Fire Sale

by Sara Paretsky

  “Maybe,” I said. “Do you want-” but he hung up before I could finish asking him if he wanted to see me.

  I pulled over to the curb to relay Billy’s message to his father. Naturally enough, Mr. William wasn’t pleased, but his response took the form of petulant bullying (“That’s all? You think I’m paying your fee for sending me a disrespectful message? I want my son now.”) But when I told him I was going to have to quit the assignment, he stopped complaining about the message and demanded that I get back to work.

  “I can’t, Mr. William, not when I promised Billy to stop looking for him.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” He was astonished. “It was a good ploy-he won’t be suspecting you.”

  “It’s my word, Mr. William-I don’t have three thousand stores to carry me through lean times. My good word is my only asset. If I lose that, well, it would be a bigger disaster for me than losing all those stores would be for you, because I wouldn’t have any capital to start over again.”

  He still didn’t seem to understand: he was willing to overlook my insolence, but he wanted his son without delay.

  “Fee, fie, foe, fum,” I muttered, slamming the car into gear. Halfway up Lake Shore Drive to Morrell’s place, I decided to put everything behind me, the Bysens, the South Side, even my important paying clients and my tangled love life. I needed time alone, just for myself. I went to my own apartment and collected the dogs. When Morrell didn’t answer the phone, I left a message on his voice mail, told a startled Mr. Contreras I’d be back late on Sunday, and took off for the country. I ended up in a B and B in Michigan, took the dogs for ten-mile rambles along the lakeshore, read one of Paula Sharpe’s quirky novels. Every now and then, I wondered about Morrell, with Marcena down the hall, but not even those thoughts undid my essential pleasure in my private weekend.

  15 Heart-stopper

  My peaceful mood held until Monday afternoon, when April Czernin collapsed in the middle of practice. At first, I thought Celine Jackman had taken her out in an escalation of their ongoing feud, but Celine was in the back-court; April had been driving under the basket when she fell all in a heap, as if she’d been shot.

  I blew my whistle to stop practice and ran to her side. Her skin was blue around the mouth, and I couldn’t feel a pulse. I started CPR on her, trying to keep my own panic at bay so my horrified team wouldn’t disintegrate completely.

  The girls crowded around us.

  “Coach, what happened?”

  “Coach, is she dead?”

  “Did someone shoot her?”

  Josie’s face loomed next to mine. “Coach, what’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” I panted. “Do-you-know of any health problems, problems April has?”

  “No, nothing, this never happened before.” Josie’s cheeks were white with fear; she could hardly get the words out.

  “Josie,” I kept pushing on April’s diaphragm, “my cell phone is locked in the equipment room, inside my bag in the desk.”

  I took my hands away from April for a brief second and handed the keys to her. “Go get it, call 911, tell them exactly where we are. Repeat for me!”

  When she parroted back my instructions, I told her to move. She ran, stumbling, to the equipment room. Sancia went with her, murmuring petitions to Jesus.

  Celine I sent to the principal’s office: gangbanger she might be, but she had the coolest head on the team. Maybe the school nurse was still here, maybe she knew something about April’s history. Josie came back with the phone, her face pinched and white: she was so nervous, she couldn’t figure out how to use the phone. I stepped her through it, not pausing in my work on April’s chest, and had her put the phone to my head so I could talk to the dispatcher myself. I waited long enough for an acknowledgment of our location, then told Josie to take the phone and try to reach April’s folks.

  “They’re both at work, Coach, and I don’t know how to get them. April’s mom, she’s a cashier over at the By-Smart on Ninety-fifth and, well, you know, her dad, he drives that truck, I don’t know where he is.” Her voice cracked.

  “Okay, girl, it’s okay. You call…this number, and hit the send key.” I squinted, trying to calm down enough to remember Morrell’s number. When I finally came up with it, I had Josie type it in and then hold the little phone up to my head.

  “V. I.,” I said, continuing my work on April’s chest. “Emergency, with Romeo’s kid…need to find Romeo. Ask…Marcena, okay? If she can…track him down…have him…call my cell.”

  Years in battle zones made Morrell accept what I said without wasting time on useless questions. He simply said he was on it and let me get back to the task at hand. I didn’t know what else to do while I waited for the ambulance, so I kept pushing on April’s chest and blowing into her mouth.

  Natalie Gault, the assistant principal, sailed into the room. The girls reluctantly pulled back to let her in next to me.

  “What’s happened here? Another team fight?”

  “No. April…Czernin…collapsed. You got anything…in her file…on medical history?” Sweat was running down my neck, and my back was wet with it.

  “I didn’t check for that-I thought this was more of your gang warfare.”

  I didn’t have energy to waste on anger. “Nope. Nature’s doing. Worried…about her heart. Check her file, call…her mother.”

  Gault looked down at me, as if deciding whether she could take an order from me. Fortunately, at that moment, we had one of the South Side’s major miracles: an ambulance crew actually arrived, in under four minutes. I got gratefully to my feet and wiped sweat from my eyes.

  While I gave the techs a sketch of what had happened, they moved in next to April with a portable defibrillator. They slid her onto a stretcher and pulled up her damp T-shirt to attach the pads, one below her left breast, the other on her right shoulder. The girls crowded in, anxious and titillated at the same time. As if we were in a movie, the techs told us to stand clear; I pulled the girls away while the techs administered a shock. Just as in a movie, April’s body jerked. They watched their monitor anxiously; no heartbeat. They had to shock her twice more before the muscle came back to life and began a sluggish beat, like an engine slowly turning over on a cold day. As soon as they were sure she was breathing, the techs packed up their equipment and began running across the gym with the stretcher.

  I trotted along next to them. “Where are you taking her?”

  “ University of Chicago -it’s the closest pediatric trauma center. They’ll need an adult to admit her.”

  “The school is trying to find the parents,” I said.

  “You in a position to okay medical treatment?”

  “I don’t know. I’m the basketball coach; she collapsed during practice, but I don’t think that gives me legal rights.”

  “Up to you, but the kid needs an adult and an advocate.”

  We were outside now. The ambulance had drawn a crowd, but the students stood back respectfully as the techs opened the door and slid April inside. I couldn’t let her go alone; I could see that.

  I scrambled into the back and took her hand. “It’s okay, baby, you’ll be okay, you’ll see,” I kept murmuring, squeezing her hand while she lay semiconscious, her eyes blunking back in her head.

  The heart monitor was the loudest sound in the world, louder than the siren, louder than my cell phone, which rang without my hearing it until the EMT crew told me to turn it off because it could interfere with their instruments. The irregular beeping bounced in my head like a basketball. A-pril’s still alive but isn’t stable, A-pril’s still alive but isn’t stable. It drowned any other thoughts, about By-Smart, or Andrés, or where Romeo Czernin might be. The sound seemed to go on forever, so when we arrived at the hospital I was startled to see we’d covered seven city miles in twelve minutes.

  As soon as we pulled into the ambulance bay, the EMTs whisked April into the emergency room and left me to grapple with her paperwork, a frustrating bureaucratic ba
ttle, since I had no idea what kind of insurance her parents had. The school had a little policy on the athletes, but only for injuries sustained while playing; if this was a preexisting condition, the policy wouldn’t cover it.

  When the ER staff saw I didn’t know enough to fill out the forms, they sent me off to a tiny cubicle to wrestle with an admissions official. After forty minutes, I felt like a boxer who’d been punched for thirteen rounds but couldn’t quite fall over. Because April had come in as a pediatric emergency, they were treating her, but they needed parental consent, and they needed to be paid-not, I need hardly add, in that order.

  I couldn’t guarantee the payment, and I wasn’t legally able to give consent, so I tried to track down April’s mom at work, which was in itself a bureaucratic nightmare; it took me nine minutes to find someone with the authority to deliver a message to an employee working the floor, but that someone said Mrs. Czernin’s shift had ended at four and she wasn’t in the store any longer. She wasn’t at home, either, but the Czernins did have an answering machine, with a message delivered in the hesitant voice of someone uncomfortable with technology.

  I tried Morrell again. He hadn’t been able to track down Marcena. Only because I’d run out of other ideas, I called Mary Ann McFarlane.

  My old coach was alarmed when she heard what had happened-she didn’t know about any health problems April had, certainly she had never collapsed before. Several times last year, she’d suddenly run out of steam during drills, but Mary Ann had put that down to lack of conditioning. The coach knew nothing about health insurance, either: she assumed most of the girls on the team had green cards, entitling them to Medicaid, but she’d never needed to check. And, of course, both April’s parents worked, so the Czernins probably didn’t qualify for public assistance.

  When I hung up, the admissions official told me if I couldn’t get April’s care sorted out they’d have to move her to County. We argued over it for a few minutes, and I was demanding to see a supervisor, when a woman burst in on us.

  “Tori Warshawski, I might have known. What did you do to my girl? Where’s my April?”

  Her use of Boom-Boom’s old name didn’t register with me at first. “Did you get the message I left on your machine? I’m sorry I had to notify you that way, Mrs. Czernin. April collapsed during practice. We were able to revive her, but no one knows what’s wrong. And they need her insurance information here, I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t ‘Mrs. Czernin’ me, Tori Warshawski. If you hurt my girl, you are going to pay for it with the last drop of blood in your body.”

  I stared at her blankly. She was a thin woman, not thin like Aunt Jacqui or Marcena, with the carefully tended slimness of the wealthy; she had tendons in her neck like steel cables, and deep grooves around her mouth, from smoking or worry or both. Her hair was bleached and scraped back from her head in waves as hard as coiled wire. She looked old enough to be April’s grandmother, not her mother, and I racked my tired brain for where we might have met.

  “You don’t know me?” she spat. “I used to be Sandra Zoltak.”

  Against my will, a wave of crimson flooded my cheeks. Sandy Zoltak. When I last knew her, she’d had soft blond ringlets, a plump soft body, like a Persian cat, but a sly smile, and a way of turning up when you didn’t expect or even want her. She’d been in Boom-Boom’s class in high school, a year ahead of me, but I’d known her. Oh yes indeed, I’d known her.

  “I’m sorry, Sandy, sorry I didn’t recognize you. Sorry, too, about April. She collapsed suddenly in practice. Does she have anything wrong with her heart?” My voice came out more roughly than I’d meant, but Sandra didn’t seem to notice that.

  “Not unless you did something to her. When Bron told me you was filling in for McFarlane, I told April she had to be careful, you could be mean, but I never expected-”

  “ Sandy, she was going in for a basket and her heart stopped beating.”

  I talked slowly and loudly, forcing her to pay attention. Sandy had been riding with demons all the way to the hospital, worrying about her child; she needed someone to take it out on, and I wasn’t just convenient, I was an old enemy, from a neighborhood that stored grudges as carefully as if they were food in a bomb shelter.

  I tried telling her what we’d done to help April, and what the impasse was here at the hospital, but she poured furious accusations over me: my negligence, my bullying, my desire to get back at her through her daughter.

  “Sandy, no, Sandy, please, that’s all dead and gone. April’s a great kid, she’s about the best athlete on the team, I want her to be healthy and happy. I need to know, the hospital needs to know, does she have some kind of heart problem?”

  “Ladies,” the woman at the admissions cubicle interrupted us in magisterial tones, “save your fight for the home, please. All I want to hear right now is billing information for this child.”

  “Naturally,” I snapped. “Money comes way ahead of health care in American hospitals. Why don’t you tell Mrs. Czernin what’s happening with her daughter? I don’t think she can answer any billing questions until she knows how April’s doing.”

  The administrator pursed her lips, but turned to her phone and made a call. Sandy stopped shouting and strained to listen, but the woman was speaking so quietly we couldn’t make out what she was saying. Still, within a few minutes a nurse from the emergency room appeared. April was stable; she seemed to have good reflexes, good recall of events: although she couldn’t name the mayor or the governor, she probably hadn’t known those facts this morning. She could name her teammates and recite her parents’ phone number, but the hospital wanted to keep her overnight, and maybe for a few days, for tests, and to make sure she was stable.

  “I need to see her. I need to be with her.” Sandra’s voice was a harsh caw.

  “I’ll take you back as soon as you finish with the paperwork here,” the nurse promised. “We told her you’d arrived, and she’s eager to see you.”

  When I was fifteen, I would have wanted my mother, too, but it was hard to picture Sandy Zoltak thinking about another person with the passion and care my mother had felt for me. I found myself blinking back tears-of frustration, fatigue, longing for my mother-I didn’t know what.

  I abruptly left the area, prowling around the hall until I saw Sandra return from the emergency room to the admissions desk. When I went over, she was fishing an insurance card out of her wallet. By-Smart was written on it in big letters; I was relieved but surprised-from what I’d read, the company didn’t provide insurance to their cashiers. Of course, Romeo drove for them; maybe he had real benefits. When Sandra had finished filling out forms, I asked if she wanted me to wait for her.

  Her mouth twisted. “You? I don’t need your help for anything, Victoria Iffy-genius Warshawski. You couldn’t get a husband, you couldn’t have a kid, now you’re trying to muscle into my family? Just go the hell away.”

  I’d forgotten that tired old insult the kids used to use. My middle name, Iphigenia, the bane of my life-who had let it out on the playground to begin with? And then my mother’s ambitions for me to go to college, the support of teachers like Mary Ann McFarlane, my own drive, some of the kids thought I was a snot, an egghead, an iffy genius. Being Boom-Boom’s cousin, and his sidekick, had been a help in high school, but all those taunts, maybe that’s why I’d done some of the things I’d done, trying to prove to the rest of the school that I wasn’t just a brain, that I could be as big an idiot as any other adolescent.

  Despite her spitefulness, I handed Sandra a business card. “My cell phone’s on here. If you change your mind, give me a call.”

  It was only six o’clock when I walked out of the hospital. I couldn’t believe it was that early-I thought I must have been working all night, I felt so beat. I looked aimlessly around Cottage Grove Avenue for my car, wondering if I’d forgotten to set the alarm, when I remembered it was still down at the high school-I’d ridden to Hyde Park in the ambulance.

  I picked up a t
axi at the stand across the street and bullied the driver into going south. All the way down Route 41, the cabbie kept hectoring me on how dangerous it was, and who was going to pay his fare back north?

  I refused to take part in one more fight, leaning back in the seat with my eyes shut, hoping that would make the driver close his mouth. He may have kept up his complaint, but I did fall into a sound sleep that lasted all the way to the high school parking lot.

  I made my way home more by luck than skill, and fell back down into the well of sleep as soon as I got home. My dreams weren’t restful. I was back in the gym, fifteen years old. It was dark, but I knew I was there with Sylvia, Jennie, and the rest of my old basketball team. We’d run the length of the room so many times, we automatically avoided the sharp edges of the bleachers, and the horse and hurdles leaning against the wall. We knew where the ladders were, and which one had the climbing ropes looped around it.

  I was the strongest: I clambered up the narrow steel ladder and unhooked the climbing ropes. Sylvia was like a squirrel on the ropes. She clung with her thighs, hauling up the underpants and the sign. Jennie, keeping watch at the gym doors, was sweating.

  Homecoming was the next night, and the dream switched to that. Even in my dream, I felt thick with grievance against Boom-Boom-he’d promised to take me and now he wouldn’t. What did he see in Sandy, anyway?

  It was the exposure waiting round the bend in my mind that woke me. I wasn’t going to let myself dream to the end, to Boom-Boom’s anger and my own mortification. I sat in bed, sweating, panting, seeing Sandy Zoltak again as she’d been then, soft, plump, with a sly smile for the girls, a foxy one for the guys, her shimmery satin dress a blue that matched her eyes, going into the gym on Boom-Boom’s arm-I pushed aside the memory and thought instead how I wouldn’t have known Sandy on the street today-I certainly hadn’t known her in the hospital.

  It must have been that random thought that brought the punk I’d seen on the street when I was talking to Pastor Andrés back into mind, the “chavo banda” Andrés chewed out for showing up at his construction site.