Chicago Blood: Detective Shannon Rourke Book 1

by Stewart Matthews

  Shannon slid the curtain aside.

  Her throat closed on itself as soon as she saw Isabella.

  She laid in the bed, sleeping. Her beautiful hair was spread out along the pillow. It made her appear as if she were in a constant state of falling into place. Tubes and wires came from her body. They plugged into machines next to the bed, machines on the wall, machines on carts, machines on shelves—machines anywhere the hospital staff could stuff them without burying Isabella alive.

  There was a chair at the bed’s side. Shannon took a seat. She couldn’t bring herself to ask Isabella anything. Not now.

  Then Isabella stirred in the bed. Tears gathered in the corners of her closed eyes.

  Shannon grabbed her hand.

  “It’s okay.” She stroked Isabella’s hair. “You’re in the hospital. Your baby will be okay.”

  The act leapt beyond anything a police officer should do. Protocol had no place here.

  Isabella’s eyes fluttered open. She looked at Shannon with pupils as big as quarters. She was drugged out of her mind.

  “Hi, baby,” Isabella said. She squeezed Shannon’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s Detective Rourke,” Shannon said. “What happened to you?”

  Isabella’s mouth twisted up in pain. Tears rolled down her cheeks and onto the white hospital pillow.

  “We were so close, baby,” she said between sobs. “We had the money. We had Windsor. He was gone… We were so close.”

  She was delirious. Shannon didn’t know what to say. Isabella thought she was Colm.

  “You did what I asked—you did great,” Isabella said. “You did better than Afonso could have.”

  Did what she asked? Was it her idea to rob Ewan? Did she know about Robbie’s involvement?

  “I was so proud of you,” Isabella said. “You were a man. You stood up. You protected your family just like you said you were always gonna do.” She smiled at Shannon. “You did it right.”

  Isabella choked on her own sobs for a moment.

  “I’ll miss you,” she said.

  CHAPTER 28

  “Who are you?”

  Shannon turned her eyes from Isabella. A doctor stood half-obscured by the curtain blocking the door, his reading glasses focused on her.

  “I’m a friend,” Shannon said. “I heard from Afonso that Isabella was in the hospital, so I came to see she was okay.”

  A convincing lie.

  “I’m sorry, miss, but this room is open to family members only,” the doctor said. “You’ll have to leave. Now.”

  She looked at Isabella.

  “Don’t leave,” she said. “I can’t do this alone.” Another pair of tears darted down from Isabella’s eyes.

  Isabella didn’t know who she was crying for. And neither did Shannon. She felt a bit like a vulture feeding on Isabella’s suffering.

  Even if she stayed in the room, if she planted her feet and refused to budge until a pack of security officers came and dragged her away, Shannon wouldn’t get any of the closure she craved.

  She let go of Isabella’s hand, then stood up from her chair. She had a new lead in her case—Isabella probably had a hand in stealing Ewan’s money. That was worth something, wasn’t it? Even if she had to prey on a woman at her most vulnerable to get it.

  “Is her baby alive?” Shannon asked.

  The doctor’s expression curdled.

  “Miss, you need to leave.”

  “Right,” Shannon said. She stepped away from Isabella’s bedside and felt like she’d had a ton of bricks dropped on her.

  Once out in the hall, Shannon made her way back toward the hospital’s front door.

  “You!” A security guard approached her just outside of Isabella’s room. “I saw you access that computer at the nurse’s station.”

  She didn’t have the patience for this.

  “I’m a cop.”

  “I don’t care who the hell you are. You’re coming with me right now.” The guy tried to grab her by the wrist. She caught his arm with both hands and twisted it around until she had him lying on his belly in the middle of the hall, crying mercy.

  Nurses and patients up and down the hallway gasped, but she didn’t pay much mind to them. She held her star up where everyone could see it. A few of them went back to what they were doing, but others stayed quiet and kept their eyes on her.

  The security guard groaned wordlessly on the ground.

  Shannon looked down at him and something in his face—a twist of his lip, his watering eyes—something touched the humanity in her.

  What in the hell did she just do?

  She got off him.

  Suddenly she was out front, her hand on the door of Dedrick’s Impala, the bile rising up in the back of her throat.

  She ripped the car’s door open, then flung herself into the driver’s seat. She leaned up against the steering wheel and cried.

  Motherhood came to drown her again.

  She was supposed to have bailed herself out of it at the VA a long time ago. She used that bucket every day for a year. All the psychologists and the support groups and the volunteers—they brought buckets for her, too.

  When that didn’t work, they helped her build a dike. They helped her wall off pain that should’ve receded a long, long time ago.

  But here it came to swallow her up.

  Shannon opened her eyes.

  She was laid up in that stuffy pea-soup-green recovery room in Germany again. Her right leg had been shattered after the IED flipped her truck. The surgeons managed to fix it, and now it hung from a sling over her hospital bed.

  “Lance Corporal Rourke.” That blonde Marine Corps nurse stood in the door to Shannon’s room. She had a green file folder clutched to her chest. She sighed and grimaced at Shannon. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  “Tell anyone what?”

  Shannon wiped the tears from her eyes. She was back in the Imapala, free from the worst part of her intrusive memory.

  There would be times when things like this happened. She remembered what the psychologist at the VA told her: she had to have a strategy. She needed to come up with a a way to bail herself out again at a moment’s notice.

  She did, but Frank wasn’t here. He was probably at home laying in her bed. Her fingers twitched as if they could break the space between she and her dog, and scratch the loose folds of skin over his shoulders.

  Breathe. She should breathe. She huffed air in through her nose, then blew it out of her mouth. In through the nose, out through the mouth. In and out and in and out.

  Her phone rang. It was Michael.

  She sucked up the tears, took a breath, and swiped the screen of her phone to answer the call.

  “Hi,” she said, sounding altogether unconvincing.

  “Shannon?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m at the hospital.”

  “What? Are you hurt?”

  “No, I’m fine,” she said. “I just—I need to come home. I’m tired. I’ve worked too long today.”

  “Okay,” Michael said. “I’m nearly there, but I can come get you. Where are you?”

  “Mitchell Hospital,” she said. “But I’ll be fine to drive. I’ll see you at home.”

  She hung up. She looked at herself in the rear-view mirror. Her eyes were bloodshot and ringed with red. Strands of her dark hair had come out of her ponytail and hung down over her forehead. Her cheeks were flushed, like she’d come in from shoveling up snow after one of the blizzards came roaring over the lakes.

  This was no way for a Marine to be. No way for a CPD detective to act.

  Shannon took a deep breath through her nose and turned the ignition on the Impala.

  When she got home and got to hold Frank, everything would be okay. She’d have to make it on her own until then.

  CHAPTER 29

  Shannon drove Dedrick’s Impala all the way back to the curb in front of her apartment. He wouldn’t be happy about leaving his take-home car with her
all night. She’d call him later and apologize, but for now, she just had to get out of the scouring outside world and into her place.

  In the brief seconds it took to get from the car to the front door of her building, Shannon heard music and singing slip through the evening haze over Wrigleyville. The seventh-inning stretch over at the Cubs’ game was about halfway through. People would be spilling out of the stadium and into the bars soon.

  While they did, she’d be curled up next to Frank, music from her headphones blasting away the bad memories.

  The old door at her apartment building’s entrance creaked open. She took the steps up and unlocked the door to her place.

  Frank was right there on the other side. He looked up at her with big brown eyes, like he could smell the grief on her. His tail swished left and right with excitement. His tongue sneaked little glimpses of her from between his big, saggy lips.

  She started to feel better already.

  “Hey, buddy!” She dropped to her knees and hugged him. She squeezed him so tight he groaned, but he didn’t shy away from her. He pressed into her harder, almost knocking her over. His tail pounded against the doorframe—thud, thud, thud.

  Frank licked her face. This big dumb dog wanted nothing more than to see her, to be next to her, and to feel her hands scratching and rubbing him. Well, all that and the occasional walk. She felt tears fighting to make their way out of her again, but she held them back.

  “All right, buddy, let me inside.” She stood up and stepped past him and into her apartment. She closed the door behind her.

  “Hi.” Michael’s voice came from the kitchen. She couldn’t see him. “You hungry?”

  “I’m starving.” She hadn’t touched anything since her grilled chicken salad nearly eight hours ago. She almost laughed when she thought of Dedrick and his kids in that chintzy diner together.

  “Take a seat, then,” Michael said. “I’m almost ready to plate dinner.”

  She pulled a chair out at their little circular dinette table and collapsed into it. Behind her, she heard Michael click the stove off and scrape something out of a frying pan.

  Frank, who thought himself to be the size of a teacup poodle, squeezed under the table. His tail whacked her on the thigh.

  She reached down and rubbed her knuckles on his ear. Frank couldn’t stop himself from pressing harder against her hand, to the point that she was almost pulling wax out of his ear canal.

  “How was the drive home?” Michael asked. “Feeling any better?”

  “I am now,” Shannon said to Frank.

  “I want to talk to you about our conversation earlier,” Michael said.

  Shannon didn’t know what there was to talk about. He couldn’t go hunting for information about Colm and that was that.

  “I’m sorry I stuck my nose into your job,” he said. “You were right. I shouldn’t have done that. I just had to know how Colm had come by his money.”

  She sighed. In all the commotion, she hadn’t mentioned anything to Michael about Colm’s plan to go to Canada, and why. She’d have to tell him sooner or later. But how could Shannon tell her brother something she was certain would unstitch him?

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  “I just couldn’t quit wondering about him,” Michael said. “Me and Colm, we just—I gotta know what happened to him. Good or bad.”

  “There’s something you need to hear.”

  He sat a plate of salmon and sautéed asparagus in front of her, and a similar plate across the table for him, then he took his seat.

  “Okay.”

  She stared at the fish. He knew exactly what she liked. He deserved better family than her.

  “Michael, Colm was—”

  When her eyes met him, she had to stop. There was something wrong with the way he looked. It wasn’t just that he was disheveled and tired, but he looked…not himself.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “What have you been doing today?”

  “You go first.” He forked a piece of salmon. Whatever it was—and she was sure it was something—he didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Michael, what the hell happened to you?”

  He shrugged. “I’m fine.”

  “Did you…you didn’t—”

  Silence. His face went from tired to defensive in a matter of seconds.

  “What?” he snapped. “Did I what?”

  “You didn’t use, did you?”

  Another uncomfortable pause—the tension was strong enough to make Frank’s hackles come to attention on his shoulders.

  “Did I use heroin today, Shannon?” Michael said. “Is that what you want to ask me?”

  Words escaped her. She didn’t want to say it, but he looked like he had. There was a shine to his eyes—a certain quality they lost when he used. They looked back at her from across the table, dull as a stone.

  “Did you?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  His answer didn’t make her relax.

  He tore another piece of his salmon with his fork, then stuffed it in his mouth.

  God. What had she become? His mother? Just because he looked a little rough, it didn’t mean he was back on heroin. She had to trust he wouldn’t do that.

  “I’m sorry,” she said into her plate. “It wasn’t right for me to accuse you.”

  The tears came out again.

  “Shannon?” Michael’s fork clanged against the dish. “Shannon, it’s fine.”

  “It’s not.” She shook her head. “None of this is fine.”

  “I’m not upset,” Michael said. “I don’t blame you for being suspicious.”

  “Colm wanted money to move to Canada,” she blurted. “He and a friend robbed Ewan to get it.”

  Michael sat back in his chair. He took the news a lot better than she expected. Maybe he didn’t understand the reason why Colm wanted to move.

  But her brother wasn’t that dumb.

  “I figured he’d try to get out of the country,” Michael said. “He’d told me before that he didn’t want to stay in Chicago.”

  “I can’t blame him,” Shannon said. “I don’t want to stay here either. I’m tired of all the baggage—of being the daughter of a mobster, of a man who killed himself. I see Tommy every time I look at the streets. I see him with a belt in his hand chasing after you when we were kids. I see him scowing at the wall with a pile of empty beer cans next to him, while mom did nothing but turn see-through.

  “To me, all of Chicago is Tommy. The wind smells like the booze on his breath, and the buildings look gray as his hateful eyes, and I see all the anger he put into you, Michael.”

  Shannon had seen it a thousand times in her cases. File after file of young men and women never loved by those who were supposed to love them, nursed on a steady diet of indifference, left to rot through their lives.

  As people grew, that rot spread. Not only within themselves, but without. They turned to anger, they turned to violence, they turned to destroying anything they could.

  They killed each other. They killed themselves. They killed anyone who was handy.

  “This city can be terrible—I know. I was part of it.” Michael clenched his jaw. “But if I learned anything about life at my meetings, it’s that running away from trouble is worse than the trouble itself.”

  And what was Stockholm to her, if not a place to run away from her troubles? She thought back to what Dedrick said in the diner.

  Suddenly, her food was a lot less appetizing.

  “I think I need a shower,” she said.

  Shannon excused herself from the table and made her way to the bathroom. Frank followed.

  She closed the door behind her, then turned on the water. She couldn’t get her clothes off fast enough. They smelled like sweat, blood, and that odd combination of plastic and sanitizer produced by hospitals everywhere.

  The smell didn’t discourage Frank from using them as a bed while she showered.

  CHAPTER 30
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br />   Shannon didn’t leave the shower until the cold water forced her out.

  She grabbed one of the white towels hanging on the back of the door, dried herself off, and slipped into her room where she got dressed to the first couple tracks on Kurt Vile’s album, B’lieve I’m Goin’ down.

  His music always got her thinking clearer.

  Soon as she slipped an old Cubs t-shirt on, hunger came back at her. Michael had probably wrapped her plate and put it in the fridge—he was always better about saving leftovers than she was.

  She left the music going in her room and walked out to the kitchen.

  Michael sat at the table with his laptop in front of him. More investigating, probably. If that’s all he was getting into, she was better leaving it alone. Why get upset at him for doing a bit of Facebook snooping?

  Over his shoulder, she saw some new picture of Isabella, Colm, and Robbie. They were at a nightclub together. They sat in one of those big, white leather sectionals, like something straight out of Scarface. Jimmy Butler, the Bulls’ best player, sat next to them—on Colm’s left. An open bottle of Dom Perignon was on ice in front of them.

  “Colm wasn’t shy about bringing his money problems on himself, was he?” She reached into the fridge and grabbed out her saran-wrapped plate.

  “No, he wasn’t.” Michael’s fingers were interlaced in front of his mouth.

  She popped the plate in the microwave.

  “Don’t microwave fish.” He whipped around in his chair. “You’ll ruin it, and you’ll make the entire building stink. Eat it cold.”

  Shannon scrunched her nose at the idea. “I’d rather eat my own foot.”

  She started the microwave.

  “Keep that attitude up, and I might arrange it,” Michael said.

  She looked in his direction to sneer, but when she had a second look at his computer screen, she froze.

  “What?” Michael looked at his computer. He looked back to her. “What is it?”

  Shannon moved closer to his laptop. Maybe her eyes were playing tricks on her and she hadn’t seen what she’d just thought she saw.

  “Did Colm ever think Isabella cheated on him?” She stared at the picture.