Why?
I supposed I could ask. But I wasn’t being paid to find out why Cherry was missing work. I was only being paid to find her.
Which I had done.
But if I told Kahdem where she was, he’d probably want the rest of his retainer back.
I didn’t like that idea. I had a horse to feed.
Also, I wasn’t sure telling Kahdem was the right move. Yeah, he was the client. And he seemed like a decent guy. But maybe I read him wrong and he was a crazy psycho who was in love with Cherry and wanted to cut off her head and keep it in his freezer, and that’s why she and Puma were keeping away from him. If that was the case, it wouldn’t do much for business, or my stellar reputation, if I just handed her over.
I fished one of my business cards out of a jacket pocket and gave it to the doorman. “Can you call Meredith, tell her I’d like to speak to her? If she’s nervous, you can be there when we chat.”
The doorman nodded, and went into the building.
A few minutes later, he came back out.
“She doesn’t want to speak to you,” he told me.
“Did you let her know I was charming, and devilishly handsome?”
“She’s not taking any visitors. I’m sorry.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
I began to roll up the window. He rapped a knuckle on it and showed me the half a Franklin.
“Hey, what about this?”
“Can’t do much with that,” I said. “I’ll give you ten bucks for it.”
He looked insulted. I rolled up the window and began to pull away. He chased me down and knocked again.
I gave him the ten bucks for the half a bill. Worked every time. But before I let him take it, I threw him a bone.
“If that Jeep comes back, call me and I’ll give you the other forty bucks.”
My next move was to wait. For Cherry to come out. Or for the Jeep guy to come back. Or for the doorman to drop dead of a heart attack, stroke, or some other lucky physical defect.
I pulled over to the other side of the street, next to a fire hydrant, and parked the Vette where I had a good view of Meredith’s building.
Then, I waited.
I kept an emergency stakeout kit in my car for times like this. It consisted of five candy bars, a six pack of diet pop (I’m a Chicagoan, we say pop not soda), a plastic container for biological unpleasantries, two pairs of binoculars (in case I lose one), two walkie-talkies (though I haven’t ever used them because I have no partner and work alone, so that was more wishful thinking than necessity) and a pen and notepad. Once upon a time I also kept dirty magazines on hand to kill time, but invariably I’d get absorbed in them because nudity is more entertaining than surveillance, and whoever I was watching would slip by unnoticed. So now I amuse myself with counting to a million by threes, and listening to music.
But first, I had to deal with a pressing bit of adultness. Last night I’d gotten a little too drunk and came home with a dwarf miniature pony. Even though I made that purchase during a bout of alcoholic bad judgement, I needed to own up to my responsibilities and make sure the animal was adjusting to his new environment.
But I couldn’t leave the stakeout because; money. So I called my condo and left a message.
“Hey, horse. It’s me. I hope you’re okay, and that hearing your master’s voice has a calming effect. I’ll be gone for a few hours, so rewind this if you get lonely.” Then I added, “It’s Harry.”
My duty to the horse complete, I popped in a CD of The Beginner by Bob Walkenhorst, and let his dulcet, sexy tones stimulate me as I eased into surveillance mode. Then I popped open a can of diet, keeping one eye on the door, and the other on cops looking to ticket me for illegal parking.
# # #
Ninety minutes passed. I had to move twice so I wouldn’t get fined by Chicago’s finest. Once upon a time, I was a cop in this city. I’d had my career cut short because I was a maverick rogue lone wolf who refused to play by their rules, and because I abused my allotted sick days by a factor of two. Since I was fired, I got no pension, and had to somehow make ends meet with the millions I was pulling in from the TV show. Luckily, I had a good accountant who’d convinced me to put my extra funds into a surefire, guaranteed investment; Beanie Babies. It was the one toy that would never go out of style. The current market was rather bearish, but I anticipated a rebound any day now.
I’d finished my third pop and was pissing in the plastic container when a black Jeep pulled up to the building. Two seconds later, a woman darted out of the lobby, hopped into the vehicle, and they sped off like they were late for life-saving surgery.
It was a bad moment for me, because I’d just hit that point in my stream where stopping was difficult, bordering on impossible. I managed to barely rein it in without my bladder inverting, then looked for the lid.
The lid wasn’t around.
Did I even have a lid?
In the meantime, the Jeep was blending into traffic.
It was hard choices like this that separated the men from the boys. The plastic container was three-quarters full of urine, and I didn’t want to spill it in my car, or on myself. I never wanted to be called Pee-Pee Harry again, stemming from a youthful incident of my school years. One little bathroom accident and your fellow twelfth-graders never let you forget it. Kids could be cruel.
The thing to do was open the door and dump out the urine, then tail the Jeep.
But I technically only had one functional hand. My robotic prosthesis could do some cool things, like crush a can of soup, or crush a can of beans, but it lacked the subtlety of human touch. That meant I had to tuck myself back in, zip up, open the door, pour out the urine, close the door, and then begin pursuit. During that time, the Jeep would be gone.
So I placed the container on the dashboard, put Little Harry away, then pulled smoothly into traffic, deciding to dump the pee when I got to a stoplight.
Then it was full-on white-knuckle adrenalin-rush car chase.
There’s an art to tailing somebody. Especially in a car as obvious as my Corvette.
Unfortunately, I was unaware of that art, and just tried to keep the Jeep in sight without being seen myself, while also making sure I didn’t splash piss all over everything.
That meant easy acceleration, easy on the brakes, no quick turns, and for god’s sake watch out for potholes. I also couldn’t answer my cell phone, which was ringing. I let it go to voice mail.
Whoever was behind the wheel of the Jeep drove like an asshole, cutting other cars off, not using his turn signal, speeding. He quickly got five car lengths ahead, and I was in danger of losing him.
I was also in danger of spilling piss everywhere.
I had to make a decision. Perhaps the most important decision of my life.
I loved my Corvette. I originally had a ‘67 Ford Mustang, but had to give it up when I lost my hand because I couldn’t drive stick shift. I didn’t expect the Vette to ever take the place of the Stang in my heart, but it had.
Forever ruining my interior with urine wasn’t an option.
But I’d read a lot of survival books. About people in similar situations to mine, like being stuck in the ocean on a lifeboat without any water, or stranded in the desert a hundred miles away from the nearest river, or trapped in a crevasse while exploring a cave, or being unable to get out of the armchair while binge-watching all eight seasons of the X-Files on Netflix.
In order to survive, you had to drink your urine.
And to save my Corvette, I knew I had to do the same.
Gingerly picking up the plastic container while steering straight with my robot hand, I brought it up to my mouth, parted my lips, began to pour—
—then the horrible urine smell hit me, like the bathroom at Wrigley Field times ten, and I gagged and splashed piss everywhere.
My hair. My clothes. My plush leather seats.
Soaked. Soaked and stinky.
Then I puked all over the steering wheel and dashboard.
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When I finally stopped crying, I could no longer see the Jeep. It was like multiplying a tragedy by a tragedy, squared.
I hit the gas, passing cars left and right, fighting not to throw up again, and saw the Jeep turn on Congress.
I followed, then steered with my wet knees long enough to open a window, making a note to see a doctor soon because human urine shouldn’t smell that bad.
Yeah, it was gross. I had firsthand knowledge of how gross it was. Welcome to life. It’s smelly, and messy, and disgusting. Try taking care of a baby. Or an elderly parent. Or a dwarf miniature horse.
We all have to get our hands dirty. It comes with being a human being. You deal with it and move on. So if you’re thinking about leaving a bad Amazon review because this scene is repulsive, remember that you have bodily functions, too. And trust me; they don’t smell like roses.
That said, if given a second chance, I probably would have rethought the whole pissing in a container without a lid situation.
On top of the mess, and the smell, and the regret, I got stuck at a red light, and the Jeep sped ahead, vanishing in traffic.
I used the reprieve to quickly check the glove compartment for napkins, and found a single wet wipe. It probably wouldn’t soak up a liter of piss, but at least I could wipe my mouth off.
I felt one hundred percent better.
Not really. But by that point, I’d take any small victory.
The light changed and I gunned it, coming up to the turn onto I-90.
Running on pure private eye instinct, I took the ramp.
Either I was still following them, or I wasn’t.
I stayed the course.
I drove for almost five minutes at eighty miles an hour, thinking for sure I must have lost them. But then the Jeep appeared, to my left, in the express lanes. I followed as best I could, keeping them in sight when possible, guessing where they were when the express lanes split off from the main highway to go around the el tracks that ran parallel to our course.
It was nerve wracking, and I had to go to the bathroom again, and I actually considered just going because my clothes and car were ruined anyway, but I pushed the thought away because that’s what real men do.
Ten minutes later, they finally merged back into the main expressway, and I was able to keep them in sight all the way to them exiting on Roselle road.
He wound up in a suburb called Maple Hills. I vaguely remembered dating a girl, years ago, who lived in Maple Hills. Or maybe her name was Maple. Or Hills. Something was familiar, I was one hundred percent mostly sure of that.
After some suburban stop-and-go traffic, the Jeep turned into a trailer park.
I mean, it turned left, into a trailer park. It didn’t turn into a trailer park, werewolf-style. Bad choice of words. I wondered if I tended to overthink things, and spent the next few minutes thinking about that.
I’d been abandoned as a baby, never knowing my parents, bouncing from foster home to foster home, and for a brief amount of time I lived in a trailer home. The media makes trailer parks out to be tornado magnets entrenched with ignorance and poverty. But I found them to be just like any other neighborhood, Just poorer and stupider. Also, they attracted tornadoes.
It was all rank and file like a huge compartmentalized drawer for human beings. The grid of narrow streets all needed repaving, two out of every three trailers needed paint, and seeing unkept lawns too small for cemetery plots didn’t make me want to run right out and fork over a down payment.
The Jeep parked in front of a tan double-wide, and I stopped around the corner, watching.
A guy came out, tallish, thinish, non-descript. A girl came out as well. She might have been Cherry. I couldn’t tell from that distance. Then I remembered my binoculars. I shook off the urine and took a peek.
Too late. She turned her head.
I watched her, and the guy, go into the house.
I was also finally close enough to read the Jeep’s license. Illinois plates. I found my notepad, but it was soaked with pee and when I used the pen it tore through the paper.
I needed to get myself cleaned up.
In my trunk I had a gym bag, a leftover from one of my more optimistic moments when I joined a gym with dreams of becoming an amateur body builder, which lasted until right after I signed a four year gym membership and then got distracted by dreams of becoming an amateur astronomer. I got as far as finding the moon. It’s the big round one that comes out at night.
My gym bag contained a towel, a sweatshirt, shorts, and fresh underwear and socks, all of which I needed. I took off my shoulder holster (did I mention I carried a .44 Magnum, which was a very large handgun but I really wasn’t overcompensating for anything), and changed into clean clothes really fast in case anyone was watching. I also used almost an entire bottle of baby powder on my body, because; chafing.
Since I was no longer wearing a jacket, I had nothing to hide my Magnum, so I locked it in the trunk and put the throw away piece I keep in my tool kit—a Hi-Point 380HC—in my shorts pocket. For the uninitiated, a throw-away piece is an untraceable gun that you would plant on someone if you ever accidentally killed them, to make it look like you acted in self-defense. I’d never needed to use a throw-away piece, but I never needed to use a fire extinguisher, either. That didn’t mean it was a bad idea to have one.
I set the various alarms on my Vette, then went to work.
Like many trailer parks, all of the homes were arranged in rank and file, parked close enough for neighbors to hear each other’s televisions. I didn’t notice anyone wandering around, but someone’s dog wouldn’t shut up, and someone else was listening to country music at a volume that shouldn’t be legal north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Since I assumed trailer parks were frequently patrolled by cops who didn’t have anything better to do, I knew I had to remain fully alert. I took another look around, three-hundred and sixty degrees. Then, in my spur-of-the-moment yet clever ready-for-the-gym disguise, I sauntered up to the trailer Cherry went in, and went to the closest window to peek inside.
There were blinds drawn. I hated blinds. They were a private eye’s worst enemy.
I crept around to the next window. This one had drapes, not blinds, and I was able to see through the crack, into the kitchen. My two suspects were up against the fridge, locked in a passionate embrace.
Either that, or they were sharing the same piece of gum.
I brought up my iPhone and tapped the camera app to bring it up. Their faces were mashed against each other’s so I couldn’t tell if this was Cherry or not.
The kissing got more intense. He moved his head down to her neck and began sucking on that, but it was the wrong side and I still couldn’t see her face. Then, abruptly, he stopped and they walked out of my field of vision.
How funny would it be if I went through all of this to get here, and it wasn’t Cherry?
Answer; not funny at all.
I took another look around for cops, and nosy neighbors, and dogs, and wandering trailer park psychopaths, and then moved on to the next window.
A living room. And set up was a makeshift photography studio. Three soft lights, attached to white filtering umbrellas, were focused on the couch. There were also two cameras on tripods, each of varying focal lengths. A third camera was around the guy’s neck, and he was aiming it at the sofa.
I snapped a picture of him.
On the sofa, legs under her in a kittenish pose, was Cherry.
The ace private eye does it again.
I aimed the phone at her and took a few pics.
The guy took a light meter reading, adjusted his f-stop, then took a few pictures of her too. He was talking, but I couldn’t make out anything through the window.
Then Cherry took off her shirt, revealing her bra.
I didn’t have to know the circumstances to guess what had led to this point. The guy said he was a talent scout, or a photographer, or a movie producer, and he told Cherry she was beautiful and he’d
make her famous. So she skips her breast augmentation appointment for this once-in-a-lifetime chance to snap some nudie pictures in a trailer park.
What a cheap, tawdry little scam.
I wondered how quickly I could get some business cards printed up that said I was a talent scout.
“This is the Maple Hills Police! Lie on the ground with your hands behind your head!”
I turned, saw a cop standing up next to his squad car.
Nice job, Harry.
I decided not to take the kindly policeman’s advice, and instead ran in the opposite direction. I cut through the backyard, working my way up to a full sprint, trying to weigh my options.
Had they found my car yet? If not, how could I get to it without being seen? In two or three minutes the streets would be swarming with cop cars, since this was the burbs and they had nothing better to do. Hiding was out of the question, because it would eventually become a foot search.
I ducked through an adjacent backyard and chanced a look behind me. No cops. I ran ahead.
The safest place for me was probably inside one of these trailers. But B&E carried more weight than a simple peeping tom charge, and I didn’t want to risk it.
The gym clothes may have fooled the casual onlooker, but I was already out of breath. I wasn’t in my prime. In fact, when I was in my prime I wasn’t in my prime. I should probably start an exercise program. Maybe join a gym.
I hugged close to the trailer and made my way to the front. There was a faint flashing red light off to my left. I peeked around the corner and saw two squad cars parked side-by-side in opposite directions, their drivers conversing.
Shit. I looked to my right and could barely make out the trunk of my car, parked about fifty meters away. If I made a mad dash for it, I’d probably be seen and chased. If I walked up to it casually, I’d probably be seen and chased. If I kept sneaking around the back yards of houses, eventually someone was going to find my car and take down the license, if they hadn’t already.
Any direction I turned my ass, someone was waiting to plug me.
Unless I created a diversion.
I debated starting a trailer on fire, but immediately disregarded it. Fires took a while to get started, and I needed something fast. Besides, I left my tank of kerosene in my other shorts. I adjusted the gun in my pocket and tried to think of something else I could use to get their attention. If I only had some way to make a loud noise of some sort. Or some way to make them run for cover...
Dying Breath Page 12
