Apparently talk wasn’t getting through.
He’d have to find a clearer way to communicate.
17
So Easily Stripped
Exhaust billowed white in the cold air, but no one sat inside the Mercedes.
Danny let the door to the White Hen swing shut behind him, and took a swig of coffee. An E500 sedan, V8, sticker probably sixty grand, and some asshole had dashed in to buy milk and left it running. He could have it downtown in ten minutes, find a shop through Patrick, and make two weeks’ pay before lunch.
Danny shook his head, turned away, hopped in his truck. Richard expected him, and with midday traffic, he’d be hard-pressed to make the twenty-minute drive in forty.
He did allow himself a last glance as he pulled onto Diversey.
Work had been tough. He had to keep his routine up, pretend like nothing was going on — however this nightmare shook out, he couldn’t afford raised eyebrows. The morning had been spent overseeing the final winterizing of the Pike Street loft complex. The foreman, McCloskey, had it well in hand. The infrastructure of the whole building was in place, and the open walls sealed off with plastic. Tools and materials had been stored, and by the end of the week, the site would be chained up.
The unfinished loft complex and the construction trailer would remain untouched through winter’s lonely haul, waiting, like the rest of the city, for spring to resurrect them.
As he turned onto Lakeshore, the wind lashed steel waves against the rocks, spray climbing tall as a man. It suited his mood. Nearly a week since he’d found Evan in his kitchen. It wouldn’t be long before he showed up demanding an answer. Nearly a week, and Danny still had no plan. All he’d managed to do was remind a detective he existed. That, and make Karen suspicious. He’d thought he was playing it close to his chest, but she knew him too well.
“Nightmares again, baby?” She’d touched the dark circles under his eyes and smiled tenderly at him in the bathroom mirror.
“Just busy,” he said, and put on his game face. She’d nodded, but he knew her mind was still chewing on it.
Not telling her was eating at him. It wasn’t his way to hide things from her. Just the opposite. She came at things from different angles, fresh viewpoints, and together there hadn’t been many problems they couldn’t solve.
But the most dangerous one of the last seven years? That, he didn’t dare share.
Wednesday, and the lawn crews had descended to service the wealthy. Day laborers called to one another in Spanish as they pushed mowers and raked leaves. A white guy with a clipboard sat in the heated cab of the pickup outside Richard’s house. Late October, and Danny knew the workers must be getting nervous, all too aware that business would shut down for the winter. He had a flash of coming home in the afternoon to find his old man at the kitchen table, a cigarette smoldering untouched in an ashtray, and knowing that another construction company had screwed them; that this winter, like last, Dad would be getting up at four in the morning to help Kevin O’Bannon with the snowplow.
Richard answered the door in golf pants and a polo shirt, like he planned on hitting the back nine after lunch. “What took so long?”
“Lakeshore was bumper-to-bumper.”
Richard nodded. “Come in. Ignore this mess.” The way he said it, Danny wasn’t sure if he was talking about the leaves on his lawn or the guys raking it. “You bring those contracts?”
“Yeah.” He stepped in, shutting the front door behind him. Richard was already halfway down the hall, and Danny followed him into the kitchen. Skylights brought autumn sun flooding across granite countertops and stainless appliances. With two ovens, two sinks, and a massive chef’s prep island in the center, the kitchen could service a restaurant, but he noticed the copper pans hanging over the chopping block had dust on them.
“You look everything over? I don’t want to find out I got rogered again.”
The last time Richard had gotten rogered it had been because he’d ignored Danny’s cost estimates, but Danny kept that to himself. “They’re clean.”
His boss nodded, sipping espresso as he flipped through the documents. “How’s Pike Street?” he asked, not looking up.
“McCloskey will have it locked down by the end of the week.”
“Good. And we’ve got him on contract for the spring?”
Danny started. “Huh?”
“McCloskey. We’ve got him set for the spring?”
Danny remembered his conversation with the foreman in the trailer, how good it had felt to treat him like a man, to explain the situation instead of just lay down the law the way so many managers had laid it on his father. “We’re keeping McCloskey on over the winter, remember?”
Richard didn’t look up from his papers. “Yeah, I thought it over, ran some numbers, and it’s not going to work.”
Had he heard right? “What?”
“Jeff Teller has the other projects under control, and he costs less. We’ll dump McCloskey and his crew for the winter, pick ’em back up in spring.”
Danny’s mind was racing. He’d promised that no one would lose his job. “Teller’s good, but not as good as McCloskey. And we could use help prepping next spring’s bids.”
Richard shrugged, his mind only half in the conversation. “I don’t need a foreman to tell me how to throw a bid.”
Danny tried a different tack. “You know, McCloskey’s pretty connected. We let him go, we may not get him back.”
“The market’s not going to be much better then. Besides, we can always find somebody else.”
There was no way around it. Danny said, “I gave them my word that we had work for them.”
His boss’s head snapped up, surprise on his face. “You did what?”
“I told McCloskey the deal, why we had to shut Pike down for now, and I told him that there was work for him and his crew.”
“Why would you do that?” Richard squinted as if trying to see Danny more clearly.
“Don’t you remember? We talked about it and agreed to keep them on.”
Richard shook his head. “I never said anything like that. I might have said that it would be nice to keep them on, but that’s all.”
Danny fought a sudden urge to break his boss’s nose. “We were sitting in the conference room. Reviewing budgets. You wanted to let them go, and I suggested we could keep them on half-time to get them through the winter. You agreed.”
Richard closed the contract and looked at him appraisingly. Danny met the stare unblinking. Finally his boss sighed. “I know how you feel. But you know how rough things have been. Believe you me, nobody’s been bleeding more than I have.” He took a sip of coffee and reopened the contracts, spinning the pen between his fingers.
Danny stood trying to think of something to say, his eyes ranging over the rich furnishings as if for the first time. A framed photo of Richard on his yacht, a silly captain’s hat on his head. The Italian cappuccino machine. A laptop, casually placed half on, half off the counter.
With a scribble, Richard signed his name on the contracts and pushed them to Danny. “Here. Make sure Pike Street is locked down tight. Don’t want it turning into a homeless camp.”
Through the bay window, Danny could see two Mexicans in hunting vests and fingerless gloves bundling branches that had fallen in last week’s storm. He wondered what he was doing on this side of the glass.
Later, heading south in his truck, Danny wasn’t sure why he decided to skip the Michigan Avenue exit and continue south to I-55; why he got off at Archer; why he found himself driving through Bridgeport. But it might have had something to do with his boss standing in golf clothes, using a gold pen to cut blue collars.
It wasn’t the first time he’d driven through the neighborhood since leaving, but in the past, he’d blitzed along, consciously not looking too hard to the left or right, avoiding the rawest of the old wounds. This time he went slowly and kept his eyes open, intent on yanking scabs.
Things had changed. Things
had stayed the same.
Tan and orange bungalows still crowded sidewalks bordered by sagging chain link. The Gothic spires of half a dozen massive churches rose over faded tract housing. White Sox flags hung limp under hazy skies. Smokestacks and skyscrapers loomed at the edge of the horizon, blurring like fever dreams.
He pulled up at a red light as a group of Hispanic kids swaggered along the sidewalk. They wore long basketball jerseys and bright sneakers, hats cocked to mark gang allegiances. A fair-skinned kid with close-shorn hair eyed Danny’s SUV, his lips opening in a threatening grin that revealed gold-capped teeth.
So there were still young lions in Bridgeport after all.
Danny stared back, putting all his street weight into it. It wasn’t a look you earned in a North Shore private school like the one Richard’s son attended. It required less gentle surroundings.
The kid held his gaze, slowing so that his crew moved past. For a few seconds they watched each other, a young predator and an old one, both bathed in the amber light of late afternoon. Then the kid smiled again, trying for scorn but not quite getting it, turned and pimp-strutted back to his friends. Danny watched him go.
Had he kept all of this from Karen to protect her?
Or because he was thinking of doing it?
Was that why he had come here, why his eyes had hungered for the class differences between himself and Richard? His new life, it couldn’t be that thin, so easily stripped of veneer.
Was he just a thief with a better address?
The light changed. He turned the truck and steered north.
18
Safety
Salsa was hopping.
Leaning over the balcony, trying to take some weight off her feet — the heels were killing her — Karen had a prime view of the dance floor. The crowd was young, most of them midtwenties, the girls in skintight dresses with sparkles that ended only where flesh began, the men sweating through black linen shirts. Lasers cut rainbow swaths in the swirling cigarette smoke. It was a party bar, and people would stick till the lights came on, throwing down drinks with the accelerating pace of a dreamer who fears awakening.
She straightened, let her head fall back, rolling it from side to side to ease the muscles. The smoke had given her a headache, and she wanted to be rid of it before she went home. Danny had been withdrawn lately, private. Something was obviously bothering him, but he kept it to himself. Maybe if she slipped out early, showed up with a bottle of wine and a naughty expression, she could loosen him up.
She smiled at the thought, stepped away from the railing to weave through the upstairs. When she’d taken over managing the place, the first thing she’d done was convert the balcony to a VIP room. A certain breed of guy would eagerly drop three hundred bucks on a twenty-dollar bottle of Stoli to impress a date in a low-cut dress, and in one stroke she’d upped the bar’s take 40 percent. Which made it her job to ensure that everyone upstairs felt like Very Important People. She moved through the crowd, chatting with regulars, touching men’s biceps and complimenting women on their shoes. It was her routine, but something felt off tonight. She had a weird tingle in her neck. Some animal instinct, like she was being watched. Not gawked at — she was used to that. This was different. It felt like she was being studied.
Hunted.
The word popped into her mind of its own accord, and her skin went cold. She stopped and glanced around, eyes darting over men in Armani, women sipping Cosmos, an anorexic blonde checking her makeup in a compact. Nothing to raise alarms. She moved to the railing, looked down at the main floor, scanning the sweating mass below. A long-legged girl spun and swirled her skirt amid a triangle of men wearing expressions of pained lust. A couple leaned against the column by the bathroom, locked in a late-night kiss, his thigh riding between her knees. For an instant, a lighter flared, near the back wall. The glow revealed a hard face framed by brown curls. He stared directly at her. Not at the VIP area. At her.
Then he snapped the lighter shut and disappeared.
She squinted, trying to pick him out again. The light bouncing off the dance floor left her night blind, the rear wall a blur of inseparable shapes with way too many cigarettes to make his stand out. But someone had been there. She was sure of it.
Who was he? He had seemed, in that split second, strangely familiar. An old acquaintance? Her nervousness suggested not. Whoever he was, she felt sure they weren’t friends.
“Karen!”
She jumped, spun around fast, heart pounding. Two of her regulars smiled down at her; Louis, a tall, elegant black man with his arm threaded around his partner Charles’s waist. “Join us for a drink?”
Adopting her best hostess smile, Karen turned from the dance floor. If she wanted to get out early, she didn’t have time to jump at shadows.
This was what job security looked like in the bar biz: ten past twelve on a weeknight, and still a line outside the door. The crowd was rowdy, already amped up on drink and eager to get in from the cold. She pushed through them, looking for Hector. Normally she walked to her car alone, but the stranger inside had made her nervous.
She found the bouncer at the head of the line, glowering down on a scrawny guy with a goatee, giving him the full impact of 250 pounds of tattooed muscle. “You gonna wanna think about that again, hoss.”
“Hey, screw you, Cheech.” The man’s face was red, though with booze or anger Karen couldn’t tell. “I told you, I just stepped out to make a call.”
“What’s going on?” Karen asked, using her manager voice.
“This gentleman don’t want to wait in line,” Hector said.
Up close now, Karen could see that Goatee’s eyes were all pupil. Ecstasy, probably, maybe with a little meth to give it an edge. Normally she wouldn’t care; half the crowd was hopped on something. But nobody messed with her staff. She shook her head. “Get him out of here.”
The bouncer grinned. He clamped meaty hands on the man’s shoulders, spun him around, and walked him protesting past the line. As he did, the crowd surged forward, a couple of similarly dressed guys, his friends maybe, pushing for the now unmanned door.
“Shit. Hector!”
The bouncer turned in time to see the men dash inside amid the thronging crowd. He growled and bounded back to the head of the line.
“Where’s Rodney?” Karen asked.
“He wasn’t feeling good, so I said I’d cover for him.” Hector looked at her sheepishly. “It was only for a couple hours, didn’t think you’d mind.”
She grimaced. “It’s just I was going to ask you to walk me to my car.”
Hector pulled out his radio. “Lemme get Kevin or Joe.”
They were both bartenders. The club was packed, everybody vying to get their last couple of rounds in. Pulling a bartender would slow things down, make everybody’s life harder, and cut the take. All for a weird feeling. She felt silly all of a sudden.
“Forget it,” she said. “I’ll be okay.”
“You sure?”
She nodded, pulled out the pepper spray key ring Danny insisted she carry. “Sure thing.”
He winked at her, turned back to the line of patrons.
Karen stepped out from behind the velvet rope and started down Ontario. Goose bumps massed on her exposed shoulders. Soon it would be time for jackets, gloves, layers. The unpleasant accoutrements of a Chicago winter.
The man from the bar haunted her. Who was he? Years of dealing with drunks had honed her instincts, and something about that guy had given her a bad feeling.
As if on cue, she heard footsteps behind her. A careful walk. The steps heavy and muffled. A man’s stride. Had she been foolish not to pull one of the bartenders? She quickened her step and gripped the pepper spray more tightly. Part of her wanted to whirl around, but she was afraid of what she’d see. She could feel her heart, the thumping swift against her ribs. Should she run? The heels would slow her down; if someone was following her, the man from the bar, he’d catch her easily.
Sh
e turned onto Franklin. The Explorer was in an alley a block down. If she could get to it, she’d be safe.
The footsteps followed, closer than ever. She didn’t think she’d make it, not at this rate. Mouth dry, she spun, raising the pepper spray in her right hand, her left bracing against the building. A tall man walked toward her, face cloaked in shadow. Her hand shook. She opened her mouth to yell — this was a public street, there were people just down the block, surely someone would help her. The man took another step. Just as she was about to shout, the headlights from a passing car fell across him.
Deep wrinkles cut his forehead, and his eyes were sunken. His walk was careful, all right — geriatrically so. The gentleman had to be in his seventies. He stared far away, pulling a tan raincoat tighter as he passed.
She snorted, almost laughed, the tension draining away. Why had she gotten so jumpy because someone on the floor looked up at the VIP lounge? That was what made it a VIP lounge — it was where everyone wanted to be.
She shook her head and continued. The alley wasn’t technically parking, but cops turned a blind eye for industry staff as long as no one com plained. She could see a gleam off the truck’s windshield, right where she’d left it. She started toward it, thinking of how to tell Danny the story, to convey her goofy fear. She decided that it would be in the details — the old guy, his wrinkles, that perv raincoat.
A shadow detached itself from the wall and reached for her.
She had time to gasp, to jerk the pepper spray up, knowing this time it was real. He was almost on her before her thumb found the button. She jammed it down to spit a stream of blinding poison.
Nothing happened.
He grabbed her arm, twisted it backward. Her shoulder and elbow blazed as she spun. A gloved hand stifled her scream with the taste of sour leather and cigarettes. She felt the keys yanked from numbing fingers.
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