At The City's Edge

by Marcus Sakey

  July 9, 2004

  Jason sits on the ridge in full kit – desert BDUs, body armor, M4 carbine, spare 5.56 ammo, helmet with NODs, sidearm, Gerber knife, Wiley X ballistic sunglasses, first aid kit, gallon of water, sixty, seventy pounds in all – and watches the house burn.

  Flame runs like water, spills in hungry shades of orange and yellow. The heat warps the world into twists and spires. Greasy black smoke pours out windows. The warmth on his face is a pulse, a brush of sun.

  He has his iPod going, only the left earphone in, Bjork singing over shimmering tones that all is full of love, that you have to trust it, her dreamy voice a fantastical counterpoint to the angry roar and crackle of flame. Down the hill, Jones macks for the camera, rifle in one hand, a thumb jerking toward the flame, as Kaye frames the shot with the digital camera.

  "I was talking to that guy," Martinez points, then pats an ammo pouch on his flak jacket, pulls a pack of Miamis, Iraqi knock-offs of Marlboro Reds. Lights one with a Zippo, takes a drag. "He told me the people lived here were Sunnis, that's why they got burned out."

  "They work for Saddam?"

  "Nah. Just Sunnis, somebody didn't want 'em around."

  Jason nods, swatting at a fly buzzing his ear. He does a silent count of his men, Jones, Campbell, Kaye, Frieden, Crist, Flumignan, Borcherts, Paoletti, Rosemoor, and Martinez, ten. "Too bad."

  "Too bad for them, too bad for us." Martinez turns, holds the moment, then smiles. "Here we are without a couple of hot dogs and some long damn sticks."

  All is full of love, all around you.

  CHAPTER 34

  The Dark Below

  Floating dust and the smell of fire.

  Under chipped paint, the metal railing was cool. Jason kept a hand on it as he moved down the steep staircase, swinging the flashlight in arcs. The darkness was thick and hungry enough that the flashlight seemed only to make the gloom more oppressive. He pointed it like a blind man with a cane, sweeping the ground before him. Pipes and electrical conduit hung from scorched concrete. The air was thick with a smell of burned toast. Piles of junk and abandoned furniture loomed like the bones of giants.

  Metal bonged, and he turned to see Cruz descending, outlined in pale gray light, rain seeming to magically appear around her, the drops bounded by the square trap hole. She had the crowbar in one hand and her flashlight in the other. Where their beams met, the spot seemed to glow with light against the greater darkness.

  "The fire didn't reach it," she said. Her voice muted and hollow with subterranean acoustics.

  "Went up, I guess," Jason said. "The ceiling is concrete."

  She nodded, then frowned. "Shit." He followed her gaze. Shelves had been overturned, and piles of broken glass sparkled. Boxes lay open, their contents strewn in all directions. She sighed. "Galway and DiRisio must have checked here. They'd have had hours. If there was something to find, they'd have found it."

  Jason nodded absently, seeing two basements. The one his flashlight illuminated, ruined and silent. And the one he and Mikey had sat in years ago. All afternoon they'd hauled junk out of the place, and when they were done, they'd collapsed on ladder back chairs. Listened to the Sox game and shared a bottle of Black Label that Michael had stashed, passing it back and forth, smiling.

  "To the good life, bro." He barely whispered the words.

  "What?"

  "You from Chicago?" He started for the southwest corner.

  Cruz followed, her footsteps seeming to come from all directions. "Yeah. Well, Cicero."

  The chairs were gone, the radio was gone, but the radiator was right where he remembered it. An old stand-up job, maybe three feet high and the same across, a coiling rack of heavy metal jutting out of the wall. "Growing up, you ever hear about bars, speakeasies, I guess, that served alcohol during Prohibition?"

  "Sure."

  "This used to be one. Speakeasies survived by payoffs. Grease the wheels, get left alone. But," he squatted in front of the radiator, ran his hands over the cool metal, "sometimes even the ones that paid got raided. You know, so the city could make it look like they were cracking down on Capone and the rest."

  "So?"

  "So," he said, his index finger finding a metal rib, "owners realized they needed good places to hide things." Jason lifted the latch. There was a click as it locked upwards. He grabbed the radiator with both hands and pulled. It swung aside like a door.

  Behind it lay a cast-iron safe, the face set even with the wall.

  "No shit," she said, admiration in her voice.

  "No shit. Michael loved all the little secrets in this place. He used to store a bottle in here just to have an excuse to open it." Jason reached for the handle, fingers tingling. He jerked down on the lever.

  It didn't budge.

  "Gimme the crowbar." He wedged it behind the handle, the tip braced against the floor. Took a deep breath and heaved. Nothing. He pictured DiRisio smiling down at Mikey. The last face his brother ever saw. Threw himself against the drop-forged steel, the veins in his neck popping, his arms shaking.

  The handle didn't even shudder.

  Jason stood, wound up, and hurled the crowbar. "Christ!" It arced through the air with a whir like a helicopter cranking up and smashed into something metal at the far end. The clanging echoed back loud. He felt tears of frustration gathering at the corner of his eyes. So close. They were so goddamn close. But what good was close?

  The circle of light Cruz held on the radiator swayed and stretched, then narrowed as she knelt in front of it. One hand traced the face. "We can figure this out."

  "Don't waste your time," he said, one hand rubbing his eyes.

  "Look, it's a hidden safe. He probably didn't bother with a random combination." She sucked air through her teeth. "When's Billy's birthday?"

  "Huh? April 2." He turned, hope springing sudden, and then equally suddenly quelled. "No, it won't work."

  "Why?"

  "The dial only goes to 50. He was born in '97."

  She rocked back on her haunches. Twisted a curl of hair idly, fed the tip of it to her mouth. Then smiled. "You got twenty bucks?"

  "Why?"

  She reached for the dial, spun it three times, then stopped, spun it the other way, stopped, then once again. The latch swung with a quiet clank. She smiled. "April 2, 1997: 42-9-7. He combined the month and day, split the year."

  He stared at her for a long moment. "I could kiss you."

  "Open the safe. You owe me twenty bucks."

  The briefcase was a brown leather zipper bag, the kind lawyers liked. Soft and new-smelling. The same one he'd watched his brother worry over just days ago.

  Jason stared at it. Hiding this briefcase had been his brother's last act.

  Why had he done that? If he'd suspected men were coming for him, he wouldn't have waited, wouldn't have put Billy at risk. So it must just have been a precaution. Jason remembered how nervous his brother had seemed about the bag, how he'd moved it around. He must have stowed it so he could relax, know that it was in a safe place. And not just any safe place.

  One where Jason would know to look.

  The thought sent a chill dancing between his vertebrae, like Mikey had left it here as a message. A last request.

  I won't let you down, bro. Not this time.

  Jason reached in and grasped the briefcase handle. For a moment he imagined he could feel the warmth of his brother's fingers on the leather. Cruz held both flashlights, and a dim globe of light surrounded them, splashing a matter of feet before vanishing into the abyss. He could hear her breathing, soft and wet and more than anything, alive. Against it, the zipper sounded grating. He opened the briefcase slowly, hands shaking.

  Inside sat a plain manila folder an inch thick. Legal-sized, and filled with paper. That was all.

  Jason wasn't sure what he'd expected, but something more dramatic. He flipped the folder open. A document with the dense print of legalese. Beneath that, some sort of spreadsheet. Something else that looked like a manifest. He
rifled quickly. Pages and pages of documents, data in rows and columns, cramped paragraphs, notes and letters. It was paper. Just paper. And yet someone had killed Michael for it.

  He broke the stack into two piles, wordlessly handed one to Cruz. Then Jason Palmer leaned against the basement wall of his brother's bar and began to read.

  The air was cool, and once the warmth of exertion gave way, he began to feel a chill. His fingertips were raw, the nerves close, and he could feel the texture of the paper, every wrinkle and bump. He turned pages slowly, let his eyes drink the information. When the cold had him shaking, he stood and jumped up and down, stamped his feet. Then sat and continued. Reading with care, like a scholar working with ancient manuscripts. Finishing one and returning to others he'd already reviewed. Assembling a picture, a page at a time. His hands were white with a delicate filigree of blue veins. He looked at details, compared them. Fit them together. Tried them like puzzle pieces: Did this match against that one? How about the other? The world narrowed to the dim glow of the flashlights, a circle of warm light floating in nothing. Just him and Cruz and this riddle. This last message from his brother.

  There were a lot of documents, and they were complicated. He didn't rush. It took most of an hour. But even before he was finished, he understood. Understood why his brother was dead. Why his nephew was in danger. Why they were all hunted.

  More than anything, he understood the problem was bigger than he'd dared imagine.

  Cruz had finished first, and was staring into the darkness, her hair drying frizzy, a twist of it between lips. She pulled the hair from her mouth and said, "This can't just be Galway and DiRisio."

  He set the paper down. "No."

  "Do you think it means-"

  "Yeah," he cut her off. "I think it does."

  Cruz shook her head, rubbed her eyes. "Jesus Christ."

  He listened to the soft steady patter of rain on the stairs. The violence of the storm had settled into an easy rhythm, the kind of soaking drizzle that could go all night. Normally he liked rain, but he found no comfort here, entombed in the dark below the spot his brother died.

  "No wonder they killed him. This…" She shook her head. Blew air through her mouth. "So now what?"

  "We got what we need. Let's go." He collected everything, rapped the stack against the floor to even the edge, and put the manila folder back in the briefcase.

  After the sepulchral darkness of the basement, the world above seemed huge and wild. Climbing the ladder, he had an eerie feeling that something had changed. That he was coming out the trap hatch a different man. He stood to one side and offered Cruz a hand, and she took it. They picked their way across the rubble, the rain soaking clothes that hadn't dried from the last time.

  "Who do we take this to?" Cruz asked.

  "No one."

  "Huh?"

  "We don't take it anywhere." He stepped over a charred beam. "We stay out of sight. Just make copies, and send them to everyone."

  She smiled. "NBC 5, for one."

  "Yeah. The Tribune. The Sun-Times."

  "The mayor. Fast Eddie Owens."

  "Fast Eddie Owens…" He had an image of a sun-faded poster, a campaign ad. It had been in the front window of Michael's bar. "The alderman? Why?"

  "This is his district, and he's an anti-gang crusader. He's even backing a budget proposal to upgrade the equipment of cops on the street, buy digital cameras and PDAs. I won't bore you with details, but believe me, it would make a huge difference." She stepped gingerly onto the sidewalk and began digging in her pocket. Came out with the keys and went around to the driver's side of Washington's Honda. "And he's not part of the police department."

  "Good by me. Hell, let's send it everywhere." His head buzzing. Thinking of the documents he'd read in a darkness beneath the world. Just words, just paper and ink. But more, too. Blood. Lives. All being manipulated with a sheer and brutal pragmatism that left him sick inside.

  But at least it was almost over. They had what they needed to end it. Jason opened the passenger side door, the air inside stuffy with the smell of Washington's tobacco. He tossed the briefcase in the back and brushed off what dirt and ash he could from his clothes.

  He was just about to sit down when his window exploded.

  CHAPTER 35

  Mean and Close

  His body moved before his brain caught up. Jason whirled, saw a car screaming toward them, something low-bodied, a dark shape cutting the rain. A strobe of lights flared from the passenger side, and as he dropped he processed the image, someone shooting at them with a submachine gun, a drive-by, he was in a goddamn drive-by, and as he realized that, fivesixseven holes ripped in the door beside him, the firecracker rattle of the gunblasts arriving just afterward, the bullets traveling faster than the sound.

  He heard an engine turning over, looked to see Cruz cranking the key. Jason threw himself into the passenger seat as Cruz slammed the car into reverse, the Honda whining like a toy as it rocketed backward. The sudden motion had him scrabbling for a grip, and he got a hand against the dash just as the rear window blew in spiderwebs of broken glass. Cruz's lips were moving but he couldn't hear what she was saying, and then the Honda slammed into something solid, a bone-crunching jerk he felt in his teeth, the impact of metal on metal, a screeching sound that pitched him back into the seat, neck whiplashing, the angry slippy hum of tires against wet concrete, momentum slamming shut the passenger door, and then Cruz threw it into drive and spun the wheel and stamped the accelerator, and they were moving again, the Honda leaping forward gamely, a rattling from behind like they were dragging the bumper or muffler.

  His head hurt, and he realized he must have hit it against something, maybe the dash. Cruz kept mumbling to herself as she squinted out the windshield, foot jammed all the way down on the gas. The world blurred and shifted, lights running like melting wax, and for a moment Jason wondered if he'd hit his head harder than he thought. Then he realized it was water streaming down the glass, the rain, and he said, in a voice that sounded calmer than he would have expected, "Wipers."

  She reached for them with her left hand, and he could hear what she was saying now, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed are thou among women, the wipers starting now, shick-shock, their pace steady and fast and metronomic, her words timing to them.

  Get it together, man. You're a soldier. What's your goddamn situation?

  The sit rep was that they were streaking north on Damen, the wind howling in the passenger window, where a few scraps of safety glass clung stubbornly to the frame. Turning, he could see headlights through the splintered back window. Someone chasing them. He couldn't say who, though he'd seen the car. Low and fast-looking. A Mustang, a Charger, something like that. Something that would be able to smoke a '94 Honda. Her ramming maneuver had bought them a little time. But unless she'd been able to take out a tire or bend an axle, it wouldn't be enough.

  "Holy Mary, Mother of God." Cruz's voice was settling now, not the panicked mumbling of before. Her eyes flicked to the rearview, narrowed. "Hold on."

  Jason reached for the seatbelt, clicked it into place as she yanked the wheel to the right, a hard, sliding turn on streets slick with rain and grease. The back fishtailed, skidding around, and then she hit the gas again, the vector overwhelming the spin as they charged east. The street was ghetto-residential, sagging houses drooping toward cracked earth, rusting fences, weeds shining damp in gardens of broken glass. Battered cars lined both sides of the street, shit, all facing toward them, which meant they were going the wrong direction down a one-way street. The rain had driven people off the street to their porches, and Jason heard angry yells. Someone threw a bottle wrapped in brown paper, the glass smashing in their wake.

  Behind them, headlights spun around the same curve, slid too far, side-slammed into a parked car. Jason watched, willing the car to flip. It didn't. Another set of headlights came in behind.

  "There's a second car," he said.

  Cruz nodde
d, her knuckles white on the wheel.

  He'd have given a finger for a weapon. He felt helpless, Cruz driving, him riding shotgun without a shotgun. More flashes exploded behind them, but didn't seem to hit anything.

  A hundred yards ahead, headlights glowed. An oncoming car. The street was too narrow for them to pass. It would trap them.

  "Elena-"

  "I see it." She stayed on course, running straight, the accelerator to the floor. There was a cross-street between them and the oncoming car. A northbound street, Racine he thought. It was a toss-up whether they could get there first. A horn shrieked from the oncoming car. Behind them, the Charger was gaining fast. Jason gripped the armrest. Angry yells poured in the Honda's broken windows. A couple years ago a white delivery driver had accidentally hit a black kid in this neighborhood. The crowd had pulled him from his car and beaten him to death before the police arrived. Jason watched the headlights grow larger, the distance disappearing.

  Then they reached the corner and Cruz yanked the wheel left in a full-speed turn. Centripetal force threw him against the seatbelt. Tires screamed on asphalt. Jason had a glimpse of the terrified eyes of the driver of the other car, a Buick, and then they cleared it by inches.

  He swiveled to look behind in time to see the Charger slam into the Buick. The squealing horn died, replaced by the nails-on-chalkboard sound of metal tearing. Glass cracked and popped, and headlight beams swam wildly up the sides of rotting houses. Then the Charger flipped to its side and surfed a trail of sparks out of sight.

  Jason let himself breathe again.

  They were heading north, the Honda's four cylinders as close to roaring as they were likely to get, a clank coming from the engine that he didn't like. Fifty blocks up, Racine was a lovely residential street of hundred-year trees and million-dollar graystones. But on the south side it twisted between abandoned factories and weed-filled lots strewn with black garbage bags. The rain covered everything with a greasy film.