He’s the guy you were going to kill at Wrigley Field, a little while ago. Your name is Evan, isn’t it?”
I don’t answer her.
“If you were going to kill me, Evan, you would’ve done it by now, wouldn’t you?”
I still can’t find speech.
“I knew who you were after we were together for a week. I saw your picture in the paper. I’m not senile, you know.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” I ask.
“But I killed those five soldiers. And there were others, too.”
“In the war?” she wants to know.
“Yes. But there were still others. I used to work for Tommy Costello.”
“I know. I read about that in the paper, also.”
I watch her eyes, now that she’s lowered the Sun Times to the table.
“Then why haven’t you called the police?” I ask her.
“Because I don’t want you to leave me, like I said. I knew we were going to be together the first time I saw how you looked at me.”
“I’m a killer, Diana. I’m a serial murderer, like it said in the papers and on TV. I’m a dangerous man. Why aren’t you afraid?”
“I knew who you were the first time you touched me. You’re not a murderer.”
“I’ve killed men for money.”
“Isn’t that what soldiers do, too, really? You don’t make the money, but other men make a fortune from what you do, what you did. Isn’t that true?”
“I better go, then, Diana. You’ll be in trouble if they find out we’ve been—”
“I don’t care, Evan. I’ve been living alone a long time, and I don’t care what happens to me as long as you don’t go away.”
“I can’t stay here for much longer. They’ll find me pretty soon.”
“Who? Costello or the police?” she asks.
“What difference does it make? Either way, I’ll be gone. And I’m not going to prison.”
“I thought you said you loved me.”
“I do love you. You know that.”
“Then why won’t you take me away with you somewhere?”
“If the cops don’t catch me, then Costello will. Tommy has a lot of money and a lot of people—and so do the police. They know what I look like. You figured it out. We’ll go out somewhere and someone will spot me, and then they’ll drag you in, too. If it’s the police, you’re an accessory to murder, and that means you go to prison. If Costello finds us, he’ll kill you, too, but he won’t just put a bullet in both of us. He’ll make it hurt before he does us, Diana. You don’t know how bad he really is.”
“Why can’t we leave the country? Go to Mexico? People do disappear there, don’t they? I mean the border is a joke, isn’t it? The drug people and the illegal immigrants pass in and out all the time. Can’t we just disappear? The papers said you did it for years after the war. Can’t we both at least try? Because I know I don’t want to go back to living alone. I know I’m starting to get old. I’ll be fifty-three in August, and you’re still young, so if that’s the reason you don’t—”
“You know it isn’t the reason.”
“You still want to kill Costello. Is he more important than us, Evan?”
I grip the table tightly. My eyes go down to my hands.
“He killed Li. I was living with her, and she was shot by Tommy’s brother, and I know Tommy gave the order to get me, but Willy killed Li and she was pregnant.”
“I’m so sorry.”
I nod.
“I love you, Diana. I never thought it would happen once, let alone happen again with you, but it has, and I don’t want you hurt in any way.”
“You think I won’t be hurt if you take off on me?”
I don’t have an answer for her.
“Are you going to kill Costello?”
I watch her beautiful eyes.
“I have to do it, Diana. I can’t let him get away with it. I killed five Rangers because of the war, but I’m not going to do the survivor. His name is Steven James. I had no right to kill the others, but the Army didn’t get around to court-marshaling any of us, and I had to make it right. We butchered women and children who had nothing to do with that damned war, and I couldn’t let it stand unanswered. Somebody should’ve made us pay, but no one did, and I’m not waiting for God to do the job on us. Maybe he’ll meet up with James and me sometime soon, but I don’t think there’s a higher power who gives a shit, Diana. The jobs I did for Tommy have no excuse for them. I did them for money. There’s no justifying any of those killings, and I deserve to be punished.”
“Were they criminals? Were they bad people?”
I can’t defend myself to her.
“Let’s take this one chance at a life, Evan. All you’ve ever known is death. Let’s take a chance on a life with each other. Somewhere. Anywhere.”
She reaches across the kitchen table and takes hold of my hand.
*
The forest preserve is somewhere off 95th Street in the wooded portion of Oak Lawn, a southwestern suburb. We cart the cooler, and then we spread out her blanket on the grass in a meadow that is surrounded by tall and majestic-looking elms and oaks. They’re starting to sprout full green leaves, and spring has kicked in. Soon everything out here in the preserve will have flowered toward summer.
We eat her ham sandwiches and her potato salad and her mixed fruit, and we drink the few beers in the ice chest, and the temperature rises into the seventies, just as predicted.
I don’t want to run away. I want to build us a cabin right here.
The notion flies away in a moment. We’re lying out together in the sun. She’s worn a skirt and a loose blouse that bares her shoulders, and even though we’re both a bit full from the lunch, nature takes over. I look around and see no one in our vicinity. They have rangers who watch these preserves, but they tend to appear when kids come out to neck or make love, and the teens are still in school until the third week of June, Diana tells me.
I lift up her skirt and I slide the red bikini panties down past her ankles, and then I open my jeans and haul them down below my rear, and then I’m atop her and into her and she has her hands on my face on either cheek.
“Don’t go, Evan. You can’t go.”
“I won’t.”
Then she smiles blearily and raises her face toward mine and she kisses me fiercely on the lips and thrusts her tongue into my mouth. I come right back at her, and sooner than I’d like, we’re spent.
But she won’t let me withdraw. She’s got her legs wrapped about my middle.
She looks up at me, her face wet with perspiration, mine and hers.
“We can go to Mexico. You do what you have to do, and we’ll go so far south that no one will ever find us. We’ll vanish the way you did in Vietnam. People disappear, Evan. We can do it, too. I have money. I’ll sell the apartment building. I’ll do whatever I have to do.”
“I told you. I won’t leave you.”
She kisses me long and intensely again.
“You need to get the other over soon. We need to be gone before anyone can come find us.”
I’m stone-hard inside her again, and she thrusts her hips at me, and we’re completely and thoroughly joined together.
*
I keep scanning the newspapers and watching television for the news for the next few days, and on the third day I read a piece in the Chicago Tribune that says the mobster Tommy Costello is due out of St. John’s Hospital in three more days—that’s next Tuesday.
Getting at him in the hospital is difficult but not impossible. It is true that you can kill anyone. And this time I have an additional reason to nail Costello. He’s the last male family member alive. His brother Willy was Tommy’s sole masculine sibling, and there are no living relatives that I know about unless they’re alive in Sicily. So if I kill Tommy Costello, that’s one fewer bloodhound on our trail, if we actually do make it out of the country alive or if we’re not in irons.
I should just leave her. It would be the intelligent, right thing to do, but I can’t. It’s not that she won’t allow it, any longer. I just can’t see myself surviving if it means I have to live the way I did after Li was gone. Like I told Diana, I never figured on one great chance in this life, and to throw away a miraculous second opportunity seems like spitting in Fate’s face. It’s like tearing up a million dollar lottery ticket.
She wants this. She knows what happ
ens if we get caught, and she still wants to take off with me. The only minor problem is getting away with a whack on Tommy Costello. There’ll be cops outside the hospital and police on the inside. I’m figuring this Detective Parisi, who keeps popping up in the news articles about me and Costello, won’t allow Tommy’s goons to do security. Most cops are extremely territorial about looking out for witnesses or anyone else they’re supposed to be protecting. A lot of coppers can be bought to look the other way, but Homicides are known for not taking money. If these were Vice police or anybody else, I could grease a few palms and waltz in and pop Tommy in his hospital room. But not this time.
So I’ll have to figure another way at him before he leaves on Tuesday next. There’ll be too many uniforms and bad guys outside St. John’s when they release him.
*
Li was a girl, just turning into a woman. Willy never gave her time to mature. Diana is a complete, flowered female. I’ve never known the like, not with the sleeping around I did from time to time after I got out of high school. Diana teaches me new things every time we’re together, and I don’t just mean when we’re in bed. Or on the blanket back in that forest preserve. I was literally stunned when I looked into her eyes the first time when I came to see about the apartment that I never occupy, here in Orland Park. I’ve been with her ever since the first time we made love.
The more I think about it the more I’m convinced that she made the right decision. She could’ve dimed me the instant she recognized me from the photo they’re circulating across the country, but she didn’t. If I found out I was sleeping with a series killer, I don’t know if I would’ve invited him back for an encore. She did, and she kept on taking me back, inside her, with her.
Now it’s two of us. There’s no more just me and what I need to do and what I alone want. It’s what Diana needs. It was that way with Li for a very short time, and I’ll never know, of course, how deep things would’ve run for my refugee and me.
