She loops her legs trying to reattach to the bridge.
“Throw your gun in the river.”
“Pull me up! We need the goddamn gun.”
“We? My arm’s getting tired . . .”
She relaxes. “Okay. Big deal, my new jeans get wet.”
She’s right, it’s not like the fall ever killed my friends or me. I wedge my weight behind the railing, plant both feet on the deck, and use both hands to pull her up far enough that she can regrab the bridge and haul herself over.
Miss Devereux reestablishes on the repairman’s walkway. She does not look happy, inhales big—pushes the hair out of her face—exhales big, then:
“Deal. One ninety for Astor Argyle and the remaining Barbancourt bottle. Let’s have a look.”
“Show me the money. That you said you don’t have.”
“Anne told me not to hurt you, but she’s not here. I may have to make an executive decision.”
“Better bring your lunch.”
Miss Devereux frowns. “Right. You have a twelve-inch dick. Show me Astor and the bottle of Barbancourt, and I’ll show you the money.”
“I don’t have the bottle . . . yet.”
Major frown. Then: “But you do have Astor Argyle?”
I pull the eight-by-ten win picture of Astor Argyle out of my shirt and hand it to her. Her face brightens, not surprising after a five-year chase. Sans threat, her crooked smile is turn-your-head radiant. In the silver moonlight, she holds the picture close to her face, flips it over to see if anything is written on the back, then flips it back and asks, “We know any of these men other than Eddie O’Hare?”
“Al Capone’s brother Ralph is the guy on the left. James W. Barlow Sr. is next to him.”
“The black man?” She looks above the photograph to me.
I shake my head.
She says, “Has to be a Péralte—the head and face are unmistakable—a family from Haiti whose hands are all over the Capone gold.”
I stop myself before saying that for as long as I can remember, and until the day Sportsman’s closed, the maître d’ at the third-floor clubhouse restaurant was Constantine Péralte, a guy I knew well enough to know his kids’ names. His daughter Zelda worked there with him. Miss Devereux is correct, the Mr. Péralte I knew did have an odd-shaped head and face . . . just like the photograph.
I say, “Behind what you’re holding were two eight-by-tens and a poem hidden in the frame.”
“Show me.”
“Show me the money.”
“Anne wants you in . . . as a partner. For the same reasons Dave and Barlow did. It’s the only way you’ll get paid and survive all your problems up here.”
“I go down there in hurricane season, handicap a guy who died eighty years ago while we dodge a crew of—”
“Yes.”
Deep breath. “O-kay.” Someone with my voice says: “How would that work, me being partners with you and Anne?”
“And Siri. We take the items to Port Royal, tonight. You help us decipher Mr. O’Hare’s poetry, Chicago and horse-racing mumbo jumbo. Best guess? Probably leads us back to Cuba, and maybe Haiti later.”
“Anne says Haiti’s about to implode.”
Miss Devereux shrugs. “When wasn’t it?”
Dry swallow. “Not going to Haiti.”
“Haiti’s already here, Bill. The Gryphon’s not going away because we killed a few of his crew. Show me the eight-by-tens.”
“Didn’t bring them. Sorry.”
“And the bottle?”
“I think I know where it is. Maybe. But it’s a good, solid maybe.”
“Like your twelve-inch dick?”
“That’s your fantasy. I do fine with less.”
“Okay, I’m on my back; you’ve been doing ‘fine with less’ for fifteen minutes; big finish / happy ending for both of us; I say, ‘Wow, Bill, that was the best of all time. Could you show me the photos, poem, and bottle?’”
I hold out my hand. “Give me your gun.”
“Don’t think so.”
I vault the railing, toes on the trestle’s outer edge, holding on with one hand. “Then give me the magazine and the round in the chamber or you’re on your own.”
“Bill, we need a gun. And bullets.” She points at her neck. “We’re not playing lawn tennis.”
“Magazine or bye.”
She pulls a Glock 21, drops the magazine, racks out the .45 ACP round, and puts both on the railing by my hand.
I say, “Step back.”
She does. I vault back over to her side of the railing, pocket the magazine and round, then point toward North Avenue. “Grossfeld’s. There’s two spots there where the bottle could be; I’ll call Anne en route. We’ll make a deal that doesn’t include me and Haiti.”
Miss Devereux frowns again. “I’ll yell really bad words at whoever tries to kill us between here and Grossfeld’s.”
“Tell ’em you’re a rugby player.”
She nods. “Wag your twelve-inch dick. Always works in your 007 movies.”
More like my shriveled dick. Only now is the look of the black shooters at Nick & Nora’s registering. I’d so completely blocked out my Haitian past that their hats, coats, and sunglasses didn’t translate. Same look as the two I saw at Millennium Park across from Barlow’s office when I got off the bus.
In my previous life, those hats, coats, and sunglasses were what Papa Doc Duvalier’s Militia of National Security Volunteers wore. Tontons Macoutes, they were called. Shadow men, miscreants and sociopaths too deranged for the army, encouraged to roam Haiti’s countryside, defending the république by whatever means necessary. Papa Doc’s son, Bébé Doc, renamed them when he took over from his psychotic father in 1971, but it was the Tontons Macoutes who built me my nightmare fifteen years later in 1986.
Those deranged fucking cannibals up here in Chicago, looking to kidnap me back to Haiti, is my equivalent of waking up with the devil straddling my hips.
Chapter 12
Bill Owens
Four stories above the street, Susie Devereux and I duckwalk one hundred feet of stinky tar roof to the roof’s northern parapet. It’s midnight; we’re directly across from Grossfeld’s. We peek.
Four stories below, the weekend-reveler traffic clogs North Avenue in both directions. Idling under the streetlights that define Grossfeld’s half block of windows and walls is a dented blue ’04 panel van—like the white one at Nick & Nora’s. Two white men sit in the van, windows down, smoking.
The front-office section of Grossfeld’s is lit, but no shadows move on the window blinds.
I squint. “Gotta be Loef’s guys in the van. Here for the trucks.”
Susie wipes sweat from her eyes. “They need to hurry up.” Her perfume or deodorant is lemon-light but nice, way out of sync with the tar stink and sweat.
Behind Grossfeld’s is a wide alley that I can’t see.
At what would be the alley’s west end, a white guy sips a half pint, looks up and down the north-south side street, then disappears back behind Dave’s building.
My madras Wally Reid jacket binds in the armpits. The pants bind at the knees, neither garment made for rooftop recon work. I re-squint North Avenue for Haitians, then tell Susie, “There’s a warehouse trash door that Barlow or Loef won’t know about and your Haitian pals shouldn’t either—”
“Don’t kid yourself, Bill. Before Dave died, he answered every question they asked.”
“You know that?”
Susie Devereux hardens to stone. She shows me her wrists. “Yeah, motherfucker, I know that.”
The marks on her wrists run up her arm, not across, what a deep, serious suicide attempt looks like. The history in her face looks similar to some of my own. “Sorry.”
She says, “Is there any reason you can imagine—any reaso
n—why Dave would need to talk about that door?”
“A way to get in. But Dave has, had, door keys he could give them.”
Susie thinks about it. “Your pal Dave thought he was in Rum Cay to buy both rhum bottles for $100,000; a trap the Gryphon set for him and Barlow.”
Bingo. That’s the missing piece, why Dave went to a loan shark and why he went down there right after I came back without Susie.
Susie scans North Avenue. “The Haitians won’t come to Dave’s warehouse until Barlow tells them he sent us here. And he will. Barlow will be careful; he knows who he’s facing, but the Haitians know where he is. Barlow will be dead by sunrise, or he’ll wish he was. And then we’ll be the only connections left for the Gryphon to hunt.”
My stomach binds like my clothes. “You really think there’s more Haitians? Four dead today is a bunch—”
“At least two crews. We saw the shooters, his grab team. There’s a backup/transport team we didn’t see.”
“We’re facing a goddamn army?”
Susie nods. “He makes them. The Gryphon’s a trafficker and Haiti never runs out of poor people. Same as the cartel soldiers on the Mexican border.” She turns her back to North Avenue and slides her shoulders down behind the parapet. “It’ll be light in six hours. We want to be as far ahead as possible before Barlow spills everything he knows.”
I peek back over the parapet. The alley’s mouth still has the lookout. The drivers for the trucks are probably back there too. “Okay, I say we climb down, loop the block, call in a fire on this building from the pay phone outside Snyder’s.”
“A fire?”
“Yeah. Engine Company 35 is just around the block on Damen; take ’em two seconds to get here. The sirens will blow Loef’s crew out of the alley. When the fire trucks and cops jam the block, we sneak in the trash door in back.”
“I’m not going down there without a loaded gun and you shouldn’t either.”
I weigh Haitian pirates versus Scottish Moroccan pirates. “If you shoot me in the knees, I’m still not telling you where the rest of Astor Argyle is.”
Susie Devereux rolls her eyes in the moonlight, pulls the Glock off her stomach, then holds out her hand for the Glock’s magazine. “Scout’s honor.”
***
12:50 a.m.
Sirens echo outside Grossfeld’s warehouse.
Inside, the police and fire-engine lights flash across the warehouse’s opaque windows. Heat turbines whir in the barrel-vault ceiling. The floor is a maze of stacked crates and pallets that go on forever, all of it in the deep shadow of low-voltage security lamps. The smell is cardboard and engine oil.
Miss Devereux allows me to lead; clearly she’s spooked that the Haitians could be squirreled in here, waiting. Sweat drips off my nose. My eyes bounce left at a noise I can’t see, then right, then to Susie Devereux behind my shoulder. If she’s queasy, what the fuck should a Boy Scout civilian be?
Fifteen minutes into our B&E, the last siren quits. The red, blue, and white lights continue flashing. By now the firemen know it’s a false alarm. The Irish goons probably do too. I refocus on the thirty wall lockers Dave allows the staff to use for free; some unopened for years. I cut the first lock with a bolt cutter liberated from Grossfeld’s tool locker. The snap echoes like thunder.
“Jesus.”
Susie aims her Glock at the shadows. “Don’t think Jesus is down for this one.”
I search each locker with a small flashlight.
No Barbancourt Rhum bottle.
“Dave will have a file in his office from the 2003 Sportsman’s move.” I point for Susie to follow me.
We creep through the warehouse’s pallet maze toward the front-office section on North Avenue. I open the connecting door an inch, then squint into fluorescent light.
Susie’s hand nudges me on the ass. “On the off chance this isn’t a waste of time we don’t have, today would be good.”
“Feel free to take over whenever you’re ready.”
“Funny how those twelve inches shrink when it’s time to use ’em.”
Uh-huh. Some women can kill a hard-on on a sixteen-year-old. I crawl into the fluorescent-lit hallway. Susie stays crouched at the doorjamb, pistol leveled on bad possibilities in both directions. The red, blue, and white lights outside flash across the window blinds.
I crawl past file cabinets and three offices to Dave’s. The door is shut. His light wasn’t on when we called in the fire. I reach up, turn the doorknob, and squeak the door open.
Dave’s blinds are closed. No lights flash against them. I crawl under Dave’s window and hunch up behind his desk.
Outside, a shadow darkens Dave’s blinds in the middle—a man shape lit by the streetlight above him. Loef’s goons are back.
I rifle Dave’s top drawer. His Beretta automatic isn’t there, but eight hundred-dollar bills are. I pocket them. Noise? I stare at the blinds, then the doorway. We do not want to go to a loan shark’s basement. I search the other drawers, find Dave’s Beretta, drop the magazine—it’s full; half-rack the slide to see the round in the chamber. My knees ache on Dave’s linoleum. I lean back and sit, straighten one knee, then the other. A Grossfeld’s Flyers jersey is framed on the wall, signed by our star goalie, Lisa “The Wall” Saunders.
At the front door, a voice shouts: “POLICE. OPEN UP.” The door rattles hard against its frame. “POLICE. WE HAVE A WARRANT.”
I jump up, pull Dave’s Beretta out of my pants, stuff the gun back in his drawer, and make it to the front door just as it splinters and bangs open.
“DOWN! DOWN! ON THE GROUND! ON THE GROUND!”
Body armor and guns flood the fluorescent-lit lobby. I pancake on the linoleum. Police burst past me in every direction.
“ON THE GROUND!” echoes from the warehouse. “ON THE GROUND!”
Warehouse fluorescents sizzle, then pop on.
The shoes by my face are scuffed and topped by jeans. The voice is familiar. “Working overtime, Bill?” Hands search me up and down, then pull me up by my belt. I land upright with a large man at each shoulder.
Facing me is a heavily armed, square-faced Polish gentleman. He says, “Cannot wait to hear your story. Always good, but this one should be special.”
“How you doing, Waz?”
“Wife still thinks I’m Superman. Kids?” Lieutenant Timothy Waznooski frowns. “They like the rap singers better.”
“Possibly you should’ve stayed home more. Played catch and stuff.”
Lieutenant Waznooski shrugs agreement. “Softball’s dead; even twelve-inch. If my kids go out at all, it’s soccer.” He points the two cops at my shoulders into the warehouse.
When we’re alone, Lieutenant Waznooski says, “Susie Devereux.”
I retuck my shirt. “Excuse me?”
“Susie Devereux. The illustrious James W. Barlow Jr. says she shot him twice. Barlow seems to think she’s here”—Lieutenant Waznooski points at the worn linoleum between us—“because you are.”
I don’t glance at the warehouse where Susie’s hiding. “Far as I know, I’m the only person here.”
“And why is that, Bill? And why does Barlow’s alleged assailant care?”
“Maybe you didn’t hear, Dave Grossfeld committed suicide. Dave and I were partners. I came down, you know, to sit with his stuff.”
“Yeah, we heard about Dave when we were at Barlow’s office. As did you when your phone called Barlow’s. And we heard about Loef Brummel. Dave really owe $200K?”
“Think it was a hundred. But either way, Dave can’t pay. Or couldn’t . . . when he was alive.”
Lieutenant Waznooski doesn’t ask who told me Dave owed Loef because Waz probably knows. “So that leaves you owing the money?” Waz’s face prunes. “Can you pay the hundred?”
“I can pay my rent, most of the time.”
“So why would the woman who shot Barlow be here ‘because you are’?”
“That’d be a Barlow question.”
“Except I’m asking you. Is she here, Bill? I got eight guys in there looking. Devereux has a serious sheet, lots of black redactions nobody wants to talk about. One of my guys dies, me and the team aren’t gonna be happy.”
“Shit, Waz, I don’t know. Dave’s warehouse could hide an army. Dave and I were partners in the mausoleum business and the Flyers. I helped out here occasionally when the voice of reason was required. But this place”—I shrug at the rest of the warehouse—“who knows what’s in there?”
Waz’s tone drops. “Barlow’s security tape has you on it. His weekend secretary confirms you were by to see him eleven hours ago. About what?”
“Barlow sent me on an errand a month back and wanted to talk about it.” I hold my hand up. “Before you ask, you know I can’t discuss his case preparation or he’ll sue me into oblivion.”
“Barlow’s got bigger worries. He’s got enough private security on him to protect the president. Way more than he needs if Devereux is all that’s after him. Already changed hospitals twice but won’t tell us why. How ’bout you tell me?”
Two cops enter from the warehouse. Both are shaking their heads.
Lieutenant Waznooski says “Try harder” and points them back into the warehouse. Waz returns to me. “Neither of your eyes are red from crying. What the fuck are you doing here at one in the morning?”
“Couldn’t sleep—”
“Bullshit.”
Commotion and loud voices at the splintered front door.
Lieutenant Waznooski turns to a uniformed officer who cocks his head back and says, “Sheriffs and some loan company guys. Say they’re serving a repo order for moving trucks.”
Lieutenant Waznooski turns to me, floating his eyebrows for an explanation.
I shrug and shake my head.
He tells the uniformed officer, “Keep ’em out till we’ve searched the building,” then points over my shoulder at Dave’s office. “That Dave’s?”
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