I gave McGlade a shake, and one eye peeked open.
“Is it over?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Did we live?”
I nodded again.
He smiled. “For a moment there I thought we were in trouble.”
I smiled back. “Nice work, Sundance.”
“You soowe me some sex.”
I disentangled myself from Harry and managed to stand up, albeit painfully. A few yards away, the he li cop ter powered off and a beaten- up Herb hopped out. He hobbled over to us, his face awash with concern.
“Jack! Are you okay?”
He came to me, approaching slowly, and I threw my arms around his shoulders and hugged him.
“Thanks, Herb.”
I felt his strong arms patting my back. “Somebody’s gotta save your ass.”
After the male- bonding, I pulled away and sized him up. Herb didn’t look much better than I did—skinned knees, bleeding head, torn shirt.
“What happened?” I asked.
“A little car trouble. Nothing serious. I was lucky my phone didn’t break; I wouldn’t have been able to call for the chopper.”
I heard a very faint sound. It was music, some heavy metal song from the eighties.
“Speaking of.” Herb pointed. “Your pocket.”
I stuck my hand in and pulled out Harry’s phone, surprised it had survived. I’d have to pick up one of these things.
“Daniels,” I answered.
“Lieutenant? Is that you? It’s Hajek, at the crime lab. Are you the one that sent me the fingerprint from this phone?”
“Yeah. What have you got?”
“I got a trace. It belongs to a postal worker named Carey Schimmel.”
I knew that name.
“He was the guy who delivered the extortion letter to the superintendent’s office, the one covered in BT.”
And it suddenly made sense why the Chemist was so paranoid about leaving prints. Postal workers are government employees, and they get fingerprinted when they’re hired. Schimmel’s prints were on file. I remembered his brief statement, and then wanted to kick myself.
“He said he wore gloves. But there were no other prints on that letter, other than from people at police headquarters. Dammit, how did we miss that?”
Hajek groaned. “It was staring us right in the face. A dozen people in the post office would have touched that letter, left some prints. But none of them did, becaus. Schimmel was the only one who handled it. Did we even check to see if headquarters was on his route?”
“No,” I said, feeling like an ass. “Does he have a record?”
“No, he’s clean. But I’ve got his current address. He lives in Forest Glen.”
That was a Chicago neighborhood on the north side, only a few miles away.
“Call the super. Get a warrant. We’ll be there in two minutes.”
“Hold on, I’m sending you a JPEG of his driver’s license picture.”
I shared the information with Herb, and the chopper pi lot, a woman called Leaky. She radioed base to get coordinates. Next, I approached Harry, who appeared to have successfully snapped his shoulder back into place, but not without consequences. He was moaning, and tears had left some clean trails in the filth on his cheeks.
“Got any morphine on you, Jackie? Or crack?”
“You’ll get some help soon, Harry.”
“Going to drop me off at the hospital?”
“No. You’re staying here.”
“No I’m not.”
“We’ll send an ambulance for you.”
“I’d like that, but I have to come with.” He pointed to his mechanical hand, still locked on to the ladder rung. “It won’t come off.”
Against Herb’s protestations, we helped McGlade into the bird.
“No grab- ass,” Harry warned him.
“I’ll try to restrain myself.”
“No reach- around either, Sir Eats- A-Lot.”
“I did save your life. How about a thank- you?”
“Be honest. The reason you came charging in here so fast is because you thought I had a cruller in my pocket.”
“God, you’re an asshole.”
Once we were airborne, I played with Harry’s phone and managed to access the Internet. After sifting through an extraordinary number of e -mails that involved porn, much of it the chunky booty variety, I found the picture from Hajek. Carey Schimmel was an average- looking white male, thirty- five years old, dark blond hair, and brown eyes. I remembered those eyes. They were the same eyes I saw in Rec ords.
I Googled “Carey Schimmel” and got a hit that referenced a lawsuit from five years ago. An old newspaper article:
SLAIN WOMAN’S BOYFRIEND LASHES OUT
Merle and Felicity Hotham of Cicero settled out of court today in a wrongful death suit brought against the city of Chicago. The Hothams claimed the police department’s late response to a 911 call resulted in their daughter’s death.
Tracey Hotham, 29, died last August at the hands of convicted murderer Marti. Welch, during an attack that lasted over fifty minutes. Hotham reportedly dialed the 911 Emergency number just as Welch entered the Chicago apartment she shared with her fianc é, Carey Schimmel. She was beaten, raped, and strangled in a 53- minute ordeal that ended just before the police arrived.
Sources say the settlement, an undisclosed sum, was well below the two million dollars in damages originally sought. Schimmel was reportedly outraged at the announcement, calling the parents “cowards,” and was removed from the courtroom when he began to chant “the system doesn’t work.”
Welch, sentenced to life for the attack, is currently serving time in Jolie. State Prison.
I shared this with Herb.
“I’d be pissed too,” he said. “But not enough to poison half the city and try to blow up forty thousand people.”
We set down a block away from Schimmel’s house, in an empty public baseball field. I checked my ankle holster, which still held the AMT. Leaky unlocked the he li cop ter’s anti-riot arsenal, and offered Herb a 40mm multi-launcher with ten nonlethal beanbag rounds. The large silver canisters were packed with gunpowder, but instead of a lead bullet or buckshot, the projectile was essentially a small, woven Hacky Sack. It hit with enough velocity to knock down a three-hundred-pound linebacker.
“You sure you’re ready for this?” Herb asked. “You look pretty banged up.”
“I’ll manage. How about you? This is a long way from Robbery.”
“I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” Herb dropped the final cartridge into the weapon’s cylinder and snapped the breach closed. “You think he’s still in town?”
I thought about the Chemist, hating the police so much that he spent years planning this elaborate revenge scheme.
“I’m sure of it. He needed to hear the boom.”
“How about the warrant?”
“Probable cause. We believe that retired CPD officer Jason Alger is being held inside Schimmel’s residence against his will.”
“That works for me.” Herb grinned. “Partner.”
He helped me out of the chopper, and we went to go pay the Chemist a visit—one he wasn’t expecting, and definitely wouldn’t enjoy.
Chapter 44
THE EXPLOSION IS SPECTACULAR. Standing in his backyard, Carey Schimmel actually feels the ground shake beneath him, and he’s seven miles away. The Chemist has been dreaming about this day, this moment, for so long, and it has finally arrived.
After six years, three months, and fifteen days, he’s finally fulfilled.
He watches the smoke cloud drift upward for several minutes, then goes back into the house and turns on the television to see the devastation up close.
The first reports are sketchy, but he expected that.
“Something has exploded in the village of Skokie. We’ll have more information as reports come in.”
There is much speculation. A gas line? Terrorists? The first cameras on the scene show sm
oke and wreckage. He micro waves some popcorn and waits expectantly for the video of the slaughter to be broadcast.
CNN has a special report. So does Fox. Channel 5 and channel 9 interrupt the regularly scheduled programming with breaking news. But no one knows anything. He wonders if he should call, help them out. Maybe he’ll do that tomorrow, from the cabana he’s renting in Mexico. Reveal everything about the Chemist, and what Chicago has covered up.
“I got them, Tracey,” he says. “I got them good.”
This is how revenge tastes, and it is delicious.
“Just in, the source of the explosion has been pinpointed to the Northside Wate. Reclamation Plant, on 3500 West Howard Street. So far, there have been no reported casualties.”
The smile freezes on Schimmel’s face. What is this, a cover-up? A government conspiracy?
He watches it, live. There’s the plant, blown up. The debris, scattered all over the street. Is this some kind of old footage, used to spin the truth?
No. These are definitely pictures of Skokie, and it’s happening right now. But how could they have figured it out? How could they have—
There’s a banging on the front door. “Carey Schimmel, this is the Chicago police!”
Schimmel doesn’t think, he acts. He assumes they’re also covering the back door, so he enters the kitchen, climbs onto the sink, opens the window, and crawls out face-first. The money is still in the house, but he isn’t considering the money. Escape is not an option. He means to kill as many cops as he can before they take him down.
He rolls onto the lawn and runs to the greenhouse. To get his jet injector. To make his last stand.
Chapter 45
FREEZE!”Schimmel didn’t freeze, and I didn’t fire; he was ten yards away and moving fast, and with the short-barreled AMT I’d just be wasting bullets. The quick glimpse I caught didn’t reveal if he had any weapons or not.
“Herb! Around back!”
I limped in pursuit. My ankle was swollen from the truck leap, but the pain was minimal compared to my resolve. I wasn’t going to let this guy get away.
He stopped in front of the greenhouse—a large glass structure that took up much of his backyard—and fussed with the door. I closed to within twenty feet and yelled, “Hands in the air!” He didn’t comply, and I fired twice, but he was moving fast and crouching down, and I missed both shots. He was inside his garden of death before I could adjust my aim.
Herb met me at the greenhouse entrance, told me to stand back, and pumped two beanbag rounds through the locked door, shattering the glass. I went in first, my weapon in a two-handed grip, and was enveloped by moist heat.
It was big, bigger than it seemed from the outside. About the size of a small house, with opaque plastic partitions serving as walls. All around me were plants, rows and rows of plants, some of them as high as the glass ceiling. Flowers, in every imaginable color, trees, vines, even a table covered with brownish moss. It smelled fragrant, tropical, and the sweat had already broken out on my brow.
There were plenty of places to hide. The safe thing to do would be to wait for backup. Or maybe burn the entire structure to the ground. The foliage looked harmless, but I knew better. Each lovely bit of flora promised a different, horrible death.
I moved slowly, keeping my elbows tucked in, trying not to touch anything. Herb lumbered in a few steps behind me, and he went left while I stayed right. We would work the perimeter first, moving in opposite concentric circles until we reached the center.
I crept past a bed of striking red flowers, but restrained myself from gathering up a bouquet. Beyond them was a large compost heap, a refrigerator, a workbench, a pallet of stacked brown boxes—
I froze, my feet growing roots.
“Oh, Jesus.”
Those weren’t boxes. They were beehives. And the bees noticed my arrival, several hundred of them swarming out of the box and over to me, to investigate the intruder.
I tried to remember everything I’d ever learned about bees, and I’d learned a lot since almost dying from that sting years ago. They were attracted to sugar, and perfume. They attacked the color black. They attacked when provoked. They hated sudden movements, or loud noises. After a bee stung you, its stinger pulled out and it died, but the stinger continued to pump poison into your body. Bees were attracted to CO2, to your breath. Each year, a hundred people in the Unite. States were killed by bees, mostly because of allergies like mine. Once a bee stung you, it released a pheromone that made other bees sting in the same spot. But all the experts agreed that if you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you.
All of these things swirled through my head as the bees buzzed around me. One landed on my bare arm. Another flew into my face, bouncing off my nose. I held my breath, shut my eyes, and tried to stop trembling. I needed to back up, to get out of there, but my feet wouldn’t move. This was so much worse than the cockroaches. This was worse than anything I’d ever encountered. I was too scared to even speak.
Buzzing, so close to my ear that I flinched. Bees on my hands now, on my neck, on my face. Some of them crawling. Some of them content to just stay there and find the best place to sting.
“Afraid of bees, Lieutenant?”
I squinted, saw the Chemist standing next to the hive, about eight feet away from me. He had a jet injector in his hand. I raised my gun.
“If you shoot, they’ll sting you,” he said. “These are very ill-tempered bees. I don’t like keeping them around, but pure honey has quite a lot of botulism spores in it. It’s not the easiest bacteria to culture. Required a lot of trial and error. Years of it, in fact. I’ve been stung dozens of times. Painful. Normally I don’t come in here without my netting on. Why are you so frightened? Are you allergic?”
I was trying to aim at his center mass, but my arms were shaking too badly and I couldn’t steady the gun. I was completely, utterly helpless. A bee landed on my lip and tried to crawl up my nose. I flinched, and almost started to cry.
“Allergic, I bet. You look absolutely terrified. Quite a change from the tough cop on the phone. I tell you what—I’m going to do you a favor.”
He took a slow step toward me, and I felt my knees begin to buckle.
“This is loaded with ricin”—he held up the jet injector—“derived from the castor bean. It will kill you quickly. I can’t promise it will be painless, but it is a much better way to go than anaphylactic shock, gasping for breath.”
Another step closer. Now my knees actually did give out, and I fell onto my butt. The bees didn’t like the sudden movement, and their buzzing became louder.
“What did you do?” the Chemist asked me. He seemed oddly calm. “Did you drive the truck out of the festival, to the plant?”
I nodded, forcing myself to do something. I thought about bravery. I’d been afraid many times before, but never to the point where it had incapacitated me. Even while in the truck, facing certain death, I’d been able to function. Why should a few lousy bees turn me into an invalid?
“Where is the rest of your squad? I only saw the fat guy. Only two of you came for me?”
I said, “More are coming,” and surprised myself by how strong it came out.
“I’d better hurry then. I was thinking this was a final siege, an Alamo. But if it’s only you two, then I can kill you both and get away. Then I can start all over again.”
He raised the jet injector and took another cautious step forward. I brought up the AMT. My hand was no longer shaking. If I died, I died. Once I accepted that, a lot of the fear went away.
Schimmel paused, looking unsure.
“If you shoot me, they’ll sting you.”
“Fair trade,” I said, my teeth clenched.
“Jackie! Duck!”
I looked to my left, and saw McGlade standing a few yards away, holding a semiautomatic in his left hand. He fired six times. Predictably, all six shots missed Schimmel, the bullets burying themselves into the stacked wooden beehive.
The bees weren�
��t happy. Innately sensing their attacker, they swarmed on Harry.
I rolled backward just as Schimmel sprayed a cloud of ricin at the space I used to occupy. He jumped to the right, then scurried away to the rear of the green house.
I continued to crab-walk backward, to get away from the bees, but they pretty much ignored me, focusing their wrath on McGlade. He ran past me, a cloud of bees around him, and then doubled back and went in the opposite direction, the whole time screaming, “THEY’RE BITING ME! THEY’RE BITING ME!”
A BOOMto my right, and a sharp cry. Beanbag rounds were used to induce what law enforcement officers called “pain compliance.” They weren’t lethal, but they hurt so badly you wished they were. I limped after the sound and saw Schimmel writhing around on the ground, next to a small aquarium. The jet injector lay a few feet away. Herb was standing over him.
“Where’d you hit him?” I asked.
“Stomach. Want me to peg him a few more times?”
“No need. I think he’s been subdued.”
Schimmel moaned, doubling up into the fetal position.
“You got cuffs?” Herb asked.
“No. You?”
“No. There’s probably something back in the chopper. I’ll—”
The Chemist rolled up to his knees and reached for the aquarium beside him, lifting. Before he had a chance to throw it at us, Herb fired another beanbag into his legs.
Schimmel fell, the aquarium crashing down on top of him, dumping water and rocks and brightly colored shells onto his body.
He gasped once.
And then he began to scream.
Chapter 46
IFOUND OUT LATER THAT the brightly colored creatures in that aquarium were called cone snails, and their toxin was among the most poisonous in the animal kingdom.
The snails apparently hadn’t liked their environment being disturbed in such a rough fashion, and moments after landing on Schimmel, they showed their disapproval.
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