by Julie Beard
Suddenly, I wanted him out of here. “You’re not a regular detective, are you?”
“No, I’m not. I worked in psy-ops for five years.”
Psychological operations. He was a frickin’ shrink. No wonder he gave me the heebie-jeebies.
“Two years ago I went back to the academy to enter a new program designed to streamline the training of solo detectives to replace those killed by the mobs. I graduated yesterday.”
And today he was at my door. This was getting worse by the minute. “Why did you decide to switch from being a shrink to a gumshoe?”
He looked at me with those dark-lashed eyes of his. “You don’t want to know.”
Goose bumps spread over my arms. He was gunning for me. But why? I didn’t think it had anything to do with Alvarez. The mayor’s nine-year-old niece had been molested. The guy got off because he’d been smart enough to leave no DNA. After the trial, I’d found him and brought him to the mayor’s brother for a little justice. That was the end of my involvement. I had a feeling Detective Marco had done some research on me and mentioned the Alvarez case simply to get in the door.
“Let’s cut to the chase, Marco. Is this about the Gibson Warrants?”
His mouth twisted with irony and he took a drink, watching me as he sipped, then said, “No, that’s not why I came. But, since you mentioned it, I’m head of the Fraternal Order of City Police committee working to outlaw your profession. I was actually happy about the Gibson Warrants. They’ve shown the world what I’ve known all along—that you’re nothing more than a bunch of outlaws. This isn’t the Wild West, Ms. Baker.”
“Oh, but it is.” I moved to the edge of my chair. “That’s precisely the point. I don’t approve of what Judge Gibson has done, but I understand it. How many hundreds of thousands of restraining orders have judges given out over the last hundred and fifty years? How many of them have actually stopped an enraged husband from killing his wife? Everyone knows restraining orders are a joke.”
“But if you commit murder to prevent murder, is society any better off?”
“I haven’t decided that yet.” I wasn’t about to tell him that I thought the warrants went too far. For some reason, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“So you want to play God. Are you saying that you—or Gibson—have the power to determine who lives and dies?”
“People are going to live and die no matter what we do.”
“You can’t be that cynical, Baker.”
I gave him an exaggerated scowl. “Don’t be such a Boy Scout. You know as well as I do that rich people almost never pay for their crimes because they can afford great lawyers. And anybody, rich or poor, who is smart enough to keep DNA out of a crime scene will be back on the street, even with a conviction, after only two years. That’s a slap on the wrist. You’ve got to hate that, Detective. All your hard work trying to catch the perps goes to waste.”
“The system sucks, I agree. So why don’t you try to change it instead of compromising it?”
“Because the system is controlled by giant corporations and international crime syndicates who don’t give a damn about life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness, thank you very much. But if I can protect one woman from an abusive husband, or help a victim at least get an apology from his assailant, then at the end of the day I’ve done something worthwhile.”
“An apology?” A sardonic half smile tugged his lips. “Is that all your clients want from their perps after you hand them over? Some of the ex-cons you people haul in wind up at the bottom of Lake Michigan.”
Heat burned my cheeks. “That’s not my fault.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I don’t take any clients who would do that sort of thing. Nor does any other retribution specialist who is certified. We have a professional code and contracts that specify that no perpetrator can be killed or tortured. Surely you know that.”
“What I know is that you’re playing with fire. You can’t take the law into your own hands, no matter what criminals do. Even if what you do is legal, it’s not right. You have to leave law and order to trained officers. We’ll do our job.”
I snorted in derision. “And who are you? Elliott Ness? You think you’re going to clean up this town like Ness cleared out Capone and his gang back in the early 1900s?” I shook my head. “Cops. You’re all either corrupt or egomaniacs who think you’re going to save the world.”
He blinked slowly. “Why do you have such a low opinion of legitimate law enforcement?”
I took in a deep breath. Because the cops who arrested my mother and put her in jail for bookkeeping had been placing bets at her apartment the night before. Because the social workers who put me in foster care the next day knew my foster father had a history of abuse. Because I don’t trust anyone.
“Because,” I said in a rough voice, “even if you do your job perfectly, the bad guys are going to go free. Judge Gibson wants to change all that. While you can argue with his method, I can’t imagine anyone who would argue with the result.”
“So you’ve used Gibson Warrants?”
I leaned back as I thought about my encounter with Drummond. “You might say that.”
His chestnut-colored eyes darkened. “How many people have you executed?”
“In the past two months?” I shrugged. “I’ve lost count.”
For some reason he wanted to hate me, but he knew I was yanking his chain. He sighed and leaned back, taking another sip.
“What are you drinking?” I asked.
He licked the clear liquor from his lips. “Chianti.”
“Chianti.” I smiled. He was Italian. “I should have known. But I might have taken you for a Scotch man.” I hated Scotch.
In the pause that followed, the old-time elevated train roared by not two hundred yards away. It was the only original el-track still functioning in the entire country and a real tourist attraction. In the mid-twenty-first century, all of Chicago’s elevated trains and subways had been replaced by aboveground superconductor lines, which were virtually noiseless. I had the dubious privilege of living near the only remaining electric track capable of making my two-flat rattle from its vibration.
“So, Detective,” I said when the rumble died, “let’s cut to the chase. I’m not a bloodthirsty ogre and we both know it. What really brought you here?”
“Danny Black,” he said.
Two words. They may as well have been two fists pounding into my solar plexus. For a moment I couldn’t breathe. I tried to keep my cool, but my eyes closed of their own will while unwanted images flashed in my mind. I saw Officer Daniel Black’s body lying in a pool of blood in a rat-infested alley in the Loop. A minute before there had been seven of us—me and Darelle Jones, a drug dealer I’d been contracted to bring in, Officer Danny Black and four dealers—connected with the neo-Russian mob.
Darelle opened fire, killing everyone but me. I was close enough to witness the massacre, but just out of sight around the corner of a nearby building. When the smoke cleared, I was the only witness. The fact that I was the lone survivor and had prior connections to the assailant made me doubly suspicious. But a thorough investigation cleared me of any collusion.
I put the unpleasant memories aside and opened my eyes. I found Detective Marco heading toward the door, readjusting his sport coat. He wasn’t even going to hear me out.
“If you’ve bothered to look at the record, Marco,” I said as I stood and crossed my arms, unwilling to chase after him, “you know that I was found completely innocent in that tragedy. The chief even held a press conference announcing that conclusion. The case is closed.”
He opened the door, adjusted his collar and seared me from the distance with a laser-beam glare. “I’ve read the record, Baker. And you’re right, you were cleared of wrongdoing. But you couldn’t be more wrong on another count. The case isn’t closed. It’s now officially reopened.”
He slammed the door behind him. I didn’t move for a long time. I couldn�
�t have been more stunned if he’d said, “Frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn.” And in a way, that’s exactly what he did say.
Chapter 4
Black Coffee, Blue Dragon
As soon as Marco left, I called the private eye whom I’d hired to watch the abuse shelter where Drummond’s wife and kid were staying. Some retributionists who make good money have a whole staff of private investigators who do everything from watching over victims to tracking the whereabouts of ex-cons. I kept my operation simple by using a freelance P.I. when needed.
My guy was an old pro from Skokie. I told him about my fight with Drummond and told him to call the cops and me, in that order, if my threats failed to cower Drummond and he showed up at the shelter. The police could legally shoot the sonofabitch if he attacked his family. I could only do it with a bogus Gibson Warrant and wind up in jail for fraud.
I had just hung up when someone knocked on the door again.
“Now what?” I muttered as I flung it open. And there, standing before me with a rakish smirk and a tilted fedora, was none other than Humphrey Bogart.
“Bogie,” I said on a long sigh of relief. “I forgot you were coming. Man, am I glad you’re here.”
He passed me with a wink and a whiff of tobacco trailed behind him. There was something so simply and confidently masculine about him that just watching him climb the stairs and saunter into my flat made my wire-tight shoulders unfurl. Okay, fine. I’d given in to Chicago’s uniquely primal summer heat. I was here. He was here. My libido was definitely here.
Though Bogie wore a trench coat, he wasn’t sweating. I was. He shrugged out of the coat and tossed it onto my couch, then poured himself a glass of Vivante. Bourbon. You never had to ask with a man like Bogie. He took a long sip, then looked at me long and hard. His upper lip twitched once—one of his rare signs of emotion.
“You look tired, Angel.”
I nodded. “More than you could ever know.” Between Drummond and Detective Marco, I felt as if the whole world was against me. I needed someone who would accept me as I was, ask no questions and leave no doubts that I was a woman. Lucky for me, that someone was standing in arm’s reach.
When Bogie put down his glass on the serving bar and came my way, hands tucked into his suit pocket, my skin tingled all over. He kissed me lightly. I smelled tobacco on his breath, and it was so real I melted in his arms.
“Make love to me, Bogie.”
“Is that an order?”
I nodded. He took me to my bedroom and undressed me. His jaded eyes lit with hunger.
“Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.”
And I knew from experience he would do much more than that.
The next morning I arose, as usual, to the soft sound of Mike’s Chinese gong and the smell of incense. Both were di rigeur for his meditations. Sound and scent floated up from the garden through the open French windows in my bedroom. I flopped my arm across my double bed, not expecting to find Bogie there. And I didn’t.
I’d only contracted with AutoMates to have Humphrey Bogart until 3:00 a.m. With his internal clock fully engaged, quite literally, Bogie always rose promptly, no matter how deliciously exhausting our lovemaking was. He’d light a cigarette, which AutoMates were permitted to do. After all, tar and nicotine can’t hurt a robot. Granted, second-hand smoke was still a problem, but the stinking rich AutoMates corporation lobbyists had convinced Congress that a few smoking movie star robots couldn’t produce all that much smoke.
After lighting up, Bogie would dress in darkness, his rugged features illuminated only by the red glow of his cigarette, and depart.
His zombielike obedience to time always reminded me a little of those blond people in The Time Machine who went off in a trance whenever the Morlocks called. The 1960s movie, starring Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux, was a classic. It was in color, but I still liked it.
The fact that Bogie had been programmed to send me to the moon diminished the afterglow, but not by much. With a compubot produced by AutoMates, the premiere manufacturer, satisfaction was always guaranteed. And I was lucky enough to get exclusive dibs on the star attraction of Rick’s Café Americain, the reality bar down the street.
Yet I’ll admit the physical satisfaction did little to relieve my loneliness. That’s why I always sent Bogie home before morning. The emptiness of our so-called relationship always glared in early daylight. The problem was I just wasn’t sure if I could handle a real man again. I wasn’t exactly lucky in love. While on the outside I looked fearless, my heart was about as tough as a bowl of cherry Jell-O.
I made coffee, and when I had a steaming cup in hand, I went into the garden, thinking my martial arts trainer would give me a break from training today. Mike’s savage attack cry promptly disabused me of the notion.
“Haieeeeyaaaa!” he screamed.
My every muscle tensed. I knew what was coming next. Nevertheless, as the stimulant-dependant occidental that I was, I managed to take a slurp of my treasured caffeine before going into defense mode. Not only because my sluggish brain desperately needed it, but because it made Mike mad.
As a former Buddhist monk, he’d prefer I ate no meat, drank no caffeine, engaged in no sex and slept on a straw mat. He wanted me to live like a…well, a monk. It was my lifelong determination to prove to him that I could be every bit the fighter he was even while maintaining my status on the top of the carnivorous, lecherous and indulgent food chain.
I saw a tornado of sienna-colored robes rounding a bank of blooming pink azaleas.
“Aaiiiyeeee!” he cried again, every tendon straining as he squatted and assumed a pose of steel.
“Oh, hell.” He was opening with the iron buffalo ploughs the field. That classic Shaolin kung fu move was enough to make me want to dig a foxhole. I took one last slurp of coffee and tossed my mug into the grass. “Hey, Mike, can we talk about this?”
His typically enigmatic Oriental expression, boyish for his thirty years of age, was distorted into a mask of savagery. Boy, he wasn’t kidding around. My dalliances with Bogie always pissed him off. Mike believed compubots could suck the chi out of you for days. He was trying to teach me a lesson. But while I was sporting the just-laid look, I had more energy than he suspected. The question was, what move?
I cleared all thoughts as Mike had taught me, making way for instinct. He blazed toward me—jumping, squatting, rolling on the ground and flailing. But just before he downed me with a blue dragon tail-wag move, I leaped and grabbed the twisted tree branch that was shading a bed of hostas and pulled myself up with catlike grace. Squatting barefoot on the branch, and wearing nothing more than a tank top and boy-short briefs, I pounced down on him—now the tiger—and flattened him.
“Ha!” I cried out when he sank back in defeat. I stood on my adrenaline-pumped legs. “I told you never to do that before I’ve had at least two cups of coffee.”
He sat up, not the least the worse for wear, and smoothed a hand over his shaved head. “I make sure you are awake.”
“Well, it worked. But I lost a perfectly good cup of coffee. And I’m going to have more,” I said emphatically as I combed through my sprigs of platinum hair and headed back to the kitchen.
“Wait, Baker.”
His somber request stopped me cold. It was more his tone than the words that worried me. He always called me Baker. Ever since I’d rescued him from a prison camp in Joliet, Illinois, he’d called me by my last name, thinking it was my first. The Chinese put their last names first. His was Pu Yun. Yun would be his first name, except he’d taken a classic American nickname.
“What is it, Mike? Can’t it wait for another cup of java?”
His long pause worried me. But finally he nodded. Reluctantly.
With a steaming cup of joe, I joined him in his shed at the end of the long, fenced-in garden. I always called it a shed, but it was much more than that. Mike lived in a cozy twenty-by-fifteen-foot renovated coach house. With a bare wooden floor, it was insulated but not well heated,
so we had put in a potbellied stove.
In accordance with the principles of feng shui, a water pond coated with green lilies and stocked with white and red carp sat serenely outside his door. Inside, colorful painted images of a dragon, a red bird and a tortoise adorned differing walls.
I glanced around and noticed the place was unusually cluttered—Taoist amulets and talismans scrawled on red and yellow strips of paper were pinned here and there, his bag of I Ching tablets lay in the corner, incense burned before a small statue of the Buddha, and he’d been working at his suitcase-size desk on a purple astrology chart. Fact was, Mike was superstitious, as were most Chinese who’d grown up in the old country.
“I have very bad luck,” he’d said when I first brought him here five years ago. His wrists had been scarred from being chained after numerous attempts to escape from the work camp. He was skinny and looked like a concentration camp victim. “My father…his grave is in a bad place near Shanghai. Pointing east. We are all cursed, my family, because of this.”
Not if you’re one of the elite Shaolin monks, I’d thought at the time, which he was. The monks and their kung fu style of martial arts had first come to the attention of Westerners in the 1970s because of a television show. When the Chinese communist government realized they could make money off of the monks, the Shaolin Temple north of the Shaoshi Mountain opened to tourists. While Mike had made a name for himself at the Shaolin temple, he had come to America in search of social freedom.
Whether it was because of bad luck or naiveté, he had arranged his trip through a crafty travel agency sponsored by the Mongolian mafia. Mike unwittingly ended up in a prison work camp operated by the mafia on the outskirts of Chicago. He’d slaved in Illinois’s legalized opium fields for two years before I’d rescued him while taking a tour of the camp, a spontaneous act of mercy on my part.