Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  Days of Rage

  A Smokey Dalton Novel

  Kris Nelscott

  Days of Rage

  Copyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © 2012 by Alptraum/Dreamstime

  Cover Design copyright © 2012 WMG Publishing

  First published in 2006 by St. Martins Press

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  The Smokey Dalton Series in order:

  Novels

  Dangerous Road

  Smoke-Filled Rooms

  Thin Walls

  Stone Cribs

  War At Home

  Days of Rage

  The Day After (Upcoming)

  Short Stories

  Guarding Lacey

  Family Affair

  For Dean,

  because he understands

  Acknowledgments

  As always, these books come together due to a variety of people. My husband, Dean Wesley Smith, used his architectural training to draw the floor plans of the important buildings in this book, as well as helped me put a large amount of information into a coherent story. Steve Braunginn and Paul Higginbotham acted as my trusty first readers. Kelley Ragland has given me incredible advice and support on all of these books. Thanks, everyone. I appreciate all that you’ve done.

  Revolution is no motherfucking game for us.

  The black community has enough martyrs already.

  —Fred Hampton,

  October 1969

  ONE

  I parked the police car in the trees, along the dirt access road. I shut off the headlights and let out a small breath.

  My eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness.

  A few blocks away, I could hear the rumble and clangs from the Ford Motor Plant. The air smelled of rotten eggs and sewage, the stink so thick it made my eyes water.

  My heart was pounding. I had to force myself to take deep, even breaths despite the smell. For five long minutes, I sat in the car, staring out the windows, checking the rearview, hoping no one followed me.

  When it became clear that no one had, I got out, closing the door carefully so that it didn’t slam. I could see my breath. My back ached, and blood still trickled down the side of my face. I swiped at it with my arm, staining the sleeve of my coat.

  At least I had the presence of mind to bring my gloves.

  I walked down the dirt road to the construction site. Spindly trees rose up around me, their leaves scattered on the road. The noise from the Ford Plant covered the crunch of my feet along the path.

  Equipment sat along the edge of the canal, ghostly shapes against the darkness. I stopped short of the edge.

  They had finished dredging this section last year when someone had deemed the canal deep enough.

  The water glinted, black and filthy, its depth impossible to see. Some lights from the nearby industrial plants reflected thinly on the water’s surface, revealing a gasoline slick and bits of wadded up paper.

  I let out a small breath, hating this moment, seeing no other choice.

  Then I went back to the cop car. I pushed on the trunk, making sure the latch held. Then I opened the back passenger door, rolled down the window, and went to the front passenger door, doing the same. I saved the driver’s window for last.

  I crawled back inside the car just as the radio crackled, startling me. The thin voice coming across the static talked about a fight at the Kinetic Playground, which had nothing to do with me.

  Still, my heart pounded harder.

  I started the car. It rumbled to life, the powerful engine ready to go.

  I was shaking.

  I kept the car in park, then I pushed the emergency brake. I reached across the seat and picked up my gloves and the blood-covered nightstick.

  I released the emergency brake, got out of the car, and leaned inside the door. Carefully, I wedged the nightstick against the accelerator, making sure that thing flattened against the floor.

  The car’s engine revved, echoing in that grove of too-thin trees.

  I braced my left hand on the car seat, grabbed the automatic gear shift, and shoved the car into drive. Then I leapt back, sprawling in the cold dirt as the car zoomed down the road.

  The car disappeared over the bank, and I braced myself for a crash of metal against concrete — a crash that meant I had failed.

  A half-second later, I heard a large splash. I ran to the edge of the road and stared down the embankment.

  The car tipped, front end already lost to the canal. The brackish water flowed into the open windows, sinking it even faster.

  The trunk went under last, disappearing in a riot of bubbles. I could almost imagine it popping open at the last moment, the bodies emerging, floating along the surface like the gasoline slick, revealing themselves much too soon.

  But the bubbles eventually stopped, and the car vanished into the canal’s depths.

  I took off the bloody gloves and tossed them on top of the filthy water. No one would connect them to the car.

  No one would ever know.

  Except me.

  TWO

  Three months earlier, I parked my panel van about seventy blocks north of the Ford Plant.

  The building I’d parked near dominated one of Chicago’s oldest neighborhoods. Once the house had been one of the nicest in the area. Built in the Queen Anne style, the turrets remained, tall and imposing, but the rest of the house had succumbed to time and weather. The lot had been taken apart bit by bit, and now the old house was uncomfortably sandwiched between a six-flat on the right, and a U-shaped apartment complex on the left.

  The street, which had once been large and wide, had narrowed too, until it became little more than an alley between rental properties, a place for tenants to drop their garbage, park their battered cars, and leave moving boxes to rot in the humid air.

  Usually, standing in front of neglected buildings made me sad, but this one made me uneasy. It wasn’t the shuttered windows or the cockeyed front door, and it certainly wasn’t the overcrowding that greedy developers had forced on a once-peaceful neighborhood.

  Something about the house itself seemed sinister.

  I shook off the feeling and unlocked the front door. I had a wad of keys, most of them unlabeled. They came from the building’s manager, who had also been the building’s very last tenant. He had died alone in his apartment, found only two weeks ago by the mailman.

  By then the manager had been dead more than a week.

  Knowing that history probably led to my unease. I would be the first person to enter this place since the body had been removed.

  I braced myself as I stepped inside the wide entry.

  The heat was incredible. I was instantly covered with sweat. We were having a late September heatwave, which made every unair-conditioned building in the city hot. But this felt worse. It seemed like no one had turned off the building’s heat last spring.

  The smell, however, wasn’t as bad as I had expected. Just a hint of rot, not bad enough to even make me sneeze.

  I expected it to be worse on the other side of the building, where the manager’s apartment was.

  I shoved my clipboard under my arm, and wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. The entry was dark, probably because the conversion to apartments had walled off the wide windows in the front parlor and the library.
I flicked on my flashlight, and ran it across the wall until I found the light switch beside the door. The switch was old — a punch switch put in when the building was electrified, somewhere near the turn of the century.

  I was here in my capacity as an off-the-books building inspector for Sturdy Investments. I was off the books for a variety of reasons. The main one had to do with the corruption that flowed through Chicago like water. Sturdy had a long history of illegal business practices. Laura Hathaway, the company’s new CEO and the daughter of its original owner, had decided to clean up all the problems she found.

  She hired me because I was one of the few people she trusted. Laura and I had an on-again, off-again relationship that had been mostly off since I returned from a trip back east, but she knew that I was honest and would tell her exactly what I found.

  So far, all I’d found was unbearable heat.

  I pushed the top part of the button, hoping that the lights still worked and that the act of turning them on didn’t start a short somewhere. I knew, because I had checked, that this building hadn’t had an inspection or a repair call in more than a decade. I could only hope that the newly deceased manager had handled all of the repairs himself.

  A dim bulb hidden in a dirt-encrusted chandelier added a little light to the front. It was barely enough to see by. To my left was a door with a large 1 painted across its wood frame. The only lock, so far as I could tell, was on the doorknob itself.

  To my right, another door, this one marked with a large 2. And in front of me, the wide oak staircase that had once been the entry’s most important feature.

  I wiped my face again. I was losing most of my weight in sweat. My first mission was to shut off the heat. Then I could turn my attention the apartments themselves.

  After a little more inspection, I realized there was no easy way to get from the front entry to the back of the building where the heating system had to be. I let myself out, pulling the front door closed behind me, but not bothering to lock it. Any determined burglar could push his way inside the building. The door, which was obviously original, was in such a rotten state of repair that it barely clung to its hinges.

  I paused on the top of the stairs, took my clipboard, and made a note about the door in the appropriate place on the form Laura and I had developed. Then I went around the side of the building.

  I’d already examined the foundation, and taken the necessary measurements. I had hope. The foundation looked sturdy enough for a seventy-year-old, neglected house. There were few cracks and only a little water damage.

  The water damage might be a problem, since the tiny basement windows lining the building’s sides and back had, for the most part, been bricked closed. But that was a problem I’d worry about once I got inside.

  The back faced yet another set of apartments, which were about twenty years old. Sturdy owned most of this neighborhood and had converted it to student housing for the nearby University of Chicago.

  It was a smart move: students didn’t care what kind of apartment they lived in so long as it was cheap and provided a place to sleep, eat, and study. The turnover was great, and the need for apartments was even greater. Sturdy, in the bad old days, was one of Chicago’s largest slumlords, and student housing was one of the easiest areas in rentals to ignore repairs.

  The manager’s apartment was on the first floor in the back. That was how the mailman managed to see inside just enough to get worried. I expected the back door to open directly into the apartment, but it didn’t. The door, which wasn’t even locked, opened into what had once been a mudroom. The entrance to the apartment was to my right, and a door, closed and locked, was to my left.

  Like I expected, the rot smell was stronger here. I shuddered and wiped at my nose this time, even though I knew that wouldn’t make the smell of death go away. I propped the back door open, hoping for a breeze, something – anything – that would make both the heat and the stench go away.

  The door to my left had to be the door to the basement. I grabbed the bundle of keys and started working through them one by one, trying to find a key that fit into the deadbolt on the unmarked door. That door was the only one that I had seen so far with a deadbolt, which helped me a little in looking for the correct key. There had to be a hundred different keys on a variety of interlocking rings, many of the keys so old that they looked like they hadn’t been used in decades.

  Obviously, the manager had been the kind of man who kept everything. I wondered what his apartment looked like, and realized I would find out soon enough.

  Halfway through the ring, I finally found the key that opened the deadbolt. Then I tried the knob. It was also locked, but it didn’t latch tightly enough to provide any protection. I pushed the door open.

  It creaked, the sound loud in the house’s silence. I switched on the flashlight. Its wide beam revealed dust and cobwebs and old wooden stairs that disappeared into the darkness.

  I sighed. This was one of those times that I wished I was working in a team. If the stairs collapsed under my weight, no one would find me for hours. I was supposed to pick up my son, Jimmy, from his afterschool program around five. No one would notice I was missing until then.

  I propped the basement door open, and tested the top step with my right foot. The step seemed sturdier than I expected. They had been reinforced against the wall. I looked between the steps and saw that someone had added extra wood underneath so that the steps could hold more weight.

  On the second step, I turned and set my clipboard near the door. I’d make my notes from memory. I wanted both hands free as I descended into that darkness.

  I hadn’t seen any light switch near the top of the stairs, so the flashlight had to serve. Still, I braced the side of my left hand, the hand in which I held the light, on the rough concrete that formed the narrow tunnel that housed the stairs. Even if the stairs fell out from underneath me, I could hold myself in place with the railing and the wall.

  That worked until the wall stopped halfway down. By then, I had a sense of the basement. It was narrow and musty. It smelled of damp, old clothes, and that persistent odor of rot.

  When I reached the bottom of the steps, something brushed against my hair. I cringed, thinking more cobwebs, then looked up. It was the dangling cord attached to a bare light bulb. I pulled, having no faith that the bulb still worked.

  But it did. This bulb was stronger than the one in the main entry. The light reached all parts of this side of the basement room. Ahead of me, wooden storage units had been built against the wall. Each unit had a number painted on it, one which presumably matched an apartment number above. The units were closed, and some of them had very old padlocks attached to them. The latches were rusted and covered with dirt. No one had touched this area in years.

  The basement should have extended to my left, but it didn’t. Someone had built a wall across that area. The wall looked old, but well made, clearly dating from the days when this building had been a single-family home.

  I’d found a few large liquor-storage units in previous buildings in this part of town. Chicago’s reputation as the center of sin during Prohibition was well deserved. In one old building, I’d even discovered some unopened bottles. They had disappeared into Laura’s custody. She promised to destroy them, saying that a lot of the old homemade liquor from that period was deadly.

  Behind the stairs, I encountered another wall, and a door that had been padlocked shut. Someone had scrawled Boiler with a pen along what had once been white paint, but which had turned yellow-gray with time.

  I wasn’t surprised to find the lock. Most public basements in apartment buildings locked off the furnace and the water heater so that tenants couldn’t adjust them to their own particular needs. Sometimes that meant — at least in the case of Sturdy’s bad old days — that the heat wouldn’t come on until someone complained to the rental agency or the police, but often it was just a precaution to keep the temperature in the building uniform.

  The bulb’s
light didn’t reach here. I had to hold the flashlight while I searched for the right key. Fortunately, it didn’t take too long. I undid the padlock, found the key to the knob, and let myself in the boiler room.

  A wave of steam heat nearly pushed me backward. I stopped, caught my breath, and went inside. This room was neat and clean, clearly used a lot. To my left, a small metal shelf held a variety of tools. The boiler itself was ahead of me, a large metal thing that looked like it could play the villain in a horror movie.

  It only took a minute to find the overhead bulb in this room. That bulb was relatively new, and so was the cord. I clicked it on, and clicked the flashlight off.

  The boiler was pretty standard. I found the wrench that allowed me to switch the entire system off. Since no one lived in the building, the heat could remain off until the first serious freeze.

  I set the wrench back onto its shelf and sighed. The boiler clanked as the water settled in the pipes. The building would talk to me for the rest of the day as the heat dissipated, the water cooled, and the radiators gradually shut down.

  This room would be easy to inspect. I had to check the connections on the boiler, but I was no professional on that level. This thing was old enough that I’d have Laura bring in a repairman to flush the system, and then see if it was working properly.

  There was nothing behind the boiler except open space, and the only other item in the room was a large metal cabinet on that mysterious wall. The cabinet was padlocked closed.

  This padlock was tiny, so the key had to be as well. That made my search through the rings an easy one. I unlocked the lock, removed it, and pulled the double metal doors open.

  They squealed as they moved. They’d been closed a long time. A cloud of dust came toward me, and I sneezed. Then I wiped my face for a third time in the past half hour, and frowned.

  There were no shelves in the cabinet. In fact, there was nothing in the cabinet at all — no supplies, no treasures, no records. The cabinet had been placed against the wall to cover a door that looked as old as the wall itself.