When the woman finished the introductions the mayor moved toward the microphone and Bill maneuvered his wheelchair around and started working slowly through the crowd. Lucinda and I waited thirty seconds, then started walking through the crowd too, cutting away from Bill but always staying within sight.
Bill reached the sidewalk, cut along the edge of Daley Plaza, went around a corner, and headed toward a red-and-white striped awning that looked like it should house a circus but sheltered the entrance to the Hotel Burnham. He turned his chair and went into the hotel lobby. Lucinda and I made sure no one was watching us and then went inside after him.
The lobby was two stories high and had carpet that looked like it could’ve been skinned from leopards, a lot of dark wood on the walls, and heavy art-deco chandeliers. Bill was a big man but the room seemed to swallow him as he waited in his wheelchair just inside the door.
As I stepped in, a half smile formed on his lips. When Lucinda stepped in after me, the smile broke. He glanced again at her and then at me. “What the hell is she doing here?”
Lucinda crossed her arms over her chest. “Good to see you, Bill.”
Bill’s lips cracked into a little smile again. “Yeah, good to see you too, Lucinda.” Like he might mean it.
“That’s better.”
“Now, take a walk, will you?” he said to her.
Lucinda looked at me.
I shrugged.
“Screw yourselves, then,” she said and she stepped back outside.
“Sweet girl. Why did you bring her?”
“We work together.”
He shook his head. “Not on this you don’t. We’ve already got three police officers dead and two wounded. I don’t want her to get hurt.”
“Me, on the other hand—”
“That’s right, you on the other hand.”
“What do you have for me?” I asked.
He pulled a manila envelope from his jacket. “Dates, times, and places where thefts occurred, totaling a hundred sixty thousand dollars. Police reports verifying the thefts. Bank records showing deposits into accounts in Johnson’s name.” He said it without pleasure.
“Was Johnson really involved in any of it?” I said.
“Not a bit.”
“You’re right about Monroe,” I said. “He’ll kill Johnson when he finds out he’s been cutting him out.”
“That’s the plan.”
I shook my head. “Who was watching us at Daley Plaza?”
“They’re not in the department,” said Bill.
“FBI?”
“Could be. If they are, it’s news to me.”
“Why not invite them into the investigation?” I said.
He laughed. “The FBI? No thanks. They wouldn’t approve of this kind of cleanup.”
“Then I’m not getting involved if they’re watching.”
“You were involved the moment you pulled the trigger at Southshore.”
“Then I’m not getting in deeper.”
“Probably a good idea,” he said and held out the envelope.
“You’re a bastard,” I said and took it.
He laughed. “If you decide you really want out, dump the envelope in the garbage. If you stay in, be careful how you use the documents. Monroe will kill you instead of Johnson if he figures out what you’re up to.”
“Why would I stay in with a sales job like that?”
He stared me in the eyes. “What’s left of you if you quit?”
It was a good question—a hard one but good—and I figured there was love and worry in it. So I called him a bastard again, stuck the envelope inside my jacket, and left him there.
Lucinda was outside, leaning against the building, arms crossed to keep warm. We walked back toward Daley Plaza. Lucinda raised her eyebrows. “Well?”
“He’s afraid you’ll get hurt,” I said.
“He’s a bastard.”
“That’s what I told him. But he’s our bastard.”
At the Plaza, we listened to the mayor’s speech from the back of the crowd. He was talking about good men and women who put the safety of the city above their own and about the sacrifices they and their families made every day and the bigger sacrifices that a few of them made on especially terrible days, sacrifices that could never be repaid. I glanced at the row of wives and children and wished that I hadn’t.
We turned away as the mayor finished his comments and a bugle started playing sad and soulful.
“What else did Bill tell you?” Lucinda said.
I wondered if Bill was right. Lucinda could get hurt and maybe I should keep my mouth shut. But she would never forgive me if I did. “He gave me the papers I need to bring Johnson down.”
“Let’s see.”
“In the car.”
“Do you trust him?”
“He’s my oldest friend. He’s always been there for me.”
“Except when you were drinking heavily.”
“He came around on that when his wife started abusing.”
“When it served his purposes. It seems to me more like you’ve always been there for him.”
“Except when he got shot.”
“You didn’t shoot him, and you did everything you could to help him afterward. As far as I can tell, you saved his life.”
“I’m not sure he sees it that way.”
She shrugged. “He might have it wrong.”
“He’s the closest friend I’ve got.”
We walked north a block, then east toward the parking garage. The cold wind blew a plastic bag across the street. The bag rose along the side of a building and danced in the air five stories up like a dirty angel.
“So how do you want to work this?” Lucinda said.
I considered the possibilities. “I’m meeting with Bob Monroe and Raj this afternoon,” I said. “I’ll start feeding them information in little bits. If it goes well, they’ll want more. Can you see what you can find out about these guys? What trouble have they gotten into in the department and outside it? Who are their friends? Anyone with power? I don’t want surprises.”
We came to the corner of Wabash and Randolph and stopped for the light. An El train screeched on the tracks above Wabash. A city bus rushed along the curb. A white GMC van slowed to a stop in front of us.
Lucinda moved close so her shoulder touched my arm. I smiled at her. We had a plan. That was something.
Then footsteps approached from behind. Too fast.
I spun.
Three men were closing in on us.
I’d seen them before. Fifteen minutes earlier, they’d watched Bill and me at Daley Plaza.
Lucinda and I could have backed off the curb but the bus would have flattened us. We could have run north under the El tracks. We could have yelled for help.
We stood where we were.
The men grabbed us and threw us against the white van.
Lucinda rolled to the side and caught one of them in his throat with her elbow. He went down on the sidewalk. She turned to another and he backed away and pulled a chained badge out of his jacket. It said FBI.
Lucinda stopped. “Shit! Why didn’t you say?”
The man she’d knocked down peeled himself off the pavement. He was short and thick, with brown hair parted on the left and combed neatly to the side. The back door of the van opened, and the man with the badge—taller, older, and with less hair than the one Lucinda had hit—said, “Get in!”
I said, “Not me.” Lucinda looked at me as though she wondered if she should start swinging again.
The two agents who’d stayed on their feet came at us hard. The one with the badge took me and the other one, bigger, took Lucinda. It was over in about fifteen seconds and the one with the badge repeated himself. “Get in!”
We got in.
The back door slammed and the van pulled away from the curb. Vinyl benches lined the sides. Lucinda and I sat on one, the FBI agents on the other. The man Lucinda had knocked down touched the tender spot on his
throat and glared at me like it was my fault.
The one who’d told us to get in showed me an open palm. “Give it to me.”
“What?” I said.
“The envelope Gubman gave you.”
“What envelope?”
He looked disgusted. “Don’t make me take it from you.”
I shook my head. “Only with a court order.”
More disgust. “Jesus Christ!” He cocked a fist and shifted toward me.
“All right,” I said and fished the envelope out of my coat. He handed it to a woman sitting in the front passenger seat. “Do we get to know your names?” I said.
He gave me a grim smile. “No.”
“Great,” said Lucinda.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“We want to know what you’re doing.”
“I’ve spent half my life trying to figure that out.”
He pursed his lips. “The man you killed at Southshore was working with us.”
Lucinda sighed. “Shit.”
I said, “He was FBI?”
The man shook his head. “He was a cop. A bad one. But he was also an informant. He’s gone and so is most of our investigation into Johnson’s crew.”
I looked down at the van floor. “You should’ve kept tighter control of him, told him not to point his gun at other cops if he got caught.”
The man Lucinda knocked down said, “You should’ve kept your finger off your fucking trigger.”
The lead man frowned at him. “So,” the lead man asked again, reasonable and level, “what are you doing?”
I shrugged. “I’m trying to dig myself out.”
The man with the sore throat said, “You’re up to your fucking ears. You’re not getting out.”
The lead man leaned toward me. “What did Johnson and his people want from you last night?”
I considered telling him what Bill Gubman had asked me to do and what Bob Monroe, Raj, and Earl Johnson had asked me to do—telling it all. I said, “Like you, they wanted to know what I was doing.”
“For an hour and a half at Bob Monroe’s apartment and three hours at The Spa Club?”
“You’re not always as obvious when you’re watching as you were at Daley Plaza,” I said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No, it’s not,” I agreed, and I asked again, “What do you want from me?”
The lead man went silent for a moment like he was considering options. “We want you to report what you hear from Johnson’s group,” he said.
I almost laughed. “You want me to be your new informant?”
He nodded once. “In a word.”
I needed no time to think about it. “No.”
He looked unsurprised but asked, “May I know why not?”
Because, I thought, with Bill on one side and Johnson’s crew on the other I already was juggling knives. I didn’t need the FBI to toss in another. “You won’t even tell me your name,” I said. “Why should I trust you? I figure when Johnson’s crew goes down, you might let them take me with them.”
He didn’t deny it. He smiled. “My partner said you’re in up to your ears, but he’s wrong. You’re in way over your head.”
I smiled too, like that’s where I wanted to be.
“As for you,” he said to Lucinda, “I’d keep away from this guy. He just blew his only chance.”
Lucinda put her hand on my thigh, squeezed, and said nothing.
The van stopped and the back door opened. We’d driven in a circle and were where we’d started. The woman in front handed the manila envelope back to the lead man. He glanced at it and handed it to me.
We climbed out, the door slammed, and the van drove west for a block and disappeared around a corner.
Lucinda looked at me. “Why’d they let you go?”
I shook my head. “Why’d they give me Bill’s envelope?”
“Maybe they want you to keep doing what you’re doing.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said.
She laughed uncertainly.
“I don’t,” I said.
“Come on,” she said. We crossed the street and stepped into the cold shade of the parking garage.
My cell phone rang. Lucinda and I jumped. I flipped the phone open, said hello.
It was Raj. “Where the hell are you?” he said.
“Why?”
He backed off. “I saw you at Daley Plaza. Then you were gone.”
I wondered what he’d seen. If he’d seen us following Bill out of the Plaza, that would be trouble. If he’d seen the FBI agents shadowing me, that would be more. “I got tired of the noise and left.”
“Pretty woman you were hanging with. Does your ex-wife know about her?”
“What do you want, Raj?”
“Change of plans. Monroe wants to meet this morning.”
“I’m not available.”
“Ten thirty at The Spa Club.”
“Sorry. I’ll see you this afternoon.”
He sounded annoyed. “You’ve got something more important?”
“Than seeing you? Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
ELEVEN
JASON HAD A FOURTH-FLOOR room in Children’s Memorial on Fullerton. The IV stand had a sock puppet over the top bar. Stickers of Spider-Man, Bart Simpson, and other cartoon characters covered the sides of the monitors. Painters had striped the white walls with yellow, red, and blue. In a lounge at the end of the corridor, a television was set to the Cartoon Network. But under every smiling face, you knew there was pain.
When I went in, Jason was lying in a hospital bed adjusted a quarter off horizontal, like a deck chair positioned to take in the afternoon sun. The television in his room was tuned to an animal show called Wild Rescues, which was doing a segment on koala kidnapping.
A doctor was examining Jason.
Mom sat in a chair by the window.
Jason grinned when he saw me. He was a tall, skinny eleven-year-old, and he wore a blue-dotted hospital gown. As usual, he needed a haircut. Mom got up and came to me, gave me a long hug, whispered, “Joseph,” like I was a wild kid who’d finally fallen asleep. She was pushing seventy but normally looked fifty-five. Today she looked eighty. I wondered if I was responsible.
Jason tried to sit up but the doctor, whose tag identified him as Elijah Abassi, said, “Whoa, not yet, young man.”
I went to the bed and handed Jason a bag with an iPod in it. “To pass the time until they let you out of here,” I said.
He plugged it into his ears. “Sounds like a singing pirate,” he said.
“Tom Waits.”
“Cool. Thanks.”
Mom moved over to me and put her hand on my arm like she needed to touch me to make sure I was real and solid and safe. I knew how she felt. I put my arm around her shoulders and hugged her.
I asked the doctor, “How long until you spring him?”
The doctor shrugged. “Another day or two. Possibly three.”
“For an appendectomy?”
“For a postoperative infection.”
“What happened?”
“It’s not unusual, especially when the appendicitis is as far advanced as it was in Jason. The antibiotics seem to have it under control now.”
“How far advanced was it?”
Another shrug. “Another hour or two, the appendix would have ruptured.”
I turned to Mom. “Why didn’t you get him here earlier?”
Her face lost color and she moved away. “Don’t—” Her anger surprised me. “You were in jail,” she said. “Jason was upset. When he said his stomach hurt, I thought—” She broke off.
I realized that she’d been as scared for Jason as I was. “I understand,” I said, as gentle as I could manage.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “You were in jail. I don’t like the work you do but I say nothing. You make your own decisions. But you’re also my boy and I worry. My stomach hurt.” She turned to Jason. “And then this happened.”
I went to her but she pulled into herself and glared. She said, “No,” and walked out of the room.
Jason looked at me. “You screwed up.”
“That’s a first.”
He laughed, then clutched his side. “Ow.”
The doctor said, “When we release Jason, who will be caring for him?”
“My mom, at first,” I said.
“Good.” He followed Mom out of the room.
I pulled a chair to the side of Jason’s bed and sat. “How’re you feeling?” I said.
He gave me his grin. “I’m okay.”
I figured that was a lie but I didn’t push him on it.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you.”
“It wasn’t your fault.” He said it like a question.
“No, it wasn’t. But I’m sorry anyway.”
He pushed himself onto his elbows, winced, lowered himself. “Are you going back to jail?”
I shook my head. “They had me as a witness so they could talk to me any time they wanted. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“The news said you shot a policeman.”
“The policeman was threatening to shoot at other policemen. I shot to stop him.”
He looked unsure but said, “Good.”
There was a gentle knock at the door—polite, the way you knock when you know you’re interrupting something but want to come in anyway.
Corrine stepped in. I’d never managed to call her but she came to me and gave me a quick kiss like I’d never made a bad move in my life. In the last couple of years she’d gotten thick in the hips, and her long black hair was streaked with gray. But I liked to look at her. She dropped a brown paper bag on Jason’s bed and said to him in a fake whisper, “Dirty magazines. Don’t tell your uncle.”
Jason ripped open the bag. It held three magazines—Games, Skateboarding, and Powerboat. “I don’t skateboard, but thanks,” he said.
We sat and talked about the Chicago parks that would be best for skateboarding if he ever started. We debated which powerboats would be good for fishing if we happened to move to an ocean-side village south of the Florida border. After awhile, Jason closed his eyes and drifted to sleep.
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