The Betrayers (22 page)

Authors: James Patrick Hunt

BOOK: The Betrayers

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Hastings tucked the Jaguar around the corner in a parking lot with old pickups and classic autos that would never be restored. When he was done backing it in, the Jag faced the garage across the street. He shut the car off, got out, and walked out into the street.

An industrial area, bleak and dreary. Motor rebuilders, steel fabrication, heat exchangers, engine service, and auto parts. It thrummed with business in the decade following the Second World War, but had been in decay since the Johnson administration. Dark and cold now and no traffic in sight.

The patrol cars were hidden, two blocks west and three blocks east.

He walked back to the Jag and popped open the trunk. Took out an Ithaca pump shotgun, made sure it was loaded. He racked the slide and put one in the chamber. He got in the car and rested the shotgun on the passenger seat, his hand on the stock.

He waited.

He closed his eyes for a couple of seconds and thought of sitting behind a blind in Nebraska, sitting in cold and trying not to think about the freezing temperature, waiting for the sound of the deer rustling through the brush before it appeared.

The file on Dillon noted that he had gone underground the day before charges were filed against him in state court, Cook County. Chicago and state police had prepared the case against him. Racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, trafficking in narcotics. The guy had made millions extorting payments from bookies and drug dealers. No murder charges filed on him, but the paperwork showed that people around him tended to die or disappear.

Released from the federal penitentiary in 1982. No convictions since. No arrests.

No arrests?

How?

In many respects, George Hastings was a cautious man. He kept a lot of his opinions to himself. He was not politically ideological; it seemed like a lot of work to him. But he was aware enough to recognize that he was a moderately skilled diplomat himself. Not because he particularly wanted to be, but because he needed to be. It was a line you walked in police administration, maintaining self-respect while surviving the bear traps of departmental infighting and bureaucracy. When he was married, Eileen, a born snob, went to great lengths to establish friendships with people outside of law enforcement. Some of them were okay, some of them not; usually it didn't last. Hastings remembered having a tolerable conversation with a college professor at an otherwise dreadful dinner party. The guy had tenure at a state university and he complained about a bitter ongoing dispute. The guy said, “Do you know why the fighting is so intense? It's because the stakes are so low.” And Hastings had smiled. The department could be like that. That was why it was best to keep your opinions to yourself. That was why he had revealed his mixed feelings about the death penalty only to Joe Klosterman, one of the few people he trusted fully. When Hastings thought about this in his quieter, more contemplative moments, he realized that his discomfort with state-sponsored execution stemmed, in some part, from his experience in dealing with a few judges and prosecutors stupid enough and arrogant enough to frighten him. But he also knew that he was uncomfortable with his own thoughts about it. Like the one he had now. The one that said, this man needs to die.

At an earlier time, the man needed to be put in a cage and kept there. It made no difference to Hastings if the cage was an isolated cell at Sing Sing or one with shag carpet and cable television. The man needed to be separated from civilized society. But someone had opened the man's
cage and let him out. Let him roam and menace and kill. And now three police officers were dead. They could catch him now and put him back in his cage, but it wouldn't make Cain or Hummel or Deputy Childers any less dead.

Hastings heard something.

A car approaching.

Lights illuminated the street, pushed down the street and then it was there. A black Cadillac.

Hastings waited.

A man got out of the Caddy. It was him. He fit the description. It was the man from the photo, standing about forty yards away.

Hastings thought, get out of the car, put the shotgun on him, and order him to put his hands on the roof of the car. Do that â¦

Or call in the patrol cars?

No. He might be gone by then. Might hear the radio squawk. Might hear the cars approach and bolt. Might get away again â¦

Dillon looked around. Looked up and down the street. Did not see the detective across the street, hiding in his car in the shadows. He walked to the front door of the garage, unlocked it, and went in.

He flicked on the lights. For a moment, he actually expected to see Jimmy there. Weird. Honey, I'm home. Oh, yeah, he's not here. He got clipped.

The Thunderbird was here.

Good. Good call. Dillon wasn't sure if Jimmy knew about the eighty thousand hidden in the T-Bird. Maybe he had known and had taken it out. Maybe Jack had refused to let him take the car, thinking there would be a weapon hidden in there. Jack was smart that way. Smarter than Jimmy had been. But, Dillon thought, not smarter than me. He smiled at the sight of Jack falling back. Had he killed him? If there had been more time, fewer people, he would have walked over and made
sure. Said something clever and final.
Hey, Jackie. How do you like St. Louis?
Then put a bullet in his head.

Then he saw it.

Light reflecting off the steel fabrication building across the street. Sweeping then coming back onto the road.

It was enough.

Hastings called in the patrol cars on his handheld radio. He got out of the car and walked carefully across the street. Holding the shotgun with both hands, he approached the door. A block down, one of the patrol cars turned out into the street, headlights on, but no siren or flashers.

He heard it then, the machinery kicking on as the garage door began to open, to his right, and it was happening, the door halfway open as Hastings turned and the nose of the Thunderbird poked out and then the whole car as the engine roared and Hastings raised the shotgun and fired. Buckshot spattering the rear window of the car and then it was gone from that space and out into the street, in front of the patrol car and turning left, going around the two officers in their unit and Hastings couldn't fire another round for fear of hitting the officers.

Hastings yelled, “Get him.” As if the men inside the car could hear and the patrol car reversed, tires squealing as they accelerated and flipped the car around, not quite 180 but almost, and the other patrol car whizzed by them to give chase.

Hastings ran across the street to the Jaguar.

Minutes later, he was trailing the two patrol cars, racing through intersections. In the distance, he could see the beige Thunderbird, its taillights bobbing up and down as it hit dips in the road going about eighty. God, Hastings thought. It could get bad. A killer with absolutely nothing to lose, blowing through a red light and slamming into a van with a family inside. It could get very bad.

The Thunderbird slowed, without hitting the brakes, and then made a left at the next intersection and Hastings saw the patrol car in front of him slowing, hesitating, and, shit, the lead patrol car losing it in the turn and slamming into a parked car, the second patrol car hitting its brakes, fishtailing, but holding the turn and then accelerating away. Hastings followed, briefly catching the sight of a white exploded airbag and the flourlike smoke emanating from the smashed car. Hastings kept going.

He heard voices squawking from his radio, calling for assistance now, south on Macklind Avenue, in pursuit of a 1989 Beige Ford Thunderbird, suspect Mike Dillon, armed and dangerous. Heard the call for assist and thought, hurry, man, hurry.

They hit Manchester Road, the same boulevard where it all began, same street but miles farther toward downtown, and the Thunderbird slowed near the intersection because there were sirens and lights approaching from the west, so the Thunderbird turned east and began racing toward Kingshighway, where there would be other patrol cars moving, closing in â¦ . The cars driving up an incline now as Kingshighway became a bridge and crossed over a viaduct, railroad tracks beneath.

Dillon saw the lights and siren coming north on Kingshighway. He slowed and cranked the wheel right, descending now into the road before Kingshighway, down toward the railways and the darkness. He took the road two-thirds of the way down the incline, then hit the brakes and cranked the wheel right again, bringing the car to a power slide then a stop. Out of the car then and running as the first police car raced down the incline and T-boned into the Thunderbird.

Dillon kept running.

Hastings had no choice. He stopped the Jag a few feet short of the collision, fully blocking the way. He got out and ran past the patrol car and the Thunderbird. He still had the shotgun.

An eighteen-wheel semi was making a turn at the bottom and coming
up the incline. Dillon ran to the right of it and then was alongside of it, the truck and trailer shielding him from a shot.

Hastings had to go to the left of the truck, its gears shifting and motor revving as it began climbing the road â¦ slowing as the driver inside saw the collided vehicles in front of him.

Dillon reached the railroad tracks, a classification yard, eighteen to twenty tracks spreading out like a series of fork tines, some with freight cars on them, some not; the Union Pacific and Burlington Northern moved through here alongside trains at a standstill. Dillon moved into the dark cover of it, a forest, and was out of sight by the time Hastings reached the bottom of the incline.

Dillon saw the massive orange locomotive, the hog, pulling a dozen boxcars and a half-dozen flats. He ran in front of its path, plenty of lead time, and moments later heard it pass behind him. The horn blaring after he was already gone, the engineer thinking he was just another transient, squatting in one of the nearby abandoned buildings. The train kept rolling, thacking out a steady beat. Dillon kept running, watching his steps so that he didn't trip. He was in good shape for his age, but he was not a jogger and he was losing wind. He saw a boxcar ahead to his left and ran to it. When he got to the other side, he leaned back against it and tried to rest and think.

Hastings waited for the Union Pacific line to pass by then ran behind it, ran over tracks, then slowed and stopped and looked.

More tracks, railroad cars, dark places where a man could crouch and hide. In the distance he could see Interstate 44, hear its traffic. He looked left and right, moved forward.

Behind the boxcar, Dillon too looked to his left and right. East was the Kingshighway Bridge, darker underneath it. But between this place and the bridge there was a lot of open ground. Police cars had been driving over that bridge only minutes ago. There could be more posted up there, maybe with a searchlight, the advantage of being able to look
down on him. To the west, more tracks. Go that way maybe half a mile and the tracks would converge. Less cover, but less light too. There was another boxcar on another track, southwest, maybe forty yards away, open ground between there and here, but he needed to move.

He moved.

And Hastings saw him. Saw him and raised the shotgun and fired. And missed. Hastings racked the slide, but Dillon was behind the boxcar now, putting his hands around the corner, and firing shots from his pistol.

Hastings ran to his left and took cover behind the boxcar Dillon had previously used to hide himself. Two more shots, but Hastings was sheltered then, and Dillon stopped wasting bullets.

Silence.

Hastings waited. Somehow, he knew he should wait.

Five seconds dragged by.

Then he heard the man call out to him.

“Hey,” Dillon said. “Hey.”

Hastings called back, “What?”

“Did I get you?”

Hastings processed it for a moment. The killer was calling him out. Enjoying it.

“Huh?” Dillon said again. “Did I get you?”

“Yeah,” Hastings called back. “Someone needs to call an ambulance.”

More silence. Then Hastings heard the man laugh.

“Ah, I didn't get you,” Dillon said. “Shit. Wasted shots.”