When I was full, I watched as Rafael helped himself to a fourth bowl. When he finished, he wiped his chin and looked me in the eyes, aware that I’d been watching him. “What?” he said.
“You didn’t rescue me and bring me here for dinner because you’re my friend. What do you get for helping me out?”
Rafael looked insulted, but not very. “It is a favor. Friends do favors.”
“Uh-huh. What kind of favor do you want from me in return?”
He shrugged. “First, let’s see if we keep you alive. If we do, we can talk about favors later.”
“You know, I’ve got a bad record of filling obligations.”
He smiled big. “That don’t surprise me. Anyway, you already give me something. You help me fuck with Earl Johnson.”
He stood and went into the hall, came back a minute later with a bag. He pulled out a thin black disposable cell phone and gave it to me. “If you need to call me, use this. Don’t use Sanchia’s phone. We keep her clean—she’s got enough trouble already.”
I took the phone. “You keep extras lying around?”
“Sure. You never know when you need one.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You got four hours of talk time. Throw it out when you’re done.”
I said I would.
“Now stand up,” he said.
“Why?”
“Just stand the fuck up,” he said.
I did.
He looked me up and down, measuring me. “I’ll bring you clothes in the morning.”
“Thanks,” I said again.
“Give me the phone.” I gave it to him and he punched in his own number. “Day or night, you call me if there’s trouble.”
“You’re a saint,” I said.
He smiled again. “I’ll shoot anyone who doesn’t say so.” He walked back into the hall, saying, “Be a good boy tonight.”
A minute later, the front door opened and closed, and I was alone with Rafael’s sister-in-law and her two boys. The Virgin Mary watched me from above the stove. A wooden kitchen clock, shaped like a horse, ticked loudly. Up the hall, the television laugh track heard something hysterical.
I thought about slipping out the back door into the cold night. I could call a cab on the phone Rafael gave me, and it would take me anywhere I wanted to go. But I didn’t know where that would be. Lucinda needed rescuing but going back to The Spa Club alone and without a gun seemed like a bad idea. Going to Corrine’s house or Mom’s would bring my trouble to them.
I dialed Bill Gubman’s home phone number. His wife picked up.
“Hi, Eileen,” I said.
She recognized my voice. “Joe—” She said. She didn’t need to say anything else to let me know she’d heard about my problems and whatever else the TV news had made up about me.
“Is Bill there?”
“No,” she said. “He’s working late—”
“Thanks, Eileen. I’ll try him at the station.”
“Joe?”
“Yeah?” I said, bracing myself for another friend telling me I should turn myself in.
“Take care of yourself,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said and hung up.
I called the department and asked to talk to Bill. The desk operator said he was out of his office. “It’s important that I talk to him. Can you give me a number where I can reach him?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She didn’t sound sorry.
“Put me through to his voice mail?”
She did.
I left a frantic message. “Johnson has Lucinda at The Spa Club,” I said. “I don’t know what they’re going to do with her but it won’t be good. It’s time to end this. You need to break up Johnson’s crew now, you understand?” I left the number of the disposable cell phone and said, “Call me as soon as you get this.”
He didn’t call. I sat alone for an hour, and the phone never rang.
I fished the FBI card that Stuart Felicano had given me from my wallet. He’d asked me to call if I had any information. I’d told myself I never would, but I’d slipped the card into my wallet anyway. Now I wondered if that meant I’d always known I was a liar.
I dialed the cell number printed on the card.
After three rings, Felicano picked up.
“It’s Joe Kozmarski,” I said.
If I’d said I was a large roach, he might’ve sounded happier to talk with me. “What do you want?” he said.
“I’ve got information,” I said. “If you want Johnson and his crew, I can tell you where to find them tonight. You can get them on about thirty charges. Prostitution. Grand theft. Racketeering. Kidnapping too. I’ll testify for you. You don’t have to promise me anything.”
There was a long pause. Then he said, “You’re too late. We’re off the case.”
“What do you mean?” I almost dropped the phone.
“I mean, your friend Bill Gubman talked to my boss, and my boss talked to me. It’s part of a new spirit of cooperation between city and federal agencies, she said. This is a city matter. We’re letting the city cops handle it.”
“But Johnson has my partner—”
“Tell it to Gubman.”
“I tried but I can’t reach him.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“Sorry?” I shouted.
“Not even very,” he said.
I hung up.
I paced the kitchen for awhile. That didn’t help, so I walked to the living room and sat on a chair next to the boy on the floor and the one on the couch. Their mother was somewhere else, probably upstairs. The video was ending, the credits rolling up the screen, and it all washed over me like a haze.
The seven-year-old rolled onto his back and stared at me. He looked worried and I figured I did too.
So I tried to smile. “Hey,” I said.
He smiled. “Hey.”
“What’s your name?”
“Emilio.”
His mother swept downstairs and into the room. She said, “¡Emilio, vete a tu cuarto!”—Go to your room. The boy got up and shuffled toward the hall. Sanchia turned to the older boy. “Tu tambien.” He got up and followed his brother.
“Buenas noches,” I said.
The seven-year-old giggled.
His mother didn’t. She turned to me. “You will wait here. My younger son will sleep in his brother’s room. You can sleep in his bed.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I can sleep down here.”
“No,” she said and gave me a look that let me know I was in her house and I would do as she told me.
“Thank you,” I said.
She nodded once and followed her boys upstairs.
A bath turned on. Sanchia talked with her boys in Spanish and English. I sat and listened and tried not to think.
When the house got quiet, I went up the stairs. A light was on in a bedroom—the younger boy’s. Toy cars, a tower made of Tinkertoys, and about a dozen jigsaw puzzles of jungle scenes and birds, neatly constructed and lined up edge to edge, covered the floor. The bed was unmade, the covers pushed to the bottom. Crayon pictures of birds hung on the walls. I went in and closed the door, stepped through the mess to the window, and opened the shade. Across a gap of about four feet, another window and another shade faced the house from next door. If you leaned out far enough, you could kiss your neighbor.
I closed the shade, sat on the bed, and took off my shoes, socks, and pants. I straightened the sheets. They smelled like soap and the gentle sweat of a kid. I climbed in and turned off the lamp, then closed my eyes and breathed deep.
After awhile, I slept, and sometime during the night I dreamed a good dream, one that I’d dreamed before. I was with Corrine and Jason. We were on a powerboat, motoring across blue-green Caribbean water. The sky was clear and the sun gleamed on the ocean ripples. We wore swimsuits and cotton shirts that billowed in the salt breeze. We said nothing to each other. We didn’t need to say anything. We were happy. Happy.
A ha
nd shook my shoulder. I opened my eyes, expecting to see Corrine and Jason. The room was dark. The hand shook my shoulder some more. “Wake up!” whispered a voice, a woman’s, accented Spanish—Sanchia’s voice, I realized when she whispered again, “Wake up!”
“What?” I managed to say.
“Get up!” she whispered. “You must go.”
Other voices were yelling somewhere else. Downstairs. Outside. Men’s voices.
“Who—?” And then I knew and I sat bolt upright in bed.
“Quick,” Sanchia said and she stepped out of the bedroom.
I put on my pants and shoes and followed her into the dimly lighted hall.
The men outside were quiet now.
Sanchia opened a hall closet and took out an aluminum stepladder. She set it under a ceiling trapdoor.
“That go to the roof?” I asked.
She nodded and pointed toward the side of the house. “Three houses and you go inside. They wait for you,” she said.
Men shouted outside the house again.
I climbed the ladder, unfastened a latch, opened the heavy door, and heaved myself onto a flat tar roof.
Downstairs, someone kicked the front door, kicked it again, and kicked it a third time. Wood splintered and the door slammed open.
I turned and said, “Thanks,” but Sanchia was already putting the ladder back in the closet.
Heavy footsteps ran up the stairs.
I lowered the trapdoor and heard the latch snap shut, then stood still and silent in the cold night.
A man’s voice yelled at Sanchia. Not Finley’s. The voice of one of the other men in Johnson’s crew. He wanted to know where I was.
I didn’t hear Sanchia’s answer.
He yelled louder.
She yelled back, “¡No comprendo!”
The night was black and a cold breeze cut through my clothes. What could I do? Sanchia had said, Three houses and you go inside.
I looked both ways. On one side, there were two roofs and then the church with the mural of the naked woman in a canoe. On the other side, there were just roofs, four or five feet apart on the closely built houses.
They wait for you, Sanchia had said.
I inched quietly to the edge of the roof. In the shadows twenty feet down, garbage cans stood on the path between the houses. They would break my fall but not much.
I estimated the distance between Sanchia’s roof and the next one, breathed deep, and jumped. My foot caught the edge of the roof and I fell forward. Anyone under me would’ve thought an ox fell on the house. I got up, ran across the roof, and jumped again, landing on my feet.
Three houses.
The next gap was wider than the first two but I didn’t slow. I cleared it with plenty to spare.
In the middle of the roof, there was a trapdoor that matched the one on Sanchia’s house.
I ran to it and reached to open it but it opened as if on its own and a hand came out and then a man’s cheerful round face. “¡Hola!” the man said. “Come in before you freeze.”
I went down a stepladder into a dark house. “Come with me,” the man said and he led me to the stairway and downstairs. In the living room, he gestured at a sofa. “You can sleep here. I’ll get some blankets.” As he went to get them, he whistled cheerfully. It was three in the morning, a stranger had dropped through his ceiling into his house, and he was whistling.
I sat on the sofa and he brought two folded blankets and set them next to me. “Sleep now,” he said. “You’re safe here.” And, whistling, he climbed the stairs to the second floor.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE MAN DIDN’T TELL me his name and I didn’t ask for it. He left me with two blankets and a place to sleep, surrounded by strange sounds and smells, and I was eight miles from home and could have been on the other side of the world. I stretched out under the blankets with my shoes on.
When I closed my eyes, fear surged through me as if another hand would shake me awake and tell me to run. So I opened my eyes and stared at the dark ceiling and at a glint that bounced off the glass front of a china cabinet, or maybe it was a mirror—it was too dark to tell and I didn’t get up to find out. I twisted David Russo’s wedding ring on my finger. I counted the minutes and hours and every one of them was as dark as the last, until the first sunlight filtered into the room a little after six. I could see that the glass with the glint in it was a mirror and then I closed my eyes and slept.
I slept hard and dull, and when I woke a little after eleven, I stayed on the couch and wished I still was sleeping. The man with the round, cheerful face was in the kitchen talking with someone in Spanish—Rafael, I realized. Then a cell phone rang and Rafael answered it in English and talked some more. I tried not to listen. I stared at the ceiling and wondered if I could ever get to the place where I’d been during the good dream I was having before Sanchia shook my shoulder, a happy place with Corrine and Jason.
After awhile, the doorbell rang and Rafael went to it through the living room. He saw I was awake, nodded at me, and said, “Buenos.”
I nodded back.
He stepped outside to the front porch and talked for awhile, then came in again and sat on the side of the couch like a father waking up his kid. “Hey,” he said, “you got a visitor.”
For a moment that made me glad. I figured Johnson had freed Lucinda and she’d come to see me. Maybe there was no sense in it but I sat up expecting to see her.
Bob Monroe stood inside the front door. He wore the same brown tracksuit he’d had on when Finley had broken up our talk about bringing down Johnson. He looked like he hadn’t slept and his left eye was bloodshot.
“Morning,” he said. The confidence he usually had in his voice was gone.
I stated the obvious. “You got out.”
“I guess so.”
“Lucinda?”
“Your partner?” He shook his head like he was embarrassed. “They’ve still got her.”
“Why?” I said as if it was his fault.
He shrugged.
“How did you escape?”
Another shrug. “They let me go. After Finley got back from chasing you—limping and one arm in a sling—he saw the receipts on my desk and worked it out. They unlocked my door around nine this morning. Johnson’s saying he didn’t rip us off. He’s saying he’s played it straight. But they’ve got him locked in the room where you were. No chair, though.”
“What happened to Lucinda?”
“They say she caused a lot of trouble last night—scared the hell out of a seventy-year-old alderman who came out of a room while a couple of the guys were taking her from the stairwell. What were you thinking, telling her to come to the club?”
Now I shrugged. “I thought I could use a hand if someone locked me in a room with only a chair.”
“Seems to me you did all right without her.”
“Where is she now? Is she all right?”
He nodded. “She’s in the room next to Johnson.”
“Why?” I asked again.
This time he told me. “Finley’s still not totally convinced Johnson’s the enemy. Same with some of the others. They let me out so I could find you and bring you back. They want us to explain the evidence. They want Johnson to defend himself.”
“They’re holding a trial?”
“Something like that. They think keeping your partner will get you to come back.”
“Why do they want me so bad?”
“You gave me the bank receipts. Why wouldn’t they want you?”
He had a point, and, even if he didn’t, I needed to go back for Lucinda. But I would have liked to go back with Bill Gubman beside me and a SWAT team in front of us.
“Okay,” I said and I got up.
Rafael handed me a bag with the clothes he’d promised—a new pair of jeans, a new white sweatshirt, and a used brown leather jacket. While I cleaned up and changed into them, the round-faced man cooked us a meal of scrambled eggs and chorizo. When I came into the kitchen,
Rafael and Monroe were sitting at the kitchen table and the man stood at the stove, whistling again like there was nothing he liked more than serving breakfast to cop killers, gangbangers, and thieves.
After we ate, Monroe and I drove back to The Spa Club in Monroe’s car. Outside, the sun was shining, the sky clear, the wind calm for the first time in a week. I felt like we were driving toward our deaths. I glanced at Monroe. He was watching the road, lips pursed, unhappy. Maybe he felt like we were driving to our deaths too.
I said, “What about Raj?”
The question shook Monroe out of his thoughts. “What about him?”
“Finley shot him.”
He shook his head. “No, he didn’t—not as far as you’re concerned. There’s a newspaper in the backseat. Take a look at it.”
I reached into the backseat, picked up a copy of the Sun-Times. The front-page headline said COP GUNNED DOWN IN ROBBERY. The story explained that neighbors found Raj’s body on the sidewalk outside his house after hearing gunshots. His wallet was gone. The police had no suspects, though one of the neighbors reported having seen a black male, approximately six foot two and a hundred ninety pounds, acting suspiciously an hour before the shooting.
Monroe said, “We’ll support Raj’s wife, and his kids will grow up knowing their dad was a good cop.”
“Finley gets away with it?”
Monroe shook his head some more. “Now’s not the time. Finley’s not sure whose side he’s on. He sees the banking evidence. He knows Johnson screwed him. But they’ve been buddies for a long time. If we want him on our side, we’ve got to be forgiving.”
“I’m not ready to forgive.”
“We’ll see,” he said, though I didn’t know what there was to see.
At The Spa Club, Monroe pulled through the circular driveway, passed the valet, and parked in a fire lane on the side of the building. We got out and he pocketed the keys. He said, “I want to be able to get to my car—just in case.”
I nodded. “I hope you don’t mind giving me and Lucinda a lift—just in case.”
“It’ll be my pleasure.”
We rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor.
When the door opened, the lounge was empty. No one sat at the tables. No one tended bar. No one stood at the hostess station.
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