We worked fast, except in the first few rooms we went into on the sixth floor. Those were the rooms where the girls had been held. We both stopped at the filth, the stench, the conditions. Sinkovich kicked a long chain that I recognized from history books about my own people. And I shivered, regretting that I had simply shot the son of a bitch upstairs. I should have castrated him first.
We wanted to trust that the women had gone through every room, that the place was clear. But neither Sinkovich nor I were built for trust. We moved faster the lower we went, because the smell of smoke trailed us. We knew if we weren’t careful, we could become victims of the fire we set.
When we reached the second floor, Sinkovich saw flames on the far wall. He hit me on the shoulder.
“We gotta get out,” he said.
“No more burning,” I said, “but we have to check the rooms.”
He nodded and went left while I went right. We ran through the remaining rooms, yelling for people to get out, get out, but no one answered. The hotel was empty except for the two of us.
When we reached the main floor, we saw the desk clerk. He was still tied up, but he’d been shot multiple times. I figured Loring killed him, but I didn’t know. The level of overkill suggested something personal, something I didn’t want to completely understand.
Sinkovich and I both ran through the restaurant, which looked no different than it had when we first looked at it. The kitchen was empty, but the griddle smoked.
Sinkovich gestured at a vat of cooking oil, but I shook my head. Let the fire work its way down.
We needed to get out.
We went out the kitchen door and stepped into thin morning sunlight. The operation had taken a lot longer than we planned. I took a deep breath, then turned around.
The entire upper story of the hotel was engulfed in flames. The whole place had been a tinderbox just waiting to ignite.
“I hope we got everyone,” Sinkovich said.
“Me, too,” I said.
Then without consulting each other, we hurried to the corner. No cars went by. The ice was slick beneath our feet.
The coffee van was gone, just like it was supposed to be, on its way to a hospital where Marvella had already set up some of the staff to handle the incoming patients.
Sinkovich put a hand on my shoulder. “Damn women. Didn’t expect it of them,” he said.
I hadn’t either.
We walked across the street to the school parking lot. My van was the only remaining vehicle. Marvella must have gotten the woman out. I hoped she figured out a place to take her.
“We gotta dump these clothes,” Sinkovich said. “They probably smell like smoke.”
I nodded. I swung the van out of the lot, and headed back to my place.
“The kid’s gonna ask about the smell, ain’t he?” Sinkovich asked.
“He’s with Laura,” I said.
“Good,” Sinkovich said. “Then he ain’t gonna see me having a beer at eight in the goddamn morning.”
As if that was the thing to worry about. We had caused the death of seven people, and burned down a hotel, and Sinkovich was worried about drinking a beer before noon?
I grinned at him. He shrugged. He looked awful. His face was smeared with soot. He had blood along one sleeve.
“You still got matches in your pocket?” I asked.
“Shit,” he said, and rolled down his window. Freezing air blasted us. It felt good, especially against my smoke-encrusted lungs.
He tossed matches out the window like breadcrumbs.
“You could’ve asked me if anyone was behind us,” I said.
“I looked before I dumped. Whadda ya think, I’m dumb? Now, gimme yours.”
I freed one hand from the wheel and emptied the matchbooks out of my pockets. This time, I saw him glance behind us, and then he dumped them. It looked like a matchbook truck had lost control and spilled its load all over the street behind us.
“Isn’t that a driving hazard?” I asked.
“Shit, the ice in this parta town is a driving hazard,” he said. “That’s just free matches for the smokers of the world.”
I looked at him.
He shrugged and opened his hands like a man expecting to get in trouble. “What? It is.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You were right. I couldn’t have done this without you.”
He caught my tone. It was serious. “Them women were something else too. They’re gonna be messed up when they realize what went down.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “They were a lot tougher than both you and I expected.”
“I ain’t calling them ladies no more,” he said. “Not that I know what to call them. Because really, they’re broads, in the best sense of the word.”
I smiled for a second time. “You’re not going to tell them that either, are you?”
“Hell, I ain’t talking to women again until someone approves my vocabulary. Seems from the time I met my wife to now, everything in dealing with the female sex has changed.”
I nodded. I drove us to my apartment. I would bag our clothes and toss them out. Sinkovich was smaller than me, but he could wear my clothes home.
Maybe by the time we were done, Marvella would come back. Maybe by then, she would have news on the girls.
We didn’t dare show up at any of the hospitals.
We had to pretend this hadn’t happened at all.
I could do that. And I now believed that Sinkovich could.
When we reached the apartment, I would join him in his early morning beer. We deserved it.
We got rid of the damn hotel. We got rid of Turner. We had cleaned up the neighborhood, just a bit.
And we had come out of it alive.
That was more than I expected.
It was a small victory, but it was a victory all the same.
FORTY-FOUR
ONE WEEK LATER, I stood in the back room of a restaurant in Hyde Park. The room was filled with birthday balloons. A cake half the size of a wedding cake stood on a pedestal in the middle of a long serving table. Already-cut pieces of a marble sheet cake sat on paper plates. Round tables covered in paper cloths filled the room, and in the center of each, a small centerpiece made out of Matchbox cars surrounded pitchers filled with Kool-Aid.
Laura had rented the place and planned this whole thing the moment she realized that I had no idea how to do it, and Althea was too overwhelmed with Lacey to give a party any thought. Laura, of course, had given it too much thought, but the kids didn’t seem to know that.
Jimmy and his friends sat on the floor on the far side of the room, playing some kind of game that I didn’t understand. Laura and Althea were running it. It involved a lot of shouting and laughing and prizes. Althea had already warned me that when this party was over, I would receive a sugared-up kid who was so jittery he wouldn’t know what to do with himself, and my job would be to take him home and calm him down.
I stood near the door, with Franklin, watching. Lacey had walked around the room twice, inspecting the doors and windows. She had peered at the cake several times as well, and actually looked interested in it. She didn’t look at the presents, piled obscenely in the corner.
She knew that the hotel had burned down. I had a hunch she suspected who had done it. She claimed it made her feel better, but I doubted it. She claimed a lot of things, and did nothing. She had spent the week at home, recuperating. On Monday, she would start at the Laboratory School attached to the University of Chicago.
Laura had pulled some strings to get Lacey in during the already-started winter term but, she insisted, Lacey’s grades had done the rest. Now Laura was talking about setting up a scholarship program for deserving South Side students. She had also agreed to fund the other Grimshaw children into the private school of their parents’ choice, but the problem was that no school was taking students at this time of year.
Jonathan had taken the Catholic School exam without telling anyone he planned to do it. He had, in fa
ct, left for it about the time Sinkovich and I were driving to my apartment. Jonathan’s score was high, but the Catholics only wanted him to go to the school in the Black Belt, and that school had a waiting list as long as my arm.
We would work on a campaign for all of the children in our little family for the fall term. I felt better about sending them to the school at the moment.
The neighborhood still reeked of smoke. The Starlite Hotel remained as a burned-out shell. Part of the hotel’s roof had fallen on the restaurant and burned it down as well.
The police called the burning of the hotel arson, but they blamed the Stones. The body of the desk clerk had been found in the rubble still intact, with all of the bullet wounds to his body. The other bodies were as yet unidentified, but a police spokesperson claimed that at least one of them had to be Turner.
No one found or interviewed the woman Marvella had taken out of the hotel. Marvella had taken her to a different hospital from the girls we had rescued. The story Marvella had given hospital staff was that she found the woman wandering a few blocks from the school in her nightclothes, clearly high on something.
She never got arrested and no one seemed to know she existed. Marvella promised me that she would get help, just like the girls would.
Eight girls got rescued from that hellhole. Three had intact families. The other five would get help from Marvella’s group or Helping Hands. And, Marvella told me, my folder was in the custody of the women. I had accidentally left it at the Y the day we planned the operation. Some of the women took it, and would try to find the girls who had disappeared.
I offered to help. She turned me down.
“I wasn’t kidding when I told you they don’t like men,” she said. “Better to let them do it.”
For once, I agreed. I had to get back to paying work. But more than that, I finally felt comfortable with giving away some of my workload. Those women taught me something. They taught me that help sometimes came from the most unexpected places, and I needed to be open to that.
I looked across the room at Jimmy, who had started all of this. He seemed no worse for the wear. If he knew how much danger I had been in, he didn’t show it.
In fact, he’d had more trouble with official birthday celebrations for Martin. Every school in Bronzeville had had some kind of remembrance. Several let any kid who wanted to go to the special church services held that Thursday morning.
Jimmy had asked me if he could stay home. I let him. Thursday was also his birthday, an irony I’d noted the year before, but one I had ignored. This time, I decided he deserved something special. I let him sleep in, and then we went to the Field Museum, which was probably a better learning experience than anything he would have gotten that day in school.
Gradually, the on-edge feeling I’d had eased. I did ask Sinkovich to follow up on the girls, just to make sure no one reported any of them as prostitutes or as victims of a possible fire. No one did. The police seemed clueless about what happened at the Starlite, and I hoped it would stay that way.
More laughter erupted from the far side of the room. Lacey looked over, longing on her face. I walked toward her, making sure she could see me so she wouldn’t think I snuck up on her.
“Why don’t you join them?” I asked.
She shook her head. “That’s for kids.”
“Laughing’s for everyone,” I said.
“Then you join them,” she snapped.
“I will if you will,” I said.
She gave me a sideways look. “You’re just taking care of me.”
“Of course I am,” I said. “But I’m also taking care of me. Everyone’s going to stop laughing if I go over there by myself and join that circle. I need you as cover.”
She looked at them, and then up at me, as if she were assessing me. Then she took my hand, and led me over to the group.
We sat down together. The kids, mostly little boys, looked at us like we didn’t belong. But after a moment, we’d been clued as to the rules of the game, and Lacey was letting out the occasional reluctant chuckle.
Laura smiled at me. She maneuvered the game so that I would not win, which was just fine with me. I decided I would go home with my son, just as sugar-high and just as relaxed.
I’d never been to a real birthday party, either.
I wasn’t all that good at normal life. I used to think I wouldn’t like it. But as the damaged teenage girl next to me smiled and touched my arm, I realized that I liked a lot of it.
I especially liked how much other people enjoyed it.
And I would do everything in my power to make sure that they could continue to enjoy it, every single day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kris Nelscott is an open pen name used by USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
The first Smokey Dalton novel, A Dangerous Road, won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery and was short-listed for the Edgar Award for Best Novel; the second, Smoke-Filled Rooms, was a PNBA Book Award finalist; and the third, Thin Walls, was one of the Chicago Tribune’s best mysteries of the year. Kirkus chose Days of Rage as one of the top ten mysteries of the year and it was also nominated for a Shamus award for The Best Private Eye Hardcover Novel of the Year.
Entertainment Weekly says her equals are Walter Mosley and Raymond Chandler. Booklist calls the Smokey Dalton books “a high-class crime series” and Salon says “Kris Nelscott can lay claim to the strongest series of detective novels now being written by an American author.”
For more information about Kris Nelscott, or author Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s other works, please go to KristineKathrynRusch.com.
THE SMOKEY DALTON SERIES
in order:
Novels
A Dangerous Road
Smoke-Filled Rooms
Thin Walls
Stone Cribs
War At Home
Days of Rage
Street Justice
Short Stories
Guarding Lacey
Family Affair
Copyright Information
Street Justice
Copyright © 2014 by Kristine K. Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2014 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Robert Cocquyt/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Smokey Dalton Series
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Smokey Dalton Series
Copyright Information
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Nelscott, Kris, Street Justice: A Smokey Dalton Novel
Street Justice: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 32
