The Keepers

by Jeffrey B. Burton

  The only saving grace, apparently, was that they’d not found my F-150 at the airport … not yet, anyway.

  “Jesus, Kippy,” I had said in the CACC truck, “we are so screwed.”

  “That number they keep giving for anyone who’s spotted us,” Kippy had replied, “I bet it links back to Superintendent Callum so he can send his hit team.”

  * * *

  “If I were drug trafficking for this Arturo Solos fellow, I think I’d have a newer truck. And I might not live in a trailer home.” I sat at the rest stop table, shook the remaining crumbs from a cookie bag down my throat, and thought of how Wabs had nailed it on the head at Russell’s bar in West Town—how Callum would pin Feist’s murder on some patsy drug dealer or thief. It just never occurred to me that we’d be part of that picture. “When he hears all this, Paul’s going to freak.”

  “Will he call in the truck?”

  “No, I don’t think Paul will do that right away, although I couldn’t blame the guy.”

  Kippy thought for a second, and then spun the manila folder on the rest stop table so it faced my way. Officer Wabiszewski’s packet of information. “You know Dave kept at it, don’t you?”

  “He’d sometimes grab a beer at night, tell me he was going to chip away, and then shut himself in his office for a couple hours,” I replied. “I just assumed he was surfing porn.”

  “I imagine there was a fair amount of that, but as an investigator Wabs was meticulous. He’d gotten burned early on at a trial, made to look like a buffoon in front of a jury by some defense attorney. Wabs took it to heart and every incident report he wrote from that day forward overflowed with every single minute detail. I used to give him shit about it, told him we weren’t getting paid by the word.” Kippy blinked back tears. “Anyway, check out the article on top.”

  I flipped open the file and saw a picture of a smiling Peter Feist and a headline: Mayor Appoints Peter Feist to Head Special Prosecutions Bureau. It was an article from Chicago magazine dated last year, soon after Carter Weeks took office. Wabs must have printed it from the magazine’s website. I looked across the picnic table at Kippy.

  “Give it a read,” she said. “It’s just a one-page puff piece.”

  The profile began with Peter Feist’s background—where he’d grown up, Lincoln Park; the law school he’d attended, Loyola University School of Law; his wife and daughters, Laura and Annika and Kiley; then segued into the positions he’d held leading up to his current posting; four years as Cook County State’s Attorney and six previous years serving as an assistant state’s attorney; and it concluded with a short interview. Kippy was right, the article was a pure puff piece like something you’d find in People magazine. Feist spouted platitudes about how fortunate he was to lead the brilliant legal team in the Special Prosecutions Bureau and how he promised to work twenty-four/seven for the great citizens of Chicago. In the final paragraph, Feist talked about how he’d promised his wife he’d take a sabbatical from the weekends he spent at the family’s old cabin on Rock Lake, near Lake Mills in lower Wisconsin. Evidently, Feist lived to fish—odd, since every photograph I’d seen of the man had him city-boyed up in expensive suits—and the special prosecutor mentioned a certain honey hole only he knew about where the rock bass literally jumped into your boat. But Feist had sworn to his wife that he’d grant the bass and walleye and pike in Rock Lake a reprieve as—between his new role leading the Special Prosecutions Bureau and his fishing weekends at the cabin—his wife would never see him again … and soon forget what he looked like … and possibly start dating again.

  Ergo, the fishing trips were dispensable—they had to go.

  That’s how the article ended, but Wabs had drawn a line from the reference to the family’s old cabin on Rock Lake to the margin in pencil. In the margins Wabs had jotted down an address in Lake Mills, presumably that of the Feist family cabin.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “Two things. First, you find yourself working on something huge—a case that’s a game-changer—so big it could take down some very powerful men, right?”

  “Right.”

  “If I were Feist, I’d be so damned paranoid that I’d squirrel away a thing or two—I don’t know, a flash drive or photocopies of documents or images in a Ziploc bag—in a place only I knew about as an insurance policy, right? For safekeeping?”

  “But at the family cabin?”

  “Why not?”

  “You’d hide things where your children play? Where the extended family or friends hang out?”

  “The cabin sounds more like a getaway that only Feist used for fishing, or maybe for a little solitude and downtime.”

  “Well, these days you can get invited to somebody’s cabin for a weekend,” I said, “and you’re thinking it’ll be rustic and small—Ma-and-Pa-Kettle like—but when you show up, it’s like a freaking first-class resort.”

  “Feist referred to it as the family’s old cabin in the article. And it’s probably been in his family multiple generations. Maybe the only renovation it’s ever seen was when they got rid of the outhouse in the eighties or whenever. It sounds like Feist didn’t bring his wife and kids along when he went fishing, so I’m thinking something more Ma and Pa Kettle than five-star lake resort,” Kippy said. “Feist was an only child, right? And remember his parents at the funeral?”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re both in their seventies and his dad was using a walker.” Kippy tapped a finger on the Chicago magazine article. “I think Feist had this place all to himself. Perfect for stashing something away.”

  I thought for a moment. “What’s the second thing?”

  “What?”

  “You said you thought of two things.”

  “Peter Feist’s fishing cabin,” Kippy replied. “No one would think to look for us there.”

  CHAPTER 35

  CPD superintendent Gerald Callum hung up the phone, splashed a heavy wave of Baileys into his mug of steaming black coffee, shoved the bottle back into the lower drawer, grabbed the cup, leaned back in his chair, put his feet up on his desk, and glanced about his empty office. He’d not had a drop of caffeine after midmorning in a couple of decades; it fucked with his circadian rhythm, but since he’d been up all last night he didn’t think he’d have a problem when his head finally hit the pillow this evening. It was nearly eleven in the morning and, quite frankly, Callum knew he’d be lucky to make it to five o’clock.

  No doubt about it—yesterday had been a goat-fuck … a goat-fuck of epic proportions.

  As soon as he’d gotten back to the mayor’s office, he’d tasked Cordov Woods with getting their hacker, Jethro or Bumbo or Dumbo or whatever the hell the computer guy’s nickname was, into erasing all evidence that the two police officers and the dog handler were ever in attendance at City Hall—deleting any security footage of the three of them and, most certainly, any proof of Officer Kippy Gimm or the goddamned dog man having yanked the fire alarm.

  Then Cordov Woods hauled the recently departed Dave Wabiszewski over to the dog man’s piece of crap trailer and dumped the deceased officer into Mason Reid’s bathroom tub. It had also been a stroke of fucking genius on Cordov Woods’s part to wipe down Feist’s handgun—Feist’s registered Kahr CM9—which Woods had lifted from the prosecutor’s windbreaker on the night of Feist’s demise in Washington Park, and drop it into one of Reid’s kitchen drawers. Woods then planted props—cash and street drugs—in the homes of both Officer Wabiszewski and Officer Gimm.

  And once the authorities had been pointed in the right direction—well, hell—nature would take its course. In fact, nature had already begun to take its course. Callum had just received a report indicating that fingerprints lifted from Reid’s trailer placed both Officer Wabiszewski and Officer Gimm at Reid’s home, and that Mason Reid’s fingerprints were all over Wabiszewski’s domicile.

  Superintendent Callum took a long sip of his spiked coffee.

  The Arturo Solos
scenario had been initially set in place when it became clear that Special Prosecutor Peter Feist had to go, and would have occurred days earlier had Officer Kippy Gimm not shown up on Mayor Weeks’s doorstep with a tale that, at face value, sounded preposterous, but, for the most part, happened to be spot-on. Superintendent Callum personally directed the SWAT team—his handpicked squad of no-shit shooters that no one in their right mind would ever wish to run afoul of—from his office phone. Who knows? These hard-asses from SWAT might well have shot Arturo Solos on their own accord—as payback for Peter Feist—had Callum and Cordov Woods not stacked the deck for them.

  Truth be told, Solos was a major-league fuck-up with zero ties to Los Zetas, was hooked on the snow himself, and would likely never have made it through another Chicago winter without managing to punch his own one-way ticket to the morgue. About a minute before SWAT was going to cave in his door, Solos got a call from his chief soldier or lieutenant, or however in hell these low-grade chucklefucks rank themselves, screaming that another street gang—La Raza—was coming for him dressed up as pigs and SWAT and whatnot. And though the call from Solos’s lieutenant had been quite convincing and full of passion—it had been staged.

  It had been complete bullshit.

  And why had Solos’s lieutenant’s call been so convincing, so Academy Award winning? Because during the call Cordov Woods had an arm around the lieutenant’s throat and a knife stuck in his ear. Solos’s lieutenant had the mistaken expectation that he’d be let go and sent on his merry way with a bag of cash once this small favor had been performed. Not only would Solos’s lieutenant never be heard from or seen again, but he’d also go down in the police report as having been the criminal informant that dimed Arturo Solos in the first place. And Solos’s reaction to his lieutenant’s call could be spotted coming from miles away. The junked-up spic did what his junked-up spic genes told him to do—he grabbed an assault rifle and began firing at the entry door. That is, until the incompetent twat had jammed his own fucking gun.

  Superintendent Callum’s team then blinded him with a flash-bang and put him down for the count.

  Ain’t life grand?

  The way it went down was the equivalent of a signed confession. And it would place the entire Peter Feist murder case in the rearview mirror. As for Arturo Solos—no great loss there—just another coke head in a sea of coke heads whose premature extinction would spell victory for the common good and for the great city of Chicago.

  Callum took another long hit from his coffee mug.

  The superintendent’s concern now lay with the media. He figured Officer Gimm would attempt to make her case to the press and—even though her story was so far-fetched and unbelievable, and no hard evidence existed—Callum would just as soon Officer Gimm’s allegations never make the light of day. Even if they were chuckled at as Gimm’s Fairy Tales and quickly dismissed. So Callum had been playing the media preemptively—leaking the story in real time, creating the narrative—and morphing the couple into a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde, both armed and dangerous; only, in this particular case, be sure to hide the women and children as these two psychopaths kept a kennel full of junkyard dogs to boot. He had the media singing in one-hundred-part harmony that Gimm and Reid were not only on the loose, but on a rampage. And though that image of Mason Reid fed to the Chicago Tribune had been taken at some goddamned dog show or another, and though it had been taken of Reid barking commands at his dogs, in today’s context the picture made him look like a young Charles Manson … rabid and obsessed.

  Yup, Callum had been leaking more than a litter of week-old puppies.

  And the special phone number provided for anyone who’d seen fugitive Kippy Gimm or fugitive Mason Reid ultimately led back to Superintendent Callum’s office, thereby giving Cordov Woods a head start on any incoming tips from concerned citizens.

  They had the pair on the run, but they needed a knockout punch before Officer Gimm tried connecting with the media or, worse yet, those worthless glory hounds at the FBI. In Callum’s book, the feebs were a bunch of sugar-tit pussies, always had been. As crime fighters, they did none of the hard work but insisted on taking all of the credit. He’d met a time or two with the FBI’s new special agent in charge, Len Squires, and the undersized stump of a man seemed like all the rest—another pompous egghead with a stick stuck up his ass sideways. Were he in Gimm and Reid’s predicament—ill-fated and on the lam—Callum would try to broker some kind of surrender to SAC Squires, to be able to live long enough to tell his tale. Of course, in their case, without any evidence, Callum’s prompt reply would be a resounding denial—never met you, don’t know you, you killed my good friend Peter Feist—and then leave the rest of the chattering to the attorneys. But, again, Superintendent Callum did not want Gimm and Reid’s allegations released into the public sphere, which was why the call he’d just ended with Cordov Woods brought a smile to his face and a song to his heart. It was the reason he’d celebrated with two shots of Baileys in his java instead of just the one.

  “Jethro got a hit from Wabiszewski’s history,” Woods said.

  “His home PC?” Callum asked.

  “Yup. It shows an interest in a cabin Feist’s parents own in Wisconsin. He did an address search. Some fucking place on Rock Lake. Wabiszewski even did a Google Earth search on the address.”

  Callum thought for a moment. “Remember Feist’s threat of having backups of his backups?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take the psycho and the nerd along,” Callum ordered.

  “The psycho makes me nervous,” Woods replied.

  “Psychos tend to do that.” Callum felt the Cappellis should have some skin in the game; especially since Cappelli Sr. and that big-shot friend of his had created this mess to begin with, and then the two pricks dumped it in his lap for cleanup. “But we can’t have anyone slipping through the cracks this time. And turn the nerd loose if you find any PCs or smartphones.”

  “Can do,” Woods said.

  “And Cordov.”

  “What?”

  “About Feist’s cabin, burn that fucker down,” Callum replied. “After you kill Gimm and Reid and the dog, of course.”

  CHAPTER 36

  I pulled the CACC truck into a Walmart on the outskirts of Beloit and ventured in on a quick supply run while Kippy stayed with the girls. With one of Wabiszewski’s Cubs caps down around my eyebrows, I did ten minutes of tossing cases of water, a loaf of bread, peanut butter, a couple pounds of trail mix, popcorn, and a half-dozen bags of beef jerky into the cart. Then I hit Electronics and grabbed a prepaid cell phone off the rack.

  I headed for the checkout lanes, but then veered toward the Garden Center. Five seconds later I came to a halt and turned the cart around. I was in serious need of having my head examined. We’re on the run, Wabs is dead—murdered in the mayor’s office—our lives are turned upside down and, depending on who gets to us first, we may not have lives—turned upside down or not—and here I am thinking of picking up some flowers for Kippy.

  Crazy couple of days, huh, Kip? I got you some tulips.

  Mom must have dropped me when I was young.

  At the self-checkout, I ran the prepaid cell phone package over the scanner. It didn’t take. I tried several more times. No luck. I lowered my cap as far as it would go—just a nose peeking out—glanced sideways and saw that the checkout attendant was busy with another customer. I looked behind me. The line was now several customers deep, all of them staring back at me.

  I felt my face begin to redden.

  I scanned and bagged the groceries at an Olympic pace, and then tried the phone package again. Still no cigar.

  Damnit.

  The attendant was free and I flagged her over.

  “This won’t scan,” I said, urgently handing her the phone package, and then realized I shouldn’t be acting all urgent-like and panicky and tried turning it around. “Isn’t that just the darndest thing? The other stuff scanned perfectly, but it keeps getting stuck on
this one item.”

  She smiled noncommittally and tried running the barcode over the scanner.

  “I bet you get this all day long,” I said, lump in throat, and with what I hoped was an amiable smile.

  The attendant had yet to say a word but poked at the screen until some fields came up where she could tap in numbers. Her tapping took and she looked my way. “You’re good to go.”

  “Thank you so much.” I got it in my noggin that no one would think I was the fugitive from the news headlines if I were super polite. “That was very kind of you.”

  Twenty seconds later I had to flag her down again.

  “It doesn’t like my twenties.” At this point—deep down inside—I believed the scanner had read my anxiety level and was intentionally stalling me out until security arrived.

  Of course the attendant was able to feed each of my twenties into the slot on her first try.