Penance jl-1

by Dan O'Shea

“Almost like he was bragging. Anybody else we know of could have taken the shot?”

  “At that distance, with that weapon and in that wind? No, sir. There are only a few who could have made the shot at all, with anything.”

  “So he shoots an old lady coming out of church just for kicks.”

  “A Catholic church?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Had she just attended the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation?”

  “Reconciliation? What the fuck is that?”

  “The sacrament previously known as confession. The victim in Wisconsin had just left reconciliation.”

  “Don’t know. We’ll check. But that feels like something. Fisher had the Jesus bug pretty bad.” Weaver stopped for a moment, rubbed his face. It had been a long day, and there was the prospect of longer days to come.

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes, sir.” Chen pulled another small envelope from her pocket. The envelope held two tiny electronic devices: a camera half the size of a pencil eraser and a transmitter smaller than that, two thin wires sticking out of it like antennae. “These are our most advanced audio and video surveillance options. I found the audio transmitter wedged into the molding inside one of the confessional booths in the church the victim had just left. The camera was affixed to the bottom of the last row of pews. The camera was directed at the door of the booth in which the transmitter was hidden.”

  “You check with Paravola?” Tom Paravola headed InterGov’s technical section.

  “Thirty sets of these units are missing.”

  “So we can assume another set is sitting in the church in Chicago just waiting to get us in this up to our asses. Locals tumble on those, nobody’s going to think they came from Radio Shack.”

  “Yes, sir. Their discovery would prove problematic.”

  Weaver thought for a moment. “Get to Chicago, Chen, but I don’t want you anywhere near that church. Let’s get a local on this. Who’s that guy we used on the University of Chicago break-in down there? Villanueva? See if we can get to him. This goes south, I don’t want our fingerprints on it.”

  “Yes, sir. I will make arrangements. Is there anything else?”

  “Bring Ferguson up to speed, will you? Tell him to get a team together by tomorrow, get the war wagon loaded up. We need to get Fisher inside a body bag before some cop gets his mitts on him. If Fisher decides to start answering questions, well, that would add up to better than thirty years of the wrong sorts of answers.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Weaver sat alone in the office, nursing a drink. Hide and seek with Ishmael Fisher, Ferguson was gonna love this one.

  Weaver closed the files on his desk and put them in the drawer. Lease renewal two months out, request from research for another $150,000 in computer shit, open enrollment for the health plan coming up. Couldn’t think with all that crap in front of him. Needed to get a line on Fisher.

  OK, Fisher was driving almost certainly. Just too hard to hide traveling by air now. Also — ten days between Wisconsin and Chicago, so he was taking his time. If he had slipped his moorings, and Weaver was pretty sure Fisher was well away from the dock at this point, there wasn’t anything wrong with his navigation. Everything aboard the SS Fisher was battened down and squared away. Just working off a new set of charts was all. Charts from Mars or somewhere.

  Get PsyOps back on it, of course. See if the behavioral witch doctors could get a reading. They were right more often than Weaver expected them to be, but he still didn’t trust that psychic hotline bullshit.

  Two killings, though. So that gave him two dots to string together. Enough to start looking for a pattern. Weaver punched up the two churches on the computer, plotted them on GPS. Dot two was damn near exactly due south of dot one — within yards of due south of dot one. OK, that’s odd. Could be a one-in-360-degree coincidence, but at least it was a place to start. Something about Fisher’s moral rigidity and an exact north-south line resonated with Weaver. He sent an email down to research.

  Needed to muddy up the waters, too. Dot one was working out. Locals didn’t have squat, and they weren’t going to find the slug or the electronics now.

  He had Eddie Marslovak attached to dot two. Guy with that kind of money, those kinds of connections… Weaver figured they could play the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game with him pretty easy. Wouldn’t be too hard to put some stink on him, to get the cops interested. It’d fall apart, but Weaver didn’t need a conviction, he just needed time.

  Weaver’s to-do list was getting crowded. Get research to expand their parameters on the Fisher search. See what they could do about grabbing any public video — ATM cameras, security cameras, toll booth cameras, traffic cameras. Chicago was pretty wired up. Run all that through the recognition software, see if anything comes up. What else? Toss Fisher’s place again, couldn’t hurt. He must have squirreled away some identities, he couldn’t be doing all this on cash.

  Weaver wondered what Fisher’s old man would have made of all this. Ezekiel Amos Fisher had been Weaver’s mentor. Zeke had started in the OSS. After Buchenwald, he’d gone zealot, convinced you had to fight evil with evil. Weaver remembered when he’d joined the team, right after Korea, Zeke going on about the just war doctrine, whatever Catholic shit that was, about how violence was only justified when it prevented a greater harm. For Zeke, Communism was the greatest harm imaginable. Which meant Zeke would do anything as long as it hurt the Reds more than it hurt Uncle Sam. Now Zeke’s kid had popped a couple civilians, one of them in Chicago. Zeke Fisher and the FBI COUNTERINTELPRO guys had done some shit in Chicago back in the day, playing ball with Hurley and his Red Squad. There was the Hampton raid, where Zeke helped the FBI tee up the Chicago Black Panther party and let the Chicago cops butcher them in their beds. And there was the other thing. Weaver didn’t want to think about the other thing just yet. But Fisher killing people in Chicago? Weaver didn’t close this down fast, Clarke would really start wetting his drawers.

  Weaver was not just leery of the upcoming Ides of March, he was having his doubts about the entire fucking month. And April was looking very cruel indeed.

  CHAPTER 4 — CHICAGO

  February, 1971

  “Jesus, Stosh, I know you’d stick your dick in a light socket if you thought you’d get away with it, but this is fucking nuts,” Riley said, looking down at the bodies.

  Hastings Clarke stood by the door watching Riley. Clarke hated Riley. Hated the big, round Irish head, the massive shoulders, the ill-fitting suit, the too-short tie on the slope of the unapologetic gut. He hated Riley as the venial representation of everything wrong with the city. When Clarke came west to join the Hurley dynasty, he found not corruption as a rash overlying the sound skeleton of government but a body politic completely rotted through. Urbs in Horto, City in a Garden, was Chicago’s official motto. But Qua Mei? was its operating principle. Where’s mine?

  Clarke understood self-interest. He’d met David Hurley, Jr at Yale Law and had seen the Chicago opportunity early. The East Coast was complicated. You had Kennedys and Tafts and Roosevelts. Dozens of old-line links to power, all with money and connections, all from the same schools, all looking for a way in. Clarke’s family was in the mix, of course, New York money back to the Revolution. But in Chicago, one family ran an entire state. David Hurley was going to be Clarke’s shortcut to the head of the class. Clarke went back to Chicago with David, ran his campaign for DA, served in his office, and now ran his campaign for the US Senate. Clarke would use his family money and contacts to ease Hurley onto the national stage. Then Hurley would back Clarke in Illinois. Maybe a congressional seat next cycle. Maybe Hurley would make a play for governor and Clarke would move to the senate. While his prep-school cronies were still angling for some backwater undersecretary slot, Clarke would be on the lead lap.

  Now David was dead. Worse, he was a dead homosexual. Eight years wasted.

  Clarke looked back at the bodies. Stosh Stefanski, head of Chicago’s Streets and
Sanitation Department, the mother-lode of clout, was sprawled in the middle of the floor, naked except for a sleeveless T-shirt. The T-shirt was a mess because Stefanski had been shot in the chest. A lot. David Hurley was slumped in an armchair across the room wearing only his boxers, a bullet hole in his right temple and a bigger, messier hole a little higher up on the left side. Hurley’s gun was on the floor next to the chair.

  “You did the right thing, kid, calling me,” said Riley. “What’s your name again? Hasty?”

  Clarke could hear the ridicule in his voice, the alpha-male bullshit, Riley having to mark his territory, make sure the east-coast punk knew who was sucking hind tit.

  “Hastings.”

  “Right, Hastings. What is that, some kind of family thing?”

  “Something like that,” said Clarke.

  Riley was over by the far wall, turning off the thermostat. “You wanna open those windows for me, Hastings?”

  “Why? It must be ten degrees outside.” Almost 10.00pm, and the temperature had been dropping all night.

  “Time of death, kid. Stuff happens with stiffs. Don’t ask me the particulars, I don’t know. But whatever it is, it happens slower if they’re cold. Gives us more time to work out what happened here.”

  Clarke looked at the mostly naked corpses, sniffed the smell of sex in the air. “Don’t we know what happened here?”

  “Looks like Junior was a rump ranger. Stosh here, well, Stosh’d fuck a toasted cheese sandwich — especially if the sandwich was just working out which way its bread was buttered. Especially if the sandwich wasn’t really sure it wanted to get fucked yet. Stosh liked em hurt and confused, liked fucking them, liked fucking them up even better. That way, he’d have em on a string, and he could pull it whenever he wanted. Looks like maybe he pulled a little too hard. Looks like Junior got pissed. That’s the rough draft, anyway.”

  “Rough draft?”

  “First shit happens, then history gets written down. Got a guy on his way’s gonna look things over, decide what history is.”

  “He who controls the present,” Clarke said.

  “Yeah, well, you, me, and Orwell, we’re gonna go see the old man.” Riley looked over, saw Clarke looking at him. “What, you think I can’t read?”

  Clarke was thinking, if they put the fix in, I may still have a play here.

  Mayor Hurley stood looking out the window of his spacious, spartan office on the fifth floor of City Hall, facing the plaza to the east, where the new Picasso sculpture stood. The wind drove small, scattered flecks of snow through the spotlights that lit the sculpture.

  The mayor was so different from the son. Junior had been tall, lean, dark Irish. The mayor was short, stocky, ruddy, yet emanated power like a scent. Clarke had never understood the relationship between father and son. The son was devoted to ending the corrupt politics for which his father was practically the Platonic form. No real emotional connection between them that Clarke could see — no real emotional connection between the mayor and anyone. But the mayor put the full force of his machine behind the son, and the son had an intense personal loyalty to his father.

  “Fucking statue, still don’t get it,” said Hurley.

  “Pardon?”

  “The Picasso. Junior’s idea, you know. Public art, he says, so we can be a great city, like New York or Paris. Like we ain’t a great city already. Like I gotta put a fucking steel monkey in the middle of the Loop so we can be a great city.”

  “Picasso is genius. Subjective as individual works may be, to have his work on so prominent a stage.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Make all the art critics in the world gush about us. Course you could move all the art critics in the world into the same damn place and you wouldn’t have a city, you’d have a village, cause there’s maybe a couple hundred of em, and the village wouldn’t need an idiot. And then they’d all starve cause they don’t know how to do nothing. What I like about it? The Picasso? I look out on a nice day in the summer, and I see the kids climbing up that slanty part at the bottom and sliding down. Got the parents standing there, trying to figure out is it a baboon or what, and their kids play on it. I like that. Some guy from the Art Institute came to tell me I gotta keep them kids off it, that it was sacrilege or some shit. Scrawny atheist fuck in my office talking about sacrilege. Told him that Picasso might be a drunk and can’t keep his pants zipped, but at least he makes a decent slide.”

  The mayor didn’t move, hands clasped in the small of his back, still facing the window, silent again. Clarke couldn’t stand the silence any longer.

  “I’m very sorry, sir,” he said, “about David.”

  The mayor nodded. “You was his friend, Junior always said that. Said you did good work for him. Said you was loyal to him. You and me, we got our differences. But you were good to my boy. I ain’t gonna forget that.”

  Clarke didn’t buy the personal emotions, he knew he was being handled. The mayor was as close to a sociopath as anyone Clarke had ever known. “Thank you, sir. He was a great man. I am proud of what I’ve been able to do with him.”

  “Still proud, after tonight?”

  “I, eh, I didn’t know…”

  “About the queer thing? Yeah, I know. I thought about it, maybe over the years. Seen this and that made me think. I wondered should I have said something. But there’s things you don’t wanna think, not about your own boy. Then he got married, and with the wife and the kid on the way and all, I thought maybe he’d be OK.”

  “It shouldn’t define him, a single weakness. It shouldn’t become all he was. It shouldn’t be used to tarnish what he stood for.”

  He could see the mayor nodding.

  “It ain’t gonna. Nobody’s gonna know. Not ever. You understand that?”

  “Riley told me.”

  “I’m not asking did Riley tell you. I’m asking do you understand that nobody’s ever gonna know?”

  “Yes, sir. I understand.”

  Another long silence. The mayor spoke first this time.

  “Junior was right, you know, about me, about how I run things. Not the way it oughta be. It was different times I come up in. You got your Hitlers and such, and nobody’s worrying too much how do you beat the son of a bitch. You do what you gotta do. And then I get this job, and see so much that needs doin’ and everybody wantin’ to chinwag everything to death. And so maybe I find some corners to cut and strings to pull, and pretty soon, I look back and I got sick fucks like Stosh running things just cause he’s got half the city by the balls. And now I gotta live with did I get my own kid killed.”

  “It does need to change, sir.” Clarke was being probed, he could feel it. Hurley could write history any way he wanted, but Clarke would always have the rough draft, so Hurley needed him.

  “Such a waste. He was our chance. Move away from all this crap, reach out to the next generation. There’s Billy, of course, but he ain’t got it, not like Junior did.” Billy was the mayor’s other son, just finishing college.

  Careful here, thought Clarke. “It doesn’t need to be a waste, sir.”

  Hurley finally turned away from the window. “You got something to say, spit it out.”

  “You need a bridge to the new generation, and you need a placeholder until Billy is ready to take the stage.”

  Hurley’s eyes glinted, almost the hint of a smile, seeing right through to Clarke’s play. “You think you’re the solution.”

  Clarke nodded. “You’ve never really gotten to know me. You saw the Ivy League polish, and you wrote me off as some pantywaist. But you and I have the same ideology.”

  “Only ideology I got is power,” said Hurley.

  “Exactly. Whatever it is you want to do, you have to have power first.”

  “So you want me to slot you into Junior’s place?”

  “Given recent events, we would have the assurance of each other’s fealty.”

  “You get a ticket to the big show, and I get a pet senator?”

  “Within reason.”r />
  Hurley walked back to the credenza, pulled a bottle of Jameson’s from the cabinet, poured some into a couple of highball glasses, handed one to Clarke.

  “Never work. No secret around town how you and me get along. I put you up, you’d look like a poodle on a leash.”

  “We can get around that.”

  Hurley put a hand up, shushing Clarke. He walked back to the window for a minute, sipping his whiskey, then turned back.

  “Here’s what we do. You declare. You’re the independent taking up Junior’s flag. Press’ll eat that shit up. They love to give it to me in the chops anyway. All those hippie loonies, they’ll flock to you. Meanwhile, I pick out some schmuck, run him in the primary. My side takes a dive, we get some of the vote out your way under the table. You’re the underdog who takes down the machine. Comes the general election, I got no choice but to back the party side.”

  Clarke thought for a moment. It was brilliant. But it could also be a ploy. Could be a way for Hurley to buy his silence long enough that Clarke couldn’t ever come forward, then cut him off at the knees, have his guy actually win, send Clarke packing. It could be, but it didn’t feel that way. There’s always a moment when you have to take that leap.

  “Smart play. I’ll give it a few days, lay low, grieving, get through the funeral. But you announce your candidate first — somebody out of the machine. Then I’m outraged. I have to step forward in Junior’s memory.”

  “Right way to play it,” said Hurley, nodding. “Just remember one thing here. We got each other by the balls. I’ve been at this a long time, had mine twisted before. You try to cross me, I’ll rip yours off.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Clarke.

  Hurley let out a soft snort.

  “What?” Clarke said.

  “The assurance of each other’s fealty? You wanna make it in this town, you better stop talking like that. Your Ivy League crap don’t carry no weight around here.”

  After Clarke left, Hurley sat in the office with Riley.

  “I’ve been thinking about who we want handling it with the cops,” said Riley. “You know that Declan Lynch guy?”