I yell for Hahn. “Shooter’s down.”
My echo answers.
I grab the machine gun, dump the clip, feel bullets, but no idea how many, slam the clip back and creep darkness back toward the trolley. No one fires. Ruben’s gunmen are dead, out of bullets, or gone. I make the trolley and duck behind it.
Lightning flashes—my brother on his back. I drop to both knees.
“Ruben. It’s me.”
Nothing, motionless.
I rip off a Tyvek glove and squeeze his wrist for pulse, then his neck.
“C’mon, Ruben, help me.” I press hard on his chest, then harder and harder. Ruben’s blood covers my hand. He doesn’t breathe. He doesn’t do anything.
“Ruben!” Tears well through the adrenaline. I hug Ruben to me hard as I can. Lightning flashes his face cradled against my chest, his brown eyes staring up at me. “Ruben!”
My brother Ruben is dead. I killed him.
Voices.
A penlight is lit on the other side of the trolley. Hahn and the Japanese woman face each other, pistol to pistol across the table. The woman’s Tyvek suit has two bullet holes. Hahn’s neck is bloody and gripped by her left hand. Hahn says, “I’m taking the money.”
Japanese woman: “No. One vial is missing. Arleen Brennan must give it.”
I scan for Arleen, wipe at the tears and smooth Ruben’s hair. “It’s okay, carnal. The vial didn’t break.”
The Japanese woman glances to my voice. Hahn shoots her twice, jumps left, and jams her pistol into the Japanese man covering the Hokkaido package. Hahn says, “I’m taking the package.”
The man doesn’t move. He has one bullet hole in the back of his helmet and a screen full of blood. Hahn gingerly pulls him back to sitting and he slumps in the chair. The package is intact. Hahn glances at me cradling my brother on the floor and levels her pistol at my chest. Instead of finishing her mission, she says, “Those cases have $18 million. The Koreans believe it’s theirs and they know Arleen’s name. I’ll give you three mil. Take one case, find your girlfriend before the Koreans do, and bury your brother.” Pause. “Or start shooting.”
My finger tightens on the trigger.
So does Hahn’s.
ARLEEN BRENNAN
SUNDAY, 8:15 PM
Dizzy. Rain pounds in sheets.
My Chevrolet’s front wheel is on the sidewalk under the Shubert’s marquee. The doors to the theater are locked. I pound the glass and yell: “Hello? Hello?” Cough. Swallow. “Out here. Hello?” The lobby’s dark and no one answers. But I’m in time. I’m not too late. I use both hands to peer; the glass smears red. Sarah’s not here. Having trouble keeping my breath. I wipe at the blood smears on the glass. My knees begin to give. I swivel my shoulders to the doors and slump to a pile. Breathe deep. Pro-ject. I try to stand but can’t. But I’m here, under the marquee lights, in time. Swallow. When the director comes and Jude Law and Toddy Pete … I’ll be here ready to go on.
I reach for my phone. No purse. I want to call Bobby, tell him to come watch me win. We’ll go out after. Be great. Pizza and Guinness. I touch my dress. Lotta blood. Blanche will have to wear a sweater.
Where is everyone? They should all be here; this is important.
Lightning crashes through the rain. A car screeches to the curb behind mine and up onto the sidewalk. Sarah! No, it’s Bobby Vargas. Bobby made it. He kneels, eyes glisteny, and touches my shoulders.
“C’mon. The Koreans know your name; they’ll be looking here. We gotta get you to a hospital.”
I wince back. “No. My audition. Right now.”
He blinks, looks up at the marquee, then stares at me, touches my dress, then my arm. His voice is a whisper. “I didn’t know what Ruben did to Coleen. I didn’t. I’m so sorry. I just didn’t.”
Ruben? Ruben’s not in Streetcar. I finger at the spacesuit Bobby’s wearing, the blood splattered on it. “Why are you wearing a spacesuit?”
“That was me at St. Dom’s, at the end. C’mon, you’re hurt.”
He lifts at me. “Oughh! Stop; I have to stay. To meet Sarah.”
“No, honey, listen. Sarah’s not coming.”
“Yes, she is! She is. She has to—”
“No, honey. They found Sarah in the backseat of a Corvair. Your number was the last one she called.”
Blink. Swallow. “She’ll be here. Eight o’clock.” Bobby puts both hands on my face. “They postponed the audition for an hour so you can clean up, give it your best shot. Okay? Let’s get you cleaned up so you can win.”
“I can win, Bobby, I can. Coleen and I will win this time. Ruben can’t stop us.”
Sirens wail; lightning flashes like cameras. I made it. I’m under the Shubert’s grand marquee on opening night; finally the right place, the right time. Coleen and I get our chance.
Bobby helps me to my feet. In the rain, the brilliant lights of the Shubert’s grand marquee are reflected in the glass building across Monroe Street.
Just Signed!
Jude Law & Tharien Thompson
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
RITA BLANCA NATIONAL GRASSLANDS
Oklahoma–Texas Border, Two Days Later
OFFICER BOBBY VARGAS
TUESDAY, 3:00 PM
I’ve had forty-three hours to justify killing my brother, the brother who taught me everything I know about being the police; the brother who raised me after my father died, who protected my mom and a neighborhood of people the system failed or outright abused. I shot him twice, not once. One, he might have survived. And that wouldn’t be right.
I stopped crying in southern Iowa—for him and for Coleen—then slept in fits at a rest area when my eyes couldn’t take any more headlights. Mostly I’ve driven parched, dusty back roads by day and anonymous, dark interstates by night. Fifteen hundred miles of blurred America while Arleen cried in her sleep or stared blank-eyed at her window. We’ve made four stops for gas, plastic-wrapped food, and maps. I’ve stolen license plates in Iowa, Oklahoma, and Texas, and against all reasonable odds, Arleen and I are still free.
The Chicago Doc-in-a-Box visit cost us ten thousand, but he patched Arleen’s side and gave me a bottle of painkillers to keep her calm. I don’t know if I’ve ever wanted a dope vacation more, but someone had to drive. I wouldn’t say we’ve been the best company. And I wouldn’t say that the pixie dust I hoped for has been anything but dust.
We cross into Texas in the Rita Blanca and the radio plays Joe Ely’s “Row of Dominoes.” Arleen pushes back in her seat, winces at the hole in her side, and looks at me. Her green eyes show age that wasn’t there two days ago, clouded with what she knows and what the drugs cover.
She motions for the water bottle on my lap, takes a sip, blinking at a vast prairie that could be another planet. She scoots to mid-seat, leans her head gently on my shoulder, says, “All things considered, you may be Peter Pan after all,” and goes back to sleep.
U.S.-MEXICAN BORDER
Santa Elena, Texas
OFFICER BOBBY VARGAS
WEDNESDAY, 1:00 AM
Texas is low and hot and withered where it meets the Chihuahuan Desert. Meets is the wrong word; collides is what the two nations actually do. At the western tip of the Big Bend, Mexico isn’t twitch-eyed and subservient. Here the favored destination of most U.S. fugitives on a budget is a massive fourteen-hundred-foot, raw-limestone escarpment cleaved by a narrow canyon river. The river empties into our southern border, the oddly named Rio Grande—a thick, bubbly trickle of mostly fertilizer washed down from the desert above. The river separates third world from first. It has a certain smell a Chicago kid would recognize; our river’s like that, too, flows backward so what we put in it doesn’t come back to poison us.
Same as a lot of things.
In the moonlight, Arleen sits the same heavy wooden bench as me, leaning her bandaged back against a chalk-stained adobe wall that’s supported many a weary traveler in its two hundred years. Her knees are pulled to her chest. She sips a Shin
er beer and balances the bottle on her knees. There’s an awful lot of dark between us. In us. All around us.
Arleen nods toward the border. “Think we’ll make it?”
I stare at the only girl I ever really wanted, dreamed about her so hard she came back to life. “You mean us? Arleen and Bobby?”
She sips the Shiner again.
“Do you want to?”
Arleen nods. “Think so. Could be the drugs, though.”
I squint at my watch, try not to grin. “If we’re gonna beat the posse, my boys have to get here before sunup.”
Arleen searches the vast starlit horizon for the riders coming to hunt us down. “How much money do Bobby and Arleen have for happily ever after?”
I show her six fingers.
“Six what? My purse had my wallet; the red bag’s in the Chevy. I’ll need clothes for our first date.”
“Million. Hahn wanted to give me three, but I explained you’d need money to build a theater.”
The beer drops out of her hand. “You have six million?”
“We. Arleen and Bobby.” I nod at our car. “In there.”
Arleen blinks, exhales, and almost smiles. “Hadn’t thought of building my own theater. And you could have the blues club next door.”
“Yep. Plan to buy a studio soundboard; Ed Cherney will visit; show me how to use it. We’ll be the new Buena Vista, like in Havana.” I sit up straight. “Call it the Seven Spanish Angels.”
Arleen’s eyes add a bit of sparkle, war-torn but it’s there. “If you were nice, I might wait tables for you, teach your crew how to run it.”
“But you’d still open the theater. You have to.”
Arleen shrugs. “Those days may be past me.”
“No. No. You believed in you for twenty years. I believe in you now. We’ll build the theater first; I’ll run the bar at halftime.”
“Intermission.”
“Yeah. See, we’re already halfway through opening night.”
She actually laughs, then winces. “Jesus. Don’t want to get shot again.” She inspects her side. “Will I be all right?”
I smile twenty-nine years at her. “Already are.”
She reaches to the floor, wincing again, grabs a handful of sandy dirt, kisses it, and throws it across the hood of our car. “Pixie dust. Everyone believes in something, might as well be us.”
I kiss her on the mouth; start to tell her—She puts a finger gently on my lips.
“Don’t talk. Show me.”
WEDNESDAY, 6:00 AM
Maybe Masters and Johnson could describe it as sex. But I can’t. I’ve never experienced the absolute electric shock of book-and-movie passion before; the five-senses, all-consuming, drown-yourself-in-happiness epiphany. If that was sex, there’d be no time for eating or drinking. It’s all anyone would do. They’d be here in the moonlight, on the border, on the run with Arleen Brennan, the Rosetta stone of delirious, skin-on-skin, don’t-ever-let-go, first-time, prom-night, best-girl-ever loves me and wants to prove it. Bobby Vargas stands corrected, there is a God. And she’s a woman. No guy could put that together.
Arleen nuzzles against me on our bench. Her bandaged back rests on my stomach, her strawberry blond hair and its scent on my chest, both of us watching the ceiling fan’s slow rotation. She listens to my iPod. I’m planning our dazzling future once we’re smuggled out of the United States.
Any minute, with a last bit of luck, we’ll be headed to the state of Michoacán, the city of Villamar, and my mother’s family. I never met my mother’s family and I never met Mexico, the land of my ancestors. Mexico and Mexicans will save us—no irony in that. The family doesn’t don’t know I shot Ruben, just that their favorite nephew is dead.
My phone rings; the number is Tracy Moens. I answer, not sure why, maybe because she’s called fifty times in the last three days and her “life/death” text messages deserve at least one comment before this phone goes in the river. I pat Arleen’s strawberry blond hair, say, “Our taxi,” loud to her earphones, then button green.
Moens says, “Don’t hang up. First, thanks for the vial, the Hokkaido package tip, and the warning. Made quite an impression.”
“Thought you’d see a story there somewhere. Spell Jewboy’s name right.”
“I will. Bad news is, so will the U.S. attorney. In nine hours, Jo Ann Merica says she will charge and prosecute someone for terrorism under the Patriot Act—nationwide, hell, worldwide media coverage of a major World Trade Center attack that she and a federal undercover agent kept from happening.”
“Merica wants to be governor. Wish her luck.”
“Yes, she does, maybe president when she also rights the wrongs of the Coleen Brennan murder and Dupree execution.”
“Like I said, wish her luck.”
“She needs someone to charge, Bobby. And it won’t be Robbie Steffen. Two Koreans shot him yesterday. He died this morning.” Pause. “That leaves you and Arleen Brennan.”
Eyes shut. The dark never stops. Eyes open. “Two things that might matter: we don’t live in America anymore, and the facts don’t fit.”
“They fit well enough. Ask Dupree. Add Robbie to the eight dead at St. Dominick’s and Chicago’s chances of being selected the 2016 Olympic City dim to candle power. Lot of angry movers and shakers, including the mayor and the superintendent. Someone has to hang and it’s not going to be them.”
“How about the actual bad guys?”
“All dead, other than Dr. Ota—Chicago’s esteemed benefactor. Merica and the feds will cleanse Furukawa’s CEO as a quid pro quo to the mayor’s political weight in D.C. and Furukawa’s Wall Street bankers—both carry a lot of water on Pennsylvania Avenue. Merica will cast Dr. Hitoshi Ota as the victim/target of a ‘racist lie and blackmail plot’ perpetrated by rogue Chicago cops and serial child molesters/murderers long involved with the Twenty-Trey Gangsters. Merica intends to make you her centerpiece in the crime, partners from the beginning with your brother, Robbie Steffen, and the Twenty-Treys.”
I don’t answer. Thinking instead about my parents, immigrants Vargas and Ruiz who loved America every day they were alive. Now their names and Ruben’s, and mine, will be one comma from Gacy and Speck.
Moens says, “Coleen Brennan was exhumed yesterday morning. In the casket was a diary written by her and Arleen. Other than the parts about you, the entries I’ve seen aren’t pretty.” Pause. “The U.S. attorney will leak her ‘interpretation’ to garner maximum public support pretrial, and by the time the public understands what Arleen and Coleen really meant, they’ll have lynched you as a serial child molester/murderer who also planned to turn the plague loose in the city.”
“Does Arleen get a part in … this?” Arleen bends her neck to look at me. I wink No problem.
“If you surrender, Merica will not indict, nor arrest, Arleen Brennan. And as a bonus, Merica will drop your gang team from any federal investigation.”
“Buff, my sergeant?”
“He made it out of ICU, beyond that I don’t know. I do know that if you don’t surrender today, now, U.S. Attorney Merica will immediately initiate a worldwide manhunt for terrorists Arleen Brennan and Roberto Vargas. By lunchtime a federal grand jury will indict Arleen and you as coconspirators on the terrorism charge and anything else CPD can dig up. Merica also promises to use her federal budget to go after everyone in Gang Team 1269 whether she and her undercover agent can put them at St. Dominick’s or not—charging them with terrorism and/or conspiracy to commit. All anyone on your team had to do was help you once in the last six days and they’re in Marion or Leavenworth for life.”
“Merica making me the devil doesn’t mean I know anything about St. Dom’s other than the address.”
Silence, then: “Odd mix, Bobby, even for the Four Corners—a cop, three newly minted Twenty-Trey gangsters, a Vietnamese woman missing since 1982, a nun, and three employees of Furukawa Industries, two of them in Tyvek suits.”
“What’s that to me?”
“The cop was your brother.”
“Yeah.” Exhale. “So I hear.”
“Tania Hahn says you were inside St. Dom’s and heard it all.”
“She’s mistaken.”
“Hahn says she’ll do what she told you she would do if you leave her out of it.”
“You and Tania pals now?”
“She has her reasons.” Pause. “I can help you—I think. It’ll be risky as hell, but you have to come back, turn yourself in, and stand trial, maybe trials.” Pause. “I have some of the story of the Brennan sisters and the Vargas brothers—you give me the rest on the record. Then you tell me everything you know about the Hokkaido package and the massacre at St. Dom’s—on the record. I’ll make sure Jo Ann can’t spin you into a noose or convict you without a trial.”
“Geez, that’s all? Helluva deal.”
Moens says, “I think we can beat her heads up, win an acquittal, but there’ll be no bond and it’ll take a while.” Moens lays out a plan that three days ago I would’ve laughed at. But three days ago I wasn’t a fugitive, wanted for murder and child molestation, and about to be charged with terrorism under the Patriot Act. I tighten my hold Arleen. She won’t do well in jail.
Moens closes with “If you come back, Merica and CPD will leave Arleen alone. I can get that in writing in the form of full immunity—that’s how bad Merica wants you to stand trial for your brother’s … enterprise.” Pause. “Carve this last advice in stone: If you don’t surrender, there is absolutely nowhere either of you can hide from a terrorism charge in the age of 9/11. Period. Unless you’re Osama bin Laden … and they probably know where he is anyway.”
“Call you back.” I flip my phone shut.
Arleen pops out her earphones. “We okay? Everything set?”
“Pixie-dust express is on the way. Had to clear up a few things.”
My hand and pistol rest on Arleen’s flat stomach. She snuggles her shoulders into my chest. “I was thinking two hundred seats, but maybe one-fifty is better. Three sections, no center aisle, a balcony—”
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