Concrete Savior

by Yvonne Navarro

  “But I had a feeling he was dead.” Gina covered her face with her hands, but her words were still clear. “Almost the whole time. I wouldn’t listen to it. I couldn’t accept it.”

  Brynna reminded herself not to remark that a lot of people did just that. Hindsight would do Georgina no good now. The truth was, it never did anyone any good, at least not as it applied to the original situation.

  “You need to know that we found him on our own,” Eran said. “I believed you wanted certain things to remain private, like the visions you have and what Casey did. I had to turn it over to the regular channels but I never told anyone that we’ve already been talking to you.” He was silent for a few seconds. “That means that once a preliminary identification is made, someone from the department’s going to show up here to tell you about it. I’m not telling you to keep any information to yourself, but I will warn you that things will become very difficult, for you and us, if people in the police department are asked to accept the true details of what went on here.”

  Gina’s expression was bitter. “Don’t worry, Detective Redmond. I’m very familiar with what ‘normal’ people can do to someone like me.” She gave a short laugh that sounded more like she was choking through her tears. “Because of her visions, my mother’s been in a mental institution since I was a kid. They claim she’s schizophrenic.” Another harsh laugh grated out of Gina’s throat. “Maybe that’s what I am. Maybe that’s where I belong.”

  “I do not believe that,” Bheru said. “What you have is both a blessing and a curse. So far it has not been kind to you, but perhaps someday you will find a good reason for its existence.”

  Gina looked like she wanted to disagree, then her shoulders slumped. “Maybe. It’s not like it’s going to go away, right?” She hugged herself, fingers digging hard into her upper arms.

  Brynna wished she could find something comfort to say, but there were other, more critical things that needed to be addressed. “Gina,” she said, “I need to ask you something. I know that right now all you can think about is Vance, but we have to find out about the last guy that Casey rescued, Tate Wernick. We need to know if you know what’s going to happen.”

  Gina looked up. Her face was hollow-cheeked and rimmed with red shadows. Her eyes were bloodshot, like someone who had been drinking for days. True grief could make a person look like that.

  “Oh my God,” Gina gasped. She had slowly slumped forward, but now she again sat up straight. “Oh my God. Tate Wernick—you have to stop him!”

  There was something so urgent in the tone of her voice that Eran literally jerked on his seat. “What is it?” he asked sharply. “What’s he going to do?”

  “Oh, I can’t believe . . . I’m—I’m—Oh my God.” She couldn’t even get the words out.

  “Gina,” Brynna prompted. “Tell us!”

  “He’s made this—this bomb thing, this truck bomb. Yeah, that’s what it is. He’s going to set it off today!”

  Eran’s mouth dropped open. “You knew this all along and you didn’t tell us?” Brynna thought he sounded more incredulous than he had throughout this entire ordeal. Even so, he didn’t pause long enough to let Gina answer. “Where?” he demanded. Suddenly he was all business. “I need to know where!”

  “In front of that building with the big plaza and that crazy-looking statue.”

  Bheru was watching her closely. “Ms. Whitfield, you’ve just described about fifty buildings downtown.”

  “I know!” Gina cried. “I don’t know the name of the building—I can’t recall it. Oh God, why can’t I remember?”

  “Just take a deep breath and think,” Bheru told her. “Breathe and exhale, and tell us what you saw.”

  Gina sucked in a ragged mouthful of air. “It’s glass—it’s all glass, and it’s round and kind of blue. It’s got tile columns and a little plaza with a fountain and that big statue in it. It’s off Clark Street, I think, or maybe LaSalle.”

  “That statue,” Eran said. Brynna could tell he was forcing himself to speak levelly. “What does it look like?”

  “It’s really modern. It’s—”

  “Is it all black, like the Picasso at the Daley Center?” Bheru suggested.

  “No,” Gina said. “It’s really large, white, and outlined in black. It’s by that other artist who’s so famous, but I can’t recall his name.”

  “Dubuffet?”

  Gina frowned. “That sounds familiar . . . yeah, I think so.”

  Eran and Bheru stood at the same time. “The James R. Thompson Center,” Eran said grimly. “He could very easily park a truck bomb right next to the building. There’s so much glass in that building—everything would shatter. The loss of life would be tremendous.”

  “When?” Bheru asked.

  “Today,” Gina answered. “This afternoon. He’s so angry about everything. At a little after four o’clock, when all the government employees are getting out of work.”

  “Great.” Eran looked at his watch and Brynna saw the color drain from his face. “That means we have just about a half hour.”

  THE LAST PERSON CHARLIE Hogue thought he would find standing on the other side of his hotel room door was his wife.

  His shock must have shown in his face because she smiled at him a little sadly. “Hello, Charlie. May I come in?”

  “Of course,” he said. He backed away, pulling the door wider. “Of course.”

  Brenda came inside and looked curiously around the hotel room. Then she stood there without moving, as though she wasn’t quite sure she belonged. For a moment, Charlie felt a deep, deep shame. He had put her in this position, his wife of twenty years. Made her feel like she shouldn’t be at his side. “Sit,” he said, pointing toward the only chair in the room. “Not very fancy, I’m afraid. But, you know, I kept the budget in mind.”

  She nodded and settled herself on the very edge of the dingy upholstered chair. She was wearing a sundress with tiny peach and white flowers on it. Brenda wasn’t a slender woman, but she wasn’t heavy, either—just more or less average. The dress fit her well and made her look a little more curvy than usual. He thought she looked beautiful. Her shiny, shoulder-length hair was showing the effects of Chicago’s humidity, and it framed her face in soft waves. She had always had good skin, had always taken care of herself, so despite having two school-age kids, she didn’t look her age.

  He supposed he did. Like a lot of guys, he went out in the sun all the time and never put anything on his skin for protection, and as he had just found out, the hair that was starting to thin at his crown was just like his father’s, Douglas Redmond. Eran didn’t have that problem; he must’ve gotten the good genes from their mother’s side. He and Eran were built a lot alike, with brown hair and the same-shaped eyes, and a good build. Eran had taken better care of himself whereas Charlie had spent his free time poking around the backyard, going fishing, sometimes playing a round of golf. He didn’t feel bad about how he looked, although maybe a little self-conscious when he was next to Eran. Eran’s job had obviously demanded that he stay in better physical condition. Now that Charlie was getting older, he was finally trying to pay a little more attention to his physical well-being.

  Charlie suddenly ached to put his arms around Brenda and hold her, but at the same time, he didn’t know how. What he had done, or what he hadn’t done by cutting himself off from her, had created a chasm between the two of them, the likes of which had never existed in all their years together. He didn’t know how to fix this, how to throw a lifeline across that enormous void. For the first time since their naive first dates, he didn’t know what to say to Brenda.

  Brenda, however, had never been one to mince words. A little shy at the beginning of their relationship, she had let that personality trait go by the time their first child had started kindergarten. If there was something on her mind, she said so . . . although you could count on her not to be overly mean about it.

  “I’ve missed you, Charlie,” she said now. “I’ve been ca
lling you . . . but you know that. Why haven’t you answere my calls or called me back? Did something go wrong with meeting your father?”

  Charlie looked at the floor. His throat was locked tight, like someone who was silently choking at the dinner table. How could he explain to her that there was another woman? Someone he’d never touched, never kissed, never been with, but who was nearly eclipsing everything good in his marriage? How could he explain himself?

  He couldn’t.

  “Talk to me, Charlie.” She had that eternally patient look on her face. He’d never liked it when it had been directed at him, but at the same time had always admired it when it surfaced as a result of his children. There were pros and cons to everything.

  “It went okay,” he finally said. “Well, less than okay.”

  “What happened?”

  “My father didn’t want to talk to me. He’s not a very nice man. He did give me my brother’s name and address.”

  “You have a brother!” Her face lit up. “Did you meet him? Did you go talk to him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well?”

  “What can I say? He was just as surprised as I was. I didn’t call first. I just showed up at his door. We talked for a while. I went back over one more time, but it didn’t go very well.”

  “Why not?”

  Charlie thought about lying, about making up some story and saying that Eran had thought Charlie was after his girlfriend. Immediately he realized how despicable that would be, not to mention effectively cutting him off from his brother for the rest of his life. He didn’t want that to happen.

  “I guess we don’t see eye to eye on some things,” Charlie said. “I’m sure we can work it out in time. It was a big shock to both of us.” Even to himself, he sounded tired and evasive. “I learned some details about my father and my mother that aren’t so nice, I suppose. That didn’t help.”

  Brenda was silent and they just sat there for a while, her looking at him, him looking at the floor. “Charlie, what’s going on?” she finally asked. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  He shrugged but he didn’t know how to answer that. He couldn’t answer that. “I guess being here, in this city,” he said after a while, “has made me think about my life.” He risked a glance at her and saw her jaw tighten. Still, she said nothing. One of the greatest things about Brenda was that she also knew how to listen. “Maybe it’s a sort of grass-is-greener syndrome. The people, the excitement . . . it’s so different from Van Wert.”

  She nodded. “It is.” She studied him for a minute or so. “There are definitely lots of different people here, Charlie.”

  His gut twisted as he realized that Brenda knew what was going on in his head, his deepest secret. She knew about Brynna somehow. Maybe she didn’t know the details—Brynna’s name, what she looked like, or even that there was any connection to Eran. But Brenda was a smart woman, smarter than most.

  “Have you been seeing someone else? Another woman?”

  “No.” At least he could answer that honestly. Had she chosen her words differently and asked, Did you meet someone else? he would have had to lie. And Brenda would have known immediately that was exactly what he was doing.

  “I haven’t been seeing anyone. I haven’t gone out with anyone.”

  “But someone has caught your attention.”

  Ouch.

  When he didn’t deny it her expression sagged, but only for an instant. Then she drew herself up and nodded slowly. “I see.” Brenda looked around the hotel room, but the movement was more robotic than searching. “Well, I don’t think I should stay here,” she said. “So I’m going to get my own room. You can call me on my cell if you want to talk, whenever you’re ready. I’ll stay for a few days. Hopefully by then you’ll have things sorted out. You’ll figure out what you want . . . either way. Goodbye, Charlie.”

  And she left him, sitting there on the edge of the bed and staring after her, and realizing that she had taken a huge part of the light in his life with her. The question was, did he want it to stay that way?

  There was an enormous difference between Brenda and Brynna . . . and how odd was it that their names were so similar? Brenda was light and warmth and sunshine, and all the things that made his existence worthwhile. Brynna was darkness and intrigue, all the things his life was not and would never be with Brenda. Did he want that? And even if he did, did he stand a chance of getting it? The way things had gone so far—absolutely not. Was he fool enough to give up everything he had, all the love, on the far-fetched notion that Brynna might change her mind? Or was he man enough to look in the mirror and call himself an idiot for even considering such a thing?

  Charlie got up and walked to the tiny bathroom, flipped on the light, and stared at his reflection in the age-spotted mirror hanging over the single sink. There were shadows under his eyes, bruising from where he hadn’t been sleeping, tossing and turning his way through each night. The face that stared back at him looked older than Eran’s, but bore a strong resemblance. It also held unpleasant shades of Douglas Redmond, the man of questionable reputation who was his father. Did he want to look in the mirror five years from now and see a man who had walked out on his family, whether or not he achieved what he thought he wanted?

  He ran a hand through his hair, fingering the strands and wishing there were more of them, accepting that there weren’t. Then he rinsed his face with brutally cold water. Accepting; that’s what he should be. Someone like Brynna was never meant for him. It wasn’t a matter of class or station in life—nothing like that. There was something about her that, if he stood back and took his thoughts away from where they shouldn’t be to begin with, he realized didn’t fit with him. There was something . . . wrong about her, something untouchable. No, that wasn’t it—it was definitely touchable, but it shouldn’t be. That nailed it. It shouldn’t be.

  He stared at himself for perhaps another ten seconds, then reeled out of the bathroom and headed for the door. Somewhere out here was his wife and he needed to stop her before she got her own room. She didn’t need that—she would never need that. She should be with him, and him with her. That’s where they belonged . . . together.

  He would not go back to Eran’s, and he would not take the chance on seeing Brynna again. Obviously there was something inside him that could not resist her, and like the owner of a puppy that gets into the trash, he was going to take not the most intellectually challenging way out, but the most logical: remove the trash, remove the temptation. He would call Eran and say goodbye. When he did, he would apologize for his behavior and hope that he could somehow undo the damage he’d done so early in their brand-new relationship. Maybe someday they could actually be brothers, be a family.

  But Charlie knew that someday was not going to happen for a long, long time.

  Twenty-three

  Eran must have made a dozen phone calls as he raced toward the James R. Thompson Center. Brynna watched him from the passenger seat, impressed with the speed and efficiency he used in contacting all the right people to help find and stop Tate Wernick. Human technology was such a wonderful thing and had pushed their ability to contact each other so far from the story of Pheidippides running the first marathon in ancient Greece. Unfortunately, the criminals had evolved right along with the communication, and that seemed to be exactly what Eran was battling here.

  “Of course he’s not at work,” Eran snapped into his cell phone. “And you won’t find him at home, either—don’t even bother. You’ll find Wernick somewhere around the Thompson Center. Odds are he’s going to want to detonate the device himself and be close enough to see the thing blow so he can see the outcome, take satisfaction in it. Depending on how savvy he thinks he is, he may be planning to go back to work, or he may have the day off. Check with his employer about that. He might also have a detailed getaway scheme already worked out.”

  Eran was silent for a few moments, then he said, “It was an anonymous tip. Yeah, another one. No, ther
e were no illegal searches going on here, no shake-downs that are going to come back and bite us in the ass.” Another pause, then Eran’s voice became even more frustrated. “No, I did not lean on anyone, and I am not hiding anything. Tell the commander to call me if he has any questions. In the meantime, we need to block the streets all the way around the Thompson Center, cut it off to incoming traffic and funnel the existing cars out. Get as many people away from there as quickly as you can without causing a panic, hopefully before the press gets too heavy in the area. Yeah, I know the mayor won’t evacuate based on a tip, but that’s the best I can do. All right. Let me know.”

  Eran cut off the call and gripped the steering wheel, his face hard as he negotiated the traffic. The bubble lights were on the roof of the car, but as usual most of the other drivers simply ignored them. It took them almost twenty-five minutes to make it from Gina Whitfield’s place to LaSalle and Wacker, where yellow sawhorses had been set up and traffic was being rerouted. Vehicular movement surrounding the cordoned-off area was reaching fiasco proportions, and Eran had t the pain of it as he tried to get the car closer to his destination. A uniformed officer moved the sawhorse and waved him in, and Eran pressed the accelerator hard. But there were still so many moving and parked vehicles in the area, including trucks, that Brynna had no idea how they were going to figure out which was the right one.