I guess I never thought I would need it.
The place smelled of fresh paint overlaying that sour odor of death, and there was a new smell — the lingering cigarette odor that trailed a smoker like a cloud.
I opened the basement door, doing it slowly and carefully so that there wouldn’t be any excessive noise. I wedged my coveralls against the jamb, preventing the door from closing all the way.
More voices, louder now. Male. I didn’t recognize them. Still faint enough that the words were lost.
Then that sound again, and this time I recognized it. The thwack of something solid — a bat, a stick, a piece of wood — against bone.
I drew my gun, elbow tight against my ribs, and eased down the stairs sideways so that my back was to the wall. I didn’t want any surprises — didn’t want someone to join me from above, didn’t want someone to shoot me from the side.
My breathing was still ragged and I struggled to control it. Even my heartbeat sounded too loud.
Another scream, this one bone-joltingly loud. A man’s scream, the sound of someone beyond pain, beyond any thought at all. And more thwacks. Half a dozen of them. Then a voice, “Fuck! He passed out.”
I had reached the bottom of the stairs. The door to the boiler room stood open. I swept the area, gun ahead of me like a shield, one hand supporting my wrist, the other holding the gun itself. I wanted to run into the back — I knew they were in the back, the sound told me that — but I couldn’t.
I had to make sure they hadn’t left a guard in the boiler room.
The search seemed to take forever. From the secret room: grunts, closed-mouth cries, someone trying to be tough. And no questions, just that thwacking noise, as if the hitting were more important than anything else.
The rooms checked out. No one had been inside. Even my bag of evidence remained on its table, untouched, as if it interested no one.
The boiler room was my next challenge. I had to get past that god-awful machine to the cabinet and into the back before the cops knew I was there.
My plan ended at that: I didn’t know what I would do when I got inside.
Surprise was all I had.
I hoped it would be all I needed.
Going around the boiler was no problem. Getting my bulk through the cabinet quietly was the issue. I reached the area near the secret door, was relieved to see that someone — in a fury? — had yanked the cabinet aside.
The secret door was revealed in all its depravity, a narrow opening carved out of a wall.
A thwack, the sickening crunch of breaking bone, a whimpering cry filled with shame.
I swallowed, my breathing finally under control. I made sure my grip on my gun was firm, my body as calm as it could be, my mind clear.
I stepped into that doorway, saw four men, two sitting on chairs that hadn’t been there this morning, one body leaning over, held in place by ropes only, blood dripping on the floor. Someone standing behind him, and someone — Minton! — in the middle on another chair.
A man, standing, took a swing at Minton’s head with a nightstick, and as he followed through, like a baseball player happy to connect with the game-winning homer, he saw me and shouted.
His partner whirled, gun already in hand, and fired, the sound an explosion in the tiny space. The bullet pinged the brick above me, sending mortar and chunks at me — tiny bits of shrapnel, shredding my skin, narrowly missing my eye.
I fired at the shooter — another explosion — then at his partner, who had dropped the nightstick for a gun. Clouds of mortar dust and smoke from my weapon’s discharge rose around me, but I fired in the same two places again, hoping I hit the cops.
Hoping I hadn’t hit Minton or LeDoux.
Wondering if LeDoux was even alive.
The shots reverberated in my ears, but nothing pinged around me. No more shrapnel. No movement. Nothing.
My breathing echoed in my own head, too loud, the only sound I could hear except the memory of those shots. The air smelled like gun powder. Then sulfur, then blood.
My eyes teared, cleaning out the smoke and the dust. I stepped closer, knowing I could die doing that, knowing that I would already be dead if those cops could shot me again.
Shapes rose in the dust-filled half-light from those bulbs we’d put in a week ago. LeDoux, still hunched in his chair, his torso held in place with ropes — dead? Unconscious?
Fuck! Someone had said. He passed out.
A body on the floor beside him, face gone. Another body in front of Minton, still moving, clutching at a blood-covered chest, gun at his side. Not going to shoot, not yet, anyway.
Minton’s left cheekbone had caved in, but his jaw was so swollen that it looked like he’d swallowed that baseball. He said, “Untie me,” and I didn’t understand his words so much as divine them.
My ears weren’t working because of the noise.
I doubted his were either.
I shoved the gun away from the man still clutching at what remained of his chest, hoping that son of a bitch would die soon, because I didn’t know what I would do with him if he lived. My whole life would get real complicated then, and I couldn’t handle complicated, not at the moment, not when blood was dripping into my own eyes, and I was shaking from adrenaline, and I needed to see if LeDoux was bleeding to death.
I looked at the other guy as I crouched behind Minton’s chair. I’d been right: no face. Not breathing.
I’d killed him, but with the first shot or the second, I couldn’t tell.
I didn’t really care.
It took three tries to wrap my shaking fingers around the ropes that these cops had used to tie Minton in place. Two more tries to get the knot loosened.
Finally it all came apart, the ropes falling away like unraveling fabric. Minton leaned forward — how painful that must have been, all the blood rushing to his battered face — and untied his own ankles.
Then he came up, the second cop’s gun in hand.
Before I could stop him, he shot the clutcher in the face — once, twice, three times — then kicked him, and burst into tears, his entire body shaking.
My ears were numb. I hadn’t really heard those last three shots: I’d felt them. The room had shaken. I thanked whatever god was listening that we were in a brick-enclosed basement.
Even though it sounded like bombs going off to me, to the neighbors those shots had probably sounded like faraway car backfires, if they’d sounded like anything at all.
I took the gun from Minton, emptied the clip, stuck it in my pants. Put the safety on my own gun and headed to LeDoux, who seemed impossibly far away.
His mouth was bleeding. He was missing teeth along the top. The right side of his face was covered with large, purple blood-blisters — he hadn’t been hit as hard as Minton, but he’d been hit hard enough.
He was breathing, though. In and out. In. Out.
I touched my own face, pulled out three chips of brick the size of fingernail clippings — all chunked just north of my eye — and understood the blood. I wasn’t badly hurt. The shaking and unsettled feeling, the disorientation — that was all from the adrenaline, just like I thought.
For the moment I left LeDoux tied. I didn’t want to lay him out on the floor next to two bodies. Chicago cops. Chicago cops who’d been the active guardians of this morgue for twenty years.
“Is there more?” Minton asked, and I heard him, faint and reedy, like a radio on a hot summer night playing several houses over.
“Don’t think so,” I said.
“This is the guy from yesterday.” He kicked the body again. The cop might also have been the one I’d seen drive by. I would never be able to say for certain. “They got here about an hour after you left, wanting to know who else knew about this place.”
“Tortured you for the information,” I said.
“Not at first. At first, they just waved their guns. LeDoux told them to leave, told them they didn’t belong. They’d’ve gone after me first, but he made them mad. He
’s a good man, Bill.”
I nodded. “We have to get him to a hospital.”
“What do we do with these guys?” Minton asked.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said.
He looked at me. “You’ll need my help.”
I shook my head. “The less you know, the better.”
“I shot the motherfucker. I’m not talking to anyone.”
“I know,” I said. “I just don’t want anyone finding them either.”
Minton and I looked at each other as the implications of what I’d just said reached both of us. Guaranteed, the men who’d entombed everyone here — the men over all those decades who, for some reason, had murdered civilians and lost them down here — had said those same words.
I just don’t want anyone finding them.
I shivered, and got down to work.
FIFTY-THREE
First, I had to take care of Minton and LeDoux. They both needed medical attention, but Minton convinced me he was well enough to drive.
So I gave him the keys to the van. We carried LeDoux out to it, not caring what the neighbors thought, even though I knew they were probably panicked over two black guys limping a clearly unconscious and beaten-up white guy to the side of the van.
We laid him in back, and I told Minton to get the hell out of there before he passed out.
He wouldn’t. Not until he helped me with the two cops.
The first cop was Faulds. I knew that. But I had to look up the other man’s name. I couldn’t leave someone I’d killed — even if it was in self-defense — a nameless corpse in my memory.
His driver’s license identified him as Kirk Strom. He was in his late forties, and fortunately there were no photographs of children or a pretty wife in his wallet.
He had the keys to the cop car in his pocket.
Minton and I wrapped him in one of the painter’s tarps. We did the same to Faulds.
“We’re never going to be able to clean this up,” Minton said to me as we stood back. I could barely understand him, the way he mashed the words against his damaged mouth. “LeDoux comes back here, he’ll know it’s a fucking crime scene. He’ll know exactly what we did.”
“You’re not cleaning this up,” I said. “I am. You’ve got to get him to a hospital. You don’t know whether he’s bleeding inside. You don’t know if you are.”
That got him. He insisted on helping me carry, but I told him no farther than the top of the stairs. We left the tarp-covered bodies on the floor outside Hanley’s apartment.
Then I walked Minton to the van. It had started to rain — a cold, heavy rain, the kind that made it clear snow was coming, and coming soon. My fingers ached with the sudden chill, and I realized I had to get one more thing.
As Minton adjusted the driver’s seat, I reached inside the glove box one final time and removed my leather gloves. I slapped them against my hand, then nodded to Minton.
“I’ll meet you at the hospital.”
“How’ll you get there?” he asked.
“I just will. You wait there with LeDoux. Make sure you get checked.”
Minton nodded. He was looking gray. The adrenaline that had been keeping him upright was wearing thin.
I looked at LeDoux — still breathing, still unconscious — and then closed the passenger door. Minton shoved the van into gear so hard the entire vehicle shook.
Then he drove off, leaving me there with two dead cops and one police car.
My stomach turned. The rain had become a downpour, gluing my clothes to my body, but clearing the blood away from my eyes. I ran back to the cop car.
I hadn’t even tested the keys. I hoped they worked.
The door was unlocked. The keys went into the ignition and the car started, a welcome sound. I set my gloves on the floor, then shut off the car and went around back.
I opened the trunk. Inside was a spare, a tire iron, blankets, candy bars, and a jug of water—a blizzard kit. I left the lid open, and realized just how well these men had parked.
Unless someone was standing right next to the house, no one would be able to see what I was doing.
Then I went inside, grabbed the first tarp-covered body, and dragged. The tarp was already turning black with blood. A stain smeared itself along the floor — something I would have to clean up.
The body thumped halfway down the back-porch stairs. Then I stopped and levered the head and shoulders into the trunk. I grabbed the legs, twisted the body, and tossed it in.
I did the same with the second body.
Then I closed the trunk and leaned on it for a moment. I had to get rid of them somehow.
I knew the right place would come to me. I just hoped it would come to me fast enough.
I went back inside. I cleaned the back area and the stairs, using bleach I found in the laundry room. I moved the cabinet back in place, cleaned out the boiler room, and, after I scrubbed them, carried the blood-stained chairs to a long-emptied storage locker.
I didn’t clean up the floor in the secret room. There was so much blood spatter that I wouldn’t be able to get rid of all of it. I wasn’t even going to try.
Instead, I grabbed the nightsticks and the police caps, and carried them to the police car. At the last minute, I decided not to put them in trunk. I set them on the floor alongside my gloves.
Then, God help me, I learned what that horrible fourth-floor bathroom was for. I almost washed my face and hands in Hanley’s bathroom — figuring after the afternoon I’d had, I could deal with the stink — then I remembered the supplies on the top floor.
Phisohex, butterfly bandages, cotton balls.
How many cops had used this bathroom to clean up after a fight? How many times had Hanley used it after he robbed the bodies the cops had placed in the basement? How many times had he scrubbed his hands here after adding to his grotesque collection?
I went up there with a flashlight, since I had a hunch I still didn’t want to see the condition that room was in, washed my face, my hands, and used hydrogen peroxide to clean out my cuts.
The stuff stung, so I knew it was working. I pulled the cuts tight, used small butterfly bandages to hold them in place, and prayed I wouldn’t need stitches again. If I did, that would be the third time in less than a year.
Which, I knew, was the least of my problems.
I swiped the bottom of my shoes with bleach, tried to see if there was more blood on my rain-soaked clothes but couldn’t, and almost put on the painter’s coveralls until I remembered that the white would show neon on an overcast day.
After I finished in the bathroom, I went back down, tossed the coveralls down the stairs, shut everything, locked it with Strom’s keys — son of a bitch, he was the other one — and took a deep breath.
Now for the tough part.
The part that could get me life in prison.
The part that could get me killed.
I left the Queen Anne, went down the back stairs, got into the cop car, and grabbed one of the police hats, placing it on my head like it belonged there. Then I slipped on my gloves, put the car in gear, and drove away, hoping I looked one whole hell of a lot more confident than I felt.
FIFTY-FOUR
Alone in a cop car. A dead man’s hat on my head, a bloody nightstick on the seat, bodies in the trunk. Driving through neighborhood after neighborhood on a Sunday afternoon, through quiet streets, rain falling lightly, face after face staring through their windows at the slow-moving cop car, wondering at the black cop going through their neighborhood.
At first, I was okay, as okay as I could be. Once I was outside the University of Chicago area — the Kenwood-Hyde Park neighborhoods — I drove through black communities. Poor ones, where the police presence was frightening, even with a black officer — old neighborhoods, where Minnie Pruitt said she had lain on a roof and shot at cops fifty years ago.
Then middle-class black neighborhoods, then the neighborhoods in transition, Sinkovich’s neighborhood, where last year the
white families wanted to burn out the encroaching blacks. He’d stopped that.
He’d stopped it, lost his wife in the process because she didn’t know him anymore. He didn’t share her values.
There were some good cops.
Who wanted to quit.
I gripped the wheel tightly. The radio spit at me, asking questions, using codes I didn’t entirely understand.
I finally knew where I was heading: a half-built canal near 120th. I’d actually inspected it. Now that the Army Corps of Engineers was done dredging, Sturdy would help with the construction — the outbuildings, the walls, the locks themselves. Laura had had me inspect the work in August, even though I told her I knew nothing about canals.
She wanted to make sure there was nothing shady going on.
I didn’t find anything, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t. Unlike buildings, with canals I didn’t know what to look for.
Another cop car pulled up behind me at a stoplight. I sat through the red, looked at my rearview mirror, made a little “hello” signal with my right forefinger. The cop behind me — white, also alone — made the same gesture in return.
He didn’t get out of his car. He didn’t follow me. He turned west and disappeared into traffic.
My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would never recover.
I saw the lights of the Ford Plant first, stretching over several city blocks, a small city in itself. I went around it, hoping no one noticed a police car this late on a Sunday afternoon, grateful for the rain that kept everything in a gray twilight, even though proper twilight wasn’t for another hour or more.
Then I turned left, and left again, finding myself on the narrow road that took me into trees, made it feel like I was in a forest instead of a city.
Just like I remembered. Only no one here to greet me, no one to hand me a yellow hardhat, remind me I was in a construction area, and tell me where to stand.
I was alone — although I scanned my mirrors to make sure.
Nothing.
No one.
Just me.
I parked along the dirt access road, then shut off my headlights. I’d been following all the rules of the road — including the one that required lights on during a gray, rainy day — just because I didn’t want anyone noticing the police car that sped south late on October nineteenth.
Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 34
