“She seem to be leaving under her own steam, son, or was someone forcing her?” Conrad asked.
The attendant hesitated. “She left alone, for sure, but maybe a minute or two later two guys left, too. I started telling them the policy, you know, no reentry, and they told me to shut the f— up.”
Conrad and the security chief tried a dozen different ways to get the attendant to describe the two men. The attendant became more and more flustered: he saw so many people every night, it was a miracle he even remembered this pair. Conrad finally let it go, his shoulders sagging.
OLYMPIC TRYOUTS
One in the morning, sitting in the cold walkway at the United Center. Conrad and the cops had taken off, Pierre had called Tintrey, one of the biggest of the private security firms, and was out in a car with them, driving the streets around the Stadium.
The security staff were getting ready to shut down the building for the night. The security chief was sympathetic: everyone felt devastated by Bernie’s disappearance, but she wasn’t in the building; I needed to leave.
I got up, my legs so stiff I lost my balance. I clutched the handrail along the wall, my bleary eyes not registering what I was looking at, the shuttered food stands, the garbage that the cleaning crew was shoveling into bags, the aisle numbers going dark as the interior lights were shut off. I was standing near 201, which was blinking at me, the bulb inside getting ready to die.
“Know how you feel,” I muttered.
I had a feverish urge to join the cops and Tintrey Security in driving the city’s streets, the way one does in hunting a missing wallet: it could be here, have you looked there?—even if the police organized a search by quartering the vicinity and fanning out from there they couldn’t cover the buildings, the bridges and tunnels. You need some kind of hint or clue and I had nothing to contribute.
My day had started with Mr. Villard’s shooting. My encounter with the Evanston police seemed part of the dim past, as if it had happened to someone else many decades earlier. I was so worn that I would be more of a hindrance than a creative help in a search. I drove home. Maybe I’d sleep, maybe I’d wake up with an idea.
“Don’t beat yourself up.” I repeated Conrad’s advice as I climbed the back stairs to my place. “Plenty of time for that later. Anyway, Pierre is doing it for you.”
He had looked at me with something akin to hatred, cursing me in two languages for involving his daughter in my criminal affairs. I was so tired that even fear and self-recrimination couldn’t keep me awake. I fell into those fever dreams, where your eyeballs feel scratchy and you only skim the surface of sleep. Viola was chasing me on a Harley . . . Nabiyev was pouring cement over my head . . . Vince Bagby invited me to dinner, then stuffed me into the middle of a mound of pet coke. As the dust closed over me, I saw the light over aisle 201 blinking on and off.
I sat up, completely awake. The slip of paper I’d found in Sebastian’s gym bag had the number “131” scrawled on it with the time. Aisle 131. Be there at 11:30 P.M.
The United Center was on my mind. I stopped in the middle of dialing the phone number for the security chief. Sebastian had been going to see the Cubs, not the Hawks, the day he vanished. Aisle 131, that was Wrigley Field. He’d been meeting someone at Wrigley Field in the middle of the night.
The coaster Bernie had brought home from a Wrigleyville bar. It wasn’t underage drinking that had put those mischief lights in her eyes a week ago—she’d been scouting the ballpark. It didn’t make sense—a week ago, she hadn’t seen the pictures, she didn’t have any reason to think Annie had been there. Maybe she only wanted to emulate Boom-Boom’s and my old bravado in climbing into the park and then after she saw the pictures, decided that was where Annie had hidden her diary.
I dressed in black: T-shirt, warm-up jacket, jeans. Rubbed mascara over my cheekbones to keep them from reflecting light, pulled a black cap over my hair. I tucked my pencil flash and picklocks into my pockets, put on a shoulder holster. Maybe I should leave a message for Jake. Everything I could imagine writing made my errand sound embarrassingly stupid at best. In the end, I scribbled,
Bernie Fouchard disappeared midway through the game. There’s a slim chance she went on her own power to Wrigley Field; I’ve gone off to look for her. Please let Mr. Contreras know as soon as you get up. Also Conrad Rawlings.
I went out the back way, slipped the note under Jake’s kitchen door, then ran down the back stairs as quietly as possible. The dogs still heard me. They were lonely for me and for Bernie; they started barking, demanding that I take them with me. I ran on tiptoe down the walk and was opening the back gate before the light came on in Mr. Contreras’s kitchen. As I jogged down the alley, I heard his gruff voice demand to know who the heck was out there, he had a shotgun, keep your distance.
When I reached Racine, the adrenaline that had propelled me out of bed drained away and I slowed to a walk. My legs felt thick and heavy from the hours of climbing around the United Center and I couldn’t force them into anything faster than a kind of shuffling jog.
The predawn air had a bite in it. The calendar said spring, but under the streetlamps I could see the mica in the sidewalks glinting with frost. I should have worn gloves. My fingers were numb and I needed them to be flexible. I thrust them deep into my jacket pockets and tucked my fists around my thumbs.
The bars along Clark and Addison had finally closed for the night. I had the street mostly to myself. I passed a man inspecting bottles that had been dropped along the street, drinking from any that still had a little something left in them. A squad car slowed, shone a light in my direction. My heart beat uncomfortably—not good to be stopped with a blackened face and picklocks. They played their spot along the street, rested it on the guy on the curb, decided he was harmless, turned south onto Clark.
I walked to the back of the bleachers. Gate L stood invitingly near me, but the wooden doors opened inward, with the lock on the inside, no handles, no place I could insert a pick.
I went back to the wall under the bleachers. Boom-Boom and I had made this climb a dozen times, but never in the middle of the night. And not with the overhang from the new rows of bleachers they’d added. Sometime between my reckless childhood and today they’d also put in new bricks, new mortar. No toeholds.
I used my flash sparingly. Even if I could get to the top of the wall, which was about six feet above my head, I couldn’t crawl past the cantilevers that supported the new bleachers. So near and yet so far.
A rattling in the wire mesh around the stands made me flinch. Night nerves, not good, but I risked a quick look upward with the flash. A piece of newsprint had been blown against the fence. Every time the wind gusted, the edge would slap the chain links.
I walked slowly along the street, studying the wall. Right beyond the gate, the shuttered ticket windows offered the only chance for entry. Not a great chance, but if I could coerce my frozen fingers and tired, middle-aged legs into action, it would do.
I studied the layout carefully, memorizing the distances: I’d have to put the light away and judge it all by feel.
I stuck the flashlight back in its belt holder, rubbed my hands together. The palms were tingling.
I can climb this wall. I am fast, smart and strong. I repeated the sentences, tried to pretend I believed them, grabbed the ledge under the ticket window and wedged my toes against the wall, shifted my hands to bring up my right knee, lost my hold, dropped to the sidewalk.
I am smart, fast, but big. Size is not always an advantage—if Bernie had figured out this route ahead of me, her lithe little body would have floated up like a gymnast’s.
I grabbed the ledge, swung my legs up and fell again. My shoulders and hamstrings were already feeling the strain. Turned around, palms on the ledge behind me, pushed down and jumped at the same time, got my butt inserted into the deeper space left by the window, swung my legs over.
Four inches of ledge supported eight inches of thigh, unstable. I moved fast. Balance beam, yes, we used to jump on a beam no wider than this in high school. I straddled the ledge, pushed myself standing. You can still do this, girl, even if it’s been thirty years.
Light from the streetlamps on Clark provided a dim glow, enough that I didn’t need the flashlight to see where I was going. I started a heel-to-toe walk along the narrow ridge, heading for the brick wall underneath the bleachers.
Headlights appeared, reflected in the glass of the building across the street. A squad car making its rounds. I froze, my shape a dark silhouette. If they looked up—they shone their spot on Gate L, some ten feet in front of me, decided it was secure, moved on. The shirt under my warm-up jacket was wet with sweat. The cold wind began turning it into an ice pack against my back. Get in motion, warm those muscles up again.
Someone was coming up Waveland toward me, but I couldn’t stop now. I walked up the wall until my knees were at squat angle, got a hand up, grabbed the clay tiles at the top of the wall. One last hoist, come on, Warshawski, you fast smart detective, do it.
“What you doing up there?”
I was lying on top of the clay tiles, a beached whale. The drunk I’d passed earlier, or maybe a different drunk, was standing underneath me.
“Practicing for the Olympics,” I said. “The wall-climbing event.”
“Seems kind of a funny place to practice.”
“Yeah, I can’t afford a gym.”
I got to my hands and knees. My muscles were wobbly, not good, since I had a lot more stadium to cover. Right hand forward on the sloping clay tile, left knee, left hand, right knee.
“You fall, you gonna crack your head open, no Olympics, no medals,” my companion said. “They got those places on the Internet where people give you money, you say you need to join a gym, they pay your membership.”
I grunted. Crowd-sourcing, what a great idea. Way better to be in a gym than creeping along the clay tiles of Wrigley Field in the dark.
“You ain’t the first to be up here practicing, case you interested,” my friend said, as if the memory had just pinged a neuron. “Other person didn’t say nothing about no Olympics. Maybe they stealing a march on you, or maybe you ain’t no Olympic athlete yourself.”
I sat up, banging a knee into the edge of one of the tiles. “When was this?” I tried to keep my voice casual.
“Oh, tonight. Don’t have me no watch, can’t tell you exactly when, but when I called out, he moved fast, way faster than you, missy. If he’s your rival, you better get your faster moves worked out.”
“He? It was a man?”
“Didn’t ask for an ID. Small kid, might have been twelve or thirteen. Wore one of those big sweatshirts, got caught on the tiles. He moved like a crab through the sand with a kingfisher after him and if you’d a asked me, I’d a said he was breaking in, not training for no Olympics. What about you?”
“I think he was breaking in, too.” Bernie, Boom-Boom’s jersey hiding her breasts, small, agile, looking like a twelve-year-old boy in the dim light.
“Meaning, maybe you breaking in, too. Like the older guys coming after the boy.”
My heart skipped a beat. Two beats. “They climb up after him?”
“They not as spry as you and the boy. They saw him go over the wall. One stood on the other’s shoulders, but he fell over, they both swore a blue streak, then they tried using a crowbar on Gate L here, only then the po-lice drove by, they took off.”
“I’ll tell you a secret,” I said. “I’m not in the Olympics. That’s my kid, running away from home, and I’ve got to find him before he hurts himself. Thanks for the tip.”
The drunk sat on his haunches, watching me. “Yeah, I didn’t figure you for no Olympic athlete,” he said under his breath.
Ignore the grinding pain in the knees where the tiles cut through my jeans. Force the numb fingers to cling to the tiles. Inch by inch, until I felt the metal of the staircase next to me, a sharper shape in the shapeless night. I swung the right leg out and over the stairwell fence bar, slipped, fell backward onto the bleacher stairs.
“Hey! You in the ballpark now!” my cheering squad shouted. “You don’t belong in there, they gonna arrest you, give you fines.”
I didn’t bother responding.
“Hey, you still alive?” the drunk shouted. “You find any beer, you drop it over the wall, you hear?”
I sat up, rubbed my tailbone. Everything in one piece. I’d done the easy part.
RUNDOWN
I skirted the bleachers and clambered into the right-field stands.
“Bernie!” I shouted. “Bernie!”
The wind whipped my voice away.
I called Conrad, message went to voice mail. I texted him and Pierre: Bernie was seen scaling the bleachers at Wrigley Field around one a.m. Two guys on her tail, my source a drunk.
Pierre replied as I was trotting along the gangway: I’m coming. Conrad, you will meet me there.
The aisle doors loomed as darker holes against the darkness of the green seats and concrete. I went into the nearest one and turned on my flash again: it was impossible to see inside. In the dark, the place smelled of stale beer and popcorn, of damp concrete.
I stopped every few yards to call her name again. My voice bounced around the concrete columns; the echo was the only reply I got.
It was no warmer inside the cement walls than it had been dangling from the brickwork outside. I swung my arms, slapped my sides, tried to restore circulation to my arms and legs, even if not in my fingers, jogging in a great circle past the closed concession stands, the locked doors in side walls that led to the stadium’s guts. It would take a hundred cops to search this place thoroughly.
Where had Bernie gone? Had she overheard me talking about the scrap of paper in Sebastian’s bag? But even if she had, she wouldn’t have known it meant—possibly meant—a meeting outside Aisle 131.
Fatigue and fear were stirring a great soup in my gut. Because I couldn’t think straight, or think of anything else, I went on down the gangway, following the ramps down to the field box level, toward Aisle 131.
I climbed the short flight of stairs that led to the stands. After being inside in complete darkness, I could make out the field and the seats in the grayer light outside. I held myself completely still, heard nothing, saw nothing move except a few stray pieces of trash.
I went back inside, trying to figure out what place Sebastian might have been meeting someone. Men’s room, smelling thickly of disinfectant layered over urine. I banged open the stall doors but the room was empty. Women’s room, empty as well. The concession stands were locked tight. I pried at the shutters, but not even a skinny street urchin could wriggle through the cracks.
There were several side doors, also locked. One door had two industrial mops wedging it shut. I took them out, but the door was locked. Maybe a janitor had been fooling around.
Bernie didn’t have picklocks, and using them was a skill I’d prudently kept to myself. She could not have opened this lock on her own.
I was close to weeping. I needed a plan, a thread to follow, but I had nothing. The men who’d been after her, who had they been, had they found another way in and grabbed her?
I shone the flash around one more time. Light glinted on metal. I knelt and saw an earring in a crack in the concrete just outside the doors with the mops through the handles. I used the edge of my pick to pry it free. A design in red and blue enamel of a flattened C embracing an H, logo of the Canadiens, inlaid in a reddish gold circle.
A chill deeper than the cold of the stadium froze my bones. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think.
You are frightened now, my darling one, and that is as it should be as we prepare to say good-bye. Gabriella’s words floated into my panic-stricken brain, her comfort to me when she told me she was dying
. The brave person isn’t the one who feels no fear, but the one who continues to act, even in the middle of fear. I know your brave heart and I know you will not let fear disable you.
My brave heart. Open the damned door, stop whining, start acting.
I knelt in front of the door, flashlight in my mouth so I could use both hands on the picks. The lock was tricky and my frozen fingers kept dropping the picks. When I finally got the last tumbler in place and heaved open the heavy door, it was to see the outsize pipes and cables that ferried water and power through the building.
I tried shining the light into the depths of the room, but my flashlight was puny and the space was vast. The entrance looked like the one I’d seen in one of Mr. Villard’s photos, the tunnel where Annie had emerged, grinning cockily, empty-handed after leaving her book inside. How had Bernie known to come here?
As I played the light around, a movement overhead made me jerk my neck back: red eyes stared down at me, then turned to saunter a short distance off along the pipe: We own this space, we own the night, we’re leaving because we want to, not because you scare us.
I jumped back involuntarily, then stomped forward, loud. “Bernie, are you in here? Come out, it’s V.I.! You’re safe now, let’s go home.”
I shut my eyes, concentrated on sound. Creaks and clanks in the ancient pipes. Feet whispering overhead, those were the rats. Gurgles and clangs along the pipes, all the sounds of an aging building.
A hard hat was hanging on a hook inside the door. I pulled that over my wool cap and started into the tunnel.
The pipes curved away in front of me, following the shape of the stadium. I rounded the first bend and heard the door slam shut behind me. I turned on my heel, jogged back to the exit, turned the inside knob. The door had been locked again from the outside. I took out my picks, worked the tumbler, shoved hard. The door was wedged shut. Those mops, they had been put there to keep someone inside.
Brush Back (V.I. Warshawski Novels Book 17) Page 34