I stood and moved to the door, ready to fight my way out—to do anything I needed to do to get to Lucinda.
The door swung open.
Finley wasn’t there with his gun. The gang leader Rafael stood in the doorway. He grinned and said, “Hola.”
I looked at him, confused. “What are you—?”
He stepped into the room. “He called,” he said, sticking a thumb over his shoulder.
Raj stepped in behind him.
I shook my head, confused. “What are you doing?”
He looked nervous. “Trying to save your ass—and my own.”
“Are you with Monroe, or Johnson and Finley?”
“I’m with myself,” he said and stepped back into the hall. Rafael and I followed.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
Raj looked down the hall toward the stairs to The Spa Club. “There’s not time.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.
He looked furious. “Don’t be an asshole. Finley told me he’d figured out Monroe was making a power play and told me to come along when he nailed him. If I hadn’t, he’d have locked me up with you. He’ll be right back—you’ve got to get out of here.”
I shook my head. “I need to check the stairwell. My partner’s supposed to be there.”
“It’s too late. You’ve got to leave.”
“Not without Lucinda.”
“Jesus! I’ll check for her myself,” he said and yelled at Rafael, “Get him the hell out of here.”
That would need to be good enough. Rafael and I headed for the exit door.
As we reached it, a voice came from the other end of the hall. “Hey!”
It was Finley. He held his pistol so he could shoot us in the back.
“Keep going,” Raj yelled at me and Rafael. He stepped toward Finley. “It’s all right, Peter—”
“Stop!” Finley yelled.
Rafael and I kept going.
Finley fired his gun. A deafening blast filled the hall and a bullet slammed into the steel plating on the exit door. I reached for the door handle, pushed, and looked over my shoulder. In the hazy light, Raj was running toward Finley. He ran the way people run toward a bad accident. Not that they can do anything to stop what already has happened or the blood that will pour. Not that they really know why they’re running. Finley watched him come, his pistol level, his lips tight, his jaw square.
Finley shot again. The blast ripped through the hallway.
Raj flew backward. He landed on his back, his eyes wide, his chest bloody.
Rafael shoved me through the door.
I tried to stop. “Get Raj!”
Rafael kept pushing. “He’s dead!”
Raj was dead. Of course he was. You don’t take a bullet in the chest from a .40-caliber Glock and live. You don’t stare at a hallway ceiling with wide unblinking eyes if you’re still feeling pain.
“Shit!” I yelled. Another shot from Finley’s gun slammed into the closing door.
We were in a gray lobby by a service elevator. Two Mexican kids held the elevator door open. They were sixteen or seventeen years old, wearing black T-shirts and low-rider jeans. One of them had on a black baseball cap with a silver star on it. He grinned at Rafael and me with a gold-capped front tooth. “What’s up?” he said, like we were meeting on a street corner.
The kids moved aside to let us into the elevator and one punched the button for the ground floor. Finley burst into the lobby as the elevator doors closed.
TWENTY-SIX
WHEN THE ELEVATOR DOORS opened again, Rafael’s friends stepped out, looked left and right, and signaled for us to follow. We ran across the lobby and out the front door. A gray BMW sedan and a jacked-up Chevy Silverado pickup stood at the curb, engines running.
Rafael’s friends climbed into the pickup.
Rafael knocked fists with the valet. “Gracias,” he said.
“Far as I know, you’re not here,” the doorman said. “I didn’t see you coming and I don’t see you going.”
“’Course you don’t,” said Rafael, and he slipped a roll of bills into the doorman’s hand.
I said nothing. Pointing out the video camera that fed everything we were doing to the Spa Club monitor room seemed like bad manners.
We got into the BMW and the doorman waved at me. “Have a good night, Mr. Kozmarski—and drive safely.”
The kid at the wheel of the pickup punched the accelerator. The tires spun and screeched and the truck leapt forward. It shot down the driveway, tilted onto the street, and disappeared to the south.
“Fucking clowns,” Rafael said. He shifted into Drive and we rode down the driveway and pulled into the street.
We went south to Oak Street, across to Lake Shore Drive, and south again. The evening traffic had thinned and Rafael weaved steadily around slower cars. To the east, a green light glowed on a breakwater wall a quarter mile off the beach. After the green light, there was nothing but darkness.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“My part of town. Johnson can’t get you there.”
I considered that. “Thanks, but I’ll do it alone. You can drop me downtown.”
“You got a car?” he said.
“No,” I admitted.
“A gun?”
“No.”
“Cops are looking for you at your office and your house. Johnson’s crew is definitely hunting for you. What’re you going to do with no car, no gun, and no place to sleep?”
I thought about that for awhile. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s go to your part of town.”
He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Right,” he said. Then he stepped on the accelerator.
“What’s the rush?”
He tipped his chin toward the backseat. “Like I said—look behind us.”
I did. A white SUV sped after us, changing lanes when we did, closing the gap. Through the glare and shadow of its front window I saw two men. The one in the passenger seat looked like Finley. I wasn’t sure about the driver. He could’ve been the guy who took my pistol from me in Monroe’s office.
“Can this thing go any faster?” I said.
Rafael laughed and sped up. We shot toward the downtown lights, the SUV behind us. The tall, black-windowed apartments in Lake Point Tower loomed on the left. On the other side, our headlights flashed on a big American flag tied to the side of a construction crane. It rose in the air on the cold breeze and fell like a giant hand waving good-bye.
“How did you get into The Spa Club?” I said.
Rafael checked the rearview mirror again and said, “Raj called. He said you were in trouble. Said it was getting too deep and he wanted out. Said if I didn’t come get you, Johnson might decide to make you go away for good. You know, any time I can fuck up Johnson’s plans I’m going to do it. Anyway, Raj is an okay guy—or was. That was ugly, what that man did to him.”
“Peter Finley.”
“Whoever. I mean, with friends like him—”
I glanced at Rafael. The light from outside glinted in his eyes. None of the tattooed words on his bicep said KILL but the inked blades and guns meant it just the same. “What do you know about friends?” I said.
He checked the mirror, then looked at me. “What? I came and got you and I don’t hardly know your ass. I didn’t see your other friends coming for you.”
No, I’d left a friend behind. If Lucinda had managed to get to the fourteenth-floor stairwell, they had her now and I was riding away from her at eighty miles an hour. “Do you have a cell phone?” I said.
He looked at me like I was a caveman. “I got three. You need one?”
I said I did. He handed me a phone and I punched Lucinda’s number into it.
It rang three times and a man’s voice answered—Johnson’s.
“Let me talk to Lucinda, Earl,” I said.
He yelled into the phone, “Get back here—”
I hung up on him.
Rafael glared at me and said, “Gimm
e.” I put the phone in his hand, and he rolled down his window and chucked it out. “You gave my phone number to Earl Johnson,” he said and shook his head.
We crossed the river, went around a bend, and flew along the harbor. In front of us, a stoplight turned yellow, then red. Rafael hit the accelerator and we went into the intersection. I looked over my shoulder. The SUV followed us through, missing a crossing car by inches.
“Muy loco,” Rafael said like he admired the driver. He pulled out a second cell phone, tapped the keypad, and talked to someone in Spanish. He added in English, or mostly, “Sí, Eighteenth and Throop Street,” then laughed and hung up.
I kept my eyes on the SUV. Finley leaned out of the passenger window. He had a weapon in his hand. He leveled it so it pointed at the back window of Rafael’s BMW.
“Do you have a gun?” I said.
Rafael sounded annoyed. “You think I would bring a weapon to a club owned by cops? You got to be kidding.”
Finley shot, and the bullet thunked into metal behind us.
“Under the seat!” Rafael said.
I reached under the seat and pulled out a sawed-off Remington shotgun. Single shot.
“Loaded?” I said.
He nodded. “But only one shell.”
I looked at him like he must be kidding. He wasn’t. “What kind of thug are you with only one round?”
“A thug who’s got one more round than you, right?” he said.
I unrolled my window and leaned out, pointed the shotgun at Finley.
He didn’t know I had only one shot. He disappeared into the SUV.
I slid into the BMW.
The next stoplight was green. We flew through the intersection and along Grant Park.
Finley’s hand, holding his pistol, jutted out of the SUV window again. He fired the gun, missed, and fired again.
“Shoot the asshole!” Rafael said.
I leaned out the window again, aimed the shotgun at Finley.
He squeezed off another two shots.
I waited for the pain that would seep into me if he hit me. None came.
I looked down the sawed-off barrel until its tip lined up with Finley’s head.
“Shoot him!” Rafael yelled.
I couldn’t pull the trigger. I’d already shot one cop too many. Another cop—even Finley, who was gunning for me—was too much.
I lowered the gun a few inches, aimed at the front tire. If I blew it out, the SUV would stop and we would leave Finley behind. That seemed better than killing him.
I pulled the trigger.
The kick of the shotgun threw me back but I kept my eyes on the SUV. The right headlight went dark. The white paint on the front hood was flecked with black. But the SUV kept coming. The tire was still good.
I slipped into the car again, and Rafael looked in the rearview mirror. He made a sound that was half laugh and half howl. “You missed! You have a fucking shotgun! How can you miss?”
I had nothing to say so I said nothing.
“Jesus!” he said. “You don’t get no second chances.” He accelerated through the next intersection, glanced in the mirror, and added, “They’re coming.”
I looked. The SUV had closed to three car lengths. Finley’s arm stuck out of the window with his gun.
“Pretend to shoot again,” Rafael said.
It seemed like as good an idea as anything else, so I turned and stuck the shotgun out the window. Finley’s arm disappeared and the SUV dropped back a couple of car lengths.
“Here goes—” Rafael said, and, before I could ask, he whipped into the turn lane at Roosevelt Road and slid around the corner.
The SUV came after us, went wide, almost ended up on the concrete median, but corrected and slid in behind. Finley’s arm came out with the gun.
“Go!” I yelled.
The BMW shot forward, the SUV right behind, Finley’s hand steadying toward our back window.
I leaned out the window with the shotgun.
But Finley didn’t buy it. He stuck his head out too. He leveled his gun. He pointed the barrel at me. His face was serious. He took no pleasure in what he was about to do.
Then Rafael said, “Ahhh.” He said it the way you do for a doctor. Again I had no time to ask. The wheels of the BMW hit a lip in the road, the kind that would give the car a light jolt if we’d been moving at half the speed. The BMW lifted as high as the shocks would take it and came down again.
The SUV hit the lip too. I watched as Finley bounced against the SUV door frame. I watched as he dropped the gun. It bounced crazily on the pavement, glanced off the side of a delivery truck, and skidded across the concrete. Finley watched it too. He yelled something that I couldn’t make out. Then he pulled himself back into the car.
I slid inside and grinned at Rafael.
“What happened?”
“We just got a second chance.”
We flew west on Roosevelt, over the South Branch of the river, over a railroad yard, over the Dan Ryan Expressway. Twice, stoplights turned red and Rafael pulled into the oncoming lanes, hit the horn, and forced his way through. Twice, the SUV followed us.
We zigged to the south on Halsted and, a mile later, zagged to the west. We drove into Pilsen, the closest thing to a Mexico City neighborhood north of the Rio Grande. The yellow and red business signs were Spanish, no translation. We sped past the Tortilleria Del Rey bakery, past La Chamba—a storefront that doubled as a union office and a temporary worker business—and past the Casa Castañeda appliance store. Painted on the brick storefronts between the signs, murals showed the Virgin Mary, a leather jacketed ranchero, a mariachi player holding an accordion with a haloed picture of Jesus looking over him, women dancing, a hairy human skull in a blue baseball cap. Music poured from the open door of a tienda. We were in Rafael’s part of town.
“Now what?” I said.
Rafael pulled out his cell phone. “Now we send these guys home,” he said.
He tapped the phone keypad. When someone answered, he said, “Okay?”
The person he was talking to must have said yes.
We flew past South Throop Street. “Here we go,” Rafael said.
Ahead of us, a burgundy sedan nosed into the street from an alley between a real estate firm with a blue awning and an accountant’s office called La Oficina.
When we were about forty feet from the alley, Rafael said, “Now!”
The sedan rolled from the alley into the middle of the street. Half a dozen guys were pushing it. No one was in the driver’s seat.
We swerved around the sedan, just missing an oncoming delivery truck.
Finley’s SUV didn’t swerve. There was no time. There was no place to go.
It buried its front end in the side of the sedan.
Rafael took his foot off the accelerator and checked the rearview mirror. The Sedan horn, shorted by the crash, blew mournfully.
Rafael shook his head. “Fucking clowns,” he said.
We drove another quarter mile, turned left onto Ashland, and turned again on 19th Street. The town houses were two and three stories high, maybe eighty years old, fronted with brick or vinyl siding and concrete steps to sit on in the warm months, built so close together that the roofs almost touched. We rode a half block in, and Rafael pulled to the curb and cut the engine.
He sighed and stretched his arms toward the car roof. “We’re home,” he said.
I looked out the window at a two-story yellow brick town house. “Yours?”
“Hell, no. Yours for now.”
We got out and Rafael walked to the back of the car. He rubbed a finger on the hole that Finley had shot into the trunk. He shook his head. “Now that pisses me off,” he said.
I looked up and down the street. Three lots away from the yellow two-story, a church was squeezed between houses. Its brown brick walls rose above the surrounding roofs. The side wall that faced us had a mural, lit by a spotlight mounted on the roof of the neighboring house. The mural showed a naked woman standing
in a canoe. A man stood on the water next to the canoe. Four red roses surrounded the man and the woman and the canoe.
“What’s that mean?” I said.
Rafael glanced at the mural and started up the path to the yellow house. “Hell if I know. What’s anything mean?”
TWENTY-SEVEN
A SMALL, HEAVY WOMAN with a long black braid opened the door. I put her in her early thirties, though she could’ve been younger. She flashed a nervous smile at Rafael and stared at me with dark suspicious eyes.
Rafael talked with her in Spanish and she opened the door and said, “Come.”
We stepped inside.
“This is Sanchia,” Rafael said. “She’ll take care of you.”
I reached my hand to shake hers. “I’m Joe.”
She left my hand hanging in the air. “I know.”
The light in the front hall was dim. A Spanish-language video with a laugh track played on the television in the living room. A boy who looked about seven was stretched on the floor watching. Another boy, a couple of years older, was on a couch. The house smelled of cooking—low-simmering meat and sweet-sour vegetables, smells I knew from Mom’s house if you added spice.
“Come on,” Rafael said and he led me down the hall into the kitchen.
We sat at the kitchen table and Sanchia spooned rice from a pot and ladled pieces of pork shoulder and tomatillos into bowls. A picture of the Virgin Mary watched from above the stove. Sanchia put the bowls in front of us and got us two beers from the refrigerator. After she warmed some tortillas for us, she left the room.
“Who is she?” I said.
Rafael looked like he was deciding how much to tell me. “My brother’s wife,” he said.
“Yeah? Where’s your brother?”
“In jail. Johnson put him there. I’m taking care of Sanchia right now.”
I took a bite of pork and rice. It warmed me like nothing else had in weeks, maybe months. “Seems like she’s taking care of you too.”
He lifted his beer bottle and toasted it against an imaginary bottle. “Family,” he said.
I lifted my bottle, the same. “Can’t live without them.”
We ate then without talking, like we hadn’t eaten in days and wouldn’t eat again for a week. Sanchia came in again twice, refilled our bowls, and gave us more beer.
A Bad Night's Sleep Page 17
