Penance

by Dan O'Shea

  “Who says I talked to him?”

  “Come on, Lynch. You’re the lead on his mother’s murder. He’s maybe the most powerful man in Chicago. What are you going to do, send him an email?”

  “Yeah, OK. I talked to Eddie. This your technique, Johnson, right for the throat? I don’t get schmoozed?”

  “You want schmooze?”

  “You’re buying the drinks. Sure. Schmooze me.”

  Another smile, a look like he’d surprised her a little, like she was happy about that. “OK, Lynch. Tell me about being the Great White.”

  Lynch’s turn to get rocked back a little. Great White: a nickname from his football days at Boston College. White guy – rare for a DB, maybe not at BC, but at most places – decent speed, played strong safety, and tended to leave blood in the water. Little grin from Lynch. Trying not to look too proud about it, the jock thing being a little silly at his age. Still, though.

  “So who put you onto that, Johnson? That’s going back some.”

  “Every girl wants to meet a football hero. Third round pick, right?”

  “Green Bay, yeah. Blew out my knee in the preseason. That was that. Happened today, signing bonus be enough to retire on.”

  “Happened today, they’d fix your knee. Miss it?”

  “Shit, I’d be long retired by now anyway, Johnson.”

  “But still?”

  “Yeah, OK. I miss it. I liked it. I was good at it. And there is nothing like completely reordering some wideout’s worldview when he tries to go over the middle.”

  Johnson laughed. “So why the cops? Why not coach or do TV or whatever?”

  “Dad was a cop. Genetic inertia, I guess. So what else you got? Gonna grill me on my aborted engagement to Cindy Tremaine back in the third grade?”

  “How about Cabrini, 1984? Want to talk about that?”

  She’d read the book on him. Lynch turned to the side, looking out the window over the river. Took a long swallow. In his mind, he could still see the muzzle flashes, hear the round thump into Michealson, hear rounds ripping through the sheet metal on the squad. Remembered getting hit, crawling to the front of the car, laying prone, firing from under the bumper. The first black kid going down, holding his gut, feet kicking, rolling over. The other kid running toward the squad, squeezing off shots. Lynch with one round left, knowing there’d be no chance to reload, knowing he’d never be able to anyway, bullet in his left shoulder, his left arm useless. He stayed prone, bracing the butt of the pistol on the ground, lining the kid up, the kid still shooting, but too high, Lynch letting him come, then putting a .38 right through his chest. Michealson making that gurgling noise, Lynch trying CPR, getting nothing out of it but a mouthful of blood.

  Lynch took another swallow, held the glass up and wiggled it at the waitress. “I said schmooze, Johnson. Didn’t ask for a proctological exam. Pick a new subject.” Waitress put down the new drink, Lynch took a pull. Both of them quiet for a minute, Johnson knowing she’d stepped out of bounds.

  “So,” he said. “What about you? Minneapolis, right?”

  “Born and raised. Cop family, too. Dad just retired. Chief of Detectives. Older brother’s a captain, younger brother put in ten years on the force, law school at night, comer in the DA’s office now.”

  “So why’d you skip town? Sounds like you had a house full of sources.”

  “When I said cop family, I meant cop family all the way. Not an easy place for a girl with ambitions beyond marrying one of them. Which I did, which was a mistake. He wasn’t too keen on me working, especially for the press. After the divorce, I was on my own, all the way out from under all that macho bullshit for the first time. Liked it. Figured I’d be even more on my own down here.”

  “So not much use for cops, huh?”

  “Don’t get me wrong, Lynch. My dad, my brothers? They’re good people. Hard to live with sometimes. I’ve been around cops my whole life. That sense of honor at the core of the whole thing? I like that. You don’t get that with your MBAs. But, with a lot of them, after a while, they never take off the body armor.”

  “Your ex?”

  “Yeah. Kevlar man.”

  “Don’t worry, Johnson. I haven’t put on a vest since I got off patrols.”

  “There, you see? We’re hitting it off already.” Johnson getting another wine.

  “Yeah. You give good schmooze. Look, I don’t really have shit on the Marslovak shooting yet, and I couldn’t give it to you if I did, you know that. Why the call?”

  “I’m not looking for a quote here, Lynch. This is not-for-attribution all the way. Just with Eddie Marslovak in the mix, this is going to be front-burner for a while. I don’t want to get blindsided by anything.”

  “OK. Strictly as background. I talked with Eddie. I think he needs a couple of bushels of Prozac and maybe a decade or two of therapy. But if he ties into the shooting, it’s going to be sideways – somebody coming back at him out of some deal he screwed them on or something. All I got.”

  “OK. Thanks. This will not come back to bite you, honest.”

  They talked for another hour. Lynch filling her in on Chicago politics, the kind of stuff you couldn’t know coming in from Minneapolis. The feudal nature of it, the ethnic blocs, the primacy of neighborhood, the mayor’s office passed down from Hurley to Hurley like a family title. And the fixers – the city lifers, on and off the payroll – guys who had lines into everything, who could pick up the phone at their summer places over on the Michigan shore and conjure up votes from thin air or graveyards.

  Got to the point where it had been time to go for a while, both of them still hanging in.

  “Hey, Dickey Regan at the Sun-Times says to say hello,” said Johnson.

  “You talked to Dickey?”

  “I heard you were friends. He gave me the Great White stuff.”

  Lynch shook his head and chuckled. “Asshole.”

  “He also told me you were a good person for a cop. Said you had better things to do on St Paddy’s Day than get shit-faced with the Emerald Society and plot to undermine our constitutional protections. That’s pretty much a direct quote, by the way.”

  “Yeah, well, Dickey and I go back. You can tell him he’s OK, too. For a press weenie.”

  Johnson finished her wine. Played with her hair a little, like she wasn’t used to it being short. Leaned back in the booth, stretched. “God, four glasses of wine. I knew I shouldn’t have driven. Now I’ve got to drive home.”

  “As a police officer, I would advise against it. I can get a unit to run you home.”

  Johnson laughed. “Just what I need, covering the cop beat. Some uniform spreading the word he got strong-armed into playing taxi for me.”

  “We can go to my place for a while, get you some coffee.”

  “Inviting me up for coffee Lynch? What’s the matter, don’t have any etchings to show me?” That sly smile again.

  “Just an offer in the interest of public safety, ma’am. Although I do have this extensive collection of Seventies album covers.”

  “Except I don’t think you should be driving either.”

  “Don’t have to. I live upstairs.”

  “Really?” There was a little tone in her voice; not sarcasm. That smile again.

  “Still like my schmoozing?” Johnson murmured into his neck as they clinched inside Lynch’s door, both of their coats and four shoes on the floor by their feet. Lynch had untucked her turtleneck and slid his hands up her back.

  “I knew you had ways of making me talk, Johnson.”

  “If you’re going to keep undressing me, you’re going to have to call me Liz.”

  “OK, Liz.” The turtleneck came over her head. Black bra. “Isn’t this the time when we’re supposed to disclose our sexual histories in the interest of public health?”

  “Why?” she asked. “Is yours long and varied?”

  “Wife died in ’86. Did some tomcatting around for a few years,” he said. “Only been back in the pool a handful of tim
es since, though.”

  “You better have been wearing your trunks,” she said.

  “Always wear my trunks.”

  “I was divorced fourteen months ago,” Johnson said. “Dipped my toe in here and there, but haven’t been doing laps for a while.”

  Lynch’s hands ran back down her back to the waistband of her slacks, and then to the front to the buckle of her belt.

  “You like to swim?” he asked.

  She pulled Lynch’s sweater over his head. “I finished second in the state in the 400 IM in high school.”

  “I can only dog paddle, but I’m vigorous,” said Lynch. “You gonna pull me out if I get in too deep?”

  Johnson’s slacks dropped to the floor. Her hands ran down Lynch’s chest and began to work the front of his jeans. “I can do better than that,” she said. “I can give lessons.” His jeans dropped. She ran a finger up the long, white welt on the right side of Lynch’s ribs, and then kissed the round, puckered scar under his left collarbone.

  He unhooked her bra, and she pulled back for a second to let it fall down her arms.

  “Last one in’s a rotten egg,” said Lynch. She smiled again, even better than last time.

  There was a moment later, Johnson on top, rocking, neither of them rushing it, the dim light through the blinds falling in gentle curves across her breasts, when Lynch felt something break and shift inside of him, like a bone that had been set wrong being made straight. All those frantic couplings all those years ago, with Katie in the car before they married, and even after, there had always been a savagery to their mating. The cop groupies he’d pick up on Rush Street and the cruel gravity of their need. Now this gentility, this fluidity. He was swimming, and not struggling toward the surface and choking for air. Just swimming. For the first time in his life, he could breathe here.

  CHAPTER 3 – RESTON, VIRGINIA

  “Yes, sir, we will keep you apprised.” Tecumseh Weaver (Colonel, USMC, retired) hung up on Clarke, sat back in his chair at InterGov Research Services and sighed. Fucking Clarke. How a guy got to be where he was with balls as small as he had was still a mystery to Weaver. But he sure had his panties in a bunch now. This little problem of his, it wasn’t the sort of thing Clarke could sic an official dog on, though. So he was tugging on Weaver’s leash instead.

  Weaver’d never liked being on a leash.

  The suite housing the offices of InterGov Research Services was not quite in Langley and not quite in DC, which was as it should be. And if the company’s internet connections and telecommunications were a little more secure, their staff a little better armed, and their raison d’etre a little harder to discern than those of the neighbors in the generic office park just off of I-66, that was as it should be, too.

  InterGov Research Services was a limited liability corporation whose owners were even more mysterious than the company itself, being the figments of some very creative imaginations. InterGov was one of the thousands of small consultancies surrounding Washington that cleared away some of the fiscal bloat of the federal budget every year. InterGov’s masters viewed this not as wasteful, but rather as a way of creating financial breathing room outside the prissy auspices of the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees. Just another form of off-balance-sheet accounting.

  And InterGov did provide real and valuable services to its legitimate clients. It had access to the NSA’s supercomputers and to some of the CIA’s best research talent, so clients like the Department of Agriculture received quick, accurate, and affordable analyses of pressing issues like Uzbekistan’s projected wheat yield, trends in Kenyan coffee production, and the statistical likelihood that, somewhere in the United States, the curious little bug that caused mad cow disease was already turning some citizen’s brain into so much insentient Jell-O.

  But InterGov’s most valuable talent pool knew very little about computers, except for those attached to weapons systems. And if most of them were a little larger, a little stronger, and a little more familiar with places like Yemen, Mogadishu, Medellin, or Montenegro than your average Joe, well, that was as it should be, too.

  It was the highest and best use of the latter pool of talent that Weaver considered as he waited for Chen to get back in from Reagan National.

  Fucking Fisher, thought Weaver. This Chicago thing had his stink all over it. No details yet – Weaver had the techies hacking into the Chicago Police systems and would have those shortly – but there was speculation regarding a rifle.

  Ishmael Leviticus Fisher, InterGov’s resident sniper – hell, resident genuine USDA-inspected number-one badass – he’d gone off the reservation two months earlier, and InterGov was pretty far off the reservation to begin with. Fisher had been on Weaver’s operations team ever since he put InterGov together. Hell, Fisher and Weaver went back all the way to Saigon. Anyway, InterGov had a leak. A lot of your Al-Qaeda types, the ones that hadn’t got Hellfire missiles up the ass, Fisher’d been the man who put them down, so he had a little rep in Arab circles. Just before Christmas, one of the raghead groups who were looking to put Fisher’s head on a wall got some intel they shouldn’t have and put a bomb in the Fisher family car. Blew up Fisher’s wife and kids, but missed him. For a couple of weeks, Fisher stuck with the program, working with the Intel team trying to get a line on the bombers, letting the PsyOps boys poke around his head looking for blown circuits. No evidence of psychotic break, the white coats had said. No apparent disassociation, they said. Somewhat disturbing lack of arousal, they said. Then Fisher disappeared.

  At first, Weaver thought maybe the ragheads had gotten Fisher, too. Then he thought maybe Fisher had gotten some intel on his own and gone hunting. Then forty days of nothing.

  On day forty-one, somebody put a 7.62mm hole through a dairy farmer in a church parking lot in Door County, Wisconsin. Lots of people get shot in the United States every day, but not many of them get shot with rifles. So when the Wisconsin thing popped up, Weaver took a sniff and caught a funny odor. So he packed Chen off to Cheesehead country to sniff it out.

  Weaver’s phone rang. Chen was back.

  Chen wore a plain black pantsuit over a black silk blouse when she walked into Weaver’s office. She stood five feet two inches and weighed, Weaver was guessing, ninety-five pounds. Educated guess, because Chen was a dead ringer for the girl Weaver had stashed in the apartment on Mandalay Road in Hong Kong through most of Vietnam. He’d had to kill that one eventually, though. Still a little twinge when he thought about it. What was it with oriental chicks anyway, Weaver wondered. No tits to speak of, asses like fourteen-year-old boys. Just like chink food, though. Finish with one and fifteen minutes later you’re ready for another serving. Not that Weaver had any carnal designs on Chen. Made a run at her when she first came on board, and the vibe he got was enough to shrivel his sack. Hoped he never had to take out Chen. She could break an oak board with either hand, with either foot, even with her head. And she could get that flat little .25 auto out from wherever she had it stashed and put all eight rounds through your “X” ring while you were still wondering whether you should be scared of her or her cute little gun. Mind like a goddamn Cray computer, too.

  “Enjoy your trip, Chen? America’s dairy land, you know. Try the cheese?”

  “Too much fat to justify the protein, sir.”

  “Of course. So what do we have? It was Fisher?”

  “Statistically, Fisher is the logical candidate. The local authorities suspect that the victim was shot from a snowmobile from close to the shore. However, the medical examiner’s findings indicate that the wound channel is on a downward angle, entering just above and to the right of the victim’s heart and exiting through the left side of the sixth thoracic vertebrae. One of the victim’s gloves was on the ground by the body, the other on his right hand. Their theory is that the victim dropped the glove and was shot as he bent over to pick it up. The victim being bent over at the time would explain the wound channel.”

  “But that’s not your theo
ry?”

  “No, sir. I was able to access the local system and examine the crime scene photographs. Blood spray on the back of the glove the victim supposedly dropped indicates the glove was within six inches of the entry wound at time of impact, which is exactly where it would have been if the victim was putting it on when he was shot. That means the victim was not bent over, which means that the round hit at a descending angle. The shot came from the ice out on the lake, which eliminates the possibility of an elevated shooting position. The downward angle can only be explained by distance. For the round to arrive at an angle matching the wound channel, the shot would have to have been fired from between nine hundred and one thousand meters. With a little more than one hundred meters between the victim and the shore, we must assume that Fisher fired from more than eight hundred meters out on the ice.”

  Weaver let out a low whistle. “A thousand meters with a weapon that’s iffy starting around seven hundred and in a twenty plus crosswind? Don’t suppose the locals bothered looking out that far.”

  “No, sir. They found fresh snowmobile tracks at one hundred ten meters and some sign that the machine stopped on the right line for the driver to take the shot. They confined their search to the first two hundred meters of ice. At eight hundred meters, the ice was only marginally safe.”

  “And they didn’t recover a slug?”

  “No, sir. Again, faulty assumptions. They assumed the round was fired from less than two hundred meters, so they assumed a flat trajectory. Therefore, they also assumed the round would have passed through the victim with sufficient velocity to reach the woods beyond the shooting scene. They determined that the round was not recoverable.”

  “So no slug?”

  Chen pulled a small plastic envelope from her jacket pocket and dropped it on Weaver’s desk. The thing inside looked like a misshapen lead mushroom. “The slug was in the landscaping bordering the parking lot less than twenty meters from where the body was located.”

  “And?”

  “A cursory examination reveals nothing to dispute the assumption that it was fired by Fisher. It is the appropriate caliber. I could find no evidence of ballistic signature. Fisher is still saboting his rounds.”