Chicago Broken: Detective Shannon Rourke Book 2

by Stewart Matthews

  She took his free hand, and helped him steady himself while he got his other foot on the toilet seat. They were like some kind of half-baked circus act sneaking a little practice in before they had to take to the ring.

  The lighter sparked on the first try. Michael held it up and stretched his arm forward as far as it would go. His foot slipped on the toilet seat, and he almost toppled off, but Miss Honey kept him up. He inched the flame closer to the sprinkler in the ceiling.

  “You’re gonna set off the fire alarm.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Then you better adjust your plan, because if you get me all wet, you’re buying me a new dress—this thing is dry-clean only.”

  The sprinkler sniffed the flame from his lighter. Water blossomed out of it, soaking Miss Honey instantly, and wetting Michael a moment later. He hopped down and smiled at her, then brushed her wet hair out of her eyes. She scowled.

  People screamed out on the casino floor.

  A second later, the lights went out in the bathroom, and an emergency floodlight over the door kicked on.

  “The wet look is good on you,” he said. “You know I can’t lie to you.”

  “You better take me to Sak’s tomorrow.” She pushed him hard enough to knock him up against the stall wall. “And I don’t want you getting all stingy on me, either.”

  Michael laughed despite his nerves. He opened the stall and made for the bathroom door, with Miss Honey following and sulking at the same time.

  The rest of the casino was a mess. Most of the patrons shoved their way toward the door, creating a log-jam of humanity in pretty dresses and three-piece suits. The staff tried their best to shout traffic directions over them. They asked people to calmly walk for the door, but all the water blasting down from the ceiling got the better of any cool heads.

  Hopefully Ewan had gotten out ahead of the mess.

  “You shook this whole damn place up then turned it upside down.” Miss Honey had to shout to be heard. “Kinda funny.”

  “I’m sure we’ll all have a big laugh later.” Michael started toward Gregory’s office on the far side of the casino. “After I buy you your new dress, of course.”

  Water began pooling up on the floor already. He didn’t imagine the drainage system of an underground casino was up to code. If their luck continued the way it had so far tonight, he and Miss Honey would probably drown before they found the ledger.

  Up ahead, the hallway to Gregory Wendt’s office looked empty. There was a single floodlight above the entrance, shining like it was the gateway to salvation. They ducked into it.

  “Got that lock pick?”

  Miss Honey already had the kit out of her purse. She dropped to one knee and jammed a pin into the keyhole while Michael kept a lookout.

  He peeked around the wall into the main room. Still the same throng of people trying to escape up the stairs. If Gregory Wendt wasn’t here, chances were he wouldn’t be coming down any time soon. At least, Michael hoped so.

  “Got it.”

  The door clicked open. Michael turned and ran through it with Miss Honey, slamming it shut behind them.

  With the single floodlight casting shadows over every surface and piece of furniture, Gregory Wendt’s office looked ominous—just like the lair of a mafia don you’d see in the movies.

  “What’s the ledger look like?” She ripped the drawer open on a big desk in center of the room.

  “No clue. But we’ll find it.” Michael ran to the far wall, which was smothered with expensive-looking cabinets and bookcases holding God-knew-what. He pulled the doors on the cabinets hard enough to almost rip them off the hinges. There were booklets and binders and file boxes—any one of them could be the ledger they were looking for, and all of them would be completely waterlogged within a matter of seconds.

  He threw a binder open and held it up to the single emergency light. It was a collection of kitchen equipment. A sales booklet. Michael chucked it.

  “Watch it!” Miss Honey said. “You almost clocked me in the damn head!”

  He turned around. The binder had landed beside her. “Did I miss? I thought I had better aim.”

  “Shut up and keep looking.” She tried the next drawer. It didn’t open. It was locked.

  He went back to rifling through Gregory Wendt’s marketing binders. He’d skimmed through half a dozen more when he heard Miss Honey squeal.

  “What is it?”

  “I got it, baby!” She held a black ledger above her head, her eyes shining in the emergency lights, and a smile on her face.

  Michael planted another kiss on Miss Honey’s lips. She laughed and kissed him again.

  This was turning out to be one hell of a good night. He could already see Shannon’s face light up in his mind’s eye. He took the ledger from Miss Honey and covered it up with his wet jacket. It probably wouldn’t do much to keep it dry, but it was better than nothing.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  The door to Gregory Wendt’s office opened.

  A short, rounded man with dark hair, misty glasses, and a waterlogged suit hugging every lump and layer of his body stood before them.

  “What in the hell are you two doing in my office?”

  Michael almost said something, but Wendt pulled a revolver out of his coat and trained it right on Michael’s face. That sort of thing tended to break his train of thought.

  CHAPTER 40

  “Does this bother you?” Gregory Wendt scowled at Michael. He gestured at the pistol like a man with the mind to use it. “You looked like you were about to say something.”

  Michael sat his jacket—and the ledger wrapped inside—on Wendt’s desk and put his hands up. Miss Honey tossed her purse down, the contents spilling across the floor, and raised her hands as well.

  “We just wanted to tell you how much we liked your office,” Miss Honey said to Wendt.

  “Yeah? Is that why the two of you threw everything out of my cabinets?”

  Michael looked over his shoulder at the messy shelves.

  “That was like that when we got in here,” she said.

  “Real funny.” Wendt circled around them. They moved in step opposite of him, sliding across the walls, mirroring his movements to make damn sure they’d put every inch of space between he and they as possible.

  It wasn’t exactly logical. There was ten feet of space between them at most, but when you can see the nose of a bullet peeking out of the revolver’s cylinder, logic takes a hike. This sort of thing never went well when someone else got the drop on you. Michael watched the gun eyeing them. It was ready to snap out like a cobra, water dripping off the barrel.

  As soon as Wendt could see behind his desk, he noticed the open drawer where his ledger had been.

  “I see you two are handy with locks.” He smiled at them. “Where’d you put it?”

  “It’s on the desk,” Michael said.

  “Michael…” Miss Honey said out of the side of her mouth. She wasn’t keen on letting the ledger go that easily.

  What was he supposed to do? Hope to God Gregory Wendt was blind as a bat and couldn’t see the ledger-shaped jacket on the desk right under his nose? “It’s wrapped up in my coat.”

  With the revolver still on them, Wendt grabbed the coat and pulled it open until the ledger tumbled off the desk and squished against the saturated carpet at his feet. He bent down and picked it up, careful to keep one eye on them—as if they’d be able to kung fu their way across the room and knock the gun out of his hand without somebody catching a bullet in the ribcage.

  “Who sent you?”

  “Nobody,” Michael said. He’d learned from his days in the mob that a lot of times, the best thing to do was keep your mouth buttoned up.

  “The police,” Miss Honey said.

  Michael’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. What in the hell was she doing?

  “Don’t be mad at her for being honest,” Wendt said. “It’s so hard to trust people nowadays with all th
e liars and degenerates out there in the world—honesty should be celebrated in all its forms. Even when we don’t like it. Even when it might be a little too dangerous.”

  He turned his attention from Michael to Miss Honey.

  “I have a sneaking suspicion you’re in league with a certain CPD homicide detective. Maybe Leigh told Detective Rourke something about my late sister-in-law’s demise.” He jiggled the revolver in Miss Honey’s direction. “What do you say, Little Miss Honesty? She send you here? You coming to arrest me?”

  “We came here for Keane.”

  That raised a couple eyebrows—Michael’s included.

  “Did you?” Wendt smiled at her. He was a round little man, but there was a predatory cunning hiding behind his fogged glasses.

  “We did,” she said. “We know you had a couple dealings with Ewan Keane. We’d be happy to take you in and work out an arrangement for your word in court, or at least that ledger of yours—since it’s a big piece of the puzzle we’ve been staring at for three years.”

  Wendt narrowed his brow. Was he actually buying Miss Honey’s proposal? That’d be a nice turn of events, if only to get him to stop pointing that gun at them.

  He laughed and threw the ledger back on his desk. “You want me to testify against the Irish mob? You think I want my face taken off with a potato peeler before my severed head is thrown into the lake?”

  “We’d protect you,” Miss Honey said. “Get you out of the state. Get you bodyguards—”

  “Get me killed before we pulled onto I-94.”

  “Or arrested, if that’s more to your persuasion,” Miss Honey said. “Your choice.”

  Wendt’s eyes darted back and forth between Michael and Miss Honey. Maybe she’d played the part well enough that he believed wasting them wasn’t the smartest way to go. Or was he thinking about who to shoot first?

  “You’re telling me you want this to make your case?” He rested a hand on the ledger. “And to get it you’re willing to negotiate with me?”

  “We can talk,” Miss Honey said. “I’m sure you’ll avoid jail time, but I can’t say you won’t be put on probation.”

  “That’s a sweetheart deal for somebody who doesn’t know me from Adam,” he said.

  She shrugged. “I know you better than you might think, Mr. Wendt.”

  He lowered the revolver. Not all the way, but enough that they’d only catch lead in the shin if his finger tripped on the trigger. “Can I keep my casino?” he said.

  “Not like I care,” Miss Honey said.

  “And my bank accounts stay the same?”

  “We don’t have use for the money.”

  “You just want Keane.”

  Miss Honey nodded.

  The overhead sprinklers shut off. The fire department must’ve shown up. If she wasn’t already in the building, Shannon couldn’t be far behind them.

  “Mr. Wendt,” a man’s deep voice said from the door, “our associates are waiting for us.”

  Michael and Miss Honey didn’t look at whomever it was who spoke from just outside Wendt’s open office door. Taking their eyes off Gregory Wendt and his revolver would be an unconscionable gamble.

  “Our friends have been patient men thus far,” Wendt said. “They can wait longer.”

  The other man disappeared into the hallway, his feet sloshing water with every step.

  Wendt scraped the water off his brow with his forearm. He took off his glasses with his free hand and rubbed them on his wet jacket—as if that’d do anything to make them dry. He put them back on and looked down at his ledger again.

  “Before I make any kind of deal with you, I need assurances.”

  “No one’s asking you to take us on faith—not with all them liars and degenerates out there in the world, right?”

  “I knew you’d understand.” He cracked a smile at Miss Honey. “First thing, I need to see your warrant and your badges.”

  Michael’s blood froze over.

  “Can’t do that,” Miss Honey said.

  “Why not?”

  “When you go undercover like we did, you’d be a damn fool to carry any of that with you. What do you think would happen if one of those big boys working upstairs got a funny feeling that my partner or I needed to be searched? They’d find the paperwork for a search warrant and our badges. Everything we’ve been busting our humps on these last couple of years would blow away in the wind. We know that the first whiff you got of us, you’d burn that ledger to Hell and back.”

  “You know me well.” Wendt nodded and sighed. He appeared resigned, as if he knew this was his only chance of walking away from jail time. “But not well enough.”

  He raised the revolver, pointing it right at Miss Honey’s forehead.

  “Get on your knees,” he said. “Both of you.”

  “Quit playing around,” she said. “You ain’t gonna shoot two cops.”

  “That’s right.” He clicked the revolver’s hammer back. “I’m not.”

  He’d sniffed out her lie.

  “No cop is going to risk blowing up an entire case in court because they did an illegal search.”

  “We’ve got the warrant in the—”

  “On your knees.” He jabbed the revolver at them so quick and violently, Michael thought the thing might go off by accident.

  Miss Honey didn’t attempt to say anything else—Michael never saw the point in talking to begin with. They both slowly got down to their knees.

  “I’m going to make this as simple as possible.” Wendt marched toward them. “I will ask you a question, and I want a straight answer. If I feel that you haven’t given me a straight answer, I’m going to shoot you in the head. Do you understand?”

  They both nodded.

  “Good.” He approached Miss Honey first and pressed the barrel of the gun to her forehead. She clenched her jaw and closed her eyes as tight as they’d go. Water trickled down her cheeks and off her chin—whether it was tears or the last drips from the sprinklers, Michael couldn’t tell.

  “Who sent you?” he said.

  “We’re with CPD’s Organized Crime Unit.”

  Wendt cocked his hand back across his opposite shoulder, then swung. He pistol-whipped Miss Honey across the jaw. She grunted and collapsed into Michael, who was already launching himself at Wendt.

  Michael crashed into him, headlong, and wrapped him up.

  The two men hit the floor in a tangle. There was a moment of confusion, of both struggling to save their own lives and kill the other, before Michael sat on top of Wendt’s back, trapping him face-down on the ground. The pudgy little man wriggled, trying to turn over and defend himself.

  Michael’s hand grabbed a fistful of hair on the back of Wendt’s head. He didn’t know what he planned on doing with it, and before he could think or even feel the slick little tendrils between his fingers, he pulled Wendt’s face out of the carpet. He pulled it up until the hair was taut and almost slipping from his fingers, then slammed Wendt’s head back down into the floor.

  It made a hollow crunch.

  Michael pulled on Wendt’s hair again, lifting his head, hearing him gurgle and gasp and scream in agony, then pounded it into the floor.

  Wendt’s body went limp.

  But that wasn’t enough. Michael did it again. And again, and again.

  In his head, he saw the steel of Wendt’s pistol flash in the floodlight. He heard Miss Honey’s grunt, the sound of her teeth crunching when the gun whacked her jaw. The scene played over and over, and with each grunt and crunch, he slammed Wendt’s head into the floor.

  “Michael!” Miss Honey screamed. “Michael, stop! Leave him! Stop!”

  Wendt’s head smacked against the floor again.

  She threw herself on him. “Michael, you’re killing him!”

  Her touch cleared his mind.

  A man’s body lay beneath him, trapped. The wet cotton of his jacket bunched around his shoulders, his collar turned partway up and partway down. His dark hair was a wet,
tangled mess. Clumps of it had left his scalp, and stuck to the crevices of Michael’s fingers.

  How had this man’s hair gotten on his hands? And the blood….

  “We gotta leave,” Miss Honey said into his ear. Why was she holding him? Why was she crying? “Get up, Michael. We have to go!”

  Blood poured from the man’s head.

  Michael scrambled off him. He knocked Miss Honey down—not that he meant to, he simply had to get away from Gregory Wendt’s blood. It was poison.

  She crawled after him. “Get up,” she yelled. “Get up and get out!” She sprung to her feet and tried to pull him up, but his legs wouldn’t work.

  “Leave him to me,” a man’s voice said behind him. It was calm as Lake Michigan in the middle of February.

  Michael recognized it.

  He turned around and looked up at Ewan Keane’s face.

  CHAPTER 41

  “What were you doing here?” Marcie righted one of the overturned chairs in the basement casino of The Aces Club. The place was dark, misty, and stank of booze and puke. It was like combing through an abandoned cruise ship.

  “I was doing surveillance.” Shannon hadn’t heard or seen anything of Michael since watching he and Miss Honey enter the club from her vantage point across the street. If they were smart, they’d slipped out with the onrush of people leaving the club when the fire alarms went off and were waiting for her at the apartment.

  She pulled out her phone and checked the screen for the hundredth time. No missed calls.

  So he hadn’t called. That wasn’t necessarily a sign that everything had gone belly-up, but it added a couple extra wrinkles to her forehead all the same. Could have been that their phones were destroyed when the sprinklers gave everyone in the club a free shower. Could have been they simply forgot to call.

  Or maybe the both of them had been fed into a wood chipper.

  Shannon pushed the intrusive thought out of her head. Conduct the search. Be a detective. If something happened to them, find it before anyone else does.

  “You aren’t afraid of reprisal from Judge Dante?” Marcie said. “I can’t imagine he’d be pleased to hear you were snooping around here after being denied a search warrant.”