The Undertaker

by William F. Brown

  Behind us, Tinkerton's blue LTD and two of his gray sedans slid into the intersection from the east, following my skid marks, just as the other gray car and the Chicago police cruiser came racing in from the west. Unfortunately for them, they had all been watching the white Lincoln, not each other, and we heard the crash of metal and the sound of breaking glass as they all collided in the middle. The LTD made it through unscathed, but one of the gray sedans hit a cop car and flipped. It slid across the street on its top while another cop car careened away and bounced off a telephone pole and another slid into the side of a Budweiser delivery truck.

  “Jeez, they hit a beer truck,” Sandy laughed. “There’s gonna be hell to pay in the ‘hood tonight.”

  We reached the concrete barrier as the shrill sound of still more police sirens came screaming in behind us. I remembered seeing grainy news footage in school about the 1968 Democratic Convention. Hairy-knuckled Chicago cops in baby-blue riot helmets, short-sleeved shirts, nightsticks, German Shepherds snarling, cameras and hand-held floodlights bouncing, as the cops chased longhaired hippies through Grant Park on a hot summer night. I was sure the Chicago Police Department had changed a lot in forty years, but there was no way I was going to stop and plead the subtleties of my case to an angry cop with a riot gun. The last of those 1968 Neanderthals may have retired years ago, but if the LA cops are any example, the new generation was even worse. We ran across the remaining grass, climbed on top of the first concrete barrier, and looked down on the mid-morning traffic racing past us, thick and fast.

  “Who was the idiot who thought this one up?” Sandy asked as three lanes of cars whizzed by us at sixty-five miles per hour, weaving, changing lanes, and honking.

  “You are. You wanted to come along, remember?” There was no turning back now. “Pretend it's touch football,” I screamed over the loud roar of the traffic. “We're going to run between them and you don't want to get touched.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Koo-bee Bryant hits a trey…

  As we stood on the divider, about to begin our mad dash out into traffic, I looked back over my shoulder. Tinkerton’s blue LTD came careening sideways down the slope at us, digging itself axle-deep into the mud until it slid to a halt behind the Lincoln. Tinkerton sat behind the wheel and one of his goons rode shotgun. In their case, the goon probably did have a shotgun, but I tried not to think about that. When Tinkerton spotted us standing on the expressway barrier, he pounded his fist on the steering wheel in angry frustration.

  “You know, you have a real talent for pissing people off,” Sandy quipped.

  “Years of practice, honed to a fine edge,” I fired back as I took a firm grip on her hand. “Stay with me, one lane at a time.” I turned and searched the onrushing flow of northbound traffic for a break, but I didn’t see much of one.

  “Now!” I yelled as I jumped off the barrier and ran between a black BMW and a big moving van, and stopped on the first white line. An Atlas Van Lines eighteen-wheeler roared behind us and a tight line of cars swept past in front of us, horns blaring, buffeting us with their back drafts. Four cars later, I saw another break coming and squeezed her hand again. “Now!” We sprinted in front of a red Dodge mini-van with a wide-eyed soccer mom behind the wheel, through a gap in the third lane, and jumped up on the relative safety of the next concrete divider that separated the local lanes from the express lanes.

  “What a hoot!” Sandy screamed as she clutched her leather shoulder bag to her chest with one hand and me with the other. “God, they ought to put this on The X-Games, Talbott,” she said as we wobbled precariously on the divider.

  “You wouldn’t listen, would you?”

  “What fun would that be?” She grinned from ear to ear.

  Up ahead, a four-car El train pulled out of the station on the southbound tracks, taking most of the waiting passengers with it. Behind us, Tinkerton and the goon had gotten out of the LTD and were standing on the other side of the first divider, three lanes away, pointing at us, screaming. Two Chicago cops ran up next to him, pistols out, with expressions of total confusion. No doubt, they had never been in a high-speed chase quite like this one. Without a whole lot of thought, I smiled at Tinkerton and flipped him the bird, holding my finger high over my head. That completely unhinged him. His face turned red and he looked ready to have a stroke right then and there. He ripped a large automatic pistol from his shoulder holster and took aim at me. He would have shot me too, if one of the Chicago cops hadn’t pulled his arm down.

  “That's real smart,” Sandy shouted. “Why don't you get him good and pissed?”

  “He didn’t shoot, did he?”

  “Not because he didn’t want to.”

  I could almost read the cop's lips as he yelled at Tinkerton and pointed at the cars whizzing by on the freeway. I doubt it was compassion or concern for us that motivated the cop. More likely, it was the mountains of paperwork and the lawsuits he’d find himself buried in if Tinkerton missed and hit the wrong people. Frustrated and even angrier, Tinkerton surprised me by climbing over the divider and following us out into the fast-moving local lanes. He still had the gun in his hand, but at least it wasn’t pointed at us. His goon followed, most unhappy about it, and the two Chicago cops took up the rear.

  “I don't know about you.” Sandy’s hand tightened on mine. “But I don't want to share this divider with anybody that big and angry, especially not one with a gun. Let's go.”

  Together, we jumped down into the express lanes and I saw this was the big leagues. There were four lanes rather than three and the stream of cars was thicker and faster than in the locals. We could see panic on the face of almost every driver who flashed by us, and I’m sure they could see it on ours.

  “Now!” I screamed and we cut behind a delivery van and kept moving through a gap between a Honda and Cadillac. We stopped, halfway there, toeing the white line as we waited for a break in the third lane. Behind us, I heard loud honking of horns and a sudden squeal of brakes followed by a sickening “Thump!” I looked back in time to see a blue-clad Chicago cop bounce high off the hood of a Toyota in the local lanes. He cartwheeled through the air, arms and legs extended, followed by a loud series of sharp crashes as a half-dozen cars rear-ended each other trying to avoid the cop and the careening Toyota. Then all hell broke loose, with more crashing metal, more squeals, and more loud horns.

  “Well, that ought to slow them down a tad,” she yelled, wide-eyed.

  Maybe, but we had enough problems of our own at that moment. Cars were speeding past, front and back. I glanced left and saw a Greyhound bus changing lanes, heading right for us, straddling the bright white line we were standing on.

  “Oh, Christ!” Sandy said as she pulled me forward. We darted in front of the bus and kept running, across the last lane of traffic, and onto the relative safety of the El station median. Hand in hand, we jumped onto the low concrete retaining wall as a big Mercedes sped past behind us, horn blaring, narrowly missing us. The wall was perhaps twelve inches wide and four feet high, separating the busy express lanes from the steel tracks. Twelve inches wasn’t very much. Sandy tottered back and forth next to me as we fought to keep our balance. Maybe I was too concerned about her making it up to the top with me, and maybe I was a bigger klutz than she was to begin with, but I couldn’t stop. I let go of her hand, but my momentum carried me over the top and I fell face-first on the grimy, sharp-edged gravel of the railroad bed.

  “Eee-Yeeagh!” My hands and knees rebelled in pain.

  “Uh, Talbott,” Sandy shouted a warning. “You see that ugly blue-black rail in the middle? The one next to your left hand?”

  “Yeah,” I answered as I looked down. My shins rested on the brightly polished track where the train's wheels ran and my right hand was a few inches away. Next to my left hand, where I had narrowly missed landing, was the evil-looking, blue-black one.

  “That's the third rail. It carries the electricity for the trains and there's about a gazillion volts in
that thing. You touch it; it'll ruin your whole day.”

  “Hey, I'm from LA,” I replied. “What do I know from rails?” Carefully, very carefully, I rose to my feet and brushed the dirt and gravel off my hands, giving the third rail a wide berth. Sandy jumped down next to me and we looked up at the subway platform. The concrete slab was even higher than the divider, at my eye level, and there was no ladder or stairs to climb. To make matters worse, I saw the front headlight of a fast-moving train coming up the northbound tracks, heading straight for us.

  “Here,” I said as I put my hands together and bent my knees. “Give me your foot. Quick. I'll boost you up.”

  “No sweat, it'll slow down as it comes in,” she announced confidently, slowly raising her left foot and placing it in my hands. As she did, I glanced past her again. The train was close enough for me to see the panicked expression on the engineer's face as he saw us standing on his tracks.

  Fortunately, Sandy did not weigh very much. “One, two… three,” I yelled and flipped her upward. She soared into the air in a tight, acrobatic flip and landed on the platform on both feet, light as a feather.

  I looked left again and I could see she was dead wrong about the train. It had not slowed a bit. I was tall and in pretty good shape. Desperation and a speeding train can make great motivators, so I put my hands flat on the platform and launched myself upward, rolling over the edge just as the lead El car roared past.

  “Oops. Guess that was an express,” I heard her say as I lay on the platform looking up at the concrete roof of the station, thankful I was able to look up at anything at all.

  That was when I heard a loud, sarcastic, and very black male voice say, “My, my, what do we have here?”

  “Ah think dey be the “Fuckin' Wallendas,” Jamal. You know, dem dudes in the circus,” a second voice added.

  “Yeah, das who they be,” came a third voice, “the ‘Fucking Wallendas.’ ”

  “Yeah, check out the mess they made back there on LaSalle. Dey sho' 'nuf fucked dat up real good.”

  “Check it out, Rashid. All them po-lice cars? Cops gonna be really pissed.”

  I looked around as six young black men closed around us in a tight circle, complete with dark sunglasses, oversized, cockeyed, flat-brimmed baseball caps — mostly White Sox and Chicago Bulls — blue jeans slung below their hips, and unlaced, high-top work boots. Harlem, Watts, or the South Side of Chicago, it was definitely your urban gang-banger-out-on-the-town outfit, complete with matching blue plaid flannel shirts hanging out at the waist and “do-rags” on their heads under the hats.

  “You be right, Toothpick. You be right,” the one in the center said as he looked back toward the chaos on the expressway with a smile. “But how come the “Fucking Wallendas” decide to drop in on my El platform this fine morning? Das what ah wants to know.”

  Toothpick was the biggest of the lot, maybe 6’ 6”, well over 300 lbs, and fat as a house. He grinned as he reached out and ran a finger slowly down Sandy's arm. “And lookey here, Jamal,” he added. “The Wallendas done brung us lunch.”

  His finger didn't make it as far as her elbow. In one smooth motion, Sandy jumped four feet in the air. With a blood-curdling scream, her Reeboks lashed out in a series of lightning-quick karate kicks. She caught Toothpick at the base of his throat, in the face, and a coup-de-grace in the groin, dropping him to his knees, bug-eyed, holding his throat and his crotch and coughing, all at once. The others took a step toward her, but she had dropped back on the platform and into a defensive Karate crouch, fingers out, eyes darting back and forth. “The next one who gets smart goes to Intensive Care.”

  Jamal defused the situation. “Nice hang time there, girl,” he laughed.

  I got to my feet and stood behind her, figuring my best efforts would be spent covering her back, but Jamal was more effective.

  “Thas enough, Toothpick, we don’t want you to hurt her no more, now do we?” he said as he raised his hand and the others immediately stopped. “Very im-pressive, very im-pressive indeed,” he said as he slowly clapped his hands. Clearly, he was their leader. He looked over at the growing line of police cars back on LaSalle Street, his eyes dancing with amusement. “But y'all seem to have gotten seriously lost. This here ain't Oak-brook or Win-net-ka. This here be the south side — my south side — and we call it ‘The People's Republic of 35th Street.’ So, y'all need to show some respect.”

  “Look,” she said. “All we want is to get on the next train out of here, that's all.”

  “Thas all?” Jamal pointed at the police cars and grinned like a malevolent shark. “What you think them pigs up on LaSalle want? You the damned Tupperware Lady? They come down here to give you a po-lice escort through the projects? No, ah think they be chasin’ yo’ asses, thas what ah think.”

  We stood our ground and the six gang members did the same. That was something, but I could tell Jamal wasn’t finished with us. He was cagey and street-smart. Behind those Oakley sunglasses, his dark-brown eyes were studying all the angles. Down here, a man couldn’t reach his eighteenth birthday alive and out of jail if he was stupid.

  “’Speakin’ of chasin’,” Jamal looked across the expressway, “Ah don’t know what y'all done, but them two ‘suits’ down there running between the cars want yo little white ass some kinda bad, girl.”

  “We didn't do anything,” I told him.

  “They sho think you did.”

  “They're wrong.”

  “Imagine that! The Chi-ca-go Po-lice chasin’ somebody on 35th Street — a white man and a white woman at that — and they got it wrong?”

  In the distance, I saw another train coming toward us. This one was on the southbound tracks heading out of the city, and I intended for us to be on it. The cops had given up and turned back toward LaSalle, but Tinkerton and his goon managed to get across the express lanes and had reached the retaining wall on the other side of the tracks, barely ten feet away. Time was running out.

  “What do you want?” I asked Jamal.

  “You askin' what we want?” A homie in a blue-plaid shirt shot back. “Shit, we takes what we want.”

  “Reparations, man. We wants reparations.” Another homie postured.

  “Yeah, some serious reparations.”

  “Y'all trespassin’ on our turf without permission, without no passports or visas.”

  “And look at what she done to Toothpick, man.”

  “Yeah, that was flat out rude, man.”

  Sandy cocked her head and took a long look at the gang leader. “Hey, I know you. That’s Jamal Sanders hiding behind those ‘Oaks’, isn’t it?”

  “Jamal don't hide, bitch!” Toothpick threatened again, but Sandy’s foot twitched and Toothpick took a step back.

  She came out of her crouch and pulled her camera out of her shoulder bag for Jamal to see. “Yeah, Jamal Sanders of the Black P-stone Disciples? Right?”

  “We now the Disciple 35th Street Nation... we be franchisin’,” Jamal corrected her. “And ah do remember. You that crazy bitch with the camera walked through the ‘hood and took all those pictures wif me. The brothers over on Cottage Grove called you ‘Lil’ Sister.’ When was that? Two years ago? Yeah, ah remember you, all right.”

  “Crazy? You never saw better shots — of you, the homies, or life in the projects — have you? That was a great spread.”

  “Yeah. Got you some kinda award, didn't it?” he asked. “What it get us?”

  “Got your face all over the front page of the Trib. That was serious pub, my man, better than you ever seen before, and you didn’t have to go to jail to get it, did you?”

  “There is that.”

  “Was I fair?”

  “Oh, yeah. You was fair. Ah'll give you that much, Lil’ Sister.”

  To our left, the outbound train roared into the station and ground to a halt. In the lead car, the motorman looked at us with round, terrified eyes as he saw what was going on, but it was too late for him to do anything about it. The train stopped,
the doors automatically opened with a loud hiss, and a dozen black passengers stepped out onto the open platform. They took one look at the gang, at us, and at the cop cars with their sirens and flashing lights, and thought better of it. In unison, they stepped back inside the cars and prayed the doors would quickly close.

  As they did, I heard a voice shout up at us from the track bed to our right. “You, up on the platform, stay right where you are.” I looked down and saw Tinkerton's dark-suited goon standing on the El tracks below us.

  “I'd do what he says if I were you, Pete,” Ralph Tinkerton's sarcastic, hardscrabble twang joined in. His usually cold, gray eyes were red-hot and angry as he tasted his impending victory. “You too, Miz Kasmarek.”

  I looked longingly at the El cars behind us, but we had blown our chance. The doors closed with a loud hiss and the train immediately started up. It gathered speed and pulled away as quickly as the anxious motorman could make it move, to the obvious relief of his frightened passengers. That was when Tinkerton’s goon raised his Glock and pointed it up at us. That was a big mistake. All around us, I heard shuffling feet and loud clicks as a dozen other handguns suddenly materialized in the gang members’ hands, one and often two per man. There were matte-black Glocks, a wicked .357 Magnum, a long-barreled .38, a .45 Colt, and a huge chrome .44 Magnum “Dirty Harry” cannon among others, and they were all pointed down at Tinkerton and his goon.

  Jamal folded his arms across his chest. “This really be some morning,” he crowed. “Everybody be forgettin' themselves today, forgettin' where they be.”

  “Ralph,” I smiled down at him. “This isn’t the Columbus Rotary Club up here. I’d be real careful if I were you.”

  Tinkerton burned with anger, but that didn’t make him stupid. “Pete,” he managed a smile. “You and I need to talk.”

  “I don’t think so. The last time we tried that, I got cut and you got that bruise on your cheek and that big ugly bandage on your hand. Is that from the fire?” Tinkerton glared and said nothing. “Too bad it didn’t fry your sorry ass.”