The Third Rail mk-3

by Michael Harvey

“No, it’s not, Michael. But sometimes things happen. And sometimes there’s no going back. The truth is, we just don’t fit in each other’s lives. No matter how hard I try to convince myself otherwise.”

  I stared at a cracked tile on the floor. She tilted my chin up until my eyes met hers. Then she took my hand, kissed it and laid it against her cheek. That was when I felt her pity and knew it was real. And that was probably the worst thing of al. We sat that way for another minute or so. Then the doctor stepped in from the corridor and gave me the sign to wrap it up.

  “I think they’re booting me out of here,” I said. Rachel tried to stand and winced.

  “Careful,” I said.

  “I know. Whole fucking thing’s fal ing apart on me.”

  I smiled. She laughed, and that led to another spate of crying that final y subsided.

  “Wil you stop by again?” she said.

  “That what you want?” My voice felt dry and tight.

  “A visit would be nice, yes.”

  Maggie jumped up and crawled close. Rachel gathered the pup into her lap. “Al right if I keep her for a while?”

  “Sure.”

  Rachel traced a finger across the back of my hand. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Thanks for letting me in.”

  She nodded and seemed suddenly tired, suddenly adrift. I tried to keep her close, but she rol ed away from me like the tide, leaving nothing between us but a bare beach, littered with the bones of a broken relationship.

  I kissed her careful y and gave the pup’s ears a scratch. Then I left. Rachel turned back to her view of the lake. Maggie’s eyes fol owed me al the way to the door.

  CHAPTER 59

  Rodriguez was sitting in a no-parking zone, sunglasses on, engine running. I slid into the passenger’s side. “How’d it go?” he said.

  “About what you’d expect.”

  The detective nodded and took a look in his rearview mirror. Then he wheeled away from the curb. “I’ve been up to see her a couple of times.”

  “Her nurse told me. Told me it was a big help.”

  “I know a little bit about this. From Nicole and everything.”

  “I remember.”

  Rodriguez sighed. “If you got a problem…” He glanced across the car.

  “It’s okay, Vince. Anything you can do to make her better. I appreciate it.”

  We drove for a while in silence. Rodriguez turned on the radio, then snapped it off. “You okay to talk a little shop?”

  I looked over. “Sure.”

  “Wilson cal ed me in this morning.”

  “How is the mayor?”

  “Happy as the proverbial pig in shit. He told me about your train crash. About Transco and CMT Holding.”

  “Probably figured I’d fil you in anyway. What do you think?”

  “I think our mayor owns the cardinal, lock, stock, and altar boys.”

  “Nice to keep the mayor happy,” I said. “By the way, what ever happened with Alvarez?”

  Rita Alvarez had gotten her exclusive. Scooped both Chicago dailies on the scene inside Cabrini and was promised an “inside look” at the task force that hunted down and kil ed Jim Doherty.

  “Funny you should ask.” Rodriguez smiled lightly.

  “Date tonight?”

  “Dinner at the Chop House.”

  I leaned back in my seat and thought about my friend and the reporter. Maybe not such a bad thing. Rodriguez hit his blinker, took a left, and pul ed up to a red light at the corner of LaSal e and Chicago. “There was something else that came up.”

  A young woman was screaming at a young man at a bus stop. The man grabbed the woman’s arm. She shook him off and stalked away.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  The man started to fol ow the woman across Chicago Avenue and almost got hit by a bus. He stepped back onto the curb, then found a bench and lit a cigarette.

  “Dispatch took an anonymous cal last night. A woman shot down in the subway.”

  “Hadn’t heard about that,” I said.

  “You won’t. It was Katherine Lawson. They traced the cal to her cel phone. Found her body down by the tracks where Maria Jackson was found.”

  I felt my head snap around. “Her body?”

  Rodriguez nodded and hit the gas as the light turned. “Shot three times with two different guns. A thirty-eight in the leg and a couple of twenty-two slugs to the head.”

  “Strange.”

  “Yeah. By the way, you stil got that cold thirty-eight I gave you before Cabrini?”

  I could feel the heavy gaze of the homicide cop walk its way across the car.

  “Probably not,” I said.

  Rodriguez grunted and we drove a little more.

  “When you talked to the mayor this morning,” I said, “did he tel you about Lawson?”

  The detective looked over again. “You mean how she was shaking down the church?”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, he mentioned it. When did you turn up that part of it?”

  “Just the last day or so. I would have told you, but…” I shrugged.

  “Some things I’m better off not knowing.”

  “Probably. You gonna pul her case?”

  Rodriguez shook his head. “Feds usual y handle it when one of their own dies.”

  “Which means what?”

  “Lawson was dirty. If it was Chicago PD, the whole thing would get buried. My guess is the Bureau’s no different. We’re holding the evidence, but I’m betting it never gets touched.”

  “So we’re done with that?”

  “Looks that way.” The detective tapped two fingers lightly against the steering wheel. “Where you headed?”

  “Home.”

  “Good idea.” Rodriguez turned up the radio and steered his car toward Lake Shore Drive. I didn’t say another word.

  CHAPTER 60

  I woke to the quiet of midafternoon, thinking about Katherine Lawson. I’d left her alive in the subway. Then someone came along and decided to finish the job. I wondered who. Better yet, why.

  I sat up on my couch and considered the fat canvas bag on my coffee table. I’d told the mayor’s accountant, Walter Sopak, part of Lawson’s story. The part about Lawson’s little girl. Sopak and his laptop agreed to meet me at an al — night Mexican place cal ed El Presidente on Wrightwood and Ashland. A couple bowls of chili and a chimichanga later, the accountant had cracked Lawson’s computer and emptied one of her offshore bank accounts. The bag was stuffed with Sopak’s good deeds-three-quarters of a mil ion dol ars the feds would never miss. I had an appointment with a trust officer at Chase set up for tomorrow morning. The account would be in the name of Melanie Lawson. She’d be informed of the money when she hit twenty and be able to access it a year later. The trust officer at Chase figured the account would be worth almost two mil ion by then. I wasn’t entirely convinced Chase would stil be in business, never mind turning anyone a profit, but what was a guy to do. So we’d al take a chance. I walked over to my desk and locked the money in a drawer. From a second drawer, I took out the whiskey, along with some pieces from the past. The first photo was a parting glass, my dad laid out in his only suit, waiting for them to fire up the funeral home’s oven and send him into eternity. My old man’s face had shrunk in death, col apsed into the empty shel that was his life. The red eyes I knew as a nine-year-old were thankful y sewn shut. The fists that broke my mom’s jaw in five places were gone as wel, replaced by a pair of pale hands clutching a set of rosary beads for al they were worth. I toasted the old man with a bit of Macal an. Good luck with that.

  The second shot I pul ed was of Hubert Russel, moments after they’d cut him down. The rope was stil twisted around his neck, and there was a smal tattoo, a yel ow star, on the side of his throat. I remembered it from the first time I met him, minding his own business at the Cook County Bureau of Land Records, thinking his life was just beginning.

  I turned Hubert’s picture facedown and walked myself and my gl
ass over to the front windows. The sparrow was back, hopping back and forth on its branch, eyeing me with a distinct measure of disdain. I cracked the closest window, and the bird took off. I opened it some more and felt the bleak fingers of a winter sun on my face. I breathed deep, let the cold air chil my lungs, and thought about Rachel, wondered if my phone would ever ring. Then I looked down the street. The black car was there, same spot as yesterday. I had run the tag, wasn’t surprised when it came back to the archdiocese. They seemed to enjoy watching me watch them. Or maybe they had nothing better to do. I didn’t know if the city’s holy men were involved in Hubert’s death. Every instinct told me no. So I believed. Guess that’s why they cal it faith. As for the blood on their hands from thirty years past, I’d leave that for Judgment Day and a higher authority. Until then, the men in col ars would live under the thumb of Chicago’s mayor. And that seemed purgatory enough for any man.

  I shut the window and finished my drink. Then I found my coat and headed for the door. The weather had softened and the streets in my neighborhood were crowded, blessedly so. I walked up and down them until, final y, I disappeared into the forgiving crush.

  EPILOGUE

  The evidence room sits in the basement of Area 4 on Chicago’s West Side. Tucked up high on a shelf, about halfway down the length of the room, is a cardboard box sealed with evidence tape. Inside it are a sheaf of pages, dried and crusted with blood, found in the subway under Katherine Lawson’s body.

  No one ever gave the pages a close read. Everyone, it seems, had a reason not to. The federal government was too arrogant. The city of Chicago, too complacent. And Michael Kel y, too angry.

  If anyone had taken a look, they would have first discovered the material Lawson had copied from the “Terror 2000” binder Jim Doherty had with him when he died. A reading of the highlighted passages would have revealed Doherty’s focus on what the Pentagon cal ed the “subway scenario”: the introduction of lightbulbs fil ed with weaponized anthrax into a major urban subway system. Anyone reading farther would have discovered Katherine Lawson’s own notes, detailing the background of Jim Doherty’s accomplice, Robert Robles, including his two-year stint at Fort Detrick in Maryland, as wel as the lab’s own experiments with weaponized anthrax. Final y, they would have found the article Lawson clipped from the Baltimore Sun, highlighting the lab’s missing cache of bioweapons. Al of this could have been gleaned from Katherine Lawson’s notes. If anyone had bothered to look. Instead, the whole troublesome problem was stuffed into an evidence box and buried. Meanwhile, a few miles away, along a run of track close to where Lawson’s body was discovered, two lightbulbs rattled and hummed in their sockets, growing looser by the day and with the rumble of every passing CTA train. No one could predict when one or both bulbs would fal. No one knew for sure what was inside. Or what wasn’t. Like most everything else, it was mostly a flick of the wrist, a rol of the dice. And the courage to live with the consequences.

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