Nine Fingers

by Thom August

  If the gloves do not fit, it can all go to shit. Ha-ha.

  Boots, for the snow. Tie the laces behind the tongue-flap to make them look untied. Laces tucked in. To avoid tripping. Check them. Look loose, but they are on good.

  9:25 A.M.: Time to leave. Into the bathroom. Pull all this stuff aside. Take a piss. Flush. Flush again. Straighten up. Then the coat. Then the topcoat, for camouflage. This will stay in the van. No one will see the outfit underneath on the way out of here.

  Sounds like nothing. Some meaningless detail. Wrong. Part of a method. A plan. This is how you keep doing this. One job and another and another. You want to kill lots and lots of people? Not get caught? Use the method. Follow the plan.

  One last check. Pain. Scale of one to ten? Four. Dull ache, not too bad. About average. Same place, one inch below the ribs, a shade to the right. Some back pain, too. Try to stretch it out. Like it’s got anything to do with being stretched out. Right. Grab the bottle of water in the coat pocket. Take a long pull.

  Slide the water bottle back into the coat. Bump into the pill bottle. Pull it out. Hold it up. Four pills. Two blue. Two white with the dark red stripe. Just in case. Tuck it away.

  Grab the front door keys, the van keys off the hook. Open the door, step out. Stand, wait, listen. No one is around. Lock up, walk down the stairs.

  Out the door. Walk two blocks to the lot. Snow is piling up. Couple a inches now. Open up the van, turn the engine on. Get the brush. Clean the windows. Pull two panels out of the back: Little Sisters of the Poor. Pop the panels into place. Get behind the wheel.

  9:30 A.M.: Put the van in gear. Head out on the street. Over to Halsted, left and south. Not much traffic. Not in the snow.

  9:35 A.M.: Taking my time. Going slow in the snow.

  9:50 A.M.: The place is a nightclub. Up on Lincoln. The 1812 Club. Nothing to do with what’s-his-name, Beethoven, or that war. Address is 1812 North Lincoln. Old days, used to be just Murphy’s Pub. Added music, couple years ago. Changed the name. Big window in the front, three paces from the entrance. Bandstand in the window, band facing inside. Coming up on it now. There it is on the left. Check it once on foot.

  Turn left. Find a space. No Parking? No problem. What Chicago cop is going to ticket the Little Sisters of the Poor? Turn the flashers on, leave the engine running. Check the extra key. On a rubber band. Around the left wrist. Step outside. Lock the door. Put the purse with the gun on that arm.

  No one around. No workmen, no cops, no streetwalkers, no homeless.

  9:57 A.M.: Directions are very clear. Five people in the band. Trumpet and sax up front. Bass, drums, piano in back. Shoot the black one in the back line, not the black one up front. Black, white? Just a way to mark them. They are not going to be wearing name tags.

  10:00 A.M.: Coming up on the window. Move to get a good line of sight. Shit. Three blacks, not two. One in front, the trumpet player. Not the target. Drums and piano in the back, both black. Something is not right. Stop. Kneel down, tying the boots. Tying the boots with no laces.

  Instructions say the black in the back. They are finishing a song. Hear the sound of clapping. They point to the drummer, little guy, turns right and bows, turns left and bows.

  Drummer is not a guy. It is a girl. And she is not black, exactly. More like Japanese, Chinese. Got the short hair, got some muscular arms. But tits, definitely, smooth face, no stubble. The eyes, those folds, what do you call that? Fooled me there.

  Standing up again, slowly. No sudden moves. Face turned out toward the street, walking ahead. Then around the corner. Pause. Lean up against the building.

  10:04 A.M.: Stick with the piano player. They told me, the only black in the back. He is sitting there, hunched over. Not moving. Piece of cake. Grab the gun. Check the safety. Flick it off. Gun behind the purse. Purse against the chest. Walk around the corner.

  Close to the building now. Dark and snowing. Wind is blowing.

  Hear the music now. Something slow and sweet. Jazz. Nice.

  Stop. Look around. No cars. No people. Just the snow and the wind.

  And me and the gun.

  Stop. Two deep breaths. Discipline.

  10:05 A.M.: Take two steps into the light, a quarter turn to the left. Aim at the head.

  Fire.

  Glass explodes, people scream. He is done.

  Keep moving. Just a bag lady stumbling along. A gun by her side.

  Around the corner, to the left. Open the van. Toss the purse on the seat. Slide inside. Flip the safety on. Tuck the gun between the thighs. The van is still running. Left foot on the brake. Put it into drive. Flip the flashers off. Turn the directional on. Check the traffic.

  Drive due west. Nice and easy. North, then west again. Away from Lincoln. West over to Halsted, north up to Belmont, then one block past. Look around. No cars.

  Pull over by a Dumpster. Open the window. Hear the howling of the wind. The sound of sirens far away.

  Take the gun out. Make sure the safety is on. Empty the bullets into a hand. Empty the hand into a pocket. Hold onto the one empty cartridge. Close the cylinder. Wipe it all down with a rag. Wrap the gun in the rag. Wrap the rag in a McDonald’s bag. Toss it all in the Dumpster. Drive.

  Drive three blocks away. Stop at the light. Roll down the window. Flick the empty cartridge down a storm grate. Gone. Clean. Easy.

  10:20 A.M.: Head to the lot. Park the van. Get out. Put the panels in the back. Lock up.

  Clean up. Get dressed. Lock up. And down the fire escape and into the car and through the snow to home.

  One more done.

  CHAPTER 2

  Vinnie Amatucci

  Inside the 1812 Club

  Thursday, January 9

  What struck me was that it happened so quickly. They were playing along in an easy, mellow shuffle and then came the crash of the shot and the shattering of the glass. I didn’t actually hear a “bang”; the sound of the breaking glass erased anything that may have come before it, like a low-grade retrograde amnesia. Everyone dove to the floor. Me, I was already on the floor, so I froze. I know, I know, it’s not very heroic, but that’s what I did. I looked around; no one seemed to be shot. It’s funny, but I immediately interpreted it as a gunshot, without question. People were bleeding a little—cuts from the glass—but everyone was up and moving around. My pulse slowed, my breathing deepened. I was almost feeling—what, relief?—when I saw the guy slumped over the piano keys. I was squatting at the left side of the bandstand as you look at it, looking at him from about ninety degrees, toward what had been his left profile, eighteen fucking inches away, and as soon as I saw him I knew he was dead.

  Half his head was splattered all over the piano, an exit wound right out of Zapruder, but backward, his mahogany forehead puckered out in red and gray, a great big brain-kiss pointing straight at me as he leaned to his right, dead eyes looking but not seeing.

  The dude was dead. No doubt.

  I guess you’d have to say that I was in shock. All the adrenaline left me too alert to function, able only to sense. And sense I did: my eyes saw every speck of stubble on his chin; my ears could hear conversations from every corner of the room; my nose could smell past my own sudden sweat to the metallic tang of his blood, pooling on the floor near my feet.

  I had been kneeling not three feet to his right, adjusting the soundboard, when it happened. I watched the reel of the tape recorder spin slowly around, one turn after another, clockwise to the right. I had an impulse to turn it off, but I couldn’t seem to act on it.

  Time jerks you around when something like this happens, because I looked at the couples moseying toward the door, and I looked at the door, and the cops were right there. I mean, right fucking there. I didn’t even hear the sirens—so much for my suddenly acute sensory focus. There were blue flashing lights behind me and a dozen of Chicago’s Finest wedging into the room, half in uniforms and half in plain clothes.

  A tall, gaunt cop in a rumpled gray suit, an old black topcoat, and bristly steel-
gray hair stepped forward. His face was all loose; it looked as if someone else had been wearing it. His eyes were deep and active. He spoke up, in a deep and raspy voice.

  “All right, no one leaves until your statement is taken. Everybody take a seat right where you were when it happened. We’ll need names and addresses, so get your licenses out. Everybody stay calm. It looks like it’s all over but the paperwork.”

  A hush fell over the room. All that adrenaline flushed out of my system, and I felt a sudden sleepiness. I wasn’t sad or anything. I didn’t know the guy at all. I mean, he wasn’t part of the band; he just sat in those last two tunes. I didn’t even know his name—“Roger Something,” I think Paul said before he sat down on the bench. Played pretty well, too, with a nice little solo on a medium-tempo version of “I Got Rhythm.” It was quite lyrical, actually; unassuming, melodic, not too showy, except he didn’t have much of a left hand.

  I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but he had been sitting in for me, so it was hard not to judge.

  I looked around; people were having trouble breathing or their eyes were wet or they were looking pale or flushed. Most folks just looked stunned, with vacant looks in their eyes, thousand-yard stares. Even the professionally impatient hadn’t had time to get restless.

  The band was scattered all around, except for Paul, who was standing right in the front of where the window had been, holding his horn to his chest like he does when he’s playing but not actually playing at that moment. It looked like he was still listening to the song’s changes in his head, getting himself ready to solo when his turn came up. One of the cops tried to get everyone to sit where they were when it happened, but no one but Paul was going to go in front of that open window anytime soon. Everything was covered in fragments of glass. The wind was blowing and the snow was starting to frost the backs of the chairs. The cops finally herded the rest of the band toward the stage and sat them in front of it, on the floor, sitting with their backs up against the risers with their elbows on their knees. Paul kept standing until a cop tugged on his sleeve. I turned off the Uher, then flopped down where I was.

  Jeff was holding his tenor sax, his fingers unconsciously playing some riff. Sidney, legs lot used like an enormous Buddha, his string bass standing next to him, was staring at something very close to him and very far from the rest of us. Paul, once he settled, seemed to be taking a nap, or at least resting his eyes. Akiko, her drumsticks clutched in her left hand, her head down, was showing nothing but short dark hair for anyone to see, but her eyes were darting everywhere.

  Then there was me. When Roger Something started his first song, I had moved to the bar and had been hitting on the blonde sitting next to me. As the second song started, I had Groucho-walked to the soundboard to turn up the volume on the piano. Maybe he was shy, and maybe the system had been tuned to me and I just play too goddamn loud. But I could hardly hear the guy. I had knelt down and had my hand on dial number three when it happened. Now, I kept turning my head to stare at the piano, a good one, a Baldwin, then seeing the blood dripping from the keyboard to the floor, a splat at a time, and quickly looking somewhere else, anywhere else.

  The ambulance took longer than the cops, and it seemed as if you could hear it coming from miles away, the siren wailing through the storm, its pitch getting higher as it neared, a classic acoustical Doppler effect. Three EMTs—two women and a man—came out of the van with their green scrubs on, no coats or hats in the snow, with those silly booties on their feet, pulling on their latex gloves, hauling a stretcher, rushing like mad, shouting. They took one look at the piano player and everything slowed right the fuck down. One of the women reached in to find a pulse. Just a formality; it didn’t take long. You could see her shake her head: No. Gone.

  “Has anyone else been shot?” she asked, looking around the room. About ten people had blood trickling down their faces, and about half of them tentatively raised their hands maybe halfway, the way you used to do when you were in third grade. They were cut up a little from the flying glass, and some of them were wearing what had previously been parts of Roger Something’s prefrontal cortex, but they hadn’t really been shot, and most of them knew it.

  But blood is blood, so the medics set about going around checking each one, picking slivers of glass out of them, wiping them down, patching them up.

  I sat back, and tried to breathe.

  Who knows? I mean, who the fuck knows, you know?

  CHAPTER 3

  Ken Ridlin

  Inside the 1812 Club

  Thursday, January 9

  It is the last night of my last shift on the last rung up the ladder back to Homicide when the call comes in.

  “Attention: All Units.”

  I am thinking about Narcotics, about how I hate it, about how I am trying to claw my way out of it. I am thinking how I am almost there, just at the lip, about to shimmy over the edge, and my first thought is—oh, no, not another idiotic drug bust.

  The thing is, most dopers are too stoned to stay out of trouble. You might say, it’s a victimless crime, they’re only hurting themselves, what’s the point of locking them up? Won’t get any argument from me, in principle. But in reality, they throw themselves in front of the cops. Guy goes to score some blow, he’s in a hurry, so he leaves his car parked in front of a hydrant, and the badge on the beat has no choice but to ticket him and toss him, and oh, is that a crack pipe in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? Or that pothead basketball player who was in the papers a while back. Going on a road trip, has to bring his half-ounce of weed with him, because you just know there’s no dope anywhere in New York or Atlanta or L.A. And he has to wrap it up for safekeeping. In aluminum foil. Which even the assholes at the airport can’t help but notice, first when he tries to walk it through the metal detector—duh—and then when he puts it into one of those little bins and sends it through the X-ray.

  What are you gonna do? It goes with the territory.

  So my first thought when the call comes in is, these junkies are going to get me killed on the last night I have to deal with them. After all I am going through to get back, it’s all going to stop in some nasty alley with some filthy mook who can’t stop sniffling, can’t aim a weapon well enough to shoot the wall behind me, but who is wasted enough to drop it on the ground and have it go off and kill me by accident.

  But it isn’t that. It’s:

  “Shots Fired, Possible Homicide, 1812 North Lincoln.”

  And then I have to listen to it again. Because I remember this address—this is a club I used to know, from back in the day. And because it is only six blocks away. And because I am not a homicide detective yet, not until midnight. And so I am thinking—will I piss somebody off for poaching on his turf before I even get on the job? Thinking—will I somehow manage to screw up a simple crime scene and give them second thoughts before they have time to think their first ones? Thinking—how can this go wrong on me, just when I need something to go right? Maybe I can drive around, let a couple hours pass. Maybe the radio is not working in the storm we are having here. Maybe I am out getting a cup of coffee and I’m not hearing it.

  And I am thinking all this when the car suddenly glides up in front of 1812 North Lincoln and I am applying the brakes and opening the door and clipping the badge to my lapel. And by then it is too late to think of anything because here I am. My blue lights are on and I do not know when I turned them on, and a squad room full of uniforms is standing right behind me, looking at me the way the linemen look at the quarterback in the huddle—ready, hopeful, expectant.

  It is chaos inside, people buzzing all around, throwing on their coats, trying to get out. All except for the band; most of them are standing in front of what used to be the window.

  I flash the tin, summon up the big voice, say, “All right, everybody take a seat where you are and we’ll get to you as soon as we can. No one leaves until your statement is taken by an officer. We’ll need names and addresses, so get your ID’s out. Mig
ht as well stay calm. Looks like it’s all over but the paperwork.”

  I get the patrons settled, set the troops in motion. It’s a routine, a process, a dance we all know how to do. We settle into the rhythm of it.

  I check the vic. He is dead. Whoever did this is either one good shot or one lucky bastard—one in the middle of the back of the head, from ten feet away, in the middle of a driving snowstorm, through a thick plate glass window—that is some good shooting. This is someone who put in some effort. There is no collateral damage—everyone else is fine. This is no crime of passion, no sudden impulse. This looks professional.

  One of the plainclothes guys is going through the vic’s clothes and fishes out a wallet. He holds it up like a twenty-pound fish he caught with five-pound line. “Driver’s license for…” he holds it up…“one Roger Tremblay—Los Angeles address. Baggage stub from O’Hare, Flight 631 arriving from L.A. at five P.M. Lucky he was able to land before the storm hit.”

  Irony. Black humor. It’s a cop thing. We’re supposed to be jaded.

  “Business card,” he says. holding up an ivory-colored rectangle, “Firm of Shields, Manfreddi, and Goldfarb, the Practice of Law” he adds. “He doesn’t look like the Goldfarb.”

  “Or the Manfreddi, either,” another chimes in.

  “One less of them—it’s tragic,” he says.

  “One less what?”

  “One less lawyer.”

  Another detective is going through the coat, draped on the back of the bar stool where the vic had sat:“Card key for the Marriott, downtown. Taxi receipt—Checker number four-nine-three-nine, from the Marriott to here, eight bucks, plus a good tip. Cash—maybe a hundred. Pack of Tic Tacs—peppermint. Picture of what looks like the wife and kids. Ad cut out from the Reader for this place. Drinking…” He picks up a half-empty glass and sniffs it, rolling it around in his gloved hands… “Scotch, rocks. J&B? Cutty?”

  I remember precisely how each smells—the distinctive medicinal aroma of the J&B, the oily tones of the Cutty Sark. I taste them in my mind as he says their names.