Brush Back (V.I. Warshawski Novels Book 17)

by Sara Paretsky

  Credits were rolling on the baseball camp video. Scanlon nodded at one of the older boys, who turned up the lights in the back of the room. When Scanlon asked for questions, a couple of shy hands went up.

  “Where’d you see him?” Bagby asked me in an undervoice.

  “Same place he saw me,” I said. “Ask him and I’m sure he’ll tell you, although I’d probably drop a plate of raw meat in front of him first, so as to keep him occupied.”

  Bagby thought that was so funny that his laugh drew attention away not just from Scanlon, but even, briefly, the video games. “You’re all right, Warshawski,” he said, slapping my shoulder. “You’re all right.”

  On our way out of the room, I stopped to look at the old photos of South Chicago. There was one that dated to 1883, when the Ninety-third Street Illinois Central station first opened, and a few from the early twentieth century, showing men going into the Wisconsin or U.S. Steel Works when those were new. Gripping lunch boxes, faces black with coal dust, skies thick with sulfur. My mother and I used to wash the windows every week but we never kept ahead of the dirt falling from the sky.

  Bernie’s face was tight with worry. She wouldn’t admit that the afternoon had scared her in any way, but she clung to my arm in an uncharacteristic way.

  I ushered her through the crowd of kids still waiting for time on the computers. When we got to the street, I froze: the Mustang’s tires had been slashed. The car was sitting on the rims.

  “Someone down here doesn’t like me very much,” I said to Bernie. “We’ll take the train home and worry about the car in the morning. You leave anything valuable inside? Then let’s go.”

  We were three blocks from the Metra station, the same one where I’d ridden back from the Guisar slip the other morning. There should be a train in ten or fifteen minutes.

  The April sky was starting to darken. I picked up the pace on an empty stretch where storefronts had been bulldozed, pushing Bernie in front of me. That’s where they jumped us.

  I kicked back, hard, hit the shin, felt the hands slacken and jerked away. Bernie was on the ground, a hulk of a kid on top of her. I jumped on his head, cracked it against the sidewalk, kicked his kidneys. Two punks grabbed me but Bernie wriggled free.

  “Run. Get to the train!”

  Passersby were scattering. No one wanted to be part of a gang fight.

  Bernie took off down the street and I kicked, punched, shouted, took a heavy blow to the stomach, ducked one to the head. I was gasping for air, kicking, lunging. I was nearly spent. Keep fighting until there’s no fight left.

  A spotlight swept the street, found us.

  “Stop what you’re doing. Hands in the air.” A police loudspeaker.

  The blows stopped. The two punks hesitated and then took off across the open ground. I leaned over, hands on my knees, gulping in air. My nose was bleeding and my left eye was swelling shut.

  The patrol unit came over, guns out. Bernie Fouchard ran past them and flung herself against me.

  ROAD TEST

  “Vic, Vic, you’re okay.”

  I stood, wincing as my wounds hit me, folded her against me. “I’m okay, better now you’re safe.”

  “I was so scared, I was afraid they would kill you and find me and kill me. But I ran in the street and found a police car. You’re not okay, you’re bleeding into my hair, I can feel it.”

  I kept her close to me, bleeding nose or not. One of the officers started talking to his lapel mike, the other shone a flash across the vacant lot, then at the punk whose head I’d jumped on.

  “What happened here?” The officer knelt, fingers on the creep’s neck, feeling for a pulse.

  “Three punks jumped us. This one had my goddaughter on the ground. I managed to break free long enough to get him off her. Is he dead?”

  “Nope. Pity. He’s an Insane Dragon, you can tell by the tattoos.”

  Under his floodlight I saw the dragons circling the creep’s arms. He even had a dragon head on his neck, the tongue licking toward an ear.

  “You need a doctor, but we need a statement, too,” the cop added.

  Three more squad cars pulled up, half-blocking Commercial, their strobes pulsing like so many giant fireflies. Three officers picked their way through the rubble in the vacant lot. One of them stood in the road, directing traffic around the squad cars. Now that the police were here, passersby were starting to gather, to murmur versions of the fight to each other.

  Two officers kept an eye on the growing crowd: there might be any number of Insane Dragons eager to take action against someone who’d brought down one of their own.

  An SUV pulled up behind the squad car and Vince Bagby came over to the sidewalk. “Christ, Warshawski. You get involved in World War Three?”

  “Sorry, sir, this is a crime— Oh, Vince—it’s you. Hey, man. You know her?”

  “Boom-Boom Warshawski’s cousin, Knute. She was just at our Say, Yes! meeting with this young lady. That your Mustang that got slashed out front, Warshawski? That sucks. You should’ve come back and gotten me to give you gals a lift. This street isn’t safe after dark, you should know that.”

  Vince’s arrival moved the police machinery a bit faster. Within a couple of minutes, Bernie and I were in the back of a squad car, heading to the Fourth District. The responding unit wanted to take us straight to a hospital, but I knew what that would mean: a long night in an ER far from home. I promised we would get to a doctor as soon as we were back north.

  Neither Conrad nor my dad’s old crony, Sid, was on duty this evening, which meant we gave our statements without a lot of extraneous name-calling or chitchat. A sergeant brought me an ice pack for my eye and nose, and reiterated the responding unit’s urgent recommendation that I get medical attention. There are legal reasons for that aside from humanitarian ones: if either Bernie or I had serious injuries from the attack, it upped the charges against the Insane Dragon and his buddies. It also made the state’s case stronger in court.

  Bagby hung around the station until we were done, telling Knute he would drive us home. I didn’t like it; I would like to have had a cast-iron assurance neither he nor Scanlon—or Thelma or Cardenal—had played a role in slashing my tires as a prelude to assault. However, Knute accepted the offer gladly. Spring nights in South Chicago, they could ill afford sending a squad car twenty miles across town to deliver us.

  During the drive, Bagby tried to make conversation, but I was phoning: Lotty, to let her know we were coming to her hospital’s emergency room; Mr. Contreras, who was predictably distressed; Jake, ditto, although less volubly, and finally, hardest call, Bernie’s parents.

  “We’re going to pack you up and send you back to Quebec tomorrow,” I said to Bernie as I typed in the Fouchards’ number.

  “No! I’m not going.”

  “Cara, I endangered your life tonight— Arlette? Hi. It’s V. I. Warshawski in Chicago . . . Not so good. I took Bernie with me to Boom-Boom’s and my old neighborhood, which is serious gang turf. We were attacked and we were lucky—”

  Bernie leaned over from the backseat and grabbed the phone from me. “Maman? C’est moi.” The conversation went on in French, which I don’t speak.

  “Out of curiosity, what were you doing at Say, Yes!?” Bagby asked.

  “Admiring Scanlon’s organizational ability,” I said. “Energetic guy. Runs the insurance agency, keeps tabs on the kids, helps out Nina Quarles’s law clients while she’s scavenging rags in Paris.”

  “You may be beat up, but you keep your sense of humor. I admire that,” Vince said. “Rory’s a good guy. Never married, gives everything to the community.”

  We were on the Ryan, all sixteen lanes moving at headlong speed. Bagby was a good driver; all those years wrestling trucks into submission, he could talk and maneuver around knots of cars without losing track of either.

  I lean
ed back against the headrest, holding the ice pack the cops had given me against my face. Lotty had been brusque on the phone, but she agreed to get me priority seating at the hospital. You’re safe? The child is safe? I’ll try to be thankful for that.

  “Who’ll take over the agency when Scanlon retires?” I asked Bagby.

  “Can’t imagine Scanlon quitting,” Bagby said. “As to who will take over the business, hard to know. I think he keeps hoping one of the kids he’s grooming in Say, Yes! will have the right combination of skills.”

  “And your daughter Delphina will take over Bagby Haulage?”

  “She’s got to stop thinking about boys and start thinking about business. Or maybe she’ll think about a boy who wants to go into trucking. How about you? You have a kid to take over your agency when you retire?”

  “Nope. But maybe young Bernie will when she gets tired of hockey—she’s tough enough.”

  “You have a husband who’s going to be shocked by your broken nose?”

  “Are you asking whether I’m married, or whether my husband is shockable?” I said.

  Vince laughed again. “Married?”

  “No longer.”

  Bernie handed me back the phone. She’d finished her conversation with her mother, but Arlette wanted to talk to me.

  “Bernadine wants to stay in Chicago. Me, I say no. Pierre will fly to Chicago as soon as possible: he is scouting in Florida right now. But please, please do not let her go near these gang neighborhoods. I know she is imagining that she is—oh, what is the word, I don’t speak enough English anymore—where you imagine someone else’s spirit is living in you—”

  “Channeling?” I suggested.

  “Yes, yes. She thinks she is channeling Boom-Boom, but I cannot have her living the life you and Boom-Boom did. Comprends?”

  “Yes, I agree, which is why I don’t want her to stay on.”

  Bernie announced loudly from the backseat that she was fine, she had ras-le-bol with the discussion. Arlette and I finally bade each other an uneasy good-bye, neither of us happy with me or the situation.

  We’d reached the Montrose exit. Beth Israel is on Wilson, a bit farther north and four miles to the east. Bagby reached the hospital without asking me for directions or consulting a GPS. When I complimented him, he gave his easy grin and said he’d been driving the city since he was sixteen.

  “I’m better than a London taxi driver, Warshawski. Bet you can’t name a road in the six counties that I can’t find.”

  He pulled into the emergency room entrance at Beth Israel and helped us out of the Patriot. Mr. Contreras was on the lookout and surged forward, exclaiming and scolding at the same time.

  “The doc called over, doll, they got an advanced practice nurse standing by and everything else, give them your insurance card and you’ll get to the head of the line, where you belong, anyway. What’d those SOBs do to your eye?”

  “Right hook, I think,” I said. “Thank God they didn’t have knucks or razors.”

  “And you, peanut?” Mr. Contreras held Bernie at arm’s length. “Scrapes on your face, nothing broken.”

  “Vic saved me, Uncle Sal, I don’t know what she did, this huge guy was on top of me but she got him off and—and—” She burst into tears, all the fear and helplessness of the last few hours pouring out in body-shaking sobs.

  Jake had been waiting on the sideline for Mr. Contreras to get over his first burst of relief. While the old man comforted Bernie, he pulled me close to him. The pressure of his shoulder against my face made my swollen eye throb, but I clung to him.

  “The first time I met you, you had me hustle you out of the building in my bass case. I thought that was the end of your adventures, not chapter 237 in the 1001 Close Shaves of Warshawskazade,” he murmured into my hair.

  He led me to the counter, keeping an arm around me while I handed in my insurance cards, reminded the intake clerk that I was supposed to see someone ASAP. Lotty had paved the way smoothly: Bernie and I were taken into the examining area, shunted off for X-rays, given eye exams, salves for the raw skin, tetanus shots, a little cocaine up the nose for me to stop the bleeding.

  Bernie had some deep bruising from where the Insane Dragon had been pounding on her, but he hadn’t been on top of her long enough for other more horrible damage. We’d both been exceptionally lucky.

  Bernie was finished before me. I stayed to go over my police report with the cop on duty at Beth Israel, but Mr. Contreras took Bernie home.

  I didn’t want her spending the night on my living room couch. I have good security, steel-plated doors and infrared motion detectors, but if I had become a target, I didn’t want Bernie near me.

  As the old man got ready to leave with Bernie, I asked if he could put her up in the room his grandsons use when they visit. He brightened measurably. When Jake and I reached home about an hour later, Mr. Contreras was heating up a pot of soup, pulling out clean sheets and giving Mitch the command to patrol.

  “You don’t really think some gang member is going to trek all the way up here to finish off the two of you, do you?” Jake asked. “I thought they liked to stay on their home ground.”

  “I have the jitters right now. Besides, I’m responsible for her safety. I shouldn’t have taken her with me to the South Side today at all—I was annoyed that she quit her job for no reason other than she didn’t like getting up early. I was punishing her by not letting her roam the city shopping or something, and now I feel like a creep.”

  “Oh, Victoria Iphigenia, you don’t control the Universe. You don’t know what might have happened to Bernadine if she’d been roaming the city on her own. Perhaps you saved her from a worse disaster by being present to protect her in the one that befell you.”

  He stroked my swollen eye. “I agree with the cop down there—it’s a pity you didn’t kill the guy whose head you jumped on. Bernie was resourceful, too. She didn’t panic, she flagged a squad car. The fact that she acted, that will help keep her from lasting trauma, at least that’s what the self-help articles I read in airline magazines tell me.”

  I tried to respond in kind, tried to get out of my self-recriminatory mode, but I wasn’t doing well these days, as a detective, or a guardian.

  CHIN MUSIC

  In the morning, I called a towing service to haul the Mustang up to my mechanic. Given the neighborhood where I’d left the car, and the distance, the cost was going to be significant. A further depressant.

  Jake offered to drive me to Lotty’s clinic so she could inspect me in person. We checked on Bernie on our way out. She was still deeply asleep, with Mitch and Mr. Contreras both keeping an anxious eye on her.

  When Jake dropped me at Lotty’s, he fretted about leaving me on my own, but he had students waiting for him at Northeastern. I assured him I could get around with public transportation and taxis and that I wouldn’t be going far—I don’t bounce back from street fights the way I used to.

  I dozed in the waiting room until Lotty had time to see me. She studied the reports from the Beth Israel ER on her computer screen, studied my face, agreeing the swelling had gone down, that there was no damage to the cornea or retina, took the cocaine-laced padding out of my nose, assured me that I would live to be scarred another day.

  She advised me not to drive for a day or two, or at least to stay off the expressways. “And—I know caution is foreign to your nature, but Victoria—please!”

  She didn’t say anything else, not the words of anger or fear she sometimes gives after an injury. Somehow that made the encounter more painful.

  I walked to Western Avenue from her clinic to pick up a southbound bus. All my muscles felt stiff and sore; the half-mile walk helped pinpoint every blow I’d absorbed last night. When the bus finally lumbered to the stop nearest my office, all I wanted was to lie down and sleep, but I went into the coffee bar across the street for an espre
sso. Maybe caffeine could compensate for painkillers and pain.

  I took a second coffee to my office, did half an hour of gentle stretches, then spent what was left of the morning at work, cleaning up jobs I could manage online. In the middle of a complicated search for funds that a partner had embezzled from his small business, my phone rang. The caller ID was blocked.

  “This Warshawski?”

  The voice was hoarse, hard to hear.

  “Think about your old man, Warshawski, think how he got treated when they sent him to West Englewood. He made the wrong people angry, and so have you. Stop before they do something worse.”

  He hung up before I could say anything. My computer records incoming calls. Not legal, I know that, don’t lecture me. I played the call back four times but it didn’t tell me any more than I’d known when I heard it live.

  I fingered my swollen eye. My dad had been transferred abruptly, to one of the city’s most dangerous districts, without any explanation I’d ever heard. He was a good and experienced beat cop, able to develop relationships in even the most difficult neighborhood. It wasn’t the gangbangers who almost did him in, but his coworkers. During his time in Englewood, he was shot at five times. Each time, the dispatcher claimed Tony had never radioed for backup. He found a dead rat in his locker seven times, piss in his coffee cup many times. Most terrifying, he’d found his photo on the cutouts at the shooting range.

  The first shooting occurred the summer after Boom-Boom made his home ice debut. I’d finished my third year at the University of Chicago. That summer, I was working as a secretary in the political science department, commuting from home to save rent money. My dad was on the graveyard shift, and in those pre–cell phone days I spent my nights on the foldout bed in the living room, too worried to go up the stairs to my own bed, never fully asleep, half-waiting for the phone to ring with news of disaster.

  Tony never told me what had gone wrong, which power broker he’d pissed off. Someone in South Chicago remembered after all this time. And knew that I’d been attacked last night. So someone had persuaded the Insane Dragons to slash my tires and jump Bernie and me. Or they were taking advantage of the attack to threaten me.