War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  War at Home

  A Smokey Dalton Novel

  Kris Nelscott

  War at Home

  Copyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © 2012 by Grandeduc/Dreamstime

  Cover Design copyright © 2012 WMG Publishing

  First published in 2005 by St. Martins Press

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  The Smokey Dalton Series in order:

  Novels

  Dangerous Road

  Smoke-Filled Rooms

  Thin Walls

  Stone Cribs

  War At Home

  Days of Rage

  The Day After (Upcoming)

  Short Stories

  Guarding Lacey

  Family Affair

  For Dean with love.

  This book is as much yours as mine.

  Acknowledgments

  Once again, I could not have written this book alone. I owe a debt of gratitude to people who helped with various parts of the research, from the Malibu Brain Trust to Christine Valada and Carl Skalak. Thanks are due also to the staff at the various libraries, from Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, the New Haven Free Public Library, the Harold Washington Branch of the Chicago Public Library, and the New York Public Library. As always, any errors are strictly my own.

  Once again, Paul Higginbotham and Steve Braunginn have taken time from their busy lives to review the manuscript. Thanks, guys.

  Kelley Ragland’s insight and understanding of Smokey have made this book much, much stronger. I’m so glad she’s a part of this project.

  Thanks too to all the booksellers who championed this series from the beginning.

  Finally, I have to thank my husband, Dean Wesley Smith, whose fertile mind always finds the best solution to the corners I box myself into.

  We were bent on revolution right here on earth, right here in America.

  —Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days

  ONE

  The blast shoved me backward. I tumbled down the steps and hit the wall on the third floor with such force that my breath left my body. I slid down and landed, feet out.

  Clouds of dust gathered around me. I was covered in dirt, bits of door, and blood.

  I hadn’t expected this. Anger, a gun, maybe, but not a bomb. The air was white with plaster dust. I was coughing, which hurt my ribs. I couldn’t see anything ahead of me. My eyes were dry and chalky, and the inside of my mouth tasted like paint. I closed it, and my teeth ground against chunks of plaster.

  The world was eerily quiet. I couldn’t even hear myself breathe. Then I realized that the concussion had knocked out my hearing. If someone was crying, if someone was calling for help, if someone was coming to the rescue, I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t realized how much I relied on my hearing until it was gone.

  I moved slowly, feeling for problems. My back felt like someone had slammed it with a two-by-four. I guess a wall was infinitely more serious than a two-by-four. My left arm burned. My chest hurt, but I attributed that to the loss of air. I could now take shallow breaths, but they were filled with plaster dust.

  The coughing continued. I could feel it digging into my throat and rib cage, but I couldn’t hear it. I felt like I was alone in a blizzard, an soundless hot blizzard of white.

  A jagged piece of wood stuck out of my thigh. A small piece. I wrapped my fingers around it and pulled. It came out easily, followed by only a little blood. The wood hadn’t hit anything vital.

  I touched my face, felt bits of stuff fall onto my lap, my fingers slick with blood. But I couldn’t find too many wounds.

  Maybe the blood wasn’t mine.

  I hadn’t been the one closest to the explosion anyway. I’d just left the third floor. I was on the fifth or sixth stair, heading to the landing. The stairs then made a ninety-degree turn to the left, and continued upward to the fourth floor.

  I’d heard voices discussing unlocking the door, the click of a handle — or maybe the lock itself — and then the explosion.

  It had to have been a powerful blast to hit me. The concussion had gone outward, and I had been protected by distance, and a plaster-and-lath wall.

  God knows what would have happened if I had been on the landing.

  I’d probably be dead now.

  Shouldn’t someone have come up the stairs? Out of the other apartments? Was the building more destroyed than I thought?

  I couldn’t tell.

  I slowly got to my feet, bracing my hand against the wall. The wall seemed sturdy, but I couldn’t see it clearly. The dust still swirled, giant clouds of it. Debris fell near my feet, some of it heavy enough to send vibrations through the floorboards. It felt strange not to be able to hear the thumps as the wood, the hardware, the whatever it was, landed.

  I was in some kind of shock — not thinking as clearly as I could — but I wasn’t sure what that meant. I wasn’t sure what had happened to the others.

  Wouldn’t they have been blown backward like me? Down the stairwell, landing in a pile?

  I climbed up the stairs, keeping one hand on the wall as a brace, the other extended toward but not touching the railing. I wasn’t sure what the explosion had blown loose. I reached the top step and swayed just a little; the wooziness hadn’t disappeared. I made myself breathe, but the air tasted of smoke, and blood.

  The landing had been ripped to pieces. The stairs going to the fourth floor disappeared into the clouds of white. I wheezed — at least, I think I did — and coughed some more, then I got on my hands and knees, distributing my weight as I crossed the ruined landing, heading for the ruined stairs.

  Someone had to see if anyone survived.

  It took me a long time — forever — to crawl up those stairs, using what was left of the wall to brace myself. My hands kept brushing nails and jagged bits of wood. I tried not to put too much weight on my knees — I didn’t want to puncture any more skin.

  The dust was as fine as baby powder. My eyes were finally starting to tear, to work the dirt out. I still couldn’t breathe very well, and I had never been so dizzy in my life.

  Then I reached the fourth floor.

  Puffs of debris, like fog, floated in the hallway. The door itself was gone, blown open, leaving a gaping hole in the wall.

  On the opposite side of the hall was an even larger hole. One that seemed to go on forever. Inside, a fire burned. No walls remained. That apartment was mostly gone.

  The blast had gone outward, leaving wood and bits of shrapnel in the wall across the hall.

  Wood, metal fragments, bone. My fingers shook as I reached toward the blood-covered whiteness sticking out of the plaster wall. My mouth was dry and I couldn’t get the charred smell of the hall off my tongue.

  I made myself look away from the bone fragment, down the dusty and ruined hall. No one. Maybe the others had gotten blown into the next apartment. Maybe they had already gone for help.

  But even as I had those thoughts, I knew they were wrong. Beneath the piles of wood — the shattered plywood door, the bits of plaster from the walls, the ruined tables — were two people.

  I crouched and started lifting the debris, one jagged piece at a time, hoping to find them.

  Praying that they were alive.

  TWO

  One month earlier, I sat in the basement of a church. For the past half year, the church had
donated this space to Grace Kirkland’s after-school sessions. Grace taught the neighborhood children at the local parents’ request. The after-school program was monitored by my good friend Franklin Grimshaw. He made certain that every parent paid Grace, either in cash or in kind. For her part, Grace made certain the children got the sort of education the Chicago Public School System promised but didn’t deliver.

  The basement was long and narrow. It smelled faintly of chalk and damp, and had a chill despite the warmth of the June day. Sitting in one of the desks designed for children, I felt like a giant. I had to turn my legs sideways so that I would fit. Grace had already apologized for the lack of adult chairs.

  She was a petite woman with ebony skin and a delicate manner that belied the steel inside her. Somehow she managed to keep a roomful of kids, ages six to sixteen, fascinated for three hours a day. As far as I was concerned, she had worked miracles since she had been running the program.

  That afternoon, she had called me down to talk about Jimmy. Jimmy was, for all intents and purposes, my son. I hadn’t formally adopted him because that would have meant we’d have had to go through legal channels, and we couldn’t. We were living in Chicago under false names, trying to stay one step ahead of the Memphis police and the FBI.

  Grace leaned against the desk the church provided for her, rested her hands on the surface, and crossed her legs at the ankles. She had fine legs, even though they were half covered by the conservative blue dress she wore.

  Grace went to a great deal of trouble to hide her good looks. When asked, she identified herself as a mother of two boys, not as a teacher. And she never took credit for the fact that one boy was at Yale on a scholarship and the other was a straight-A high school student who was taking supplemental classes at the University of Chicago.

  “I don’t want to sugar-coat this, Bill,” she said, using my alias. My real name is Smokey Dalton, but most folks around Chicago knew me as Bill Grimshaw, a relative of Franklin Grimshaw. Everyone thought Jimmy was my natural-born son, something I did not disabuse them of. I was as proud of him as if I’d raised him from the moment he was born.

  Still, I had a feeling this conversation wasn’t going to be easy. The public school term was over, and Grace was meeting with the parents, trying to see if there was enough support for a summer version of her after-school lessons. At the same time, she wanted to do a parent-teacher conference, so that we would know how our children were progressing.

  So far, my meeting with her wasn’t going as well as I had hoped.

  “Jimmy is perhaps the brightest student I have ever come across.” Her voice was soft, but there was a frown line between her eyes. “On a good day, I might even characterize him as brilliant.”

  “But?” I asked, trying not to shift in that too-small chair. I felt young and at the mercy of my teacher, instead of like the person who had hired her.

  “But,” she said, “he doesn’t apply himself, and he drifts in class. I get the feeling that I’m not even reaching him. I try to catch his interest, but he does what he does to please me, not himself.”

  That sounded about right. With authority figures, Jimmy was eager to please — most of the time. That was how he got in trouble in the first place. He had been on Mulberry Street in Memphis on the day Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot. Jimmy had seen the shooter, and it hadn’t been James Earl Ray.

  So Jimmy, like a good citizen, reported what he saw to the nearby police. They tried to shove him into a cop car as if he were the criminal, and probably would have helped him disappear if I hadn’t happened along at that moment.

  Jimmy and I had been on the run ever since.

  “He’s had a rough year,” I said.

  Grace nodded. “Moving is always traumatic on children. But I have a sense that something else is going on. I know your job is dangerous, Mr. Grimshaw. Have you ever considered going back to the hotel work you were doing, for nothing more than Jimmy’s peace of mind?”

  I suppressed a sigh. Franklin Grimshaw had been after me to do the same thing ever since I had quit my job working security at the Conrad Hilton Hotel. But I wasn’t set up to work for other people. I preferred being my own boss.

  “I have some regular clients now,” I said. “I’ve only had a few dangerous cases.”

  “A few might be too many.” She touched her left cheek, obviously referring to the still-fresh scar on my face. I had gotten it during an attack in December. The scar was a visible reminder of my unconventional life, my unconventional work.

  “My job is my job, Grace,” I said quietly.

  Something in my tone must have reached her, for she leaned her head to one side and sighed. Then she pushed away from the desk, walked across the dirty linoleum floor, and sat in the desk next to mine, turning it toward me the way she probably would with a student.

  “I’m just at my wit’s end with Jimmy,” she said. “I don’t know how to engage him, and he seems so sad. He has so much potential, Bill. I feel like I’m failing him.”

  I shook my head. “You’re not failing him. We read together every night now instead of watching television. He devours the newspaper, and he helps me with the bills. His math skills have improved a lot, thanks to you. He’s not the same boy he was in December.”

  She gave me a small smile, then twirled her finger on the kidney-shaped desktop. “It looks like we’ll have a summer program. If you let Jimmy come, I’d like your help in developing a curriculum for him.”

  I didn’t move. I wasn’t ready to commit to summer school. I wasn’t ready to commit to anything. I had been restless since Easter — the first anniversary of Martin’s death — although the anniversary had less to do with my restlessness than Chicago itself.

  The city had become a war zone. On the South Side, where I lived, 250 people had been shot and 28 had been killed since January in gang-related incidents. Some of the dead were police, and many of the dead were children.

  I had made a devil’s bargain with the gangs to help me avenge a friend and to keep them away from Jimmy. The Blackstone Rangers knew me, considered me one of their own, and were happy with me.

  The minute that happiness ended, Jimmy or I could end up among the dead.

  “Bill?” Grace asked, her head still tilted sideways. “Did Jimmy learn that habit from you?”

  “What habit?” I asked.

  “You faded out for a second. I asked you about the summer session.”

  I sighed. “My summer plans aren’t finalized yet.”

  “It would do him good,” she said. “The two of us together might be able to come up with something that would make Jimmy a participant in rather than a recipient of his own education.”

  “At this moment, I’m just happy he’s getting an education.” When I had met him, Jimmy lived on the street part-time. His mother had disappeared — which was not unusual for her — and his older brother would later abandon Jimmy in favor of drugs and a local gang.

  “I think with Jim we should strive for more.” She pushed herself out of the desk. “But it’s not my call.”

  Her words sounded conciliatory, but her tone wasn’t. I understood why the kids — even the big teenage boys — listened to her. She didn’t brook disagreement.

  But she didn’t intimidate me. I was used to strong women and, although I knew her heart was in the right place, I was privy to information that she wasn’t. Jimmy had been increasingly fragile all spring. My injury around Christmas time had shaken him up, and so had the anniversary of Martin’s death. The world was still a difficult and frightening place for Jimmy, and all I could do was give him a little safety in the middle of the chaos.

  I stood, too, struggling a little to get out of that tiny seat. Grace smiled just a bit as she watched me, then her smile faded.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” The toughness was gone from her voice now.

  I had thought the discussion was already personal, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I said, “Sure.”

  �
��I — ah — I’m having some more trouble with Daniel.”

  Daniel was her oldest son, the one who attended Yale. I had met him just before the Democratic National Convention last summer. He had come to Chicago with a group of protestors and hadn’t told his mother. But his younger brother Elijah found out and ran away to be with him. Grace hired me to find Elijah, which I did. I brought both boys back to her, and she had never again hinted that there were any more problems.

  “What kind of trouble?” I asked.

  “It’s not something I’m….” Her voice trailed off. “I’m sorry. Here I go chiding you about your work and then I ask you for help.”

  She noticed the irony; I appreciated that. “One conversation was about Jimmy. This one’s about you. And I have an expertise that it seems you need.”

  She nodded, then looked down. She rubbed her hands together. They showed her age. The skin was tough, darker than the rest of her, and slightly wrinkled.

  “Daniel’s missing.” Her voice was soft. Color rose in her cheeks and I understood that one, too. She’d been lecturing me on how to raise my child, then turned around and asked for help with hers.

  “Another protest?” I asked.

  “No.” She kept her head bowed.

  I waited. Sometimes silence worked better than twenty questions.

  “I got a letter last week,” she said. “They’re withdrawing his scholarship.”

  That startled me. “Why?”

  “Seems he enrolled in the fall, but didn’t finish his classes. Seems he didn’t even bother to enroll in the spring term.”

  “What does the school say?”

  She raised her head. Her eyes blazed, but her voice remained soft, almost emotionless. “They said such things aren’t unusual. They said Yale is a cultural experience, and some boys — no matter how bright — don’t adapt well to the culture.”

  Tears lined her eyes, but only for a moment. She blinked them away.