With my free hand, I pat our interlocked ones. “But you didn’t. Right? You didn’t.”
She blinks out of it, nods. “Right.”
I reach into my pocket for my phone. “Call your boy,” I say. “Hear his voice.”
“That’s okay.”
“No, c’mon.” I unlock my phone, hand it to her. She dials and holds the phone to her ear.
“Niño, it’s me. How are you doing? How was your day?” She listens, her eyes filling with tears, her face doing all sorts of contortions to keep from a full-throttle cry.
It’s like I’ve never seen her before, like she’s a different person, not guarded and stiff but raw and emotional and vulnerable.
We go over a bump. We’re just about to Stroger, where Carla’s going to be examined and stitched up, and I’m going to be examined a very different way, by COPA and IAB, over the officer-involved shootings tonight.
“Thank you, partner.” Carla hands me the phone. She looks like she’s going to say more, or wants to. “Thank you, Billy,” she says.
Chapter 68
WE END up at Salem’s Inn. Nobody feels like hitting the Hole tonight. The patrols are over there, living up the victory, but the four detectives seemed to collectively agree that while booze was in order, a big crowd wasn’t.
Even Carla joins us, though she drinks soda water. The left side of her face is bandaged, bruised, and swollen. She got twenty stitches on her cheek at Stroger.
“Only one lookout on the rooftop,” I say wistfully, for about the tenth time, as I down my bourbon. The good stuff, best Salem’s has, Four Roses Single Barrel, because Soscia’s buying, whether he fucking knows it or not.
He knows it. He’s feeling good and bad at the same time. Good because the raid was a success. With the fireworks outside, and the noise generated by all the blenders and coffee grinders cutting and mixing the heroin, nobody heard us coming. The rooftop lookout with the Tec-9 and cell phone never completed his phone call before I shot him. The unarmed guy at the front porch didn’t know what the hell was going on, apparently, when the undercover flirting with him pulled a small-caliber pistol out of a bag that was supposed to be holding her dog’s poop.
The final count: 8.4 kilos of heroin and six hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in cash. That’s a big take. That’s a press conference for Sosh tomorrow.
But Sosh fucked us on the roof, and he knows it. That noise we heard on the fire escape, the backup unit coming to help—the first cop up was Sosh. He’d worked this thing for weeks; this heroin bust was his. But the moment he heard my distress call, he started running for the fire escape. The patrols told me they’d never seen a guy that big move so fast. That’s Sosh. He’ll try not to let on, but the bad intel he gave us, that’s gonna stay with him for a long time.
Rodriguez takes off before the rest of us, but we’re too exhausted to give him shit about his wife. Sosh heads to the bar. I look at Carla.
“Don’t ask me how I’m doing,” she warns. “You can’t keep doing that my-poor-sick-partner thing.”
“Yeah, but tonight’s different.”
“Whatever. I’m fine, Detective. Thanks to you.”
She tries to smile, but it hurts too much.
Sosh comes back with a couple of shots of Jäger, which is a horrible idea. “All right, Griffin, now that you’ve shared a near-death experience with us—”
“Not with you I didn’t. You put me in a near-death experience.”
“Ah, semantics,” he says. “It’s time you tell us whether you’re black, Hispanic, Asian, or what-the-fuck.”
She almost spits out the club soda in her mouth. She manages to swallow and busts out laughing, touching her bandaged face while doing so. “Ow.”
I shoot Soscia a look, and he looks back like he can’t understand why I’d be shooting him a look.
“So…where’s your money?” she asks Sosh.
“I had you as a PR through and through. Harney has you half black, half Hispanic.”
By now, my hand is covering my face. Soscia ain’t so PC on his best day, and he’s thrown a lot of whiskey down the hatch tonight.
“Why Puerto Rican?” she asks.
“Don’t answer that, Sosh. Do. Not. Answer.” I have no idea what Soscia will say. I just know it won’t be good.
“My father was from Jakarta,” Carla says. “My mother was Colombian. They met at the University of Chicago, where he was getting a PhD in aeronautical engineering and she was an undergrad. Okay?”
Sosh looks at me. “I don’t even know how to make fun of that. Where the hell is Jakarta?”
“Indonesia,” she says.
“Where the hell is Indonesia?”
She laughs again. “Southeast Asia, you half-wit.”
“Okay, so you’re half Asian, half Latina?”
“If that makes it easy for you, Soscia, go for it.” She looks over at me. “Everybody good now?”
“And you became a Chicago cop.”
“What did you expect me to do? Open a dry cleaner that has salsa dancing?”
Sosh likes that. He points at her. “You’re lightening up, Griffin. I knew we’d get there.”
“Nah.” She stirs her drink. “My mother’s father was a cop in Colombia. Bogotá. He was killed by the narcos, in fact. He was one of the first cops who actually tried to stop the Medellín cartel back in the seventies, before it was fashionable to do so. So I always kinda had the cop thing in my blood.”
“So your mom must be proud of you,” I say.
She thinks about that, and her expression changes, not so easy to read when half her face is swollen and bandaged, but something different, like she was holding something in, and my innocuous comment unlocked the door. Her eyes glisten again with tears, as they did in the ambulance.
She mumbles something about needing the bathroom and rushes away.
Chapter 69
PORTER LIKES to catch the Sox from the club-level seats when he can. Sometimes—most of the time—it’s good to keep a low profile, but other times, it’s good for his mushrooms to see him in a Boss suit or in two-hundred-dollar seats, to let ’em know he has a few bucks in his pocket, which means he must know what he’s doing.
This is one of those times.
Giolito’s getting shelled by the Astros, and Anderson seems to be the only guy capable of sustaining consistent offense in the entire starting lineup, but so what? It’s a mild, breezy night, the Jameson is giving him a warm buzz, and it’s a ball game, for chrissake.
“Any trouble getting in?” he asks when Carla Griffin sits down next to him. God, does she look awful. Like she lost a fifteen-round fight.
“No. Not sure why I have to come to the Cell to meet with you.”
“Not the Cell anymore, sweetheart. And you have to come here because it’s where I am. So talk to me. What’s he doing?”
Tilson pops one into short center, ending the fourth, stranding two runners. Chased a bad pitch is what he did.
“You heard about last night,” Carla says.
“I did,” he says without looking at her. “You’re lucky to be alive, sounds like. Harney put down the mutt, yeah? So now you got warm feelings toward him?”
A simple question, but not so simple an answer, apparently. Eventually, Carla says, “Harney seems like a good cop, yeah.”
“So tell me about this good cop. He’s still tracking the ID of the Jane Doe?”
“Yeah. Thinks he traced her to an orphanage in Romania.”
Fuck me, Porter thinks to himself. I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn’t have any at all. He sips on his whiskey, counts to ten. Disco won’t be happy.
“You got my burner, right?” he asks. “I want updates daily now. Probably no good meeting every day. I want to know everything he does with this girl.”
“Why, Porter? I mean, shit, what’s he doing that’s so wrong?”
Maybe he should give her a taste of what’s going on. Not everything, but a taste. From her perspective, i
t doesn’t make a lot of sense, Porter being all concerned about some dead prostitute. He doesn’t need Carla getting too worked up about this.
Maybe he’ll read her in someday. But not today.
“You’re my eyes and ears, lady. That’s all you are. Unless you don’t like our arrangement.” He turns and looks at her. “Is that it? You don’t like our arrangement?”
She bites back a response. “Just give it to me.”
“You holding back on me?”
“I told you—” She catches herself, lowers her voice. “I told you everything. He thinks she came from Romania. He’s sending them photos. That’s it.”
“He didn’t say anything about going back to the house and searching it again?”
“What? No,” she says.
“You sure?”
“I didn’t hear anything like that.”
Well, Porter sure heard about it from Disco. Disco was practically busting a nut after his boys went over to that house only to have Harney walk in and nearly catch them. Shots fired and everything—yet Harney never called it in. And apparently didn’t mention it to his partner, either.
This is bad.
Porter reaches between his legs and hands her a paper bag. “A week’s worth,” he says.
“A week?” She reaches into the bag. “What, you’re tightening my leash?”
“Maybe I am. The fuck are you doing?”
She’s opening the bottle is what she’s doing, unscrewing the top, popping one out, looking at it in the palm of her hand. Jesus, why doesn’t she just put it up on the jumbotron for the whole fuckin’ crowd to see?
“Same as always,” Porter says. “Same color, same name. Vit-a-gin. Why the paranoia?”
Carla confirms that for herself, then pops the pill in her mouth, does a dry swallow. “Harney found one,” she says.
“He found one of these pills?”
“Apparently I left one on my chair. Or maybe he was snooping. I don’t know.”
“What’d he say? Does he know—”
“No, he doesn’t know. He thinks they’re ginger pills.” She rubs her throat. “His wife took ginger when she was pregnant, for the nausea. He thought I was pregnant.”
“Which would be a perfectly good thing to tell him,” says Porter, “if not for the fact that you’d have to have a big swollen belly soon, and then a baby. So I assume you didn’t tell him that.”
“Thanks, but I’m not a complete idiot.”
“You went with cancer?”
“Yeah.” She shrugs, looks away from him, shakes her head. “I didn’t know what else to say. I was on the spot. It worked before, right?”
“So now you have to act like you have cancer.”
“Relax,” says Carla. “I told him it was in remission but I’m doing follow-up chemo periodically. He won’t ask me anything else about it. I mean, the minute I said the c-word, he was like, None of my business, sorry to pry, that kinda thing. He won’t mention it unless I bring it up. And I won’t.”
“Jesus, Detective Griffin, the plot thickens.”
“I’ve got it under control.”
No, she doesn’t.
He gestures to the field, where the manager, Renteria, is out talking to Gio. Two Astros on, another big inning blossoming.
“The pitcher out there, Giolito? He lost his fastball. He’s over his pitch count. Coach wants to pull him, but he can’t. Know why? Cuz he don’t have a bullpen worth shit. So he’s gotta stick with a guy can’t hardly throw eighty-five.”
“Yeah, that’s interesting, Porter. You saying I lost my fastball?”
Porter leans forward, elbows on his knees, his head nearly touching Carla’s. “I, on the other hand, have a bullpen. A deep one. I got plenty a cops like you. So I sure as hell hope you’re not losing your value to me.”
“I’m not—”
“I mean, you fuck up with those pills, letting your partner find them. And you’re always questioning my motives, asking me questions I shouldn’t have to answer. Makes me think you’re not on my team anymore. You know what it makes me worry about? It makes me worry about Samuel, growing up in a boys’ home, the shit that happens in those places—”
“You don’t have to say that to me,” she snaps, but he can hear the tension in her voice, the fear. He can smell it coming off her.
He puts his hand on her knee, squeezes it. “I may need your help with Harney soon. Could be very soon. You’re not going to ask why. You’re just going to do it. Or your junkie ass goes to prison. You lose your shield, your pension, everything. And by the time you see Samuel again—baby, you won’t recognize your sweet little boy.”
He pats her knee and leans back in his seat, sips the last of his Jameson.
“We square, Detective?”
Carla shoves the pill bottle into her purse and gets up to leave. “We’re square, Captain.”
Chapter 70
“HOW WE doin’ tonight?” I say into the mike. The Hole is packed as usual. Sosh is holding court as always with all the uniforms and disciples who think he’s the shit.
It started raining an hour ago, around ten o’clock, really coming down. The Sox barely got their game in before the storm hit out of the blue. If it had come sooner, maybe Gio would’ve been spared the shellacking the Astros gave him.
The cops who got caught in the rain on the way to the Hole are shaking it off, nursing shots at the bar.
Next to the stage, they put a bucket to catch drops from the ceiling, a decent wet spot. I gesture to it. “Looks like the Hole in the Wall might have a hole in the roof.”
They like that, a little warm-up.
“Hey, Morty, I’d lend you a hand, but I haven’t had such good luck lately with roofs.”
That one works. Most everybody knows about Prince Valentine from K-Town. And Carla’s and my adventure with the lookouts on the roof in Little Village last night, not that much more than twenty-four hours ago, is still the talk of the place.
“Most people, they climb onto a roof, the one thing they’re thinking is, ‘Don’t fall.’ Me, I’m thinking, ‘Duck!’”
Sosh raises a glass to me, makes a comment to his friends.
“Hey, Sosh, am I holding up one or two fingers?”
He flips me just one, the middle one.
“Lanny, he don’t count so good,” I say. “Just kidding, Sosh. You just had poor intelligence. Same thing the nuns at Brother Rice used to tell you.
“Next time, just remember, Sosh: the number of lookouts on the rooftop equals the number of alimony payments each month.”
The crowd likes it. Soscia’s an easy foil.
“I know what you’re thinking—you can’t believe Sosh couldn’t make it work with his wives. When he got married the first time, he told me, he never knew what happiness was till he got hitched—but by then, it was too late.
“The second marriage, though—you’d think he would’ve known better. When the minister asked her to say a few words about him, she said, ‘Overweight and cheap.’
“Which isn’t fair!” I add, raising a hand. “When the check arrives, Sosh is the first one to put his hand in his pocket. The problem is, it never comes back out.
“No, seriously. Sosh will pick up a bill. He’ll pick it up and hand it to someone else.”
We laugh at what’s true.
“Sosh is so cheap that when his second wife wanted a pearl necklace, he gave her a piece of string and told her to start a collection.
“He’s so cheap, he won’t even pay attention.”
I can do these all night.
“He ordered free-range chicken for dinner because he thought it didn’t cost nuthin’.
“Ask Sosh if he has change for a twenty. He’ll give you a quarter.”
I hit the bar when I’m done. The bartender has a bourbon waiting for me. He says the coppers like it when I do a few minutes, so this one’s on the house.
That’s me, the funny guy, the comedian. The comedian who’s killed three perps in t
he line of duty in the last week. Ha-freakin’-ha.
“I forgot you had a sense of humor.” Marsha Flager takes the seat next to me.
“You did? It’s my most endearing quality.”
She raises her hands. “Didn’t mean to offend. Don’t shoot me or anything.”
“You’re safe; we’re not on a roof.”
She takes a long, hard look at me, then slides a manila envelope out of her bag and into my hands.
“Are you sure you’re safe, Billy?” she asks. “Because after reading what I just found, I’m not so sure.”
Chapter 71
FEELS LIKE a lifetime ago, but Marsha Flager and I went for a spin back in the day, when I was still a patrol officer. That was before I met Valerie and before she met her husband and popped out three kids. Somewhere between the first and second bundles of joy, I think it was, she lost her taste for the street.
“What are you havin’?” I ask her.
“Nah, I hit my limit. Got an early day tomorrow.”
“Someone stole a credit card or something?” I wink at her. I understand her move to Financial Crimes. She majored in finance in college, thought she’d do something in that field until she got a yearning for police work and thought, what the hell, put in for the Academy. Turned out she liked the street, had a real talent for it. Misses it, too, even now, but every time she’d roll out on a shift, she told me the other day, when I first called her for help, all she could think about was her children growing up without their mother.
More or less exactly what Carla said to me last night in the ambulance.
“It was good to hear from you,” she says. “Even if it was work. Doesn’t just have to be work, y’know.”
I look at her. She’s looking at me. I remember that come-hither expression. It’s what got me the first time. Four or five times, actually, before I got transferred and it petered out. She liked to do it in the back of patrol cars, hot and sweaty, legs up in the air.
“Divorced,” she says, showing me a finger without a ring.
“Ah, I didn’t know. Sorry to hear.”
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