by Tracy Clark
“That’s them,” I said, pointing at the photos.
The group leaned in over my shoulders to take a better look.
“Couple of real winners,” Ben groused. “Twins?”
“Draymond’s two years younger,” I said. “His nose is the one I broke.”
“They’re on probation,” Weber said. “That should make things easy.”
“We’ll haul them in, get them in a lineup for a formal ID. By the book,” Ben said. “You’ll need to finger them again.”
I noted the Williamses’ last known address, then stood, my knees and back stiff from sitting too long in the chair. I knew their neighborhood. I knew people who lived there. I might just have a string or two to pull. “I’ll be glad to. Let’s go, Jung.”
Jung had been peeking over Ben’s shoulder at the mug book. He looked at me, eyes wide. “Where’re we going?”
Ben eyed me, suspicious. “Yeah, where are you going?”
I looked from Ben to Weber. “I’ve just picked out a couple of dangerous criminals. I would think that gives you both plenty to do without sweating over where I’m going.”
Ben shook his head, his mouth twisted into a distrustful smirk. “Uh-uh, don’t worry about what we’ve got to do. I want to know what you think you’ve got to do.”
“I’m taking Jung home. Unless, of course, I can sit in while Marta works the fake nurse?” Both stood still, eyes averted. Of course I couldn’t. “That’s what I thought.” I motioned to Jung. “Let’s roll.”
“Stay out of this,” Ben called after us.
I waved good-bye, keeping it moving. “I’m taking my client home, if that’s all right with you, Grandpa.”
“‘Grandpa,’ my ass. Go home. Keep close to your phone. I’ll call when we grab these idiots up.”
“On my way.”
I shoved out into the office, Jung walking beside me. “You’re not going home, are you?”
“Nope.”
“You’re going after those guys?”
“Yep.”
We headed for the elevator, weaving through busy cops. They didn’t appear to take notice of either of us, but I knew they saw us, all the same. In fact, if pressed, every single one of them would likely be able to give a detailed description of Jung and me, right down to the color of our socks. It came with the training. Cop eyes missed very little.
“They work for Spada?”
I slid him a sidelong look, smiled. “Yeah, looks that way.”
Jung stopped walking. I stopped to see why he stopped. “So that old man killed Tim for money?”
He stared at me, hurt in his eyes. I’d forgotten for a moment that at the bottom of this case was Jung’s grief for his friend, that it was more than just a battle now between Spada and me. “Mostly for money, but I think he got off on the control, the power, choosing who lives or dies, seeing it done. Like this whole thing is some kind of game.”
Jung nodded, his jaw clenched. I was looking at a different face than the one I was used to. This wasn’t the easygoing sandwich guy prone to existential jabberwocky anymore; I was looking at a less innocent Jung.
“Money and control,” he muttered, looking as though he couldn’t get the concept into his brain, let alone have it live there. It appeared inconceivable to him that sacrificing a human life for money alone was an acceptable swap. It was a testament to Jung’s moral center, but naïve nonetheless. He balled his fists, then unballed them, scanning the room in frustration, as though he were looking for something he could hit or punch or tear apart with his bare hands.
“We’ll get him,” I offered gently. “And he’ll pay for what he’s done.”
“But Tim and the others will still be dead.” Jung walked away, his head down. I followed. “Money and control,” he muttered mournfully.
* * *
As I drove away, it became clear to me that I couldn’t just take Jung back to his apartment and leave him there. Spada was nuts and, despite the temporary insulation his lawyers provided him, he had to know the walls were closing in around him. He knew who Jung was, and likely knew exactly where to find him. If he had no qualms about killing people at their most vulnerable, he’d certainly lose no sleep coming after Jung, even if killing him netted him nothing in the end.
I watched Jung as he sat forlornly in my passenger seat, staring off into the night, the light from passing streetlamps casting shadows across his face. He was angry and frustrated and didn’t appear to know what to do with either emotion. He hadn’t said more than two words the whole way.
I approached the turnoff to Jung’s place, but kept going. He didn’t notice. Leaving him to fend for himself now would be like throwing a puppy headfirst into a wood chipper. He needed to be where I could keep an eye on him. It wasn’t until the car stopped in front of my building that Jung snapped out of his trance.
“Hey, this isn’t my place.”
“No, it’s mine. You’re staying here for a while.”
“What for?”
“You’ll be safer here.”
His anger, suppressed by grief up until this point, flared hot. “This is because I hid out at Swami Rain’s, isn’t it? Now you think I can’t handle myself? That I’m some chickenshit? I’m not afraid of that guy.”
I gripped my hands on the steering wheel, took a breath. “You should be. He’s dangerous, and he’s out there right now, free as a bird, and he knows who you are. He made a point of telling me.”
“He won’t make money killing me.”
“Not a dime, you’re right. He doesn’t need to kill you, but he sure wants to—that’s the part you’re missing.”
“Let him try then,” Jung said, girding himself for a fight even he, deep down, knew he wasn’t fit for. “I’m ready.”
“You’re not, and you won’t be fighting him, you’ll be fighting whoever he sends in his place. You won’t see it coming. It could be anyone—someone posing as a UPS driver, a student sitting next to you in class, someone panhandling for change on the street. You’ll have to look over your shoulder every second of every day, not knowing if the person you just passed is the one aiming to punch your ticket. Is that what you’re ready for?”
“Yeah.” Jung answered defiantly, but the uncertainty, the fear in his eyes, told a different story.
“Get out of the car, Jung.”
I got out and shut the door behind me. Jung got out on the other side. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
“Good, because you’re not getting one. I’m offering you a safe place to be, that’s it.”
He slammed his fists on the roof of the rental car, the reverb cutting through the night like a single beat of a deep drum. “I’ve got to make him pay for what he did to Tim.”
“Hey. Back up.” I jabbed an angry finger at Jung. “Now.” He moved back, watching nervously as I checked the car for dents and scratches. On top of everything else, I did not want to have to battle the rental car company over damage to the Cruze. Relieved the car was fine, I took a moment, counted to ten, keeping my breathing steady, remembering Jung was in way over his head and more afraid than he’d probably been in his entire life. I watched him, seeing, beyond the fear, the person he was before all this started. “How? How do you plan on making him pay?”
Slowly Jung seemed to deflate. It was clear he hadn’t a clue. He was a student on the lifetime plan, a yoga-loving, vegan-eating sandwich tosser. “I’ll track him down. At the marina. His boat. I’ll do to him what he did to Tim.”
We stood quietly. He was talking nonsense, and I think he knew it. Finally I headed for my front door, hoping Jung would follow. He did, eventually.
“I can’t make you stay,” I said, my key in the lock. “If you want to take off, go on, I won’t chase you. But stay or go, tell me now.”
Jung’s chin fell to his chest. “They had him and they let him go.”
“There was nothing solid yet to hold him on.”
“And there never will be. I’ve been around people like him m
y whole life. They believe their money protects them, and they’re right. There are always lawyers and more lawyers to cover things up and do the dirty work. Now you want to hide me here while he has the run of the city.”
I pushed inside. “That’s right, I do. The apartment below me is vacant. You’ll stay there. You don’t tell anyone where you are, and you do not leave until I tell you it’s okay.” We trudged up to the second floor and I unlocked the Kallishes’ door and led him inside. The place smelled of drying paint. “Lights work, bathroom’s back there. No furniture, but I’ve got a fairly comfortable air mattress you can use. I don’t think you’ll need to be here more than a day or two.”
“So I’m just supposed to hang around here, cowering in a corner like a rat?”
I padded to the front windows, checked the street, then pulled the blinds down. “How you hang around is up to you.”
“What about food? People? My life?”
“You won’t starve. No people. Your life will resume when this is over.” I padded down the hall toward the back of the apartment, Jung behind me. “You have the run of the apartment. Just don’t do anything weird in here. This is my home, respect it.”
I flicked on the light switch in the master bedroom. “I’ll get you that mattress, and bring blankets and stuff to make you comfortable. Maybe a radio or something.”
Jung didn’t look overly impressed. “What’ll you be doing while I’m locked up here?”
I stared at him, giving him all kinds of slack. “I’ll be doing the work you paid me for.”
I headed back up the hall, toward the front door.
“I sleep in the nude. Is that going to be a problem?”
He was trying to needle me. He was a petulant child denied a privilege and trying to get a rise. “If I see you nude, yes, that’s going to be a problem for you.”
He let out an aggrieved breath. “I’m a prisoner then. What happened to my civil liberties?”
I opened the door, my hand on the knob. “You lost them when you stepped inside my house. You’ll get them back when you leave.”
Chapter 42
I pulled the baseball cap down low, flipped my jacket collar up, and slid into the backseat of a dark Chrysler with a missing tailpipe, easing into the seat as it pulled away from the curb. At the corner two blocks up, the car turned left and ducked into a dark alley and stopped. The driver switched off the ignition, turned to face me.
“Whassup?”
“Hey, Dobie.”
He shot me a toothy grin, his leather Kangol cap topping a dark, thin face and a graying soul patch. “Look at me driving and you sitting back there. You live long enough you see everything, huh?”
I smiled. I was used to hauling Dobie Tavares into the district in cuffs, me driving the squad car, him cooling his heels in back, trying to explain how I had him all wrong. Now here we were, no cuffs, no hauling, just me looking for information from a trusted confidential informant.
Dobie was a car thief—fast, thorough, nonselective—which made me wonder about the car I was sitting in. He didn’t much care about make or model. If it had wheels and he felt like taking it, he took it. He could watch you walk away from your car and have it hot-wired and halfway to the choppers almost before you got where you were headed. Despite his nimble fingers and long arrest record, good old Dobie, the Caribbean Cruiser, was the pride of his large Dominican family. It figured, since most of them were car thieves, too.
“I’m not going to lie. It’s a little strange.” I looked over the backseat, more than a little curious about the car’s history.
Dobie read my mind. “No worries, Officer Raines, this one’s cold as ice.”
I handed him a pair of fifty-dollar bills. “I’m looking for a couple of guys who hire themselves out for muscle work. They’re from your neighborhood.” I held up my phone and showed him the photos of the Williams brothers, which I’d snapped from the mug shots. “I need to know where they hang out, who they hang out with.”
Dobie focused, snorted, then looked at me as if he thought I was joking. “You’re serious?” He searched my face and saw that I was. “They’re small fries,” he said incredulously. “Little fish. Dum-dums? Hell, I got shoes with more sense than them two.”
I put the phone away. “Tell me about them.”
“I just did.” Dobie handed one of the fifties back. “They ain’t worth a hundred. Besides, I still owe you for keeping my sister’s kid out of the soup that one time. Dobie Tavares always pays his debts.”
“Okay, fill me in.” I was getting a little impatient. We’d already been in the alley too long. This was Chicago, not Shangri-La. Sitting in dirty alleys in a darkened car in the middle of the night was not a thing you did if you had long-term life plans.
“Never met them, but I’ve seen them around. They hang out at the laundromat picking up odd jobs, breaking legs, roughing up. They’re hard hitters who’ll work for just about anybody.” He pointed an index finger at the side of his head and drew a circle a couple of times. “And neither one of them is wrapped too tight, if you feel me.”
“Laundromat?”
Dobie chuckled. “You’ve been off the beat too long. It’s a shell. In the front, you fluff and fold your tighty whities. In the back, it’s a whole different story.”
“Guns, drugs, girls, what?”
“Yep. Those two float in and out of the action because they spend most of their time in the can. You got to be smart to work the streets. These two I know because I used to, allegedly, run cars through their cousin’s shop.” Dobie grinned mischievously. “Why don’t they work for the cousin on the regular, you’re probably asking yourself. Well, I’ll tell you, because even though they’re familia, these two Einsteins aren’t smart enough to pour piss out of a boot. Hiring on morons leaves you open for all kinds of bad shit.”
“How would they come in contact with a rich white guy?”
Dobie’s eyes slanted. “Is he a public defender?”
“Insurance.”
“Then I got no clue. I don’t think those two know what that is.” I leaned back in the seat, out of ideas. If there was a connection between the morons and Spada, I couldn’t see it, but a lot had gone on in a relatively short amount of time. I’d been thwarted, manhandled, thrown out, and had doors slammed in my face. I’d had a dead body delivered to my doorstep and even had my own client running from me as though he were trying to give the Devil the slip. There was a connection, but I just couldn’t see it. Why else would the goons grab me, rifle through my bag, leave my gun and wallet, and take only the copies I’d made of Spada’s files? Spada had to have sent them. Our encounter wasn’t some random shakedown. And how dumb did you have to be to be banished from a chop shop? A shiver ran up the back of my neck.
“The cousin’s shop. Where is it?”
“Aw, c’mon now, you know I can’t tell you that.”
“Dobie, this is important. Where?”
He shook his head. “The thugs you get, the shop you don’t get. You mess in these people’s business and you guarantee you don’t breathe so good, and your fifty don’t come close to paying for a decent funeral.”
I leaned forward, gripping the back of the driver’s seat, my heart racing. “Fleet Transports. On Armitage. Is that the shop?”
Sweat began to bead on Dobie’s forehead. He glanced out of the window, not wanting to look at me. I was right; he didn’t have to say it. Fleet Transports where Vince Darby got the SUV he drove to the marina, the place Whip and I talked our way into under false pretenses. The goons were related to Leon, who was connected to Darby, and Darby to Spada.
“He owned gas stations or storage facilities, she said.” I was muttering to myself, recalling my conversation with Elizabeth Ayers, working it through. Or an old garage used as a front for a chop shop? Surely Elizabeth Ayers wouldn’t have taken the time to make the distinction. I grasped Dobie’s shoulder. “Spada owns the chop shop. That’s how he connects to Leon. That’s why Darby went ther
e for the car, and Leon supplied them with muscle.” I smiled, nearly giddy inside. So light was my spirit, it almost felt as though I could fly.
“I need the name of that laundromat.”
Dobie shook his head. “I ain’t no snitch.”
“It stays with me. C’mon, Dobie. Don’t stop now.”
Dobie turned it over in his head for a moment, obviously unhappy with the position I was putting him in. I was asking him to go against the code of the streets, to put his safety at risk. It would come down to whether or not he trusted me, whether he knew or not that I’d have his back. It took a moment for him to work it through. “You’re killing me here.” I waited while he took his cap off, fanned his face with it, and then put it back on. It was nervous movement, stalling action. “The Dudz and Sudz, all right? There, I gave it to you. And for the record, this? Us two right here? Never happened, understood?”
I handed Dobie back the fifty. He’d earned it. “Thanks, Dobie. I owe you one.”
Chapter 43
The Dudz and Sudz was a depressing little hole-in-the-wall on South Homan; it was wedged between a greasy hoagies shop and a nursery school advertising curbside drop-off. The grimy front window plastered with colorful community flyers looked in on three short rows of coin-operated machines that, from across the street, looked like they dated back to Milton Berle’s heyday. For a time, I idled at the curb a few doors down, watching the door as feral-eyed street folk slipped in and out, a few carrying dirty laundry to wash, most with only the clothes they had on. I assumed these were the people who had business dealings in the back. No sign of the Williams brothers, and I wasn’t going to be able to sit in the car long before someone took notice and came to make something out of it. After about ten minutes, I took one last look and drove away.