Fire Sale (23 page)

I couldn’t quite stifle a laugh, but I could picture the little room, heavy with religion and hormones. A suffocating combination. “Do you think your sister ran away with Billy?”

She turned back to look at me. “I don’t know for sure, but she left for school, then, an hour later, she came back. She put her toothbrush in her backpack, and a few things, you know, her pajamas, stuff like that. When I asked where she was off to, she said, to see April, but, well, you know, after all these years I know pretty much when Josie is lying to me. And besides, April, she was coming home from the hospital today. Mrs. Czernin, she wouldn’t have let Josie come over to the house, not with April so sick.”

“Any idea where they’d go, Billy and Josie?”

Julia shook her head. “All I know is, he wouldn’t take her to his house, you know, the rich place he lives with his ma and his daddy, ’cause, you know, they don’t want him dating no Mexican girl.”

I talked to her for a few more minutes, but she’d clearly told me all she knew. I squeezed her hand again, firmly, the dismissal squeeze. “I’ll see you Thursday at three o’clock, Julia. Got that?”

She whispered something that might have been assent. When I got up to leave, I saw a shadow move across the baby clothes lining the middle of the room: Rose had been listening in. Maybe just as well. Maybe it was the only way she’d learn a few things about her own daughters.

26

Annie, Get Your Gun

I
pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Supposing Billy and Josie are holed up down here, we might find them by finding his little sports car, assuming it’s on the street.” I did some arithmetic in my head. “There are probably only forty or forty-five miles of streets to drive up and down; we could do that in four hours, less if we skipped the alleys.”

Mr. Contreras and I were in the Mustang, where we’d fled from Rose’s overheated emotions. Almost before I’d left the room, she’d begun upbraiding Julia for not telling her own mother what she’d reported to me: “Did I raise you to be a liar?” she’d shouted, before whirling around to demand that I lose no time in finding Josie.

“Where do you suggest I look, Rose?” I’d asked tiredly. “It’s midnight. You say she isn’t at April’s. What other friends would she go to?”

“I don’t know, I can’t think. Sancia, maybe? Only Sancia, she was really Julia’s friend, although she and Josie—”

“I’ll check on Sancia,” I interrupted, “and on the other girls on the team. What about any relatives? Is she in touch with her father?”

“Her father? That
gamberro
? He hasn’t seen her since she was two. I don’t even know where he’s living right now.”

“But what’s his name? Children sometimes hide meetings with their fathers so that their mothers won’t know.”

When she’d protested that idea—Josie would never do something behind her back—I pointed out that Josie had disappeared behind her back. Rose reluctantly disgorged the man’s name, Benito Dorrado; the last time she’d seen him, eight months ago, he’d been in an Eldorado with some overpainted
puta.
In the bed behind me, I heard Julia gasp at the word.

“Any other relatives? Do you have any brothers or sisters here in Chicago?”

“My brother is in Joliet. I already called him, but he didn’t hear from her. My sister, she lives in Waco. You don’t think—”

“Rose, you’re distraught, you’re spinning both of us around in circles. Is Josie especially close to your sister? Do you think she would suggest to Billy that they drive a thousand miles to see her?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I just want my girl back.” She started to cry, the loud racking sobs of a person who doesn’t often permit herself to break down.

Mr. Contreras soothed her with much the same language he’d used on the baby. “You give us something that belongs to your girl, some T-shirt or something you haven’t washed. Mitch here will smell it, he’ll track her down, you’ll see.”

The little boys were sitting up on their air mattresses, staring at Rose with large, frightened eyes. It was one thing for their sister to disappear, quite another to see their mother falling apart. To calm everyone down, I said I’d see what I could find out tonight. I gave Rose my cell phone number and told her to call me if she heard anything.

Now my neighbor and I were sitting in my car, trying to figure out what to do next. Mitch was on the narrow backseat, with Josie’s unwashed basketball shirt between his paws. I’ve never thought of him as a star tracker, but you never know.

“You should start with the girls on the team,” Mr. Contreras suggested.

“An address book would help, a phone book, some damn thing.”

I didn’t want to go back up to the apartment to ask for a Chicago directory. Finally, even though it was so late, I called Morrell to see if he would look up the addresses for me. He was still up; in fact, he was watching the football game.

“Two-minute warning, Chiefs down by five,” I reported to Mr. Contreras, who rubbed his hands gleefully, anticipating the pot that waited for him back at my apartment.

I heard Morrell’s uneven step as he limped up the hallway to get his laptop and his phone directories. In a couple of minutes, he’d read out addresses to me of all the girls on the team who had phones, including Celine Jackman, although I couldn’t imagine Josie going to April’s archenemy on the team. I sketched out a map of the neighborhood and jotted the addresses onto the grid of streets. The addresses covered over a mile going north to south, but didn’t range more than four blocks east to west, except for April’s father. Benito Dorrado had moved out of South Chicago to the East Side, a relatively stable, marginally more prosperous neighborhood nearby.

It took well over an hour to poke around the streets and alleys near the homes of the girls on my squad. I didn’t feel like rousing any of them to ask after Josie: a late-night visit from the coach, looking for an errant player, would only get everyone on the team completely freaked out. With Mitch next to me on a short leash, I peered into the garages we found—most of the girls lived in the bungalows that dominate the neighborhood, and these often had garages in the alleys behind the houses. In one of the garages, we’d surprised a gang meeting, eight or ten young men whose flat-eyed menace made my skin crawl. They’d thought about jumping us, but Mitch’s low-throated growl made them back away long enough for us to beat a retreat.

At one-thirty, Rose called to see if we’d found any signs of Josie. When I gave her all my negatives, she sighed, but said she guessed she had to go to bed: she had to continue her job search tomorrow, although as heavy as her heart was lying in her chest she knew she wouldn’t make a good impression.

Mr. Contreras and I headed on south, under the legs of the Skyway, to Benito Dorrado’s small frame house on Avenue J. There weren’t any lights on in the bungalow, which was scarcely surprising since it was now after two, but I didn’t feel the same scruples against rousing him as I did for the girls on my team—he was Josie’s father, he could pay attention to some of the dramas of her life. I rang the doorbell urgently for several minutes, and then called him on my cell phone. When the phone had rung tinnily a dozen times or so behind the dark front door, we went around to the back. The single-car garage was empty; neither Benito’s Eldorado nor Billy’s Miata were anywhere in sight. Either he’d moved or he was spending the night with the overpainted
puta.

“I think this is where we go home to bed.” I yawned so widely my jaw cracked. “I’m seeing spots instead of street signs, which is not a good time to be driving.”

“You tired this early, doll?” my neighbor grinned. “You often ain’t later than this.”

“Not that you pay any attention, right?” I grinned back.

“No way, doll: I know you don’t like me poking around in your business.”

Usually when I’m out this late, I’m at a club with friends, dancing, exhilarated by music and motion. Sitting in a car, peering anxiously through the windshield, was another story. South Chicago was a hard area to drive in, too: streets dead-end into bits of the old swamp that underlies the city, or into a canal or shipping lane; others bump into the Skyway. I thought I remembered that I could cross west to the expressway at 103rd Street, but I ended up at the Calumet River and had to turn around. On the far side of the river lay the By-Smart warehouse. I wondered if Romeo Czernin was driving for them tonight, if he and Marcena were parked in some schoolyard, making love behind the seats in the cab.

The road was rutted here, and the houses were spaced wide apart. The long stretches in between weren’t really vacant: old beds, tires, and rusted-out car frames poked out of heaps of rotting marsh grasses and dead trees. A couple of rats crossed the road in front of me and slid into the ditch on my left; Mitch began whimpering and turning in the narrow backseat—he’d seen them, too, and was sure he could catch them if I’d just turn him loose.

I flexed my cramped shoulder muscles and opened my window to get some fresh air on my face. Mr. Contreras tutted in concern and turned on the radio, hoping the noise would keep me alert. I turned north again, on a street that should get me to an access road for the expressway.

The temperature was hovering just above freezing, WBBM reported, and the expressways were all moving freely—clearly, two in the morning was the time to drive in Chicago. Stock markets had opened sluggishly in London and Frankfurt. The Chiefs had rallied after the two-minute warning, but still fell short by eight points.

“So you beat the spread, cookie,” Mr. Contreras consoled me. “That means you only owe me seven bucks more, two for the third-quarter score, one for the total number of sacks by New England, one for—”

“Hang on a second.” I stood on the brakes.

We were underneath the stilts of the Skyway. The endless detritus of the South Side stretched depressingly on either side of the road. I’d been focusing on the potholes in front of me when some motion caught the corner of my eye. A couple of guys, poking through the debris. They stopped when I stopped and turned to glare at me. The lights from the highway overhead leaked through the joins in the road and glinted on their tire irons. I squinted beyond them, trying to make out what they were hacking at: the smooth, round fender of a new car.

I pulled my gun from my holster and grabbed Mitch’s leash. “Stay in the car,” I barked at Mr. Contreras. I wrenched the door open and was out and in the road before he could object.

I had Mitch’s leash in my left hand, the gun in my right. “Drop your weapons! Hands in the air!”

They yelled obscenities at me, but Mitch was growling, lunging against his collar.

“I can’t hold him long,” I warned, advancing on them.

Headlights from above dipped and slipped along our bodies. Mitch’s teeth gleamed in the gliding lights. The two dropped their tire irons and put their hands above their heads, backing away from me. When they’d moved, I could see the car. A Miata, driven so hard into the pile of boards and bedsprings that only its tail was visible, with the trunk pried open, and the license plate: The Kid 1.

“Where did you find this car?” I demanded.

“Fuck off, ’ho. We got here first.” The speaker dropped his hands and started toward me.

I fired the gun, wide enough to make sure I didn’t hit them but close enough to make them pay attention. Mitch roared with fear: he’d never heard a gun go off. He barked and jumped, trying to get away from me. I burned my fingers on the hot barrel as I fumbled the safety into place while Mitch snarled and bucked. When I had him somewhat under control, I was sweating and panting, and Mitch was shaking, but the two gangbangers had turned to stone, their hands once more behind their heads.

Mr. Contreras appeared next to me and took the leash. I was trembling myself, and grateful to him, but I didn’t say anything, just made sure my voice came out steady when I spoke to the guys.

“The only name you two punks call me is ‘ma’am.’ Not ‘’ho,’ not ‘bitch,’ not any nasty word that pops into your disgusting heads and out your mouths. Just ‘ma’am.’ Now. Which one of you drove this car down here?”

They didn’t say anything. I made a great show of releasing the safety on the Smith & Wesson.

“We found it here,” one of them said. “What’s it to you?”

“What’s it to you,
ma’am,
” I growled. “What it is to me is that I’m a detective, and this car is involved in a kidnapping. If I find a body, you guys will be lucky not to face a death sentence.”

“We found the car here, it was just here.” They were almost whining; I felt sickened by my own bullying—give a woman a gun and a big dog and she can do anything a man can do to humiliate other people.

“You can’t prove anything, we don’t know nothing, we—”

“Keep them covered,” I said to Mr. Contreras.

I backed around in a circle to the car, keeping the gun on them. My neighbor held Mitch, who was still moving uneasily. The trunk, which the pair had pried open, held nothing but a towel and a few books of Billy’s—
Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger
and
The Violence of Love.

The two punks were still holding their hands over their heads. I turned around and shoved my way into the bracken to peer into the car. No Josie, no Billy. The windshield had a spiderweb crack in front of the driver’s seat, and the driver’s window was smashed. The ragtop was torn. Maybe the damage had occurred when the car plunged headlong into the pile of garbage. Maybe someone had attacked the car with tire irons.

The traffic overhead sent a constant, irregular thwacking down the rusted legs of the Skyway. The lights swooped past but couldn’t penetrate the bracken well enough for me to see inside the car. Turning on the little flashlight on my cell phone, I stuck my head and shoulders through the hole in the Miata’s canvas top and shone the light around. Glass shards lay on the dashboard and the seat. I could smell whiskey, maybe bourbon or rye. I slowly moved the light around. An open thermos lay on the passenger floor, with a little puddle underneath the lip.

It was a titanium model, a Nissan. Morrell had one like it—I’d bought it for him when he left for Afghanistan. It had cost a fortune, but nothing dented it, even when he’d gotten shot, although the
i
in the logo had chipped away, just as it had on this one.

I backed out of the car and jerked open the driver’s door. Dumbly, I picked up the thermos and stuck it in the pocket of my peacoat. How had Morrell’s thermos ended up in Billy’s car? Maybe Billy had one like it, and the
i
in the
Ti
logo was prone to chipping, not that I could picture Billy or Josie drinking, especially not bourbon.

Morrell had been with me on Saturday when Buffalo Bill thumped in, demanding his grandson, but even if Morrell were the kind of guy who would go looking for Billy without telling me, he wasn’t physically up to the job. And he wasn’t much of a drinker.

I opened my phone and pressed the speed-dial key for Morrell, then shut the cover again: it was past two-thirty. I didn’t need to wake him up for something I could ask him in the morning. Anyway, I had the two thugs who’d pried open the trunk. They could answer a few questions.

As if on cue, a commotion erupted behind me: Mr. Contreras shouted, Mitch barked full throttle, and then I heard gravel spitting as our captives started running. I backed out of the bracken as fast as I could, dropping the two books in my haste. The youths were running headlong up Ewing. Mitch broke free of Mr. Contreras and tore after them.