by Tod Goldberg
Size you’d use for a .357 Magnum.
Peaches picked it up, shook it, no movement. Not that he expected any. There’d be packing inside. Gun might even be in parts.
Peaches checked the airline tags. ORD to FCO. That was the airport code for O’Hare and whatever they called the airport in Rome. A week ago. A second tag, FCO to ORD, dated today, just like MaryAnn had said.
You fly to and from a foreign country with a gun, man, you really gotta have a reason for it. Who the fuck was he dealing with? The hand-written baggage tags only had the address on them. No names. Maybe it was just some dude who’d done work in Vietnam and never got used to real life again. Peaches had uncles like that. Always strapped. Fear was natural. Meant you were ready if a saber-toothed tiger leapt out at you or some shit, but anxiety, which is what made you pack a gun on vacation, that was about something else. That was not believing saber-toothed tigers were extinct.
Or it meant you were the saber-toothed tiger to someone else.
Peaches put the man’s bag in the trunk, left the other in the backseat. He wasn’t down to cross MaryAnn. She’d done right by him. But these bags told a story, and Peaches saw some possibilities rolling out in front of him. Maybe Peaches would tell the people at the house only one bag had been released, the other was still at the airport, he’d come back in a couple hours with it, if that was okay? There a good time? Get a clock going. That way, he’d know when they might be leaving. Get one of his boys, clean out the whole house, no worries about getting popped in the act, because if you travel with that kind of jewelry, plus a firearm, what do you keep in the house? Plus, he’d have the bag with him on the return. Someone rolled up on him beforehand, he had reason to be back, if anyone asked.
That was good. An alibi.
Peaches didn’t believe in robbery as a way of life, strictly speaking, didn’t think going into a bank with a gun was very smart. Opportunity cost of sticking some fool up for his Rolex was low. But a house in Batavia? A sure thing? These were the kind of people who had homeowner’s insurance. A victimless crime.
Peaches went into Jewel’s, bought a Hostess apple pie, ate it right there in the store. Got his mind right. Made some decisions. Could be he’d put off those real estate classes for a couple months if things unfolded right. Maybe he’d walk out of this job with a Cadillac, cash, art, jewels, shit he could move in Canada if need be, once he was able to travel. Could be he bought a house of his own with this score. Yeah, Peaches thought, maybe tonight was going to be okay.
THE DROP-OFF WAS located a few blocks west of the Fox River in a new subdivision called Lockwood Estates, the sign out front advertising three hundred homes starting at twenty-five hundred square feet. Room for your RV! Custom Pool Lots! Plenty of Green Space!
Yellow model-home flags hung drab off of forty-foot-tall poles, and behind them, blocks of half-constructed skeleton houses, the weather conditions inhospitable for building, Peaches thinking someone’s ass was on the line for that fuck-up. But then he turned left at the bottom of Sagebrush Lane and found himself on a fully developed street of redbrick two-story starter mansions, each ringed with dead Christmas lights. Cadillacs and Lincolns and Mercedes and BMWs on the streets and driveways. Bikes and tricycles next to front doors. Nice ones. Not the peeling-red-paint bikes Peaches rode as a kid. Darkened windows covered by holiday wreaths and midnight snow . . . save for one house at the end of the block, where the Christmas lights still glowed, and the entire bottom floor was illuminated. He checked the address and his watch.
Three a.m. Right on time.
There was a black Jeep in the driveway, so Peaches parked next to it, got out with the woman’s bag, looked inside: a screwdriver rammed into the ignition, a Styrofoam cup on the dash, steam rising from the coffee, a picture on the passenger seat: a man, fifty-something; a woman, twenty-something; a small white dog, fluffy-something.
The fuck?
He stepped around the Jeep and stood on the sloping front lawn of the house, looked into the panorama of lit windows. A library filled with bookcases; beyond that a kitchen surrounded by what looked like restaurant-grade appliances. Then a bedroom, double bed, that fluffy dog standing with its paws on the windowsill. The rooms of other people’s homes were like a dollhouse to Peaches. He’d never own a house like this, had never spent a night in one, either, and it all looked posed . . . until he peered into the next window, and saw a den or office.
A man, standing up, back to the window, about Peaches’s height. Six foot. Big, but fit. One hundred eighty-five, two hundred pounds. Leather duster on. The man from the photo sat on a couch. Silver hair. Blue shirt opened at the collar. The standing guy, for some reason, held a lamp in his hand, the cord pulled taut from the wall.
Two men.
Shit.
Not what he was expecting.
Everything in the den looked to be leather. The man in the duster yanked the light from the wall. And then Peaches heard bap . . . bap . . . bap. Glock? Then another bap. Yeah. Glock with a silencer. It wasn’t how it was in the movies. Silencers make noise. If you know what you’re hearing, it’s impossible not to know what you’re hearing. And Peaches knew.
Shit.
Peaches was halfway back across the lawn to his car, when the rest of the house lights turned off, room by room, leaving only the Christmas lights on. The front door opened and the man in the duster walked out, gun still in his hand. If Peaches took off, he knew he’d be fucking dead. In this situation, you just assumed someone running was running to the cops. Least that was Peaches’s point of view. None of that hero shit mattered, either. Some motherfucker is sprinting away from you, you shoot him in the back. So, man up. Peaches turned and faced the shooter.
The shooter said, “Who the fuck are you?”
“Whoever you need me to be,” Peaches said. “You got the gun.”
The shooter said, “You work for someone?”
“MaryAnn and Silas.”
“The fuck is that?”
Peaches raised the bag up, so the man could see it better. “Allied Baggage.”
A glimmer of recognition. “Anyone else?” Like asking if he banged, Peaches guessed.
“I rep my set,” Peaches said.
“You do what to who?”
“I represent it,” Peaches said.
“And what’s it?”
“Four Corner Death Warriors.”
“What’s that? A metal band?”
“A gang,” Peaches said. “In Wisconsin.” It’s not like the Death Warriors had Green Bay or Madison in their grip. Mostly, they were about running drugs and protection shit in the farmlands, periodically getting into it with Vice Lords and Gangster Disciples up from Chicago who wanted to move product without local sanction. “But up Joliet, I mostly worked alone.”
“You shouldn’t have come here,” the shooter said, like they’d come to the conclusion of a dispute. “Not alone, anyway.” The shooter looked down the block, like maybe he was expecting another car to roll up. “Piece of advice? Dream Warriors sounds like a metal band.”
“Death Warriors,” Peaches said. “Motherfuckers usually pay respect on it.”
“You one of those guys, screams it out of the car after they shoot someone? ‘Dream Warriors, motherfucker!’ All that?”
“I don’t drive-by,” Peaches said. “That’s pussy shit.”
“But you got homies,” the shooter said. “They do that?”
“I’ve seen it done,” Peaches admitted.
“See. That’s bad for all of us. You live through the week, stop that shit.” He stepped around Peaches, still standing there holding the fucking Tumi bag like he was the help, opened the door to the Jeep, then said, “You meet Richard Speck in Joliet?”
“Seen him.”
“What’s that like?”
“Like seeing Godzilla or some shit,” Peaches said. “But he was quiet. Kept to his own.”
“Good advice,” the shooter said. “Wait fifteen minutes, then call the cops
, or everyone at Allied Baggage is dead.”
PEACHES WAITED THIRTY minutes to call the cops, which gave him enough time to ditch some of the shit in his trunk—guns, saws, rope, tarp, that sort of thing—before coming back to the house to call 911. Just because you were a Good Samaritan didn’t mean cops wouldn’t run you. And sure enough, a couple hours after the first cops arrived and found the body in the living room, plus the woman tied up in a closet upstairs, unhurt, a Lincoln full of men in suits pulled up and some suit called Hopper pulled Peaches aside, took his license, then asked him to sit on the curb while he called him in. No cuffs. Nothing like that. An unusual experience in Peaches’s life.
Hopper came back, still holding Peaches’s license. “You’re just out,” he said. “And you walk into this shit. Some luck.”
“No difference between luck and a curse,” Peaches said. “Just depends how you look at it.”
“Really now?” Hopper said. “You know who that guy inside is? The one missing his face?” Peaches shook his head. “Joey the Bishop. That name mean anything to you?”
“Nope.”
“Last twenty-five, thirty years,” Hopper said, “he’s been fixing every college basketball game in the country.”
“How’d he do that?” Peaches asked, interested now.
“Most of the time, kids are happy to brick a couple shots for money,” Hopper said. “Purdue playing Southern Buttfuck University, who really cares about the score? Who really loses, right? Higher up the food chain, say it’s an NCAA tournament game, big action moving. Joey might buy off the top player on both teams. Joey really needed something good, maybe he’d blackmail a coach. Get photos of him bending over a stripper or maybe he’s closeted, gets him with his boyfriend, whatever. He needs something, Joey the Bishop, he’s gonna get it.” Hopper paused. “Someone must have made more shots than they were supposed to, so then Joey got his.”
“The fuck you telling me all this for?”
“I don’t know,” Hopper said. “Thought you might be interested in a less violent path.”
“What about homeboy without a face?” Peaches said.
“Well, no one in Vegas gets shot anymore, for instance,” Hopper said. “Gambling is practically legal everywhere. You could probably get into some minor college bullshit, take frat boys for their student loans. Victimless crime. Essentially.” The coroner and two men in scrubs came out of the house, pushing a body on a gurney. And so went Joey. “The Bishop, he was old-school, though.” He gave Peaches his license back. “You got somewhere out of town you can go? Lay low for a week or two if need be?”
“I’m on parole,” Peaches said.
“I can help with that,” Hopper said.
“How’s a detective gonna help with that?”
“I’m not a detective,” Hopper said. “I’m with the FBI.”
“No shit?” Peaches said. He’d never met an FBI agent before. “I thought you’d be taller.”
“Me too,” Hopper said. “If this shooter gets caught fast, there’s going to be an assumption that there was a witness. You’ll want to be out of town. Just how it goes with these mob guys.”
“Like Al Capone and shit?”
“Al Capone didn’t own half the police force,” Hopper said. “Your name is going to be on the reports. So what I’m saying, if you saw something, we can pretend you didn’t. Just you and me.”
Back in Joliet, Peaches had met a few of those dudes. Old ones had double-wide cells and their own TVs. Took their meals in their cells half the time. Not that they were infirm. Just how it was. Some trustee would show up with their chow, except it never looked like what Peaches was eating, the talk being they got fed from the staff cafeteria. Joliet was fucked-up. But now the fucking guy in the duster made some sense. How he didn’t pop Peaches. How he talked to him like a normal guy. Those Italians guys had a code. You didn’t run around killing innocent people. Peaches, he wasn’t anyone’s idea of innocent, but he wasn’t involved. Dumb way of doing business, in Peaches’s view, even if it had saved his life. Because now, maybe the man in the duster might need to come kill him, regardless.
“It’s what I told the cops,” Peaches said. “I pulled up. Door was open. Dude was missing his face. I called 911.”
“You don’t seem like a call-911 type,” Hopper said.
“Normal situation,” Peaches said, “maybe I wouldn’t.”
“Techs go through the house,” Hopper said, “are they going to find your prints anywhere they shouldn’t be?”
“I didn’t even know the lady was upstairs,” Peaches said. “I saw the man, made the call.”
“So,” Hopper said, “how’d you see the body?”
“I walked in, there he was.”
“You make a habit of walking through open doors into people’s homes,” Hopper said, “and then down the hall, into their den?”
“Just trying to give good customer service.”
Hopper smiled. “I don’t give a shit about what you’ve done in your previous life,” he said. “You’re about two decades below my pay grade. I just want you to be sure of your story. I were you? I’d clique up with some soldiers with clout.” He took a small spiral notepad from his back pocket, flipped through it, circled something. “You really bang with the . . . Four Corner Death Warriors?”
“Did.”
“They know you’re down with Allied Baggage now?” Hopper said.
“I’m on the straight.”
He asked Peaches for his phone number, told him he’d call him straight away if something broke on this, then took out a business card, scrawled something on the back, gave it to Peaches. “You see anything funny, you feel like someone is watching you, whatever, you give me a call. Don’t try to handle it yourself. You’ll end up in a corn field.”
In his life, Peaches had called the cops exactly one time.
About three hours ago now.
He didn’t imagine he’d be doing it a second time.
“Ten arrests since you were fourteen. That right?”
“That juvenile shit is sealed,” Peaches said.
Hopper shrugged. “That life must be getting old.”
“I’m reformed.”
“Yeah, that’s what you keep saying.” Hopper sat down on the curb next to Peaches. “Can I tell you a funny thing? Off the record?” Hopper pointed his index finger like a gun in Peaches’s face. “Joey took one to his face and then there’s two shots into the wall, one in the ceiling. And then he’s got his hands tied in front of his body using a lamp cord, but it’s still attached to the lamp. Isn’t that funny?”
“Off the record?” Peaches said. Hopper nodded. “Shooting a person ain’t like what you think it’s gonna be like.”
“True,” Hopper said. “That’s very true. But the guy who did this? I’m gonna guess he was a big bastard in a leather duster,” Hopper pointed his finger gun at the two-story Cape Cod on the corner, “because that’s what the kid across the street saw out his window while he was up jerking off to the Sears catalogue. That guy? That guy is a professional. But he made the shooting look like it was done by someone who didn’t know what he was doing. Like someone who maybe showed up in the middle of the night and saw an opportunity, then panicked. A dupe, basically. A punk.”
Peaches didn’t say anything, but now his mind was working. Had MaryAnn set him up? How long had she been working that game? Every fucking peanut butter and jelly sandwich another step closer to him getting framed on a murder? Peaches had a busy day ahead of him. Maybe a busy week. Could be a busy couple of months.
“We still off the record?” Peaches said eventually.
“Sure.”
“You know this guy’s name?”
“His boys call him the Rain Man. CI told me this guy remembers every face he’s ever seen.”
“You believe that?”
“Nah,” Hopper said. “It’s just something to scare people. Because that’s pretty scary, right? You’re not even sure if you remember the color
of his hair and he’s at home with a picture of you hanging on the wall. Still, you’d be wise not to go looking for him. Not until you’re cliqued up, anyway. Like with some Navy SEALS.” Hopper stood up then. “Hold on to my card. Use it as a toothpick if you need to, but don’t lose it.” He began to walk away.
“Hey,” Peaches said, and the FBI agent stopped. Hopper wasn’t a big guy, Peaches wasn’t joking about that. Little bit of a gut. Nose was crooked, like he should have ducked when he was learning how to box, but instead led with his face. Must be tough to breathe out of it. “Why they call him the Bishop?”
“You never played chess?”
“Nah.”
“Not even in Joliet?”
“I like to read,” Peaches said.
“The bishop in chess only moves diagonally, backward and forward,” Hopper said. “Plays a crooked game.”
“How’s that different than any of these fucks?”
“Well,” Hopper said, “he was also a devout Catholic.”
Once the FBI agent had disappeared back into the crowd of cops, EMTs, and neighbors, Peaches took his card out, read what was on the back: Your Lucky Day! Get Out of Jail Half-Off.
IT WAS AFTER 8 a.m. by the time Peaches got back to Allied Baggage.
The parking lot was empty and the doors to the luggage warehouse were chained and padlocked. Middle of the week, right after Christmas? The place should have been bustling, vans moving in and out. Airlines never worse about losing luggage than when you needed it most. Had MaryAnn called everyone and told them to stay home?
He walked around to the back, where Silas and MaryAnn kept an office in a temporary construction trailer, temporary in this case lasting maybe ten years or so, judging by how the paint had chipped off the aluminum siding. Peaches tried the door. Locked. He knocked, waited. Tried to peer into the window, but the venetian blinds were closed. He knocked again, harder, waited, then just went ahead and kicked in the door.
The office had two desks, two desktop computers with TV set–sized monitors, a fax machine, a shredder, a tan file cabinet, a small brown sofa that dipped like a V in the middle, probably from Silas’s fat ass, a flimsy coffee table, a mini-fridge, a watercooler, a microwave. Nothing on the walls, apart from a calendar.
