I climb in and close the door. Immediately, she and the other woman in the front seat exit the vehicle and shut their doors. The man says nothing and dons a Tyvek helmet over his mic and headset. I jerk the Escalade’s door handle but it’s locked. “Don’t open that box while I’m in here.”
His bio suit sealed, he opens the UPS box. From the box he pulls a large can of Crisco, carefully pops the lid, and one at a time, lifts fifteen green-topped vials halfway out of the thick white shortening. I hug my door, holding my breath. He stares at each top, uses a sanitized tissue to clean each seal and inspects them again, this time with an odd suction-cup instrument he places over each seal, possibly designed to show any escaping gas or particles.
I can’t hold my breath any longer and gasp.
Next he uses another sanitized tissue to clean the exposed sides of each vial, then holds the Crisco can at eye level to locate something inside each partially exposed vial. Satisfied, he eases the vials back into the Crisco, closes the lid, and removes another instrument from the seatback pocket at his knees. He places the gauge in the air between us, waits, then removes his mask, and speaks Japanese to his headset.
The driver reenters the SUV and tells me, “The Yoshida Kaban on the deck behind you is yours.”
I reach over the seat back and pull up an expensive black soft-side bag that weighs close to twenty pounds. My hand’s trembling.
“Your vehicle has not been tampered with. We will not follow. In thirty minutes we will meet to complete the transaction.”
“Can I use your phone?”
She stares, wondering why, then shakes her head slowly, no.
I exit the Escalade. The other Japanese woman is between our cars and stares me into mine. I toss the black soft-side bag on the seat, swallow two shallow breaths, turn the key, and drive toward the exit. The attendant moves the cones, I exit onto Clark Street, and Ruben’s voice barks in the phone.
“Arleen?”
I scour for him. For Bobby. For Hahn. “Yeah. Yeah.”
“Cut over to Dearborn, and head north.”
OFFICER BOBBY VARGAS
SUNDAY, 7:00 PM
Smoke surrounds Hahn at the green SUV. Glass shards and brass casings litter the pavement. Hahn runs back up State Street toward her car. I run sidewalk from Rossi’s and reach the car when she does. She jumps in; through bit teeth she says, “Both dead,” drops her Taurus in gear, and screeches backward. Sirens wail inbound. Hahn pounds the brake and flips us north as the first squad veers to race past. For nineteen years sirens have been my friends; now I’m wanted for Danny Vacco’s murder and duck in the seat. I tell Hahn, “A guy in Rossi’s said there was a good-lookin’ blonde out front in a dress when he walked in. Gotta be Arleen. Bartender said he thought the shooters were bangers, might’ve been a gunship parked up the block.”
Hahn jerks toward the curb to avoid another inbound squad.
Over the sirens I yell, “Shouldn’t have been bangers anywhere near here today. Every cop in the city would’ve been told to burn ’em back a mile in every direction.”
Hahn mashes the gas. “Unless they were connected. Had a friend on the force.”
ARLEEN BRENNAN
SUNDAY, 7:25 PM
Ruben’s voice: “Stay on Dearborn. Turn in to the parking garage just ahead past the corner.”
At the drive I pull in to the gate. The machine pushes out a parking ticket.
Ruben’s voice: “Drive to the top floor. Double-park at the elevator, leave the engine running. Take the elevator to the ground floor and stay in the lobby till I call. Don’t go outside.”
Lilly Dillon says, “I’m keeping the money.”
“Probably has transmitters buried in the bills or sewn into the bag. Maybe worse. Might not want to handle the bag till we can be sure. Do it my way and you’ll get yours.”
“When?”
“Tiring me out, chica.” The voice is hard, cruel. “I ain’t in the mood to be tired.”
I take the parking ticket and the bar rises. I stay on the brake.
“Move, chica.”
Rearview mirror. No Bobby, no Hahn. Only Ruben, staring through his windshield. The Twenty-Trey shooters in the white Marquis pull in behind Ruben and block the entrance. The Japs won’t be following us inside. Neither will Bobby or Hahn.
I drive switchback ramps to the top, park the Chevrolet, leave the engine running, then take the elevator to the ground floor. The lobby is stark, mildewy. One of the elevators is dropping. Is this where Arleen’s supposed to die? I pop the fire-exit door and hold it open. The elevator blinks floors: 5-4-3-2-1. Ruben doesn’t call. The elevator opens; I ease into the fire-stair. Two college boys exit in yellow Olympics T-shirts, laughing, smelling like reefer. One leers at my legs, then higher and smiles.
Purse, where’s my purse? Ruben’s phone isn’t ringing because it’s in my purse. Front seat. I left my purse in the car. Ruben’s unloading the money from the Chevrolet, loading in the … package. No, Ruben won’t get near the package, not after what I just saw in the Escalade.
I jump in the elevator as the doors close, punch the top floor, and ride silent.
The door opens. I turn the corner and the drive aisle’s empty; the Chevrolet’s gone.
No, it’s parked in the shadows halfway down the descending aisle, trunk lid up, a woman bending in with her back to me. She turns just her head, sees me, and straightens. Long black hair. Not Japanese. Same clothes as the half-hidden Asian woman from the Maxwell Market; maybe the same as the oleander ghost who put the box in the Chevrolet’s backseat. A pistol appears at her leg, a long silencer screwed into the barrel. I bend to run. She jerks the pistol to my chest: “No,” and waves me to her.
I stop at twenty feet. Behind the gun, she stares a long inspection. Her posture is unbalanced, scary, a mental patient’s forced calm. She seems to vibrate, but her pistol doesn’t waver; the hole in the silencer is large and black. My heart begins to beat faster. Sweat beads on my neck.
Her free hand closes the Chevrolet’s trunk. She slides up the fender to the Chevrolet’s rear passenger door and pops it open. In the adjacent space is a ratty Corvair. Keeping the gun aimed at my chest, she backs to the Corvair’s trunk and pops the rusted lid. Her free hand waves me to her. Each step I take closer, she matches with a step back. I stop at the Corvair’s open trunk.
Her voice is monotone, the accent Vietnamese. “With care, remove the box. Place the box in the backseat of the Chevrolet.” Her eyes are feverish. Beneath them, she smiles a disconnected, paste-on smile of bluish lipstick. Surgical gloves cover her hands. She gestures with the gun, pointing me to the Corvair’s trunk.
I get a very bad vibe and step back. Her smile flattens into a frozen blue line. She gestures again.
My feet hesitate, then creep forward.
Up close, the Corvair smells of old dust; cheap, heavy oleander; and July heat. The backseat is full, covered in a blanket. Two women’s shoes extend from the pile like the witch’s feet did in The Wizard of Oz. The shoes are expensive and seem strangely familiar—
“Remove”—I jolt to her voice and the feverish eyes inspecting me again, all of me—“the box.”
Alone in the trunk is a green-black metal box, a foot square and ten inches deep. Japanese characters are stenciled on the top. Sort of military looking. I step back. “Don’t think so. I know what’s in there.”
“Does Arleen Brennan wish her share of Furukawa’s payment?”
Her voice changed cadence when she used my name.
Prozac-mental-patient-ax-murderer Ted Bundy. Lilly Dillon whispers, Get out of here, Arleen.
“Does Arleen Brennan wish her money?”
“Ah … if she can spend it.”
The woman points her pistol at the Chevrolet. “Sit in the front seat, hands on the wheel. Do not start the car. I will bring your money.”
She’ll be behind me. My neck exposed above the seat.
“Go. Now.”
OFFICER BOBBY VARGA
S
SUNDAY, 7:35 PM
“Arleen’s with Ruben, somewhere—” Hahn runs the yellow light, then swerves to avoid a church crowd spilling off the sidewalk. “Where? Where would Ruben take her?”
I flash on the photo from Lý’s apartment. “Cristo Rey.”
Hahn cuts to me.
“Lý’s altar had the Jap 7.7s, right? And the photos of the nun and St. Dom’s. Maybe Lý puts all three together, organizes her and Ruben’s payoff at St. Dom’s or Cristo Rey.”
Hahn blinks twice. “Feels right.” She brakes hard, wheels west, and tromps the gas. Then swerves to miss a CTA bus.
And I see the billboard we’ve been missing since the beginning. “Lý’s been planning each of these steps from jump street. This whole thing is about her. Lý’s mad at the Koreans for whoring her—bunch of them are dead. Lý’s mad at the Japanese—they’re about to spend a ton of money and probably get front-paged anyway.”
Storm clouds block the sunset and Chicago goes early dark. Hahn veers into headlights popping on. “Lý’s not stopping at the front page.”
I glance at Hahn and imagine the twenty-year-old betrayed by her benefactors, festering in that tiny apartment, aging, praying, waiting. “Buff brings Lý over, her life falls apart here—so Lý shoots him. The nun kicks her out—so Sister Mary Margaret’s gotta die.” Swallow. “Jesus. Row of dominoes, all the players in Lý’s life from the beginning, wraps ’em all up in one big, irony-laced payback.”
Hahn roars down the center line, jerking the wheel left, then right. “The nun kicked Lý out because of the Brennan sisters. And there’s one Brennan left. Add your brother and the Twenty-Trey Gangsters and Lý’s reassembled the whole cast of 1982.”
I flash on the rage torn into the tiny apartment, the ancestor altar, the orphan girl whored at age eight, allowed to suffer and ferment by a number of societies that didn’t see her as sufficiently valuable to save or threatening enough to kill.
White Flower Lý got Jewboy. Maybe Buff. And in a few minutes, she’ll kill Arleen and my brother. Every person alive who matters to me. She is the plague. And I’ve never even seen her.
ARLEEN BRENNAN
SUNDAY, 7:40 PM
The backseat’s full of live-virus mass murder. My hands are slick on the steering wheel. The car’s humid, windows down in the hundred-degree heat. Ruben trails me thirty feet back. I’m driving a bomb set by his partner. Her breath on my neck ten minutes ago was—She brushed me with her lips, like she was … sniffing my skin. Shiver. Sweat wipe. Where does Ruben find these freaks?
Headlights pop on and flash across the windshield. C’mon, Bobby, where are you? It’ll be full dark soon. Mirror glance—ten blocks and Ruben’s phone is silent on the seat.
Man, that Corvair woman was creepy. And so was my reaction, like I’ve heard her voice before but was too shook to place it. Swallow. Mirror glance. Could’ve been an actress I worked with, or a flashback from my runaway years in sunny California, or a real mental patient from my teenage week at Tinley Park. When Coleen died.
Do not go there, not now.
The woman’s voice was practiced, seductive, but Ted Bundy/Charles Manson behind it all. Ruben’s phone rings. “Next block, turn right.”
My eyes blur. I feel sick and pull to the curb.
Ruben yells: “Don’t—What are you doing?”
Lilly Dillon tells Ruben, “Counting my money.”
“No. Get movin’—”
I drop Ruben’s voice onto the seat next to the Herald that claims Ruben and Bobby Vargas murdered Coleen, then heft the red gym bag Ruben’s partner reached over and dropped onto my passenger seat. Fifty packs of hundreds, each an inch thick. Weighs about ten pounds. Half a million, not two million dollars. I grab the phone. Lilly Dillon says, “Where’s the rest?”
“Move, or—”
“Threaten somebody else. My backseat’s full of you and your psycho’s future; fit perfect in the river.” Pause. “I want the rest of my money now, or I take your box to Furukawa’s building and give it to the doorman.”
“The taste was one million, I told you that. We gave you half; will pop for another 1.5 when we’re all done. Icing is the Shubert and my little brother. Arleen Brennan finally hits the lottery. That’s worth followin’ the script.”
I scour the street for Bobby, and mumble, “Lottery my ass.”
Ruben gives me directions that will head me and the mass-murder box due south. I have to find a way to tell Bobby where I am. Once Ruben has me where he wants me—
“Move, chica.”
“So we’re clear, Ruben, if I’m not at the Shubert by eight tonight, my papers will be at your depositions tomorrow.”
“Drop you myself. Sarah and I are your biggest fans.”
Clark Street glance. No Bobby.
“Move, chica, or kiss the Shubert goodbye. Koreans get your name. Spend the rest of your life explaining Lawrence Avenue, Greektown, and Santa Monica to prison guards and hit men.”
I crush the phone. It’s like being trapped in bed with a snake that bites you every time you move. If I had a gun, I could shoot Ruben, if I could get close enough. Yeah, good, kill a third person. Headlights blink to brights behind me. The box is still in the backseat. Lilly Dillon whispers, Whatever it takes.
Whatever it takes. Deep breath and I pull into traffic.
Ruben changes directions, winding me west under ten lanes of Dan Ryan viaduct. We’re back near the Maxwell Market. The old streets are bumpy. Even driving slow, the box shakes on the seat. At each corner I hope for Bobby, see him there ready to save us.
My knight in shining armor doesn’t miraculously appear. Ruben tells me to turn south through the switching yards, then past the tenement tear-downs of Union Avenue leveled for urban renewal when the city still had money to trade history for future.
Higher in the distance is the dullish glint of St. Dominick’s steeple—the Irish anchor of the old Four Corners. Coleen and I and Bobby, the three of us one day would climb up there to the patinaed Gaelic cross, Tinker Bell would sprinkle us, and we’d fly away … Peter Pan, Wendy, and her sister. That was the promise, never see our father again. Coleen didn’t.
But I did, on the pier in Santa Monica, the far far end, my father’s brogue drifting toward me in the dark, him singing “Bold Belfast Shoemaker,” the rest of him appearing out of the mist, mean drunk and sugary like he used to get, licking his lips, one thumb hooked in his belt, four fingers tapping at his jeans. Sixteen years after Coleen died and I’d run away … and there was my father, circling me again, telling me it was all my fault, me lying about that Vietnam hoor, how it killed my sister, his favorite little girl. Then me desertin’ him, payin’ his needs no mind at all.
Da was ugly and worn from the drink; worn from living with his awful self, but every bit as terrifying as before. His eyes were holes, burning with that cloying fever men save for special times with their little girls. Coleen and I hated that look and Ma never seemed to be around to make him stop. We were on our own when Da was like that. Then Coleen was dead, and I was on my own. The last thing Da said to me was from five feet away.
“G’wan with ya then. If ya got the stones. Just pull the trigger.”
And that’s just what I did. Watched my bullets blow him into the Santa Monica Bay; watched his hands and arms reaching for me as he slowly sank under the pier, his face twisted into that same special time grimace.
Brights glare my mirror. Ruben’s voice says, “The fence gate at St. Dom’s is unlocked. Push the gate open with your bumper, drive in behind the convent.”
I drive eight blocks of our old neighborhood. One streetlight is lit. St. Dom’s is on my left, partially boarded up, and Gothic to the tall steeple and cross. At the gate, a Tim Rosinski FOR SALE sign is wired into the chain-link fence and spray-painted red with a five-point Latin King crown. Fresh blue TTG covers the crown and drips to the pavement.
More Twenty-Trey Gangsters. Coming back to life.
I left t
his place twenty-nine years ago. I knew it then, and I know it now: Something very bad will happen here.
OFFICER BOBBY VARGAS
SUNDAY, 7:45 PM
The hot, dark corridor echoes our footsteps. Cristo Rey is humid with blood and the stink of fouled clothing. The shape facing us from the shadows is the security guard, slumped to the floor. Blood fans the wall above and behind what remains of his head. I hear myself whisper, “Jesus.” We search the office—no blood, but Sister Mary Margaret is gone and so is her walker.
Hahn and I guessed wrong; White Flower Lý’s ancestor finale is at St. Dom’s. It should’ve been here, electricity, nun who can’t walk, except, except—it hits me with absolute certainty: “Lý’s gotta kill the building, too.”
Hahn stares.
“Lý’s murdering her past. She’s gonna let the plague go.”
We run for the car. Hahn fires the engine, wheels from Twenty-second Place to Cermak, and guns us east. “When did St. Dom’s close?”
“Ten years, twelve.” I brace into the dash, imagine Arleen trapped inside with the plague. “Jesuits tried to use it as an outreach center for prostitutes and addicts. City and some of the neighbors shut ’em down.”
Hahn pulls her second gun. “Grab the wheel.”
“I promised I wouldn’t let anyone hurt her. I fucking promised.”
“Grab the goddamn wheel.”
I do. Hahn checks the gun, then belts it. “Arleen knows my guys are dead; knows we lost her. She’ll telegraph us, do something.”
“I fucking promised.”
Hahn knocks my hand off the wheel. “She agreed, Bobby. You didn’t put her in here, your brother did.”
I glare at Hahn, bounty hunter, acid queen. “If Arleen’s not already dead, she’s not dying for your money. And you aren’t killing Ruben. Shoot him, I’ll blow you’re head off.”
Start Shooting Page 30