The Underground Detective: A Novel of Chicago Streets

by Thomas Laird

  Now’s our chance. We thank Mrs. Fairchild and give her our condolences for her loss. When they zip up Brenda’s body bag, she says to no one in particular:

  “I don’t give a good goddamn anymore.”

  Arthur Remington decides he won’t come out of his house on 121st and Lawn Avenue. It’s about two miles from the shooting. There are patrol cars on either end of the block. There are eight squads parked two abreast in the street, blocking traffic and serving as a shield for us. There are probably twenty officers here already. Several are stationed out back of Arthur’s crib, in the alley. There are houses on either side of him, and we’ve escorted the inhabitants out of the line of fire. Cops are inside those two houses now also, with rifles pointed at Remington’s windows. He’s in a box, and he doesn’t seem to have any hostages to negotiate with.

  There were three of his partners in the ’82 Chevy that now sits directly in front of his residence. Marguerite didn’t identify them, but she knew Arthur from around the hood. She’d seem him terrorize the neighbors and her, often enough. We’re assuming all four of them are inside. I don’t think they’ve had time to boogie and disperse. We were on them just minutes after the call came in.

  The SWATs are on the way, but I’d rather diffuse the situation before there’s a major firefight here. So I yell out to him. The windows are opened. He must not be able to afford air conditioning on his gangbanger’s salary.

  “Arthur Remington! Come out of the house with your hands in the air. Come on out now!”

  We don’t hear anything. Lila and I are crouched behind the rear end of a patrol car, out in the street. It’s hot and sweltering. It’s mid-August, the real dogassed portion of a Chicago summer. I literally feel scorched all over. Even the vehicle we’re behind gives off heat.

  “Remington! Come on out now!”

  We hear the pop and then the boom of the window on the passenger’s side of the car we’re behind. Glass flies everywhere, and we all duck. A cop in the house to the left of Remington’s fires from his window with a short burst. Then there’s a volley of gunfire from the front windows streaming out at Lila and me and the half dozen other patrolmen hunching behind the cars. Our strobes are all lit and they’re dancing in circles while the sun blazes down on us unmercifully.

  I’ve got the shotgun from our vehicle. It’s a 12 gauge pump. I jerk up and fire four times, and the blasts blow the three front windows into the house. I see the blinds jump backwards from the pellets, and then I hear a scream.

  But the scream is not from Remington or his bros—

  It’s from Lila. She’s down, and there’s blood pumping out of her neck.

  We’re en route to St. Luke’s. It’s the closest hospital.

  I’m in the ambulance with Lila. They’ve wadded up her wound and they’ve got her hooked up to oxygen. She looks gray, and I’m very frightened. The male technician tells her she’s going to be fine.

  “What’s her name?” he whispers to me. I tell him.

  “Lila. You hear me, Lila? Hang on. We’ll be there in a couple minutes and you’re gonna be fine. Lila?”

  She blinks a few tears at us.

  We arrive at St. Luke’s in eighteen minutes. Even with the flashing lights, traffic doesn’t allow us to get here any faster. I feel nausea coming on, but I fight it off.

  I’ve seen guys die of neck wounds in the field, but I’ve never seen a cop hit. Most of the time, we never even have to draw our weapons. I picked Lila’s .38 special off the street after she went down. I put it in our car before I left with the ambulance.

  They get her on a gurney quickly. She’s gone from gray to white, and I tell myself I don’t have time to get sick. I run into Emergency with her, but once they get her in a room, they kick me out.

  Three hours into surgery, and still no word. I sit in the waiting room. I don’t smoke, never have, and I don’t chew. Tobacco was almost universal in Vietnam. Everyone used, almost. Nicotine is notorious for its calming effect, or so say the addicts. I don’t like smoke, can’t stand the stink. Someday someone’s going to outlaw the stench in all public places. Lots of cops smoke, and Lila does, too. When I’m not around her. I can smell it on her clothing frequently. She knows I don’t have the habit, so she doesn’t light up when I’m with her.

  Four hours go by, and I’m frantic. I go to the nurse at the desk, and she must see the terror in my eyes, and she says she’ll check into it right now. A few minutes later, when she returns to the nurses’ station, she tells me.

  “They’re just finishing up. Someone will be out to see you shortly.”

  She’s an older nurse. Must be approaching retirement. Her eyes look tired. Perhaps it’s near the end of her shift. Or maybe she’s tired of checking on shot-up cops. Or shot up or hurting people in general.

  A man in blue hospital garb with a hat and a mask which dangles over his chest approaches me.

  “Are you the officer with Lila?” he asks.

  He’s an Indian. Very dark, very handsome. But no accent other than American.

  I nod.

  “The bullet nicked an artery in her neck, but we closed it off nicely. She lost a lot of blood, I’m afraid. They tell me you stanched the wound out on the street until the paramedics arrived.”

  I nod again. I want to shake him and get him to tell me if—

  “You probably saved her life. What is your name, sir?”

  “Daniel Mangan.”

  He shakes my hand.

  “I expect Lila to be fine very soon. She has a very strong heart. But I think you saved her for me. She was almost very low on oil,” he smiles.

  He tells me I can see her in a few hours when she comes fully out of the anesthesia. He shakes my hand, smiles, and then he turns and walks away.

  She’s still extremely pale, as you would expect. They have her hooked up to a few bags of various fluids.

  I was no medic. I was a trigger man in the war. I opened holes in people; I didn’t close them. I know enough about first aid from Ranger training to be aware that you apply direct pressure to wounds. Bleeding leads to shock and shock leads to eternity, our instructor informed us. I’m glad I remembered his words.

  It’s 10:37 P.M. I called Kelly and told her what happened. She wanted to rush down here, but I told her to wait until Lila was able to have visitors, and she didn’t argue with me.

  “Are you okay, Daddy?” she asked. Her voice broke. She’s never talked to me about the dangers of being a policeman, and I never brought the subject up. As I said, we usually arrive after the damage has been done, and it’s rare that we have to resort to violence. But shit does happen. This was our turn.

  I ask her if she’ll be all right by herself. Our neighborhood is fairly solid, but so was Sharon O’Connor’s area before someone dispatched her.

  She says not to worry, but I’m thinking of sending a patrol car out to our block. Then I dismiss the thought and tell myself to stop thinking paranoid.

  I tell her I’ll be home as soon as I can.

  Lila blinks at midnight, right on the stroke because I look at my watch when she does.

  “Lila?”

  Her eyes slit open a bit wider.

  “Lila? Can you hear me?”

  “Of course,” she hoarsely mutters.

  I stand up and grip her hand firmly, but I don’t squeeze. She’s got tubes running all over her and her bed. She has at least two drips dripping into her.

  “Don’t talk. Just relax. You want the nurse?” I ask her.

  She shakes her head gently.

  “Where are we?” she whispers so low I have to bend toward her to pick it up.

  “St. Luke’s.”

  “What happened, Danny?” she whispers again. It takes great effort to manage the question.

  “You got hit,” I tell her.

  “Yeah?” she smiles wearily. “No shit?”

  “No shit. Purple heart land.”

  “I’m really…pooped.”

  I have to laugh, and then s
he squeezes my hand so hard that it frightens me, at first.

  “You have to go slow, Lila.”

  She barely nods.

  “Don’t talk anymore. I’m going to go tell the nurse you’re awake.”

  I walk out of the room to the nurses’ station. We’re in a private room, now, and so the nurse isn’t the same one who checked on her status for me. This one’s younger and chubbier, but not at all worn-out, and she’s a lot more upbeat, too.

  She comes into Lila’s room herself, and I watch her check my partner out.

  The nurse finally turns to me.

  “You need to go home and rest or you’ll be bunking in one of our facilities yourself.”

  She smiles warmly. She’s Hispanic. Her brown eyes are all lit up in concern for me, so I don’t argue. I walk over to Lila and tell her I’ll be back in the morning.

  Then I bend over and kiss her softly on the lips. The nurse gives me a knowing grin.

  “Professional courtesy. I understand,” she smiles.

  I take off toward the elevators.

  Lila gets a three-week vacation, minimum, the doctor told me when I returned the next day. Kelly came with me, and both of them wept together. And then Lila made Kelly cut it out, and then I started bawling briefly, so I stepped out into the hall to contain the damage.

  You take US 38 from the city to get to Northern. There are lots of Chicago kids at this university, so the road is packed. We drive up early, about 6:30 A.M., to avoid the crush that the college warned parents would happen if we waited until the afternoon. We arrive in ninety minutes, and a slight stream of cars and U Hauls are already forming on the campus.

  It’s a big school—over 20,000 students. When school’s in session, the population of DeKalb doubles, or so goes the legend.

  I think Kelly is anxious about the move. She’s never really been out of my house before. At least not for any length of time, not even when she took off on me a few times, temporarily. The most she was gone was a few days, and I always tracked her down at one of her few friend’s houses. She hasn’t bolted on me for about two years, now. In the last six months, she’s a brand new person.

  Mike Carroll will be here a little after noon, she informed me. His parents aren’t early risers and they’re always late wherever they go. And they don’t much care for Kelly, my daughter enlightened me, earlier. They know about her past, and they’re not the most forgiving people. But Mike has been working on them, she said, and they’re slowly coming around. They’d better, Kelly said, because Mike doesn’t give a shit what they think.

  They’re also wary of the fact that I’m a cop, and like a lot of citizens in Chicago, they think we’re all on the take. I laughed when Kelly told me the above.

  She lives in a dorm called Grant Towers. They’re out in the middle of a cornfield. It looks like the whole university sprouted up with the corn.

  It takes two hours to unpack her. She’s on the third floor, so we take a slow elevator up with her several bags and cartons of belongings. I’m hanging around to take her to lunch at one of the fast food joints on the main drag of US 38. Then I’m going to get back to St. Luke’s and see Lila. She was supposed to accompany us on Kelly’s move to Northern, but she’s not nearly recovered enough, yet.

  I sit on the bottom bunk that Kelly has commandeered.

  “It’s a big room,” I tell her.

  “It’s beautiful. I love it.”

  Then I’m holding her tightly. I look down at her wet face.

  “You’re only sixty miles from me. I’ll be here so much you’ll want me to stay the hell home.”

  “Never happen, Daddy.”

  “You’ll get all caught up in this campus life. But hell, enjoy it, because working really sucks.”

  She laughs and hugs me again. I put my fingers through her hair as she presses her face against my chest, and it occurs to me.

  This is loss. It’s happening to me again.

  20

  I haven’t worked without a partner since I became a Homicide. She’s going to need three weeks after she gets out of the hospital, minimum, and that makes six weeks total before there’s a chance I get Lila back as my partner.

  I go over to the hospital during visiting hours in the evening whether I’m on shift or not. Kelly calls her on the phone in the evenings, as well, and Lila converses with her as long as she feels up to it, but Kelly knows enough to keep it short.

  Watching Lila has become my chief preoccupation and duty. She was standing right next to me when she took the bullet, but I never heard the one that got her, and I’m not going to ask her if she heard it. In Vietnam, that was the legend: you never heard the one that got you. Fortunately, this one didn’t kill her, but I’m wondering if she’s going to become gun shy now that she’s been wounded in action.

  She never got hit in Vietnam. Of course she was several thousand feet up when she dropped explosives on the enemy in the war, but it still takes balls to risk your ass up in a jet while the gunners on the surface are doing their best to splatter you all over the sky. A lot of pilots took the heat in southeast Asia. Some were recovered; some wound up in the Hanoi Hilton and shitholes just like it. Some wound up MIA. It was bad on the ground with our guys, but Lila had it bad, too.

  This time it just seems more extraordinary, being in a firefight on the city streets. The streets are supposed to be places where kids play ball or draw chalk figures on the sidewalks, or where old guys take walks with those three-pronged canes on sunny afternoons, or where mothers cart home groceries in two-wheelers from the local supermarket.

  It isn’t supposed to be the scene of a nineteenth century Dodge City shootout between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo and the fucking Clanton Brothers. This is the end of the twentieth century. We’re supposed to be civilized, here in The World.

  The only thing missing is the triple canopy jungle, a place where the sunlight isn’t allowed because of the thick vegetation cover overhead. There should be tigers and pythons and all those things indigenous to the rain forest. This is my home town, not fucking Laos or Thailand or Vietnam. This is The World that I flew the Freedom Bird to return to.

  You have to think Lila might be a little skittish to go back out on the street. When she saw enemy flack, it must have seemed surreal, up in the clouds. She must have wondered who the hell was that pissed at her. She never took fire on the ground, the way we did. She was in a jet, going hundreds of miles per hour, an almost impossible object to hit unless they got lucky, down below.

  Now it all had to seem much more intentional, what with those pricks in that house on the southside trading fire with us, out on the street. I’m saying it’s not exactly what she’s used to, even though she’s a full, blooded combat vet. There’s something about being a grunt out in the field that is unlike any other profession in the military. We didn’t always go hand to hand, but a firefight is as close as you can get. You see the product of your destruction. It’s up close and personal. You see bodies become jellied masses of goo. You see their brain matter spitting behind their skulls, and it’s no movie. This is the real thing, bodies broken, exploded, fragmented, torn and mutilated beyond recognition. And sometimes you are the cause of all of the above.

  As I say, I’m more or less familiar with such scenarios, but Lila was too far away to see the result of the death she dropped, the napalm, the high explosives, the white phosphorus, the saturation bombs. With grunts, it’s in living color and close-up. Which makes me wonder if she wants to go back for a rerun when she recuperates.

  I’ve got a lot of time to ponder all the above because I’m alone during my shifts, now that we’re at the tail end of August. My only amusement outside of work is deciding how much time I’ll worry about whether the Bears can repeat a Superbowl Championship. The Cubs and the White Sox and the Blackhawks have shown no signs of life, lately, but the Bulls might actually win something before we’re all dead.

  Kelly is on campus. I call her frequently, and she sounds
generally happy to hear from me. That kind of feeling from her is something relatively new for me, so I don’t take it for granted. There were a number of years when we didn’t communicate at all, unless absolutely necessary, and even then our talk was usually unpleasant. Sr. Catherine has phoned my daughter a few times, over the summer and even more recently since Kelly got to Northern Illinois University. It’s nice to see that my kid wasn’t just a case to the nun. They actually became friends, I’ve been informed by my nurse-to-be.

  Other than the calls and the wondering about all those Chicago sports seasons, I’m alone.

  Which is what takes me to a breeder of border collies. I saw this breed of dogs on PBS, and the show stuck it deep into me. I had to have one. So I called a local vet and asked if he knew where I might buy a pooch. He sent me to a residence not far from where we live. The guy’s name is Markey, Bill Markey, and he breeds the canines for fun and profit. He works as a stockbroker downtown, and he lives in a non-descript brick ranch, about six miles from me. He keeps the dogs in the basement, but he tells me he never keeps them very long because border collies are a hot item, at the moment.

  Bill’s about sixty, I figure. He tells me he’s a widower with three grown kids, all out of the house. I tell him I know all about it, but that I’m missing just one offspring, myself.

  He shows me the litter. They’re twelve weeks old, ready to go, but there are only two left, a male and a female. I’d love to buy them both, but I can imagine the problems with a male and a female when they reach whatever the age is that mating takes over. So I take the boy. I’m going to call him Sonny, after Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, one of my all-time favorite movies.

  Sonny has a black and white face, and he has black and white interspersed all over him. Just like a patrol car, I’m thinking. He’s had his shots, but I’ll need to take him to the vet for checkups regularly, and then Bill suggests I have him fixed.