‘You want that too – me to take him down before he takes you down.’
‘Sure. And before he takes you down too.’
‘Just one problem,’ he said. ‘You helped him kill Christian and his mom and dad. You helped him kill Raima Minhas.’
‘Greg killed them. He set me up the same as you. I had reasons to hurt Christian and the others. And I got Christian to steal drugs from the pharmacy. I did that much. But Greg killed him and the others. If I didn’t help him pin the killings on you, he would shine a light on me for the cops. With my background, I’d go down hard.’
‘So you tried to send me down instead?’
‘I’m a sucker too.’
‘No, you aren’t. You’ve never been, or if you were, it’s been a long time since you got over it.’
‘Do I look like I could kill anyone?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Go to hell.’ She tried to get up. She almost made it.
‘So you’re just his tool?’ he said. ‘Nothing more?’
‘I didn’t say that. He wanted all of me. He wanted the parts no one can buy. The parts no one should give.’
‘And now he’s trying to kill you.’
‘See? I’m a sucker.’
He stared at her. ‘All right.’
She looked surprised. ‘Yeah?’
‘I won’t turn you in yet. You’ll help me go after Toselli. But if you lie again – if you mess with me – I won’t bother taking you to the hospital. I’ll dump you with the cops.’
‘All right,’ she said.
‘Then take off your clothes.’
She gave him a look.
‘I’m not taking you anywhere until I check you for wires. Toselli’s run you from every angle. Strip.’
She tried lifting her sweater, but the pain made sweat break from her forehead.
So he did it for her. When she was naked, he ran his fingers up the seams of her pants and sweater. He dropped them on the carpet and checked her shoes. Then he took out his phone again and dialed.
‘You bastard,’ she said.
But he called Rodman’s apartment. When the big man answered, Kelson asked, ‘Can you get Cindi to come home from work?’
‘What’s up?’
‘I have Doreen Felbanks. Shot in the ribs.’
‘You want to bring her to my apartment?’
‘She says Toselli forced her to do what she did.’
‘And you believe her, why?’
‘I’m figuring this out as I go.’
‘Best thing you could do is get away.’
‘I know that.’
Rodman was silent for a while, then said, ‘Why would you want to do this?’
Kelson said, ‘Because she’s really hot?’
‘Not funny. Tell her Cindi and I don’t like blood on the rugs.’
Before taking Doreen down the hallway to the elevator, Kelson spread a pack of sliced ham on the kitchen floor for the kittens and filled three bowls with water. Then he tried to get Doreen to take one of his Percocet.
‘I don’t do that shit,’ she said. ‘It’ll kill you.’
‘Like it killed Raima Minhas?’ he said.
‘Greg did that.’
‘No lies,’ he said.
‘He did it,’ she said again. ‘I got the pills from Christian – but Greg used them.’
‘Fine,’ he said, ‘go drug-free – let it hurt – die from shock.’
When they rode down and stepped out to the street, Kelson waved at Nuñez’s men. They didn’t wave back, but the driver started the Buick, and they coasted after Kelson and Doreen as they drove south through the city.
FORTY-EIGHT
When Kelson stopped in front of the Bronzeville apartment building, Rodman came down, lifted Doreen in his arms like a baby, and carried her up the two flights to his door.
Inside, he’d covered the couch with a shower curtain and laid blankets over it. He set her down and gave her a pillow for her head.
‘Looks like you’ve done this before,’ Kelson said.
‘One mess is like another,’ Rodman said.
‘Is Cindi here?’
‘A couple hours. Short-staffed at the hospital.’
Francisca Cabon and Dominick Stevens stood by the kitchen doorway, keeping away from the wounded woman as if she still could hurt them.
Rodman looked down at her. Her pale forehead was dotted with sweat. ‘If you die,’ he said, ‘I’ll throw you off the back porch. Just so you know, that’s what we do around here.’
Doreen managed to wink at him. ‘Sweet talker.’
‘Of course, I could throw you off right now.’
Then he and Kelson spent the afternoon asking her questions.
Toselli trusted just two men, she told them. These men dealt with the street dealers and, lately, the thugs who strong-armed pimps and hookers. She had no name for either of the men, though she’d seen them. One was stocky and black, maybe thirty years old, with a close-shaved beard. The other was white, with a medium build, hard features, and black hair streaking gray. Toselli kept these men at a cold distance, giving them directions over the phone, exchanging money and drugs in the backseats of cars or through open car windows.
‘Small circle,’ Rodman said, ‘but a man better have friends in a time of need.’
Doreen seemed to slip inward to the places in her mind that haunted her. She mumbled about Christian. She mumbled about Toselli.
Rodman asked where Toselli might hide, and his soft voice brought her out of herself. She said Toselli staged his drug sales from three apartments. She’d gone to one in Edgewater, in a pink high-rise overlooking the lake.
‘How about the others?’ Kelson asked.
‘Uh-uh,’ she said. ‘He’s para—’ A wave of pain seemed to wash through her, and she looked for a moment like she would vomit.
‘Paranoid,’ Rodman offered.
She seemed to swallow the pain. ‘Uh-huh.’
‘Weapons?’ Rodman asked.
That smile. ‘A lot. He collects them’ – then, from inside – ‘like dolls.’
‘Yeah, pretty dolls with gunmetal legs,’ Kelson said.
They waited until her eyes focused again, then asked about the people who worked for Toselli. Would they back him in a fight?
She said she didn’t know.
Cindi came in as the afternoon darkened into evening. She brought a bag of antibiotics, bandages, and painkillers. She scowled at Doreen. Then she filled a syringe with Demerol.
‘She doesn’t do pain meds,’ Kelson said.
Cindi jabbed her with the needle. ‘Now she does.’
Cindi flushed the wounds with saline. She pulled dirt from them with tweezers as if picking for fish bones. She swabbed them with alcohol. She dressed them with gauze. She said, ‘You do know, baby, you’re going to die if you don’t get this treated right.’
‘Unnh,’ Doreen said, as if she’d slipped beyond caring.
That made Cindi smile. ‘Demerol cloud,’ she said, and she filled a syringe with antibiotics. She injected it into Doreen’s flaccid arm, saying to anyone listening, ‘Cephalexin bolus. She needs an IV drip, but unless one of you clowns sidelines in hijacking medical supply trucks, she gets what I shoot into her skinny ass. Is that all right with you? I thought so. Now, goodnight to y’all.’ She disappeared into the bedroom.
Rodman looked thoughtful. ‘I test her patience.’
Doreen’s eyes glazed and her breathing slowed. Kelson and Rodman tried to ask more questions, but in the middle of mumbling about a West Side warehouse where she saw Toselli torture a rival drug dealer, she fell asleep.
FORTY-NINE
Kelson and Rodman knew the pink high-rise where Doreen said Toselli based his North Side drug operation. The Edgewater Beach Co-op Apartments used to be a prestige hotel. In its time, Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra stayed there. Then the city dumped a landfill and poured eight lanes of highway where beach umbrellas once shaded cocktail-drinking guests.
The hotel went bankrupt, and now the people who lived in the decaying remains dreamed of old elegance but woke to the sounds of rush-hour traffic.
Kelson found an online picture of Toselli that he could show to people who might identify him. Then he and Rodman drove north to the apartment building. When they walked into the sales office, a skinny man in a white turtleneck and thick-framed glasses was turning off his computer for the evening. He gazed up at Rodman from the desk, and his hand floated toward a phone as if he might need help.
In that gentle voice of his, Rodman said, ‘We’re looking for a friend.’
‘Not much of a friend, as it turns out,’ Kelson said. ‘A real bastard, it turns out.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t help,’ the man said.
Rodman said, ‘You don’t know that. His name’s Toselli. Show him.’
Kelson pulled up Toselli’s picture on his cellphone.
The man glanced at the picture. ‘I handle sales. I don’t deal with tenants.’
‘So the guy in the picture is a tenant?’ Rodman said.
‘I’m afraid I’ve never seen him,’ the man said.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ Rodman said. ‘Let’s turn on your computer and look.’
‘I’ve closed for the day.’
Rodman gave him the gentlest smile. ‘Another ten minutes won’t hurt, right?’
The man eyed his phone, then the computer. He looked up at Rodman. ‘I need to ask you to leave.’ But when Rodman reached across the desk and touched the power button on the computer, he jumped back as if Rodman’s great arm would uncoil and bare fangs.
‘You could say it’s a matter of life and death,’ Rodman told him.
‘Don’t hurt me,’ the man said.
The computer screen lit up. ‘I’m not talking about yours,’ Rodman said. ‘That’s the problem – everyone thinks it’s all about them. Now sit down.’
The man inched back to the desk.
‘See if Toselli has an apartment,’ Rodman said.
The man pulled up a database and searched. ‘No Toselli,’ he said, looking relieved.
Rodman glanced at Kelson. Kelson said, ‘Try Felbanks.’
‘I can’t do this,’ the man said, but he made the search. Again he looked relieved. ‘Nope.’
‘Could be a different place,’ Kelson said.
‘You think?’ Rodman said. ‘What was Bicho’s last name?’
‘Rodriguez.’
Without being told, the salesman made a third search. Then he looked like he’d eaten something bad. ‘We’ve got a Rodriguez on the sixth floor.’
‘First name?’ Rodman asked.
‘Gregory.’
‘Really?’ Kelson said. ‘Gregory Rodriguez? That just sounds wrong.’
Rodman looked at the computer screen for the details. ‘You got keys to the units?’
‘No,’ the man said, too quick.
‘Come on …’
‘I need to close the office,’ the man said.
‘We only want a peek,’ Rodman said.
‘I insist.’
‘What’s another ten minutes?’ Rodman asked.
The man said, ‘I need to—’
‘We prefer to ask nicely.’
They rode to the sixth floor. Then the salesman tried his master key on the door of the apartment he saw on the computer. He looked relieved again when it didn’t fit. ‘Must’ve changed the lock,’ he said, as if that was that.
But Rodman smashed the doorknob with the meat of his palm. The knob and lock mechanism punched through and fell on the inside carpet.
The salesman said, ‘Oh.’
Rodman nudged the door open, and he and Kelson went in.
In the front room, a TV on a wheeled cart played the evening news. There was no other furniture. Kelson turned off the TV and checked the cord. It ran through a timer, set to go on between five o’clock and eight each morning and evening.
‘Must comfort the neighbors,’ he said, and walked to a bank of windows. Across Lake Shore Drive, the water looked like a slab of slate in the fading light.
The doors to a bathroom and a kitchenette were open. The bedroom door was closed. Kelson checked the kitchen, Rodman the bathroom. Then Rodman went to the closed door.
‘No,’ Kelson said.
Rodman gave him a look.
Kelson tried the knob and pushed only an inch – until the door resisted. He went back to the TV, unplugged it, and wheeled the cart across the room. He said to the salesman, ‘Your tenant’s a bastard.’ Then he shoved the cart through the door into the bedroom.
A shotgun blasted, and the TV screen burst.
The salesman screamed.
‘Not bad,’ Kelson said. He reached through the doorway, found a light switch and flipped it. Unsure about other traps, he stared in from the front room. The window shades were down. Metal shelves, stocked with vials of prescription drugs and plastic-wrapped packages, lined the walls. There was no sign of Toselli, no sign that anyone had been in the room recently.
Kelson, Rodman, and the salesman went back into the corridor. A bald man and a graying woman had come out to check on the gunshot. The man scurried into his apartment when he saw Rodman. The woman held her ground. As she complained to the salesman about the disturbance, Kelson called Peters and gave him the apartment address. ‘Watch out for trip wires,’ he said.
FIFTY
Kelson spent the night at Rodman’s apartment along with Doreen, Francisca Cabon, and Dominick Stevens. Doreen slept fitfully on the couch, and when Rodman closed the door to the bedroom, the others stretched out on the floor.
At two a.m., Rodman’s one-armed friend Marty knocked. He said Nancy and Sue Ellen were safe in their house – lights out, doors locked, no sign of anyone trying to get to them. Police cruisers were passing the house every half hour or so. Two men sent by Stevens were parked up the block. Marty’s girlfriend was also keeping watch.
As the sun rose the next morning, Cindi came from the bedroom. Stevens was sleeping on a rug with Francisca nestled in his arms and their baby nestled in hers. Doreen lay awake, staring silently at Kelson, who stared back and said, ‘DeMarcus says I’m too trusting. I look too hard for the good in people. I sometimes think I’m just stupid.’
Cindi asked Doreen how she was feeling.
‘Like hell,’ Doreen said.
Cindi did a quick checkup and said, ‘No fever. Maybe you’ll live.’ She filled a syringe with Demerol.
‘I don’t do that,’ Doreen said.
‘Shut up,’ Cindi said and stuck her.
‘Bitch,’ Doreen said.
Cindi filled another syringe with antibiotics and stuck her again.
Kelson stayed on the floor while Cindi went back into the bedroom, put on nurse’s scrubs, and left for work. He stayed as Stevens got up to shower and Francisca fed her baby. He watched as Doreen seemed to float away on another Demerol cloud. He said, ‘Because, you know, it could be love.’ Then he watched as Rodman came from the bedroom and scrambled a dozen eggs.
Before breakfast was ready, Kelson got up and went to the window. The sky hung heavy and gray over the neighboring buildings. In the gauzy morning light, the tenements looked thick and brown. A car and a van passed on the street. A woman walked past, pushing a stroller. A man stepped out from the side of a building – and stared up at Kelson.
‘Toselli?’ Kelson said.
The man raised a rifle to his shoulder, aimed, and fired.
The window shattered and a bullet passed within an inch of Kelson’s head and lodged in the ceiling. Plaster dust rained on him like ash.
Every sane fiber of Kelson’s brain told him to drop to the floor. Every properly processing synapse switched from fight to flight. But the rewiring that enabled him to live alone with two kittens and run an investigation business hadn’t been tested in a situation quite like this. His brain all but sparked. He stepped close to the window and yelled at Toselli. ‘Two strikes, asshole! A shattered TV and a broken window.’
<
br /> Toselli pulled the trigger again.
Another bullet flew past Kelson and sank into the ceiling.
Rodman tackled him, mashing him to the floor.
Kelson looked the big man in the eyes so close he could have kissed him and said, ‘Three strikes.’
‘You stupid son of a bitch,’ Rodman said.
‘Let me go.’
‘You going to yell out the window?’
‘No.’
‘Truth?’
‘Always.’
Rodman got off him. Kelson crawled to the coffee table where he’d left his KelTec overnight. He went back to the window and fired three times down at the street where Toselli had stood.
The bullets pocked the concrete sidewalk. Toselli was gone.
Rodman would’ve broken Kelson’s arm if Kelson hadn’t dropped the gun.
‘This is what gives my neighborhood a bad name,’ Rodman said.
FIFTY-ONE
Ten minutes later, Rodman and Kelson sat at the kitchen table. Dominick Stevens was packing his bag and his briefcase, getting the hell out of a place Rodman falsely promised would keep him safe. The baby cried on Francisca’s shoulder, and she yelled at Stevens, calling him a cobarde – a pussy, a coward – for running at the first gunshot.
‘Two gunshots,’ he said. ‘Five, if you count this idiot’s. And I’m not running. I’m walking away. You should come with me.’
‘Where to?’ she said. ‘Your house? That man’s been there. My apartment? He’s been there too.’
Rodman looked at Kelson. ‘He must’ve followed us back from Edgewater last night. I watched but didn’t see him.’
‘Someone from his crew could’ve followed. Could’ve been anyone.’
‘Unless Doreen tipped him,’ Rodman said. He went to her. She was floating – somewhere.
‘Nah,’ said Kelson.
Rodman searched her until he found her phone. He checked call history and shook his head. ‘Must’ve followed us from Edgewater,’ he said again.
Stevens said he was going to his office. He would surround himself with people who could protect him. He would stay in touch.
‘You’re stupid to go,’ Rodman said.
‘Stupid to go, stupid to stay. Right now, nothing looks smart,’ Stevens said.
Trouble in Mind Page 20