by Abbott, Jeff
Luke crashed into the bad art and a table of paint supplies. He blinked past the pain in his jaw and his chest, and saw Chris sauntering toward him, snapping fingers, dancing on the balls of his feet. Luke’s hands fumbled for an improvised weapons. His fingertips roamed across brushes, spilled water bottles, a dried, dirty palette. His hand closed on a metal canister.
A spray paint can.
‘I’m Necessary,’ Chris said. ‘To be given a high place in the emerging order. Everyone then will know my name. Know my art. Know my …’ Luke’s back was to Chris and as Chris lifted a foot to hammer a kick into Luke, Luke spun and fired a jet of red. A scarlet mist caught Chris in the face. He howled and lurched back. Crimson frosted his eyeglasses and Luke slammed a chair into his chest. Twice, hard. Chris fell.
‘They’ll know,’ Luke spat, ‘you don’t know when to shut the hell up.’ He ran for the door with five locks. He pulled on the knob but it held fast. He had to get out of here; this guy was nuts and maybe Mouser and Snow were on their way.
Looking at the garish paintings, he hadn’t noticed Chris lock the door behind him. He flipped the deadbolts. Still the door was locked. It required a key.
‘You’re not leaving.’ Chris staggered to his feet. Bleeding hard from his nose, like Luke was. Smiling through blood and red paint. ‘Not when you’re my ticket to glory, man.’
‘Give me the keys,’ Luke said.
Chris fell against a table and Luke could see a huge shard from the chair lodged near his ear, creating a bloody mess.
Luke charged toward him.
Chris yanked a drawer open.
Luke thought it would be a gun. Chris wouldn’t rely on fists now that he’d been hurt. Luke saw the fire escape on the other side of the window and ran for it.
A trio of shots shattered the window seconds after he stepped out onto the fire escape and slid down the stairs. Glass hit his hair. The sound was loud, bright in the afternoon air, cutting through the hubbub of traffic sounds of Wicker Park. He clattered down the fire escape and dropped onto the hood of Chris’s Porsche, denting it with his weight.
He heard Chris howl above him like a wounded creature.
Luke bolted out into a wide street, stumbling into the path of a taxicab, which berated him with a long drawn honk of the horn. He broke into a hard run. He had to get off the street before Chris saw him. He ran behind another squat building, decorated with garish neon, into a web of alleyways. Turn right, turn left, he came up behind a bakery that gave off a motherly scent of chocolate and almonds and a corner bar, open early for happy hour.
At the end of the alley was a construction fence. Luke scrambled over it and he heard the wail of a siren. Police. Fear opened like a fist in his chest. Someone had called, probably reporting Chris’s shots.
He ran through a passageway that backed a block’s worth of restaurants and storefronts. He thought of hiding inside a Dumpster but hiding might mean capture. He had to get free and clear of the neighborhood.
At the end of the alley, fronting onto a quiet street, a police patrol car wheeled past. Luke ducked behind a Dumpster. Peered around its edge.
The police car was gone.
He ran from the Dumpster’s shadow and tried a doorknob. Locked. He ran down to another door. Tested it. It opened onto a small kitchen way. Two men, short, Latino, glanced up from scraping a grille. Hamburger scented the air and he heard a radio playing a murmur of Spanish music.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, sidling past them and one of the cooks said, ‘What the hell, this isn’t the front door,’ in rapid Spanish.
Luke ignored him and hurried out onto the dining room floor. The restaurant was a small, spotless diner, a few tables, a chalkboard announcing burgers, sandwiches, a lunch special of meat loaf and garlic mashed potatoes. A few late lunchers sat huddled at the tables, including most of the wait staff. A waitress was erasing the boards to write the dinner specials.
Luke ran past her and the smells of comfort food and out onto a street. This avenue was busier, filled with cafes, a scattering of funky clothing shops, an Irish pub.
The police car turned back onto the street, toward him. He stepped into the nearest business, a small flower shop. The air was thick with the smell of blossoms and clean water. No one stood at the counter but the door’s attached bells jingled his arrival.
He saw a heavy plastic curtain - behind it were large plastic containers of cut flowers. He moved past the curtain, headed toward the back door.
The front door jangled behind him.
‘Hi, officer, can I help you—’ He heard a voice say on the other side of the curtain. Then silence.
The police had seen him come in. They were looking for him. Or his movements had incurred suspicion. He reached the back door, eased it open, closed it behind him. Through a small window he saw the officer move into position on the other side of the window.
He stumbled into the alley; it was already shadowed, the afternoon light dying in the narrow passage.
‘Officers!’ Chris practically screamed in his ear. ‘Here he is!’ His face was red with the slash of paint. He closed arms around Luke.
‘He shot up my studio, he’s nuts!’ Chris screeched through his painted clown’s grin.
‘Police! Stop!’ The cop hurried out into the alley.
Luke froze. ‘Help me,’ he said. ‘This guy tried to shoot me.’
The officer took a measured look at Luke’s face, seemed to study the hair, the bruises. ‘Luke Jameson Dantry. On the ground, now.’ The officer barked his orders.
Luke obeyed. ‘I’m unarmed,’ he said. ‘He fired the shots, sir, not me.’
‘Just like a criminal,’ Chris said. ‘He’s lying. I caught him.’
‘You on the ground, too,’ the cop ordered.
Chris obeyed.
Luke felt the officer patting him down, heard the clink of cuffs being removed from a belt. It took it back to the horrors of the bed in the cabin. ‘No, I don’t want to be handcuffed, please, please don’t, I’m not the bad guy here.’ His voice rose into a yell. He yanked one hand away, buried it under his chest.
The officer fought to regain control of Luke’s arms. ‘Stop resisting! Are you Luke Jameson Dantry?’ the officer yelled.
‘Yes, sir, and I have information on a dangerous group of people, please don’t, please don’t cuff me, please—’
The officer started yelling into his shoulder mike, still trying to slap the cuffs on Luke while Luke bucked and kicked. Luke turned his head and he saw a figure at the end of the alley.
Snow. Smiling at him.
Luke screamed, ‘Officer, look out!’
Her hand came up and Luke didn’t see the gun but the short sharp th-weets were loud in the shadowed alley. The cop dropped mid-sentence, two holes painting his face. The blood hit Luke’s hands and he retreated behind the trashcans.
Done, a snap of the fingers. Luke could hear her walking toward him, the click of her boots on the pavement. Not rushing, because she didn’t know if Chris was armed. He felt he could read her mind, understand her approach.
‘You’re Chris, right?’ he heard Snow say as she came forward. Friendliness in the tone.
‘Yes, I am.’ Chris stood, with ugly triumph. His genius had finally been recognized. ‘Are you here to help me?’
‘Baby, I am,’ Snow said, and she shot him.
Chris collapsed against the Dumpster. As he died the surprise faded from his eyes, replaced by the blankness of a world without anger.
‘Come on, schoolboy, time to go home,’ she said as she approached. Luke saw the policeman’s service piece, still holstered, and yanked the gun free.
He fired a blast at Snow, wide, then fired again as she took cover behind a pile of discarded pallets. The second bullet caught her - he saw her shoulder jerk, saw a stain on her jacket. She didn’t scream. She gritted teeth, like he’d only dealt her a wasp’s sting and aimed again. He fired and turned and ran down the alley. He vaulted a fence to the other
side of the street.
Her bullets powered into the fence, a bare inch from his hands as he went over the top.
He fell onto the wooden fence’s other side and ran.
He kept running, for six more blocks. No sign of her. He’d wounded her so badly she couldn’t give chase.
Sirens pierced the air. In a deserted alley Luke threw the policeman’s gun in a trashcan. If he got caught holding a dead cop’s gun …
He found a discarded newspaper and he wiped the blood from his hands and his face. He could hear the rumble of an elevated train - Chicago’s answer to the subway - and he ran until he saw the Damen station.
He fed money into a machine, it spit a card pass at him. My God. She killed a cop. I hope I killed her. The realization cut past the pain from the shrapnel. The officer radioed they had me - knew my name - and now he’s dead.
Luke stumbled onto a Blue Line train headed toward the Loop. Insanity. The officer was just doing his job. The entire city’s police force would be hunting Luke with an intensity he could barely imagine. He could not long evade their search. He sat down and studied the train’s map. His hands shook and he thought he might vomit when the train braked and then lurched back into motion. He tried not to look at anyone. No one seemed interested in him. He looked a little rough and grimy and no one wanted trouble, making eye contact with him.
What now?
He had one choice, and he had to get there before Snow and Mouser. Eric Lindoe. He had to find him.
Luke did not know Chicago well and he was unsure how to reach Eric’s bank. He got off at a station downtown. He wandered into a bookstore and used the coffee bar’s internet connection to find Eric’s business address at the private bank. It was on LaSalle Avenue, in the Financial District.
Ten minutes later, he stood outside Eric’s office in the fading sunlight. A news vendor nearby had a radio playing, and Luke drifted close enough to hear a report of a police shooting. An officer and a civilian down.
Only two. Chris was for sure dead. Which meant that he had only winged Snow, and she had slipped away. Every inch of his skin went cold. He kept seeing the officer’s face, a man just doing his job, and now dead for it. He pulled out the cheap cell phone he’d bought in Braintree, called 9-1-1, gave the operator a brief, precise description of Snow and Mouser as the shooters. Then he dismantled the phone, dropping its guts into the trash.
I’ll make them pay for you, officer, Luke thought.
Luke’s stomach rumbled. He bought a mustard-smeared hot dog and an apple juice from a street vendor and he ate the food without tasting it. Three bites into the dog, Eric Lindoe - kidnapper and murderer - hurried out of the high-windowed glass lobby of the skyscraper, glanced at his watch, and walked away. He wore a long coat, a cap pulled low over his face, dark glasses, and a look of utter guilt.
Luke followed him.
18
Eric Lindoe stepped onto the third car of a Brown Line train. Staying well back, Luke stepped onto the fourth car, nestled close to the doors. He hoped that at each stop he could step out to see if Eric disembarked.
The first stop Luke eased out a foot onto the platform, pretending to make way for departing passengers, holding the door. He got a couple of thank-yous, which was more attention than he liked.
Eric stayed on the car. So did Luke.
More stops; the train headed north. He felt like the doorman. The woman next to him had a smartphone; she was reading CNN’s news feed on it. Luke glanced at it over her shoulder. All bad news but worse than usual. An explosion in Canada had ruptured and shut down an oil pipeline. A recall of a million pounds of ground beef from a plant in Tennessee after several people in twelve states got sick yesterday with E. coli; a note sent to the local paper claimed the poisoning had been on purpose, an attack on the American food system. Authorities said they had no proof, yet, of malicious intent. A young actress of note was in rehab. The ‘Houston hobo’ shooting, with its unexpected tie to a Washington power player’s son, remained unsolved. A Chicago police officer and a bystander had been shot and killed an hour ago in Wicker Park.
His story.
The woman kept her back to him but she sensed his uncomfortable closeness and he saw her back stiffen. He moved away, locked his gaze to the floor. The police would dig into Chris’s mess of a life, and find that Chris sent money to buy a bus ticket, and the authorities would figure out the recipient was Luke. Chris’s mother would not remember her son’s cruelties, but rather Luke’s face. And Chris and the officer lay dead together in an alley.
He could not let Eric slip through his fingers. He had to force him to tell the truth.
Because, Luke knew, his life was gone. Destroyed, mangled in a way that could not be set right again. If he had self-destructed - turned away from a woman he loved, become a drunk, lost himself in work and neglected the rest of his life - then the fracturing of his life would have been easier to accept. But this? He had no idea why he had been destroyed. No idea why a man who called him son had used him and betrayed him so deeply. He had no trail to follow except Eric. If he lost Eric now, in the crowd, or because someone recognized him and grabbed him, he was finished.
The train stopped at the Armitage station. Eric rushed out, surrounded by a pool of other commuters, from the third car.
He would have to walk past Luke to reach the ground exit.
Luke hung back and followed, letting Eric storm a good ten feet ahead of him. The flock of commuters marched from the elevated platform to a metal stairway. Eric headed down and Luke risked drawing closer - only five people separating him from his kidnapper. If Eric glanced over his shoulder he would see Luke.
Eric reached Armitage Avenue, went through the exit gate. Luke stopped behind a pillar and waited, watched Eric hesitate - and then Eric crossed the street, under the elevated rails, dismissing the jeer of annoyed car honks with a polite, gentlemanly wave of his hand.
Luke followed, staying on the opposite side of Armitage, trying to keep him in view, trying not to be noticed. Thin trees stood on his side of the street and he tried to stay close to them, not be noticed, feeling vulnerable as he tracked Eric.
Lincoln Park - banners on the streetlights announced the neighborhood’s name - was a well-heeled neighborhood, high on charm factor. Storefronts, nice retail and restaurants, with apartments and offices on the higher floors. Eric turned into a small candy shop. Luke fought the urge to stop. He walked on, risking a single glance back. No Eric. Luke stopped at the end of the block. He felt horribly conspicuous just standing there. Five minutes passed. He walked back another half-block toward the candy store, paused to study the posted menu on an Italian bistro. When he dared a glance over his shoulder he saw Eric six steps out from the candy store - thank God I didn’t cross the street, Luke thought - heading on his original course. A bag of candies in his hand. Eric walked, glancing down at his phone, tapping out a number with his thumb. Luke let him pass his position, careful to keep his back turned toward Eric.
When Luke turned back, Eric was gone, as though the street had swallowed him whole.
Panic clutched Luke’s chest. He scanned the street again. Eric was tall. He couldn’t have vanished off the street.
Luke scanned the storefronts. A wine store, a small bookshop, women’s clothing boutiques, a fancy kids’ clothing store. Eric could have gone into any of them. He could be watching Luke from any of them.
Luke retreated into the doorway of a small bar. He could hear the thrum of music. He checked his watch. Two men moved past Luke, laughing, and opened the bar door, letting a blast of sound, a jangle of folksy guitars, and laughter rise from inside.
Eric stepped out of the wine shop. A neat paper bag in his hands. He didn’t glance over at Luke; he was fifteen feet ahead of him and across the street.
Candy and wine. Luke wondered if Eric was going to spend an evening with Aubrey. Had he just stepped back into his normal life after murder and kidnapping?
Luke walked slowly, trying to
keep a few cars in the diagonal angle between him and Eric. He crossed the street, dodging traffic. He gained on Eric, hurrying now, not running.
He got up five feet behind him, but he couldn’t grab him on the street. People would notice. And maybe he still had the gun he kept at Luke’s throat and ribs.
Eric spoke into his phone. ‘Yeah, a large vegetarian, thin crust. Yeah. For Crosby, Grace.’
Grace Crosby. Luke remembered the name; the young blogger who had raised the alarm that Aubrey was missing; it was the clue that had led him to Chicago.
Eric turned into a side street and Luke dropped back, let Eric walk ahead. He had gotten too close. A gaggle of young women, early twenties, loud, laughing, stylish and they knew it - walked between him and Eric and he used them as camouflage crossing the street. The women peeled away, heading down Armitage toward an Italian restaurant.
Eric walked up a stone flight of stairs into a condo building.
Luke followed.
Eric vanished into the entryway. Luke hurried to the bottom of the stairs and counted to ten. He walked up slowly. He couldn’t see into the building’s entryway; the glass was leaded and shaded.
An array of buttons announced the residents’ last names. Crosby was listed.
He could buzz in twenty minutes, pretend to be the pizza guy. But if he timed it wrong, if the pizza guy arrived while he was heading up the stairs or trying to find the right condo … he considered. He might not have enough time to make it. Then Eric would be on guard. Better to wait, not get caught in a time trap.
The pizza guy came up the side street twenty minutes later. Indian, looking harried, snuffling like he was losing a battle against a cold.
The pizza guy hurried up the steps and Luke took a chance.
‘You got a pie for Crosby?’
‘Uh, yeah.’
Luke flashed a twenty and a ten. ‘It’s mine.’