The Blade Itself

by Marcus Sakey

  “Richard O’Donnell.” A nasal voice, more than a little arrogant. Evan gave him a moment of silence, let the guy repeat his name, then said, “We have your son.”

  The man stuttered, asking, “What?” and “Who is this?” Evan cut him off.

  “We have Tommy.” Shooting a wink at Danny. “When I hang up, you can go home and see for yourself. But now you’re going to want to listen quietly. You got me?”

  There was only silence on the line.

  “Good boy, Dick. Here’s the story. To save your son’s life, all you have to do is everything I say.” He paused, savoring the thrill of it, the fear in boss man’s breathing. “If you call the cops or do anything to make us nervous, Tommy dies.” He kept his eyes on Danny, predicting he’d wince. He did.

  “How do I know he’s all right?”

  “No, Dick. We’re not going to do that. I’m not going to send you a photo with him holding a newspaper. I’m not going to play a tape of his voice, I’m not going to threaten to cut off his fingers. I’ll just kill him and disappear. Understand?”

  The arrogance vanished. “How much do you want?”

  Evan stared at Danny, the guy keyed up, fingers clenched, eyes betraying his discomfort.

  Just wait, Danny-boy. If you liked that, you’re going to love this one.

  A sheet of icy wind whipped through the parking lot, stirring dead leaves to dance. “A million in cash.”

  The look on Danny’s face was everything he could have hoped for. He went white, then red; reached for the phone, stopped himself, and finally stood frozen with anger in his eyes. Evan smiled at him. “You hear me, Dick?”

  “I… I don’t have that much.”

  “Then your boy dies. Nice talking to you.” He winked at Danny again, loving this, able to twist the knife in both of them at once, the adrenaline kicking hard now. He could see Danny wanting to make it better, but just as helpless as the boss man.

  Watching it felt good.

  “Wait!” Richard’s voice, a yell.

  “If you don’t have the money, this is a waste of my time.”

  “I can get it. I mean I will get it.” He stuttered like a little kid trying to weasel his way out of a fight.

  “I thought so. We’ll call you again in a couple of days. Wait by the phone. And Dick? Remember that you’re dealing with serious people. Doubt it for a minute and you’ll spend the rest of your life wishing you hadn’t.”

  Evan hung up the phone, pleased with himself. A nice note to end on. The guy was probably pissing himself right now, all the things he’d thought mattered to him stripped away. “Not bad, eh? I could do this for a living.”

  “You stupid fuck.” Danny’s voice was strangled, his fists white-knuckled.

  “What?” He smiled casually.

  “We said half a million.”

  “You said it, not me. Anyway, you should be thanking me – I just doubled our take.” My take.

  Danny glowered at him, looking for all the world like somebody’s dad. “Half a million he could pull from his bank account,” he lectured. “Cash in an IRA, sell some stock. But a million, it makes it more likely he goes to the cops-”

  “Blah, blah, blah. Look, the guy was quick enough to say he could get it when he knew what was at stake. Besides, now he knows he’s dealing with pros.”

  “Evan-”

  “You want to call him back?”

  They stared at each other for a long moment, Danny still edgy, like he was thinking of making a play for it. Part of Evan would have welcomed that, but he knew the time wasn’t right. He eased back on his stare, put a smile in his eyes. “Relax. The hard part’s over.”

  No need to push Danny too far yet. He was still useful. If Danny disappeared, bossman might panic. Better to stay cool, finish the job, and get paid.

  Then he and Danny could settle any final debts.

  “Cheer up, partner. It’s all downhill from here.” He almost chuckled saying it.

  Danny shook his head. “Sure,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced.

  Evan watched Danny climb into his truck and shut the door. He could see the man checking him out in the rearview. Evan smiled and threw a two-fingered salute, the way Dad used to. Funny how the little things stuck. Danny ignored him, started the truck. Put it in drive, signaled, and gently pulled out. It made Evan sick. Even furious, the guy didn’t have the cojones to squeal out of a parking lot.

  Evan walked into the gas station and asked for Winstons. Soft pack. The Pakistani at the counter pulled them down without a second glance. Didn’t even notice he’d been in forty minutes earlier, or if he did notice, didn’t say anything about it. Evan imagined taking the gun off the Mustang’s passenger seat, coming back in here, and having the guy empty the register. But instead he paid, snagged a pack of matches, and stepped outside.

  He lit a cigarette as he walked to the car. The weather seemed to be getting gloomier, twilight falling though it was only five o’clock. Dark clouds reflected the city glow in shades of gray and green. As he climbed in the car, he had an idea. It took some digging around, but he found a pen under the passenger seat. He leaned against the dash to write, 847-866-0300. Dick.

  He smiled and tucked the matchbook in his pocket.

  24

  Slippage

  The hamburgers at Top-Notch had been getting smaller over the years – no way that was half a pound of meat – but they were still good, juicy and dripping cheese, and when the waitress spotted the radios Sean Nolan and Anthony Matthews always left on the table, she’d write “Police” on the ticket so the counterman rang it up half price. Which wasn’t much consolation when Matthews’s cell phone rang thirty seconds after their meal arrived. Nolan watched him roll his eyes and wipe the grease off his fingers before he answered.

  “Hey. Lunch. Nolan. The Top-Notch. Yeah.” A pause. “Where?” He began patting his pockets, and Sean pulled the pen from his own and slid it across the table. Matthews nodded as he wrote on the napkin. “Okay. We’ll be there shortly.” He laughed. “No chance. See you in a bit.” He closed the phone and picked up his burger.

  “What’s up?”

  “That was Willie. They just pulled a floater out of the river.”

  “Where?”

  “You know where the Stevenson and Archer cross?”

  “Yeah.” Nolan chewed thoughtfully. “A smokehound who went for a swim?” People could generally be counted on to die in stupid ways, but drugs always made it worse. He’d once handled a job where a nineteen-year-old BD, Black Disciple, had been found torched. At first he’d liked the rival Gangster Disciples for it. But the medical examiner said no, there weren’t any indications of a struggle, and no premortem injury besides the fire. Turned out the genius had fallen asleep lighting his crack pipe, caught the mattress on fire, and was just too high to notice. Another criminal mastermind.

  Detective Matthews shook his head. “Not this time.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he’s got a bullet hole in his chest.”

  Nolan looked longingly at the rest of his cheeseburger. Most of the time he made himself eat well, and the occasional burger was a rare luxury. He sighed. “Let’s roll.”

  A gust of wind tagged them as they stepped out, the kind Chicago was famous for, brutal, cold, and hard enough you could lean into it, let it hold your weight. They’d left the blue Ford in a no-parking zone, but cops knew cop cars, marked or not. Nolan fired up the engine, changing his radio frequency from the seventh to the ninth district in case any news came over while they were en route. “He tell you where they were?”

  “Just said east side of the river.”

  The drive up to Bridgeport took twenty minutes, but finding the scene turned out to be easy. A dozen squad cars sat beneath the overpass, their lights painting the underside of the freeway in garish sweeps of color. Traffic racing above made the dim space hammer and thrum. One of the beat cops from the district, a tall guy with wind-burned ears and the barrel-c
hested look of a tactical vest under his uniform – Peter Bradley, that was his name – spotted them and came over with a grin.

  “Hey, Detective. You slumming?”

  “Yeah. You can go home now, Bradley – the real cops have arrived.”

  The beat cop laughed, started to lead them toward the water. “Detective Jackson is down here.”

  “What’s the story?”

  “Couple of kids saw the body, called it in.”

  “You take their story?”

  “Cutting class, said they came down here to hang out. They’re headed to the ninth now. Want me to have the sergeant save them?”

  Nolan nodded. It wasn’t likely they were involved, but they might have seen something useful. That was crucial these days. The running joke was that in the war on crime, the Felony Review Board was France. Way they saw it, you didn’t have a witness, may as well surrender. Nothing like CSI, teams of researchers working round the clock to make the physical evidence. Unless you were dealing with a high-profile case, somebody white and North Side, it took upward of four months to get anything more complicated than a print back from the crime lab.

  Amid the sea of blue-shirted beat cops, Detective Willie Jackson was easy to spot in green corduroy pants, a purple shirt, and a fedora with – no shit – a feather in the band. Before Nolan made detective, he used to wonder why they all wore hats. Once he got bumped up, he found that standing out made it clear to everybody who was in charge. It was a little thing that made a difference. Some of the guys, it tended to be the ones who wore big mustaches, they went so far as cowboy hats. He’d just gone with a brown leather golf cap. Made the point and kept his head warm.

  Jackson stood with arms crossed, watching an evidence technician as she knelt beside the body. Nolan could smell it from here. Floaters were notorious. The scent lingered in your nostrils for hours, even after a shower.

  “You guys bring me one of them burgers?” Jackson turned to them, nodded to Matthews, shook hands with Nolan.

  “Shit, no,” Matthews said. “You mess with a man’s lunch, you’re on your own.”

  Nolan ignored them, moving over to get a better look at the body. He didn’t know the evidence tech, a woman maybe thirty-five, neat brown hair, but she clearly took her work seriously. She had the dead man’s arm laid out on the cold concrete as she painted his fingertips with black ink. The victim had washerwoman wrinkles on his hands, and she held each finger firmly to soak it with ink. It felt intimate.

  When it came to bodies, Nolan had a method. He didn’t like to start with the face. Better to begin with the impersonal parts, the limbs, the clothing. That way you could look without emotion. There was a trick to being able to screen your vision, see only a part of the whole.

  The arms showed no tracks, no sign of junk abuse. A tattoo marked the inner forearm, the ace of spades. The skin had started to get the green-brown tinge of a body that had been in the water a couple of days, and was marked by typical postmortem trauma, the result of scraping against God knew what on the river bottom.

  His gaze circled inward. Black jeans, boots. A T-shirt that might once have been white, now dingy with river water and blood. Gases had swollen the belly – that was what made it float. A ragged wound gaped in his chest. At least the rats hadn’t been at it yet. Sometimes with a body out of the river, the only way to find a wound was to look where they’d eaten.

  Finally, the facts straight in his mind, cataloged and filed, he looked at the man’s face.

  Matthews joined him, wrinkling his nose. “I hate floaters.”

  “He’s pretty, huh?” Jackson said. “Any takers that it’s homicide?”

  Matthews knelt down. “He was shot somewhere else.”

  “The lividity, yeah.” Jackson directed his voice toward the evidence tech. “You able to pull clean prints?”

  She laid the arm down gently before breaking her quiet communion with the dead. “I won’t know for sure until we try to find a match. It’s tricky when a body’s been in water.”

  “How long you figure he floated?”

  She shrugged. “The skin hasn’t started sloughing. A couple days? The medical examiner can say for sure.”

  Jackson nodded, clapping his hands together and rubbing them for warmth. “Man, I hate this weather. Not even Halloween and it’s cold enough to snow.” His voice echoed and rebounded under the concrete of the overpass. “Nolan, you’re pretty quiet. What do you think?”

  “Run the prints.” Nolan kept his voice low as he stared at the man’s face. “But that’s Patrick Connelly.”

  25

  The Axle of the World

  Evan had played him.

  Knuckles white on the steering wheel, Danny remembered the previous afternoon in the construction trailer, the scorched smell of old coffee, Evan’s feet propped up on the counter. Saying that he would make the call. Saying it too quickly. It had rung an alarm in Danny’s head, but he’d let it go.

  Dammit.

  The guy had known then what he was going to do. Been planning it. Things had never been under control.

  You got it, kid. Welcome back to the dance.

  After the disastrous phone call, he’d found himself at loose ends. He wanted a place to think, and had set out for a bar in his neighborhood, but when he got there the idea of being so close to home felt sleazy, like bringing a mistress to the marriage bed. He’d gotten back in the truck, planning to head for another neighborhood, but ending up just driving, restlessly circling the city. He’d been doing it an hour now. Driving and talking to himself, punctuating his sentences with slaps to the wheel, going faster as the anger simmered in his belly.

  No matter how careful he was, how much thought he put into it, Evan was a tidal wave, an earthquake, a tornado. A force of nature. Danny pressed down harder on the accelerator, feeling the buzz of pavement beneath his tires. You could rage at a whirlwind. You could pull your hair and scream logic and good sense. But in the end, if you stood in its path, you took your chances. Cars blurred as he hurtled toward the skyline, weaving between lanes. There was no reasoning with a force of nature, no relying on its judgment. He swung left around a Mercedes. He’d hitched himself to the cyclone, and there was no way back.

  A horn screamed beside him, the Mercedes squealing in panic as he merged into its lane, his quarter panel nearly against the rounded hood. He yanked the steering wheel back, too hard, the tires screeching, and for a moment he thought he might lose it, end up on two wheels and then in a slow, stuttering roll, this whole drama brought to a sudden close, but his nerves cut in, and he eased the wheel back, turning gently, cars all around him honking. Back in his lane, he took deep breaths, ignoring the angry look and middle finger from the driver of the Mercedes. Tapped the brakes to test them, and when they felt solid, started to slow.

  Too much, too fast.

  He flipped his hazards and worked his way over. He didn’t stop in the grandma lane, but edged all the way off the road, the tires humming and buzzing across the divots cut in the pavement as he stopped. He killed the engine and squeezed the steering wheel, the silence punctuated only by the rhythmic whir of cars blowing by.

  His father sat in the passenger seat.

  He looked the same, just the way he had when he’d visited Cook County Prison, the last time Danny saw him alive. His face weather-beaten and lined, but proud. Hard. The hands rough, the circular-saw scar white across the bridge of his thumb. A cigarette clenched in the corner of his mouth, firm and straight as the axle of the world. He stared at Danny, and that look came into his eyes, the measuring one. Appraising.

  Judging.

  Dad…

  In his mind, he heard the squeal of tires. Imagined Dad pumping at the brakes, trying to regain control, a cigarette still between his lips.

  Imagined the decision. The choice, and its consequences.

  The slow motion squeal of tires. The shatter of glass and banshee wail as steel kissed concrete. The way the truck had jerked up on its front wheel
s, fast at first but then slowing, pausing, maybe holding for a terrible instant before toppling over. The strange silence – so quiet, so embarrassingly quiet – after the truck came to rest upside down.

  Dad. I…

  In his mind, he could see the disapproval in his father’s eyes. Nine years dead, and still disapproving.

  Danny shook his head. The skyline twinkled under velvet indigo skies. A semi passed in a rush of air that rocked the Explorer from side to side. Without the heater, the air grew swiftly colder.

  Danny turned off the hazards, started the truck, and got back on the road.

  The low thrum of blues bass rolled up his spine as he slotted a coin into the phone and punched the numbers.

  “You’ve reached Danny and Karen, we’re not in right now…”

  Before, he’d thought he’d go home after the job. He’d imagined he might ease the pain of waiting by reminding himself of the life, and the woman, that his efforts were meant to protect. Instead he stood in a rib joint on Halsted, listening to the accusatory beep of his own answering machine.

  “Hey, Karen. Just wanted to let you know that I’m going to be late tonight. You know, work-” There was a fumbling noise.

  “Danny.” She sounded out of breath. He thought of her wrapped in a towel and running for the phone, and the ease with which he could picture it stung him. He adopted a haggard tone as he told her how work was keeping him late. How he was sorry about it. She was silent on the other end of the phone, and he could imagine her biting her lip.

  “Danny-”

  “I know. It’s just a crazy week.”

  She sighed. “Okay.”

  “I’ll make it up to you, babe. I promise.”

  She paused. “How about tomorrow night? We haven’t been out in a while. We could,” her voice rose provocatively, “make it a date night.”