“You run through the entire place, yelling it’s a raid, then we go in. We split into the same groups you were talking about, and most of us get the girls out—”
“And what will you do if there are guards upstairs?”
“We can take care of them,” the gaunt woman said. “My name is Sam, by the way. I’d be happy to hurt one of those goons.”
“They won’t expect it,” Kim said, “any more than you did.”
“No,” I said. “It’s still not enough. Most of you will be getting the girls out, and that hotel has a lot of rooms.”
“We know a few other women,” Paulette said. “People we can trust.”
“You shouldn’t go at all, Paulette,” I said. “You have a family.”
“So do you, William,” she said. “Who’ll take care of that little boy if something happens to you?”
“And something will,” I said. “We don’t have the right team for this.”
“I figure we need about twenty people,” Beatrice said. “I can get us that. Many of the women are good shots. Several of us are strong enough to carry the girls out if we have to. We can do this.”
I let out sigh. “I know it sounds like a grand adventure, but it’s not. Let’s ignore the fact that we’re breaking and entering, we’re taking girls off the premises without permission. Let’s think about this: that place has police protection. If we get arrested, we’ll all get charged with arson. It’s a felony. And they’ll bring other charges as well. And that’s if we survive this.”
“Your plan is good,” Beatrice said. “If we’re going to rescue the girls, we do it your way.”
“We could kill someone,” I said. “Accidentally. We might miss someone. They might be hiding. There’s a lot that can go wrong.”
“It’s a risk,” Kim said. “We take risks all the time. I don’t see much choice here.”
“Me, either,” Sam said.
“What we need,” Paulette said, “is a backup. If something goes wrong, we need a way to get a signal to everyone to vacate the hotel. Even if we only manage to get a few girls out, that’s a start. Then maybe we can go to the Defender or something and put the story out there.”
“It won’t matter if the story’s in the Defender,” I said. “The city doesn’t care about the South Side. It’ll be a rumor, and it won’t stop the hotel.”
“But we’d save some girls,” Paulette said. “Even in the worst-case scenario, we’d save some and maybe get some outraged parents to put the right kind of pressure on the school board.”
“It’s that kind of naiveté that would hurt this mission,” I said. “I’m sorry, Paulette, but it just doesn’t work that way.”
“Well, I don’t like your other solution. If we wait until spring and it gets light earlier and it’s not cold and they might change their habits and they might take more girls, and suddenly we’ve missed an opportunity to do something. I don’t like missed opportunities, Bill. I’ve learned that if we wait, things get worse.”
Paulette was referring to the loss of her cousin’s family. She had seen police corruption up close and she knew how damaging it could all be.
“We have lawyers,” Sam said.
“We have good lawyers,” Kim said.
“You do too, Bill,” Marvella said. “Your girlfriend can afford an entire army of lawyers. If we’re careful, they’re not going to be able to prove anything except that we went in to rescue the girls. Since you don’t want to use an accelerant, they can’t even prove arson or that we put the matches on the beds.”
“I would do that,” I said.
“We need a team. And there are too many rooms to search in that hour-long window without a group of us doing it. We can do this, Bill. The only thing that’s preventing us is your chauvinism.”
I frowned. I wasn’t a chauvinist. I respected women. I had encouraged Laura to take over her father’s business. I worked for her, for heaven’s sake.
“I keep telling you,” Marvella said into my silence. “Women are a lot tougher than you think.”
Beatrice kept watching me. She could tell that I was unmoved by those arguments. So she shrugged.
“It’s pretty simple, Bill,” she said. “We have your diagrams. We know your plan. We’re going to do it, with or without you. I think you might be helpful. After all, you’ve been in the hotel and we haven’t. But we can do it alone. We’ve done worse, just not on as big a scale.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
She leaned back and crossed her arms. “Our acquaintance is short. I’m not going to tell you everything we’ve done, just like I’m sure you don’t want to tell me everything you’ve done.”
Touché, I thought, but didn’t say. She won the argument right there.
“We go in, it’s my plan,” I said. “I’m in charge.”
“Of course you are.” She said it with a straight face. She didn’t sound patronizing, but I had the sense she was. What was it my adopted mother used to say? It’s a wise woman who lets her husband believe he’s in charge.
I had a feeling I had just been subjected to the same treatment.
“If we go tonight,” Beatrice said, “we don’t have to worry about school. No one will be there that early on a Saturday morning, even if there are Saturday activities.”
“But the customers will stay later at the hotel,” I said.
“Not that much later,” said a young woman who hadn’t spoken until now. “The girls and the security will want to close down for the night. They won’t care if it’s Friday or Monday. They want out.”
She sounded like she knew what she was talking about. I frowned at her. Her gaze held mine, then skittered away.
“It’s personal for some of us,” she said softly.
“It’s personal for all of us,” I said, and with that, I knew I had given in.
THIRTY-NINE
I CALLED LAURA from a pay phone at the Y.
“I’m sorry to ask you this, but I have no one else,” I said, crowding against the scratched wood wall. The men’s locker room door was behind me, and this narrow hallway smelled of decades-old sweat. “Can you pick Jimmy up from the after-school program and keep him for the weekend?”
“Why?” That one question crystallized her voice, as if she hadn’t been paying attention before and she was now.
“Lacey just got home yesterday, and Marvella’s busy tonight. I really need someone to watch him.”
“You’re not going to tell me why,” she said.
My breath caught. She was going to say no. I was sending these women into that hotel unsupervised all because I couldn’t find someone to keep an eye on my kid.
“Are you protecting me, Smokey? Because I’m a big girl. I can handle what you’re going to tell me.”
I let out that breath. “Laura, listen, if something happens to me, will you make certain that Jimmy’s cared for? I can’t ask the Grimshaws, and he’s got no one else—”
“What the hell, Smokey?” she snapped. “What’s going on?”
“I should have asked that a long time ago,” I said, “and I’m just realizing it now. Can you, until I figure out something formal?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”
“And can you watch him at your place this weekend?”
She made a small sound, a release of air maybe or an exasperated grunt. “I take it you’ve all postponed the party.”
Party? I blinked. Something fell in the men’s locker room, echoing throughout. I didn’t even jump. Party. And then it clicked. We were going to have a surprise birthday party for Jimmy. I had given it a moment’s thought back on Tuesday, and forgotten it. Althea hadn’t mentioned it, either.
“The Grimshaws can’t host anything this weekend. We’ll have it next week. It’s closer to his birthday anyway,” I said.
“Well,” Laura said, sounding all businesslike. “I’d set aside time for that, and I had been on the fence about going to this stupid conference anyway. I’ve
been very worried that I was there to play either the stupid woman or the villain. I’ll have Judith cancel me out of that, and Jimmy and I will have a great weekend trying not to worry about you.”
She sounded flip, even though we both knew she wasn’t. Her words made me feel guilty. I rested my head on three different phone numbers scratched into the wood.
“I’m sorry, Laura,” I said.
“You’ve got to stop doing this, Smokey,” she said.
She didn’t even know what I was doing. And she didn’t seem to mind when I was doing something similar for Sturdy. Not that I’d ever told her everything that I had done, even for her company.
“Thank you for taking care of him,” I said.
“I’ll make sure he’s fine, no matter what happens,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said, and hung up.
I didn’t move for a long moment, my entire body frozen in place. I was committed now, and while I wasn’t going to do it exactly the way I wanted to, it would get done.
I stood up. A clock above the front desk said I’d been here less than an hour. I could go home and get some sleep. I would need that to be sharp—if I could sleep at all, which I doubted.
I also needed to do just a little extra planning, so that I would feel comfortable.
I left the Y, nodding at the man at the desk as I went out. The cold air hit me like an open palm. The Y’s interior had been a lot hotter than I had realized, and just a bit humid. I sneezed, clearing the dust and mold out of my lungs, then walked to the van, head down.
I didn’t plan to stop near the Starlite. I didn’t plan to do anything except drive by. It took longer to get there than it had earlier. The streets were congested with Friday traffic, people leaving the first week of work in the New Year as early as they possibly could. For people who didn’t like their jobs, work seemed especially hard at the holidays.
Ironically, I usually liked mine. The freedom. The hours that I could choose. Doing things my way.
I was truly doing things my way here. I wasn’t even getting paid. Which was good, because if I got paid for tonight’s job, I would be no better than some of the men who worked security for the mob.
I smiled a little bit. It was a tiny, irrelevant distinction. What I was going to do, with the help of some very determined women, was completely against the law.
Not that the law was working here.
I passed one school bus as I reached the Starlite. A few teachers’ cars were backing out of the parking lot.
The Starlite’s kitchen door stood open, and steam poured out like it had the day before. No one parked in the alley, but the alley would be a death trap in the middle of the night. Sounds there would alert the neighboring houses, and maybe bring in the cops.
I drove around the block so that I would pass the Starlite on the right side of the street. As I approached, I saw Loring and his gang of three hunching their way inside.
My stomach clenched. I didn’t want them at the Starlite. I hadn’t told them about it, but apparently, it didn’t take a lot of brains to figure out where Donna Loring had gotten her introduction to the life.
Or maybe these guys occasionally used the place. I had no idea, and I didn’t want to know. Just watching them walk a little unsteadily on the ice made me realize that I had been right not to count on them for anything.
I turned the van around and headed home, feeling calmer than I had in days.
FORTY
WE MET AT THE Y at four in the morning. The street was deserted. One streetlight fritzed as it tried to decide whether it would burn out or not. The ice-covered streets reflected ambient light from the city itself, making the neighborhood seem a little brighter than it should have been.
Still, we were just past the new moon, and the sky was as dark as it could get. The air was frigid, but there was no wind and there were no clouds.
I arrived at the same time that two other vans did. One was a VW microbus, painted black and almost invisible. The other was a panel van like mine, only with a logo running along the side. Two pickups were already parked in front of the Y, along with several sedate sedans.
I should have brought Marvella with me, but I didn’t think of it.
I wore my smelly greatcoat and some gloves I didn’t care about. I also wore old shoes that I knew I could get rid of. In fact, everything I wore would get thrown away.
The Y’s front doors were locked. I knocked on the glass, and someone pushed the door open from the inside. A dozen people milled around the main area. They were all wearing black—black pants, black ski hats, black coats, and black gloves. Most looked like teenage boys unless you actually peered at them.
Sam, the gaunt woman, towered over most of the others. I recognized both Marvella and Paulette from their shapes. No one would ever mistake them for teenage boys.
The area smelled like coffee, and someone had actually bought donuts, laying them out on a table near the front desk which was shut down. A rope cord ran across the stairs, and the lights were out everywhere but this front area.
It made the Y seem creepy and nearly abandoned.
No one talked. Someone knocked on the main door. One of the women headed toward it and in those small movements, I recognized Beatrice. She had looked like one of the teenagers to me until she pushed the door open.
Jack Sinkovich hurried inside, head bent against the cold.
“I didn’t invite you,” I said to him, wondering how the hell he even knew about this. I didn’t want him to shut us down. I wanted him out.
“I know and you shoulda,” Sinkovich said. “Marvella told me.”
She had pushed her way through the group. She looked thinner and older in her all-black costume. Her gaze met mine.
“You were going to pull off a police raid, so I figured you needed actual police,” she said.
“Jack has a family and a job. He could lose both doing this.”
“You have a family and a job too,” she said.
I turned to him. It wasn’t her decision; it was his. “You can’t do this. Think about your kid.”
“I did,” he said. “Then I thought about yours. Mine’s in Mini-fucking-sota. Yours is right here, and he ain’t got nobody. At least, my wife has mine, and she’ll do right by him if something happens to me. Your kid needs you, so that means you need me.”
“No,” I said.
“You don’t get a vote,” he said. “I’m going. Marvella told me your little plan and it’s pretty good except for the blinds.”
“The what?” I asked.
“See?” he said moving his way toward the donuts. “I figured you didn’t know.”
He grabbed a donut and a small Styrofoam cup filled with coffee. He took a sip, winced, and set the coffee down.
“Is this the group?” he asked Marvella.
“Yes.” Paulette was the one who answered. Five more women flanked her. I hadn’t seen them when I arrived. A quick count told me that twenty people filled this room.
“Okay, gather up,” Sinkovich said.
Someone muttered in the back. The question ran through the women like a game of telephone: Who put him in charge?
“I put him in charge,” Marvella snapped. “Bill’s good, but Jack knows some things that the rest of us do not. He will take care of us here. You can trust him.”
“He’s a cop,” one of the women said.
“For my sins,” Sinkovich said. “Without me, you don’t know how to do this right. You listen up or this’ll get messy.”
They quieted down. I crossed my arms. I couldn’t get rid of him now. And, truth be told, I needed him. Just his presence was enough to reassure me.
“Bill here, he cased the joint, but he don’t know a few things that the cops do. There’s one-way mirrors all over the place in that lower level of the hotel. They’re called blinds. Like deer blinds, you know?”
They probably didn’t know. Women from Chicago’s South Side probably weren’t hunters, at least in the traditional M
idwestern sense.
But I had no idea how Sinkovich knew about the blinds. I certainly hadn’t. I knew that the one-way windows had a purpose, but I figured it was security. The word “blind” implied something else.
“Them blinds, they’re money to this place,” Sinkovich said. “Lotsa money. There’re cameras in there. Usually no one’s in the blinds in the early mornings, unless there is a police raid. Then the blinds get filled up.”
He stopped, waved his donut, then set it down.
“I gotta back up. These blinds, they’re there to photograph anyone who might not want the wife or the girlfriend or the boss or the mayor to know they’re frequenting this place, you know what I mean?”
“Blackmail?” one of the women asked.
“You betcha,” Sinkovich said. “Lotsa money in blackmail. And when there’s a raid or lemme say when there used to be a raid, a designated group of guys would go into the blinds and they wouldn’t defend at all. They’d take pictures. So Idiot Rookie Officer Yahoo gets a bug up his ass to shut down the Starlite, thinks it’ll get him a promotion inside the ranks, and instead, he either gets his butt busted or he gets compromised, offered a lotta cash to never do it again or gets his kid threatened or gets fired for cause.”
Sinkovich looked at me, just to reinforce his words. He hadn’t turned me down because he hadn’t wanted to do the job. Initially, he’d been afraid to do the job.
I wondered what changed his mind.
“And, no,” Sinkovich said, “this did not happen to me. This will be my first trip into this particular little hellhole. But I read some of the files, and talked to some of the guys when my buddy Bill here first asked me about the place, and I gotta tell you, the ruthlessness that these guys go at this stuff makes your blood cold.”
The women shifted, clearly uncomfortable. I was glad I hadn’t taken a donut. My stomach was in knots.
“So, here’s the thing. We gotta go in organized, and neutralize them blinds right off, which I’m sure Bill was gonna do.”
“I was,” I said. “I saw the mirrors, and I knew that someone was watching behind them. But I thought they were security only.”
Street Justice: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 29
