The Blade Itself (18 page)

‘Hey. Lunch. Nolan. The Top-Notch. Yeah.’ A pause. ‘Where?’ He began patting his pockets, and Sean pulled the pen from his own and slid it across the table. Matthews nodded as he wrote on the napkin. ‘Okay. We’ll be there shortly.’ He laughed. ‘No chance. See you in a bit.’ He closed the phone and picked up his burger.

‘What’s up?’

‘That was Willie. They just pulled a floater out of the river.’

‘Where?’

‘You know where the Stevenson and Archer cross?’

‘Yeah.’ Nolan chewed thoughtfully. ‘A smokehound who went for a swim?’ People could generally be counted on to die in stupid ways, but drugs always made it worse. He’d once handled a job where a nineteen-year-old BD, Black Disciple, had been found torched. At first he’d liked the rival Gangster Disciples for it. But the medical examiner said no, there weren’t any indications of a struggle, and no premortem injury besides the fire. Turned out the genius
had fallen asleep lighting his crack pipe, caught the mattress on fire, and was just too high to notice. Another criminal mastermind.

Detective Matthews shook his head. ‘Not this time.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because he’s got a bullet hole in his chest.’

Nolan looked longingly at the rest of his cheeseburger. Most of the time he made himself eat well, and the occasional burger was a rare luxury. He sighed. ‘Let’s roll.’

A gust of wind tagged them as they stepped out, the kind Chicago was famous for, brutal, cold, and hard enough you could lean into it, let it hold your weight. They’d left the blue Ford in a no-parking zone, but cops knew cop cars, marked or not. Nolan fired up the engine, changing his radio frequency from the seventh to the ninth district in case any news came over while they were en route. ‘He tell you where they were?’

‘Just said east side of the river.’

The drive up to Bridgeport took twenty minutes, but finding the scene turned out to be easy. A dozen squad cars sat beneath the overpass, their lights painting the underside of the freeway in garish sweeps of color. Traffic racing above made the dim space hammer and thrum. One of the beat cops from the district, a tall guy with wind-burned ears and the barrel-chested look of a tactical vest under his uniform – Peter Bradley, that was his name – spotted them and came over with a grin.

‘Hey, Detective. You slumming?’

‘Yeah. You can go home now, Bradley – the real cops have arrived.’

The beat cop laughed, started to lead them toward the water. ‘Detective Jackson is down here.’

‘What’s the story?’

‘Couple of kids saw the body, called it in.’

‘You take their story?’

‘Cutting class, said they came down here to hang out. They’re headed to the ninth now. Want me to have the sergeant save them?’

Nolan nodded. It wasn’t likely they were involved, but they might have seen something useful. That was crucial these days. The running joke was that in the war on crime, the Felony Review Board was France. Way they saw it, you didn’t have a witness, may as well surrender. Nothing like
CSI
, teams of researchers working round the clock to make the physical evidence. Unless you were dealing with a high-profile case, somebody white and North Side, it took upward of four months to get anything more complicated than a print back from the crime lab.

Amid the sea of blue-shirted beat cops, Detective Willie Jackson was easy to spot in green corduroy pants, a purple shirt, and a fedora with – no shit – a feather in the band. Before Nolan made detective, he used to wonder why they all wore hats. Once he got bumped up, he found that standing out made it clear to everybody who was in charge. It was a little thing that made a difference. Some of the guys, it tended to be the ones who wore big mustaches, they went so far as cowboy hats. He’d just gone with a brown leather golf cap. Made the point and kept his head warm.

Jackson stood with arms crossed, watching an evidence technician as she knelt beside the body. Nolan could smell it from here. Floaters were notorious. The scent lingered in your nostrils for hours, even after a shower.

‘You guys bring me one of them burgers?’ Jackson turned to them, nodded to Matthews, shook hands with Nolan.

‘Shit, no,’ Matthews said. ‘You mess with a man’s lunch, you’re on your own.’

Nolan ignored them, moving over to get a better look at the body. He didn’t know the evidence tech, a woman
maybe thirty-five, neat brown hair, but she clearly took her work seriously. She had the dead man’s arm laid out on the cold concrete as she painted his fingertips with black ink. The victim had washerwoman wrinkles on his hands, and she held each finger firmly to soak it with ink. It felt intimate.

When it came to bodies, Nolan had a method. He didn’t like to start with the face. Better to begin with the impersonal parts, the limbs, the clothing. That way you could look without emotion. There was a trick to being able to screen your vision, see only a part of the whole.

The arms showed no tracks, no sign of junk abuse. A tattoo marked the inner forearm, the ace of spades. The skin had started to get the green-brown tinge of a body that had been in the water a couple of days, and was marked by typical postmortem trauma, the result of scraping against God knew what on the river bottom.

His gaze circled inward. Black jeans, boots. A T-shirt that might once have been white, now dingy with river water and blood. Gases had swollen the belly – that was what made it float. A ragged wound gaped in his chest. At least the rats hadn’t been at it yet. Sometimes with a body out of the river, the only way to find a wound was to look where they’d eaten.

Finally, the facts straight in his mind, cataloged and filed, he looked at the man’s face.

Matthews joined him, wrinkling his nose. ‘I hate floaters.’

‘He’s pretty, huh?’ Jackson said. ‘Any takers that it’s homicide?’

Matthews knelt down. ‘He was shot somewhere else.’

‘The lividity, yeah.’ Jackson directed his voice toward the evidence tech. ‘You able to pull clean prints?’

She laid the arm down gently before breaking her quiet communion with the dead. ‘I won’t know for sure until we
try to find a match. It’s tricky when a body’s been in water.’

‘How long you figure he floated?’

She shrugged. ‘The skin hasn’t started sloughing. A couple days? The medical examiner can say for sure.’

Jackson nodded, clapping his hands together and rubbing them for warmth. ‘Man, I hate this weather. Not even Halloween and it’s cold enough to snow.’ His voice echoed and rebounded under the concrete of the overpass. ‘Nolan, you’re pretty quiet. What do you think?’

‘Run the prints.’ Nolan kept his voice low as he stared at the man’s face. ‘But that’s Patrick Connelly.’

Evan had played him.

Knuckles white on the steering wheel, Danny remembered the previous afternoon in the construction trailer, the scorched smell of old coffee, Evan’s feet propped up on the counter. Saying that he would make the call. Saying it too quickly. It had rung an alarm in Danny’s head, but he’d let it go.

Dammit.

The guy had known then what he was going to do. Been planning it. Things had never been under control.

You got it, kid. Welcome back to the dance
.

After the disastrous phone call, he’d found himself at loose ends. He wanted a place to think, and had set out for a bar in his neighborhood, but when he got there the idea of being so close to home felt sleazy, like bringing a mistress to the marriage bed. He’d gotten back in the truck, planning to head for another neighborhood, but ending up just driving, restlessly circling the city. He’d been doing it an hour now. Driving and talking to himself, punctuating his sentences with slaps to the wheel, going faster as the anger simmered in his belly.

No matter how careful he was, how much thought he put into it, Evan was a tidal wave, an earthquake, a tornado. A force of nature. Danny pressed down harder on the accelerator, feeling the buzz of pavement beneath his tires. You could rage at a whirlwind. You could pull your hair and scream logic and good sense. But in the end, if you stood in its path, you took your chances. Cars blurred as he hurtled
toward the skyline, weaving between lanes. There was no reasoning with a force of nature, no relying on its judgment. He swung left around a Mercedes. He’d hitched himself to the cyclone, and there was no way back.

A horn screamed beside him, the Mercedes squealing in panic as he merged into its lane, his quarter panel nearly against the rounded hood. He yanked the steering wheel back, too hard, the tires screeching, and for a moment he thought he might lose it, end up on two wheels and then in a slow, stuttering roll, this whole drama brought to a sudden close, but his nerves cut in, and he eased the wheel back, turning gently, cars all around him honking. Back in his lane, he took deep breaths, ignoring the angry look and middle finger from the driver of the Mercedes. Tapped the brakes to test them, and when they felt solid, started to slow.

Too much, too fast.

He flipped his hazards and worked his way over. He didn’t stop in the grandma lane, but edged all the way off the road, the tires humming and buzzing across the divots cut in the pavement as he stopped. He killed the engine and squeezed the steering wheel, the silence punctuated only by the rhythmic whir of cars blowing by.

His father sat in the passenger seat.

He looked the same, just the way he had when he’d visited Cook County Prison, the last time Danny saw him alive. His face weather-beaten and lined, but proud. Hard. The hands rough, the circular-saw scar white across the bridge of his thumb. A cigarette clenched in the corner of his mouth, firm and straight as the axle of the world. He stared at Danny, and that look came into his eyes, the measuring one. Appraising.

Judging.

Dad
…

In his mind, he heard the squeal of tires. Imagined Dad pumping at the brakes, trying to regain control, a cigarette still between his lips.

Imagined the decision. The choice, and its consequences.

The slow motion squeal of tires. The shatter of glass and banshee wail as steel kissed concrete. The way the truck had jerked up on its front wheels, fast at first but then slowing, pausing, maybe holding for a terrible instant before toppling over. The strange silence – so quiet, so embarrassingly quiet – after the truck came to rest upside down.

Dad. I..
.

In his mind, he could see the disapproval in his father’s eyes. Nine years dead, and still disapproving.

Danny shook his head. The skyline twinkled under velvet indigo skies. A semi passed in a rush of air that rocked the Explorer from side to side. Without the heater, the air grew swiftly colder.

Danny turned off the hazards, started the truck, and got back on the road.

The low thrum of blues bass rolled up his spine as he slotted a coin into the phone and punched the numbers.

‘You’ve reached Danny and Karen, we’re not in right now.. .’

Before, he’d thought he’d go home after the job. He’d imagined he might ease the pain of waiting by reminding himself of the life, and the woman, that his efforts were meant to protect. Instead he stood in a rib joint on Halsted, listening to the accusatory beep of his own answering machine.

‘Hey, Karen. Just wanted to let you know that I’m going to be late tonight. You know, work –’ There was a fumbling noise.

‘Danny.’ She sounded out of breath. He thought of her wrapped in a towel and running for the phone, and the ease with which he could picture it stung him. He adopted a haggard tone as he told her how work was keeping him late. How he was sorry about it. She was silent on the other end of the phone, and he could imagine her biting her lip.

‘Danny –’

‘I know. It’s just a crazy week.’

She sighed. ‘Okay.’

‘I’ll make it up to you, babe. I promise.’

She paused. ‘How about tomorrow night? We haven’t been out in a while. We could,’ her voice rose provocatively, ‘make it a date night.’

‘Sure.’ He paused. ‘I mean, I’ll try.’

She snorted on the other end of the phone. ‘Okay. See you whenever, then.’

‘Wait –’ But she’d already hung up.

Lying to Karen to keep her safe. Rationalizing Richard’s willingness to screw his workers as justification for ripping him off. Planning a kidnapping to protect the kid. He’d always dealt in shades of gray, but it was getting harder to spot the contrast.

Across the room, he saw a waitress set his order on the table, but he had another call to make. He slotted the coin, willing the guy to answer. Five rings, and then the familiar message, asking him for one good reason to care that he’d called.

Danny cursed, and waited for the beep. ‘Patrick, it’s Danny. I need your help. It’s –’ He paused, trying to collect his thoughts. How much could he leave on an answering machine? ‘It’s about that thing we talked about. Look, just call my mobile when you get this, would you? Day or night.’ He started to say more, thought better of it, slammed it in the cradle.

Then he went back to his table and ate his half slab in silence, trying to think of ways to tame the whirlwind.

In the dream he stood in a warehouse under bloody spotlights. Karen held the hand of a little kid in a rugby shirt, different from Tommy but the same. They both stared over Danny’s shoulder, slack-jawed in terror. He turned in agonizing slow motion, the movement taking years. Evan stood smiling, the gun raising as though of its own accord, like the pistol was moving his arm instead of the other way around. But instead of pointing at him, the gun fell on Karen and the boy. Before he’d seen the muzzle flare Danny had jerked awake, drenched in sweat, Karen a sheet-wrapped silhouette beside him, the digital clock reading 5:32.

He’d showered in a daze and tiptoed out, a ghost in his own life.

Now though, back in the Explorer, morning light bright and cold through his windshield, he felt better. Morning did that to him; he was a sucker for the promise of a fresh start. Evan might be a force of nature, but Danny knew his potential, could read the climate of his moods. As he turned into the Pike Street complex, some of his strange black hope even began to return. If this was to be a game, at least he knew the rules.