Calumet City (21 page)

But these pieces of shit are wrong. Through Harold, I will find and kill Roland Ganz before the FBI decides to arrest me for no-showing their interview, before I’m put in prison for the Black Monday murder in Calumet City. My son will never know any of this happened.

Sonny answers, "You hear?"

"Huh?"

"Chief Jesse. Heart attack after dinner. He’s in ICU at Mercy Hospital."

I’m afraid to breathe. "He’s…gonna make it?"

"Don’t go over, you can’t see him."

"Will he make it?"

"No tellin’. Had your file in his lap, P." Long pause, then, "IAD and the G plan on taking a bunch more of your time the next few days."

That’s a polite way of saying that confinement is likely, arrest almost a given. Once that happens, anyone who helps me is toast, on their pension at a minimum. I want and need help but can’t ask Sonny for it—the Gypsy Vikings backup was already way past what’s fair. "Sonny, there’s a PI named Harold J. J. Tyree. If I’m dead or missing tomorrow, here’s his number. At the very least, beat the shit out of him."

Silence, then, "Want help?"

"Got some." Like a divine vision, I see Tracy Moens just a cell phone call away, plain as if she were standing next to me. "I’ll be in touch, and thanks for being my—"

"I went by the Cassarane, left my number at the bar for Idaho Joe."

That feels like a kiss on the lips I haven’t had in the longest time, and again it’s coming from the strangest place. I’m glad Sonny can’t see me blushing. "Sonny, you need to stay out of this now, okay? I’m about to be in shit that won’t wash off."

"That’s news?"

"This is different. My history won’t stay hidden past the weekend."

Sonny’s voice changes, not weird, but sorta. "The Cassarane already has my number. If Idaho Joe calls, I’ll call. Keep your head down, P. Me and Eric and Cisco are rootin’ for you, know that." Pause. "The whole crew, no matter what."

I want to believe it and the tears in both eyes are proof. "Bye."

   In person, Tracy Moens is definitely surprised when we meet on my side of the river and I make the offer—"You get pieces of the story now, the whole thing when it’s over." She has the look of a sleek, great white shark that’s just seen more dinner that it thought possible, turning on a dime the way they do on the Discovery Channel, so fast the 3,000-pound fish seems to be going two directions at once.

"Deal."

"You could die doing this, Tracy; if not, either part of the plan could put you in prison."

Tracy takes a half-step back, not a full one. "What are the odds…on dying?"

From the shadows I eye the traffic as it passes. So many SUVs are on the street that there’s no chance of IDing
the
SUV unless the kidnappers put a sign on it. "Worse than if you stay out of it altogether."

"But then I don’t get the story."

"Yup. There’s the price of safety." I dislike Miss All-Everything sufficiently to involve her in this. That and I don’t expect her to betray me unless it
is
life-or-death. Reporters are just as ravenous as Hollywood portrays them, almost as crazy as skydivers. Tracy sees a book contract and a new town house in Lincoln Park; I see a gunfight, prison, and maybe a cemetery.

   Fifteen minutes later the headlights of Tracy’s red Jaguar are tailing me.

I make a right and her Jaguar follows. We’re just west of the Deuce, the 2nd District—the only place in this city more violent than where I work—rolling Halsted’s cramped four lanes through light rain, wind, and dark. Thunder booms and rattles my car windows. We pass brick storefronts and klieg-lit gas stations fenced with concertina wire. The fences are fronted by street-gangster lookouts who nervous-eye the darkening sky instead of two cars driven by white women.

This drive into the city’s dark heart is the first of Tracy’s required "two parts." She has simple instructions for part one: "Do not exit your vehicle no matter what you see. If it goes bad, just call it in as 911—officer involved."

As we approach Forty-fourth from the south, the neighborhood changes to poor white people, empty warehouses, and prairies, Denny Banahan’s tag for gaping holes of used-to-be buildings. A black man waits under the corner streetlight. He’s exposed to the rain, backed by a thirty-foot-high, faded brick wall. His black Nike jumpsuit shines wet across narrow shoulders. An Afro glistens where it bubbles out from under a Sox cap. His oversize hand hides only part of a cell phone and he seems nervous at the outer edge of Canaryville. If he’s alone like I told him, he should be nervous.

He stares when he sees my car. I stop at the opposite curb, push open the driver’s door, and yell, "Haul ass, Harold."

Harold J. J. Tyree pimp rolls across Halsted, checking everything he can and still look unafraid. As he passes the center stripe I get out, pistol drawn, and point him over the hood. He balks.

"On the hood, Harold.
Now
."

"Man—"

"
Now
. Asshole." I two-hand the Smith and step so he’s sandwiched between me and the hood.
"Move."

Harold does. I pat him. Up close he smells like baby powder and Jheri curl. There’s a .32 hidden inside his right ankle.

"That’s a felony."

"Got a permit."

"Sure you do. I find a tracker on your person, it’s gonna kill you." My voice sounds like a stranger’s.

"Nah, man, no tracker."

I grab his cell and make sure it’s off, then check Tracy parked behind us. "Stand on the sidewalk."

Harold steps to the curb. I slide into the driver’s seat and drape the Smith behind the passenger’s headrest. "Get in. Hands on the dash. Take ’em off and I shoot you."

"Shit, lady—"

"In or out, Harold."

He gets in after checking Halsted again. I have to gun-barrel the back of his head before his hands reach for the dash. "
Easy, man,
easy."

"Keep ’em there." I wedge the barrel tight to the base of his head, then make a right on Pershing. Harold shies to the window.

"Where we goin’?"

I press Harold’s cheek into the window, positive Harold is the best chance Patti Black has to kill Roland Ganz. And tonight, that’s my best chance at saving my son. I make the right onto the Dan Ryan and Tracy’s headlights make it with us.

Harold sneaks a look at me and says, "We can do our talkin’ here, baby. Ain’t no reason to go south."

I consider Harold and his Afro, then his big hands again, and consider blowing his teeth into the window. The new me thinks that’s reasonable. Harold must sense this and asks again where we’re going. He won’t like my answer any better than I do.

"Calumet City."

   It’s raining harder. Harold J. J. Tyree has a gun pointed at his ear and a very dangerous white woman in the driver’s seat of a car he doesn’t own. But he doesn’t act the right kind of nervous. We’re four miles down the Dan Ryan and Harold hasn’t tried to explain why we needed to talk.

I have two good ideas why he hasn’t explained, and quick-check for an SUV in the smeary headlights behind us. We’re bracketed by three, but none the right color. I check Harold again; he doesn’t have the look of a man who’s going where I’m going. That’s unfortunate—for both of us. It’s important Harold and I get on the same page before we discuss Idaho Joe.

I jerk the wheel and us onto the Seventy-fifth Street off ramp. Now we’re in my part of the ghetto. If an Idaho whiteboy driving an SUV follows us in here, he’ll be the corpse, not the killer. I steer us right, then left, and onto a dead side street that instantly becomes more canyon than street. Gutted burnouts block the night sky on both sides. I brake at sudden, complete dark. Only bold, first-floor graffiti reflects in our headlights. Ten years of slow urban rot litters the street; we’re in a seven-story Gangster Disciple graveyard, a place to rape, rob, and murder anyone who doesn’t know better. Tracy’s Jag parks too far back.

I shove Harold with the pistol and say, "Out."

Harold exits, but not far, and glances his surroundings. We’re facing each other in the misty dark of Tracy’s headlights, him and the new me—two people with limited futures.

"You know a lot about my situation, Harold."

He nods.

"How’s that?"

Harold shakes his head. Thunder booms over the hollowed buildings and punches us with wet stench. The rain’s our angel too; gangsters don’t like the rain. There’s only a small chance Harold doesn’t know this.

"Been by my crib, Harold? Daylight B&E? You and me have to cover that."

Harold’s expression is as professionally blank as he can make it.

"What were you looking for? How’d you and Idaho Joe find me?"

His Afro sifts Tracy’s headlights as he shakes it. "Not me, baby."

I nod again, red coming to my face. I aim at his foot. He doesn’t notice. Lines I couldn’t feel last week bunch at my eyes and harden my mouth. I don’t feel great about shooting him, now that I’m about to. He seems more interested in the car illuminating his back.

"My girlfriend." I angle my head at the headlights. "You see the movie
Monster?
Aileen Wuornos. Badass number, that lady. Killed ten or twenty. My girlfriend’s like that."

I get Harold to nod.

"Her medication’s in my pocket; I don’t give it to her, she rips you to fucking pieces. The Stones and GDs sell you as tacos."

Harold stops nodding and stares. "Baby, you ain’t the first
bull-
dyke to threaten me."

"Any of ’em shoot you?"

A sharp flash cracks deep in our canyon. Harold flinches and so do I. Lightning drills into the lake and shows us the gutted buildings. Thunder booms and five loose bricks shake to the street. Harold jerks to the noise, then regroups as his Afro begins to wilt.

"This is a bad place to be, Harold, alone, shot in the foot, beat sideways by my psycho girlfriend. Your track suit’ll be in an evidence bag fifteen minutes after I leave."

"I been in the ghetto before, baby. Know these boys. Speak the language, you know?"

We stare at each other until my lips curl over my teeth. Lightning flashes again and I cock the pistol. Harold notices. I aim at his intestines so I won’t miss. "Your client is trying to kill me and my kid."

"Say what?"

"Trying to kill me and my son." More thunder, and I add volume to compete. "You and me don’t need the Ayatollah, Harold. All that civil rights shit was last week."

Harold pops up both hands. "Whoa, baby. Ease up. I ain’t into nothin’ like that."

"Idaho Joe is." Harold is about to be shot, not pardoned. Tracy will be the ASA’s witness. "Last chance, how do you know what you know?"

Harold says, "Patti Black, hero cop of the ghet-
to
."

"She’s dead." I step back and aim at his head.

"Don’t. Don’t."
Harold stumbles backward into my fender and it keeps him from falling. "Cal City Juvy. I got a guy at Cal City Juvy."

An inch of deep frown grooves my new face.
What a surprise
. Calumet City Juvenile. The records sealed forever to protect the abused and innocent. Without permission my finger tightens on the trigger.

"Wanna die, Harold?"

"No way, baby. Fuck no." Harold’s hands are up and between us. "The guy, he’s workin’ with me on this; got all kinda files he stole."

I think about John, about what’s in that file, absolutely certain it’s the one Assistant U.S. Attorney Jo Ann Merica is hunting. "This would be a really bad time to lie, Harold."

   Harold has his hands on the dash again and he’s still alive. We’re south of the ghetto on the Dan Ryan where it becomes the Bishop Louis Henry Ford Freeway and acts as a dam between the Chicago Sanitary District and the Port of Chicago. The Port is a fifteen-square-mile, rat-infested inland anchorage that connects Chicago to the Great Lakes’ steel, zinc, and lead traffic via the Calumet River.

Pretty it isn’t, even in the dark.

But it’s not actually dark; it never is in the steel towns. The tops of the 200-foot brick chimneys in the distance are capped in fire, the "Smokestack Lightnin’" Howlin’ Wolf made famous. They blotch-light the distended sky in an odd pattern off to the southeast. I can taste the metal in the air; it tastes like it used to, like the blood did by the stockyards when Chicago was still "hog butcher to the world." But this smell is different, burnt ore and fuel oil, and it stings.

If you’ve been here before, that’s how you know Calumet City and Gary are close. On the days when the wind was out of the south and east, it was all I could smell, in the basement or the attic, no matter what was in my face.

The memories shrink my Celica around me. Harold starts to say something and glances at me, then quickly away. If the new me has a reflection, I haven’t seen it, but I can imagine. We take the exit ramp at Dolton. It drops down to State Street before State becomes what’s left of the infamous Sin Strip. We roll mostly dark and deserted with Tracy behind us until we hit the first set of railroad tracks. Harold says turn south and I do, away from the warehouses and occasional damp hooker sheltering under an eave and wagging her purse.

The neighborhood we enter becomes low bungalows from the 1940s and ’50s. Rain obscures their condition. Cars line both sides of a street that’s dark other than our headlights and the low glow of curtained windows in the houses. I park us in the only driveway we pass, two concrete tire paths separated by mud and oil-dead grass. I phone Tracy and tell her to stay in her Jaguar with the engine running.

The porch is dry. Most of Harold J. J. Tyree is not. He knocks; a dim porch light blinks on and I step behind him with the Smith in his back. The door opens. I crouch deep and rugby-shove Harold inside. He stumbles through; I follow and kick the door closed behind us. The big, middle-aged white man regaining his balance and staring at me is only semi-surprised at my pistol.