The Keepers

by Jeffrey B. Burton

After two hours in cruise control, I pulled the CACC truck into a motel on the outskirts of Rockford, Illinois. The lodge had lots of dark wood and seemed as though it’d been serving the needs of travelers since Truman roamed the White House. The motel’s marquee screamed FREE HBO in large font and, below that, Pets Welcome in substantially smaller letters. I unbuckled my seat belt and reached for the door when Kippy spoke for the first time in over an hour.

  “I’ll check us in.” Her words were slow, a firm command.

  “I got this.”

  “Mace,” she said, shaking her head, “you’re a horrible liar. Everyone in the lobby will remember the jittery guy with no ID who insisted on paying in cash. I’ll be the friendly ditz in town for some animal convention who left her purse on the kitchen table back home in Chicago.”

  “Okay,” I said, thankful just to hear Kippy speaking in complete sentences and gladder yet to see her back in the here and now and engaged in our predicament. My only thought since the City Hall disaster had been to flee. I’d exhausted all ideas that came from my years parked in front of detective shows on cable TV.

  Switch vehicles to something clean and untraceable. Check. Turn off mobile phones and pop out the batteries. Check. In fact, our disassembled smartphones sat in the glove compartment in the F-150 I’d stashed at O’Hare. Check. Wear baseball caps and sunglasses. Check. Pay for everything only in cash. Check. Find someplace safe to hunker down—well, hopefully, that’s what Kippy—all decked out in Wabiszewski’s baggy sweats and Cubs cap—was now scoring for us. Check.

  After that … I had nothing.

  I looked at Vira, sitting in the passenger seat Kippy had recently vacated. “What do you think, girl?”

  My golden retriever looked at me a second and then returned her gaze back to the side window. “Oh, great.” I glanced in the back seat at Delta Dawn and Maggie May. “Either of you got any ideas?” My sister collies returned my look but remained silent. “Yeah,” I said, “me neither.”

  Kippy did have a valid point about my being a horrible liar as there’d been an occasion when we’d first met—when I didn’t know Kippy, when I saw only the uniform she wore—that I’d massaged and stretched and fudged the truth in order to keep some close friends out of legal jeopardy as well as save Vira from being put to sleep at CACC. Per Kippy, not unlike some sexual harasser in the workplace, any and all bearing witness to my untruths are rendered uncomfortable. While being dishonest I tend to avoid eye contact, turn red, and then fidget and squirm like some grade school kid in urgent need of a bathroom pass.

  Pathetic—a preschooler can tell when I’m full of shit … and, evidently, it’s now something I need to work on.

  A minute later Kippy returned to the car and opened the passenger door.

  “Room one-twenty,” she said and pointed. “The last room on the end.”

  * * *

  I tended my girls. First, we went for an extended walk. Then I fed them each a cup and a half of dry cereal and, afterward, rinsed their bowls and set them up as water dishes. Kippy had retreated back into her shell, silent again, seated at the room’s only table and sorting through Wabiszewski’s documentation.

  “You hungry?”

  Kippy shook her head and continued staring at her partner’s paperwork, though I wondered how much of it she was actually absorbing. Vira was curled up at her feet. Delta and Maggie had hijacked the bed, while the local TV news droned on in the background. The two collies kept glancing toward the window every time a car door slammed.

  “I’m going to grab us some takeout and something to drink.”

  Kippy flipped pages but said nothing. I slipped out quietly, alone, leaving Kippy to watch the girls or, perhaps, for the girls to keep an eye on Kippy. I thought maybe Kippy needed some alone time and that I’d drive around a bit, but I changed my mind once I hopped in the CACC truck. It’d be safer for all of us to stick together.

  I returned after twenty minutes with a bag of cheeseburgers and a six-pack of bottled water.

  I managed to choke down a burger that was likely quite tasty, but, tonight, it went down like soggy cardboard. I also drank two bottles of water while sitting on the bed and working the TV clicker. Most of the local news dealt with events in Rockford—car accidents, a pawn shop robbery, some guy had been arrested for his eighth DUI, sports, weather, and on and on it went. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Luckily, no one cut in with a newsflash about Chicago’s mayor having been assaulted. There were no breaking headlines about the tragic death of a Chicago police officer named Dave Wabiszewski. I continued working the clicker, flipping from local news to cable and eventually tripped over a news station out of Chicago.

  I sat glued to the screen for forty minutes but they had nothing to report concerning today’s events at City Hall, not even a quick blurb regarding the fire alarm.

  I took the dogs out for a short walk—long enough for them to make peace with their bladders for the long night ahead of us. I shook off a series of yawns, suddenly realizing how drained I had become. Upon my return, I sat at the table in the chair across from Kippy. I was glad to see she’d nearly finished one of the water bottles.

  “You should eat something.”

  “I can’t, Mace.”

  I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes, and listened to the station out of Chicago in case there were any late-breaking headlines we should know about. My head bobbed. I was exhausted, physically and mentally. I went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth with a forefinger and some toothpaste I squeezed out of an all-but-empty tube of Crest I’d found floating about the bottom of my gym bag. I dumped the pumpkin-colored bedspread along with a couple of extra pillows I’d taken from the closet onto the floor in front of the TV, and then turned the volume down.

  I glanced over at Kippy. “You should try to get some sleep.”

  I wasn’t sure she heard me but ultimately she replied. “I don’t think I can,” she said. “I keep thinking about … Wabs.”

  “I know, Kip,” I said. “I know.”

  “It was my plan. I’m the genius that walked us into an ambush,” she said. “I’m the genius that got Wabs killed.”

  “There’s no way you could have known.”

  “It’s like whenever something crazy happens in that goddamned town, we all shrug and roll our eyes and say, ‘That’s Chicago for you.’ I was naïve, Mace. And stupid. I should have guessed the mayor was part of the same stink—that Weeks was worse than any of those Keepers he railed about in the campaign.”

  The tenor of her voice, her thousand-yard stare—Kippy was shattered, her remaining pieces being devoured by guilt and shame. “You’re not clairvoyant, Kip. Of course Callum and Weeks knew each other, but none of us—Wabs included—could have guessed they really knew each other.”

  I wished to God I’d never gone downtown to attend Eddie Clare’s interrogation; that made me Johnny-on-the-spot for CPD to grab and send off to Washington Park in search of Peter Feist. If I’d not already been at police headquarters in the middle of the night, I knew of at least two dog handlers that lived closer and would likely have been contacted first.

  And then we’d never have been sucked into this nightmare.

  Kippy continued sitting at the table, motionless. I could tell my attempt at lifting her spirits had fallen flat. I spent a minute contemplating ways to string words into phrases into sentences that might somehow lessen her grief before realizing that silence would be best. I lay down on the bedspread and pillows and stared up at the ceiling.

  I was floating off to sleep when Kippy spoke again.

  “When they come, Mace, they won’t be coming to arrest us,” she said softly. “They’ll be coming to kill us.”

  I chewed on that until my eyelids grew heavy and, soon after, I was dead to the world. When I woke in the late hours of the night, my cheek was wet. I’d been so zonked out that saliva had drooled from the corner of my mouth, soaking my pillow. Half asleep, I stumbled to the bathroom, shut the door, and rel
ieved myself. When I emerged, in the light of the quietly droning television, I made out Kippy on the bed, lying on her back and snoring lightly. Vira had snuggled up on one side while the collies nested on the other. Her Beretta sat on the night table beside the bed. I lay back down on my bundled bedspread, felt my eyes moisten as I reflected on what had proven to be the worst day of my life.

  An hour or two later I drifted back into unconsciousness.

  CHAPTER 33

  Arturo Solos freebased cocaine for personal use, extracting impurities with diethyl ether. It was a dangerous fucking process, as ether is a highly volatile and flammable liquid, but it leaves you with damn near one hundred percent pure cocaine—not like shit-ass crack, which contains baking soda and water. You pipe it to produce vapors for inhalation. The cocaine is then absorbed via the membranes in your lungs, thus hitting your bloodstream and brain within ten or fifteen seconds … and that’s when Arturo Solos’s voyage deep into the universe commenced.

  Solos was alone, shirtless, and lying in boxer shorts on the king size. He was also halfway through his trip about the cosmos when his cell phone buzzed. At first Solos thought the sound was coming from the soft-core on Cinemax, and it took him ten seconds to realize he’d set the flat-screen on mute some time ago. Solos picked up his buzzing phone and glanced at the caller ID. It was Sebastian, or Bastardo as Sebastian was more commonly referred to.

  Fuck.

  Bastardo was his right hand, and his calling at this time of night spelled trouble.

  “Bastardo,” Solos said into the cell phone.

  “Run, Arturo! Run!” Bastardo screamed through the line. “Corre ahora!”

  “Fuck you saying?”

  “La Raza’s coming for you. Made up as SWAT—policía and shit. Run fucking now, mi amigo! Muévete rápido!”

  Solos dropped the phone, bounced off the bed, ran to the condo’s balcony, peeled back a drape, and looked down on Forty-Fifth Street. From his angle, he spotted a dark van parked in the center of the street in front of his building and what appeared to be the rear bumper of another dark vehicle in front of the van. Solos glanced down the street and noted the shadow of another vehicle—more car than van—parked diagonally across Forty-Fifth, blocking traffic. He began sliding the glass door open, thinking he could drop to the balcony below him, and from there to the first-floor terrace, but then he spotted a lone figure in black on the sidewalk.

  And the figure was staring up at him.

  Solos jerked back, slid the door shut, and flicked down the latch. This made no fucking sense. Solos had paid La Raza their cut. And he paid their cut on time, each and every month, without so much as saying boo. The side-selling then flashed through his mind, deals made in other parts of the city that didn’t get declared to La Raza. A limited number of small-ass sales that were left off-book. But that was fucking pocket money … something everyone did … it was how the world worked. And how the fuck would news of those small-ass sales get back to La Raza?

  Unless, he thought … unless someone on his crew had stuck the knife in his back.

  Is that what Bastardo had tripped over and called to warn him about?

  And this setup—La Raza making it appear as though SWAT and the cops had come for his sorry ass. Bona fide investigators looking into the incident would receive looks of incomprehension from neighbors and witnesses, who would wonder why CPD was there asking them questions when it was CPD’s own damned SWAT unit that came for Solos.

  It was brilliant in a certain manner.

  Well, fuck this, and fuck La Raza. They want to come for him, they want to go down this road, then Arturo Solos would take them all the way down to where the street dead-ends. Solos ran back to his bedroom and grabbed his AR-15 off the side table. Buying the assault rifle from that bug-eyed dealer out of Indiana was going to be worth every fucking penny the black-market asshole had gouged him for it, and these La Raza motherfuckers were going to rue the day they decided to come to his casa—to violate his crib—and take him down over some chump fucking change.

  He wished he had time to pipe more vapors. Maybe later—after he got away. And he wished fucking Bastardo had given him a bigger head start. But it is what it is. When this was over, he and Bastardo would ferret out the rat—la rata—in the crew that had fucked him over.

  Solos ran to the condo door and stared through the peephole, then jumped backward as though like a marionette on a string. He’d been hoping to book it down the hallway, dive for the far-side stairwell, get down to first, and creep out the back … but there was a man in black directly outside his door, giving hand signals to others who were out of view. Solos’s throat went dry and he wondered again about the balcony, but the guy on the walk could easily pop a cap in his ass as he tried to spiderman his way down the side of the building.

  Goddamn fuck.

  Arturo Solos stood in the center of his living room, aimed the AR-15 chest-level at his door, and began squeezing the trigger. He heard voices, some kind of scramble in the hallway.

  “Yeah, motherfuckers!” he shouted, and pulled again at the trigger; only nothing happened this time, and he tried again. Nothing. He held the AR-15 sideways, confused, and stared down at it.

  At that moment, his front door blew inward, followed by a deafening noise and piercing white light.

  Solos was now somehow on his back, his bare chest a cascade of crimson. He stared up at the faces and handguns.

  But not for long.

  CHAPTER 34

  I found myself jogging down a dark path for what seemed an eternity, twisting and turning in the shadows, tree branches reaching ever closer as though to embrace me. There was a hint of water in the background—I could hear it trickling, I could smell it—and I slowly came to realize I was back at Washington Park … where it all began. And with that knowledge came panic, terror—an ice pick to the heart—and I sprinted faster, and faster yet. I dared not peek left, toward the fish pond because, if the trees thinned out, I knew I’d see him again … Peter Feist … only now he’d be sitting up in the blackish water, face still in that impossible position, watching me as I flew past, his mouth open in a gurgle of regret. I heard nothing but my breathing, and then my footsteps pounding on the pathway, but I somehow knew he was right behind me on this never-ending trail on this never-ending night.

  What started as a lucid dream turned nightmarish … and I ran for all I was worth. I ran for my life. I dashed about a curve, nearly fell but pulled myself to a halt. In the sliver of light before me I spotted a figure—Police Superintendent Gerald Callum aiming what might be a dart gun my way. And suddenly I was ensnared, lifted as though by tentacles, and pulled backward in an ever-tightening grip. I felt Man-mountain’s breath on my neck, hot like steam, followed by a dank whisper in my ear, “I’ve got a special box to put you in, dog man. A very special death box just for you.”

  I tried to struggle, but it was pointless. My arms and legs now a thousand pounds each … and Man-mountain began to cackle.

  “Mace.” Someone called my name from miles away.

  “Mace.” Someone rubbed at my shoulder. “Mace—wake up.”

  My eyes flipped open. Kippy knelt over me.

  “You were trembling,” she said. “Starting to scream.”

  I shook my head to clear it. “Bad dream.”

  She squeezed my arm. “You’ve got to get up now.”

  I lifted my head an inch. “What’s going on?”

  “We have to get out of here, Mace,” Kippy said. “You and I—we’re all over the news.”

  * * *

  We crossed into Wisconsin before pulling into an I-90 rest area to feed the dogs. The sun had yet to rise, but the rest stop was well lit, awash in overhead lights. Apart from an eighteen-wheeler parked in the opposite truck lot, the place was deserted. Kippy and I dined out of a vending machine. We sat at a picnic table on the far end of the wayside, Cubs caps shrouding our features while we let the girls roam free on the grass. In the meantime, we nibbled on over
priced crackers, chips, and cookies, washing them down with bad coffee.

  I’d leaped from the floor at Kippy’s warning, hit the bathroom at a jog, splashed cold water on my face to verify the past day hadn’t all been a nightmare, and listened as talking heads on the news channel out of Chicago told how CPD had raided the home of a minor gangbanger and dealer with suspected ties to Los Zetas—one of the more bad-assy of the bad-asses making up the various Mexican drug cartels. The dealer was named Arturo Solos. The police had been tipped off by a CI—a criminal informant—as to Solos’s involvement in the murder of Special Prosecutor Peter Feist.

  A SWAT team had gone to Solos’s home on Forty-Fifth Street where Solos proceeded to open fire on them with an assault rifle. When all was said and done, one door was destroyed, no SWAT officers were hurt, and Arturo Solos had taken four to the chest. The station showed a quick clip of a body bag being hauled out the front of an apartment complex.

  The news said Peter Feist had been busy investigating gang ties tracing back to any of the south-of-the-border cartels, and, evidently, Arturo Solos decided to nip that investigation in the bud. A logbook on Solos’s laptop implicated two Chicago police officers on the drug dealer’s payroll—Officer Dave Wabiszewski and Officer Kippy Gimm.

  As Kippy navigated us toward Wisconsin, we caught the rest of the story on the dog mobile’s radio. Authorities received a search warrant for the residences of the two CPD officers and, though Dave Wabiszewski was not home, investigators discovered thirty street packs of black tar heroin and twelve grand in hundred-dollar bills stuffed behind an air vent cover in an office wall. And though Officer Gimm was not home, either, they found fourteen grand in like-size bills also hidden behind an air vent in her apartment. Somehow the police discovered Kippy Gimm had “recently been shacking up with”—no shit, “shacking up” is how the newsreader phrased it—a guy named Mason Reid, who ran cadaver dogs for the Chicago Police Department. CPD hit Reid’s trailer house soon after 2:00 a.m. It appeared empty—evidently abandoned—and investigators initially surmised the three must have heard about the shootout with Arturo Solos through police channels and hightailed it for the hills. However, two things were quickly discovered in Mason Reid’s trailer home. First, a Kahr CM9 registered to the late Peter Feist was retrieved from a silverware drawer in Reid’s kitchen. Much more alarming, police then discovered the body of Officer Dave Wabiszewski in Reid’s bathtub, covered in blankets and pillows, with the shower curtain drawn shut. Officer Wabiszewski had been strangled to death. Authorities believed a falling out among the band of thieves occurred after receiving the news of Arturo Solos’s death. The newscaster then went on to inform listeners to be on the lookout for Mason Reid and Kippy Gimm, both thought to be armed and dangerous and may be riding in a black Ford F-150, and then he read my pickup’s plate number several times before repeating a phone number to call in case any listeners had any information regarding the whereabouts of Mason Reid or Kippy Gimm.