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

by Sara Paretsky

  I drew back my hand to pound on the door, stopped. I’d been locked in here on purpose. Begging would waste time, energy.

  I turned back into the tunnel and called Bernie’s name again, again heard nothing but the grunts of the pipes, the dripping of water along the route.

  I put the flashlight into my belt, pulled out my phone. No signal in here, of course, but it had a brighter light than my pencil flash. I kept it in my left hand, the Smith & Wesson in my right, safety off. I kept my mind on small things: overhead pipes, flooring, shelving. Tried not to breathe too deeply around the sheets of asbestos that had unpeeled from the overhead pipes. I sidestepped the cables snaking along the floor, looked behind pillars, little things to keep bigger things like rats, or Uzbeki mobsters, at bay.

  I paused every few yards and called Bernie’s name. I thought I heard noises louder than vermin would make, steps retreating from me up the tunnel.

  My fingers had lost all feeling, my forehead ached with cold. I couldn’t tell if I was moving forward or if the damp, slime-coated walls were sliding past me. Time had disappeared, everything, my life, the planet, the Universe, all compressed to this tiny point, numb body in a cavern.

  The wall angled past me again and great steel cantilevers slid into view, bracing wall and ceiling. I looked up and saw steel nets holding slabs of concrete. Above them more pipes, joists, a faded box of Cracker Jacks. Water dripped past the slabs of concrete and spread along the floor. I turned to shine the light farther ahead of me, wondering how much farther the tunnel stretched, moved too quickly, slipped and fell into the slime. Gun and phone skittered away from me. The light went out. I fumbled for the flashlight in my belt loop and cut my finger: the plastic shield and the bulb had cracked in my fall.

  Near me I heard creaking, the ceiling net or the joists or the wood panel, they all could be giving way. I imagined an army of rats gathering on the overhead pipes, preparing to hurl themselves onto my head. I drew my knees up to my face, arms clutching them, sweat coating the slime on my face.

  Lâche, Bernie had called me. I was a coward if I was going to give in to night noises. A coward to let a few rats drive me to gibbering. Let loose your fingers, spread your arms, ignore the jolt of pain through the right shoulder, take in a breath, a slow deep breath, let it out, unlock the brain. The phone and gun had slid away from me. Reimagine the sound, figure out the direction they’d gone. In front of me. All I had to do was go forward on hands and knees and feel the ground; I’d come to them.

  Deep breath in, deep breath out, hand patting sludge, hand touching snakes, hand recoiling. Not snakes, V.I., cables.

  “Vittoria, vittoria, vittoria, mio core,” I started to sing.

  My voice came out in a reedy quaver. Not good at all. Gabriella and Jake would be so disappointed, all their careful coaching coming to nothing. I sat up on my haunches, took a deep breath and belted it out. Victory, my heart! No more weeping, no more vile servitude! My voice bounced against the walls and pipes, creating a tinny echo.

  Back onto my hands and knees, a hand out, patting the slime. And a crash, and a cry of pain somewhere behind me. No rat created that noise.

  “Bernie?” I said. “Are you there?”

  No response.

  “Are you alive? Can you move your arms and legs?”

  Muffled groaning. I moved cautiously toward the noise. Banged into a steel panel. The sounds were coming from behind it. I felt my way around. Ran into the soft warm body that was Bernie.

  “Hey, girl. Hey, I’m here.” I was so sick with relief I could hardly speak.

  I felt along her body. Her hands were tied behind her and there was duct tape across her mouth. I pulled that off. She gave a little whimper of pain, swallowed it.

  “Vic? Vic? Is it you? Oh, help me, help me. He’s crazy. Where is he?”

  “Let’s see about getting you untied, carissima. Let’s make that happen. I don’t know who ‘he’ is or where he is. I think he locked us in here, but one thing at a time.”

  The knots were tight. My numb fingers kept slipping on them. “You’re going to be okay, girl, it’ll be all right,” I crooned. I took out my picks and finally managed to pierce the heart of one of the knots. Hours went by or perhaps minutes—in the cold dank dark it wasn’t possible to count—but the threads came loose. I moved Bernie’s arms to her sides and began chafing her forearms and wrists, get the blood moving.

  “We need to get out of here,” I said, “but it will help if we can find my phone and my gun.”

  Bernie’s teeth were chattering. She was clinging to me, smelling sickly sweet, the symptom of shock.

  “Who is he? Did you arrange to meet him here?”

  “Non! Non, j’ai été stupide—”

  “Bernie, my French is primitive. Tell me in English.”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she whispered. “That I would show you—but I didn’t imagine—and the stadium, it’s so big and so dark. And then I saw the open door, and it was like the photo you brought home, and I thought, I will prove to her—to you—that she was a coward and a fool, I will find the journal of this Annie. And then he jumped on me, out of nowhere. I tried to fight, but he was too strong. He lives in here, he tied me to this shelf where he is living. He said no one looks behind here, even the men who come in every day to check on pipes and valves, they don’t know this little space exists, that I will die here.”

  She gave a hysterical gulp and clung more tightly to me. “Then I heard you calling and I tried to get free, tried to call to you, I was so frightened, I thought you would leave and never know I was here, and then I fell off the shelf where he tied me.”

  A homeless man in the bowels of Wrigley Field? Not so strange, maybe: I’ve encountered homeless families camping in the bottom of elevator shafts and in cardboard shanties by the river. Why not underneath a baseball park?

  “Where’s your flashlight?” I asked.

  “He stole it from me. He said his own flashlight is dead and mine is a good one.”

  If he had set up housekeeping back here, he had to have some source of light. I gently removed Bernie’s clutch on my arms, moved her into the circle of my left arm, used the right hand to grope amid the detritus on the shelves. Something sticky, a mess of cloth that stank of stale grease. A matchbook. Yes, a matchbook.

  I struck a flame and saw a jumble of partially eaten food, cups of beer, stadium seat cushions, a filthy blanket with the Cubs logo still showing faintly blue against the dirt.

  The match went out. I lit another. In its brief life I saw a row of makeshift torches, rags wrapped around wooden spindles. I gave one to Bernie to hold and lit it with another match, lit a second for myself.

  Bernie was trembling and weeping, but she obediently followed me into the body of the tunnel.

  “Your homeless man locked us in and barricaded the door,” I said, “but I’m betting there’s a way out at the other end. I sent a message to your dad and to the police, that you’d been seen climbing into the stadium, so I’m hoping they’ll be here looking for you. But you and I are not going to wait around for someone else to rescue us.”

  BEANBALL

  Under the flickering light of greasy rags, we finally found my phone and gun. They had landed in the sludge under one of the cables, a couple of yards away from the perimeter I’d been patting. It would have been a long night in here with the rats. I wiped the phone on the underside of my jacket. It seemed to still be alive, but showed only 29 percent battery. I put it in airplane mode so it would stop wasting energy looking for a signal; I wouldn’t use the flashlight unless I absolutely had to.

  I tore a strip of fabric from my underpants—the cleanest garment I had on right now—so I could clean the gun barrel. Bernie wrung her hands, demanding that we get going, oh, why stand there playing with your weapon?

  “I know, darling, I know, but if worse comes t
o worst and I have to shoot, I don’t want this gun jamming or blowing up on us.”

  I gave her small tasks, things she had to concentrate on, working to bring her back from the edge of terror: Hold her torch over the gun barrel. Rewrap the rags around my torch. Tie her shoelaces. It’s amazing how much you can steady yourself by tying your shoelaces.

  By the time I’d finished with the gun, Bernie was calm enough to tell me what she remembered of the night. She’d been imagining going to Wrigley for more than a week—my guess about her scouting trip to the ballpark, the night she’d said she was going out with friends from the peewee hockey league, had been correct.

  “That time, I just wanted to see if I could do what Uncle Boom-Boom and you did, you know, see if I could climb up the bleachers. It looked like fun. Only then, when I saw the pictures, I knew this Annie, she must have left her diary here. I would have done that.”

  Of course she would have. She was seventeen, with a high sense of adventure and a low sense of consequences.

  Today, when Pierre took her to a camping store to get a few things for their mountain cabin, she’d bought a high-grade pocket flashlight—that made her feel confident she could navigate the stadium in the dark. Taking advantage of Pierre’s involvement with the game and with his old friends, she’d slipped out of the United Center and caught a cab.

  “The driver, he asked me, am I sure I want to come here, since I am leaving a hockey game and there is no baseball game, and then when we got here—I saw how big this ballpark was in the dark, almost I called to him, wait!, but—” She broke off, shamefaced.

  I skirted another pool of dank water dripping through the steel nets overhead. “But you didn’t want to admit you were no braver than I was,” I said matter-of-factly.

  She nodded miserably. “He drove off. I felt very small and stupid. You said you and Uncle Boom-Boom used to climb over the back of the bleachers and I looked at them last week, but tonight—they looked so big—oh! Why did I think I needed to show off to you?”

  Rats were skirmishing over something bleeding in a corner. I put an arm around Bernie to shield her from the sight.

  She described her climb up the wall behind the bleachers—the same route I’d taken. A drunk had been watching her, which had scared her into swallowing her fears and scrambling over the wall.

  “But when I was inside the park, I didn’t know where to look or what to do. I should have just gone back over the wall. Only the drunk man, it was dark, I didn’t know if he would attack me.”

  “Let’s concentrate on being here now,” I said. “How did you find this tunnel?”

  “I went inside the stadium, through the open aisle door. I thought, just one look, to prove I’m no coward, and then back outside, over the wall, and ride a cab to the hotel. I ran through the hallways, shining my flashlight around, not opening any doors. But then I came to the door to this tunnel. It was open, and I saw how she—it, the door, how it looked like the door in that photo. I stepped inside and the homeless man jumped me. He kept yelling at me, like he thought he knew me, or that I knew something I don’t know.”

  “That’s typical of someone with a mental illness who’s been living on the streets,” I said. “Their reality is all they can process. Homelessness exacerbates the problem.”

  “No! It wasn’t like that. He said that he was tired of tricks and people not believing him, that it was empty, there wasn’t anything here, but he wasn’t going to die for it. If anyone was going to die it would be me. And then he could be left alone.”

  “That what was empty?” I started to ask, but I was interrupted by a loud clang, a sound vibrating along the iron pipes overhead, and then shouts, heavy footsteps.

  “Is it Papa?” Bernie’s face was eager.

  “I don’t know. I don’t like it.” Pierre would have been calling Bernie’s name.

  I stuck our torches into holes in the concrete walls and pulled her back, away from the light.

  “Stay here,” I murmured. “I want to see who’s here.”

  I started up the tunnel, gun in hand.

  “Don’t leave me,” Bernie cried. “I can’t be by myself in here, I don’t care if I’m a lâche myself, it’s too—”

  The voices came through clearly.

  “They’re further along, I can hear them. Papa!” Bernie called joyously. “J’y suis, je t’attends!”

  Footsteps pounding, slipping, men shouting. I tried holding Bernie: “Wait, wait until we know,” but she broke away from me and ran toward the voices, calling “Papa, Papa.”

  I lumbered after her, heard her scream, rounded a corner to see her struggling in the arms of a masked man. A second masked man loomed over him, gripping a third man, who wasn’t masked. Oily unwashed black hair hung over his forehead, almost joining with a week’s growth of beard. Jeans, a sweatshirt. I could just make out the Illinois Institute of Technology logo on its filthy front.

  “Come one step closer and we shoot the girl,” the second masked man warned.

  “Sebastian!” I shouted. “Sebastian Mesaline. Give it up. The police are on their way.”

  “I told you,” Sebastian shrieked to the two goons. “I left the girl tied up in here, she’s the one you want, not me, she came in here, she stole the diary, she has the pages.”

  “No,” I shouted. “We don’t have a diary. There is no diary.”

  “Don’t lie to me, bitch,” the larger goon said. “I saw the cover to the diary. This worthless piece of shit”—he shook Sebastian—“says it was empty when he found it.”

  “You found a book in here?” I stupidly asked.

  “Yeah, Fugher, he fucking double-crossed us. He said this pansy of a nephew here did. Or you did. Which is it?”

  I couldn’t recognize the voice. Not the heavy accent of Nabiyev. Not Bagby’s lilting baritone.

  “Stella doesn’t have it?” I asked.

  “Oh, the Guzzo broad—she’s so crazy she sees double whatever she’s looking at. No, what she has isn’t what we’re looking for. Which one of you is telling the truth—the boy or you?”

  “I am,” Sebastian wailed. “I told you, I told you last week, when I gave it to Uncle Jerry the pages were already gone. Someone else was in here ahead of me. It had to be her.”

  Sebastian wrenched himself free of the thug holding him and fled toward the exit. Big Goon turned and shot. I leapt over and smashed my gun stock into Small Goon’s jaw.

  He roared in pain, loosed his grip on Bernie.

  “Go, go, go!” I screamed.

  She almost made it, bending her slight frame low, to slide under Small Goon’s arms, but she was too tired, too shell-shocked for the speed she needed. Big Goon grabbed her. Small Goon slugged me. I kicked his shins, hard, and he jumped back. Small Goon fired at me, missed.

  I felt the heat as the bullet zinged past. I ducked down, scooted under a pipe, shot back, high, over Bernie’s head. The sound was unbearable, echoing, reechoing. Smoke filled the air, the stink of sulfur. Big Goon fired again.

  “Don’t fucking kill her until we know where the goddam pages are!” the smaller creep yelled.

  “We’ll get little missy here to tell us where she lives and search her place. I’m tired of fucking bitches thinking they own the universe.” Big Goon shot again.

  Eyes watering, coughing, ears ringing, find a target that wasn’t Bernie. Edge forward. A sharp shock, and I was plummeting over a cliff, bouncing down rocks into the tar pits.

  WILD PITCH

  Tar was in my nose, my lungs. It sucked me under, I couldn’t move my arms. Someone had been sick in front of me and the smell mixed with the tar was so terrible it made me vomit. I wanted my mother but Stella Guzzo and my aunt Marie appeared.

  The tar poured over me and I blacked out. I woke in the modern epoch, into darkness so awful that I thought for a moment I actually was buried i
n tar. I flung my arms wildly trying to swim to the surface. Hit my hand on metal, heard it clang. Not tar. Tunnel. The smell of sewage and vomit. I’d been sick.

  I struggled to sit up. My head knocked into a pipe and the jolt made me throw up again, a trickle of bile that left me panting for water.

  Test for concussion: Can you remember the day, the president, the geological epoch? What’s your name? V. I. Warshawski. What’s your occupation? Idiot.

  Bernadine Fouchard, she’d been with me. And then—masked men. Sebastian Mesaline. We’d fought, I could still smell the acrid gun smoke through the stench in my nose. Don’t think about what you’ve inhaled, sit up, move, slowly, but move! Phone in pocket, still working, turn on the light.

  I’d been in the dark too long, I’d become a mole, couldn’t handle the stabbing shapes, colors. My head ached, my left eye was tearing, but I forced myself to keep blinking, looking, hoping for Bernie.

  I was alone except for the rats. They’d gathered where I’d been lying, insolent, unconcerned, eating my vomit. Good thing I’d been sick, they’d have gone for my nose and cheeks first without it. The hard hat I’d borrowed had rolled off. My gun, nearby, I wanted to shoot the rats, but I only had one magazine and I’d already fired twice.

  I bent slowly, not wanting to challenge my head, picked up the Smith & Wesson and the hard hat. I must have fallen heavily: the hat had a dent in it. I started to put it on, then looked at the dent. I’d been shot. The hat saved my life. The impact had knocked me out, but the men must have thought I was dead.

  Move, V.I. Don’t be feeble, get out of here. I moved up the tunnel, got to the entrance. Locked in, no time for finesse. I shot out the lock, put my shoulder to the door. Damned mops were holding it shut. I backed up, shot at a hinge. The bullet ricocheted, but before I could find a cleverer strategy I heard shouting from the other side.

  “What the hell are you doing in there?” Noises, mops scraping back, the door opened. I stood in the shadows, put away my gun when I saw who was on the other side. Five in the morning, game day. The grounds crew was there, getting the field ready for play.