I’ve been inside Archie’s building a couple of times before, once after killing a couple of his rival fences, and another time after I was shot in the ribs in a Chicago Public Library. Grant hired a private surgeon to stitch me up, and his sister Ruby took care of me until I got back on my feet. That was years ago, before I quit and before Ruby took a bullet to the face and died in front of a church in Siena as I stood next to her.
The apartment is as I remember it and as Smoke described. There’s dried blood in the bedroom, the color of rust, and several pieces of furniture—a lamp, a nightstand—are overturned.
“I didn’t touch nothing,” Smoke says. “This is just as I found it.”
I scan the room, then zero in on a chest of drawers and put my finger in a smooth hole.
“Shit. Is that a bullet hole? I didn’t
even
see that.” He hits the word “even” to make sure I hear the truth in his voice.
“Can you help me move this?”
The back of the chest and the wall behind it have the same hole. Risina watches, fascinated.
“You got a little knife on you?” I say to Smoke.
He immediately shakes his head, but then thinks. “Hold on a second . . .”
He scampers back to the kitchen and Risina smiles and nods, rocking forward on her toes. “I’m impressed.”
“In this job, you have to look at a scene of violence, the aftermath, and read it like a book. I want you to try to visualize what happened in this room. On your own, no help from me.”
I hear Smoke rummaging around in kitchen drawers, but I focus on Risina. Her eyes trace the room, drinking it in, and I can see her gears turning.
“I don’t know. There was a fight, and someone was shot.”
“Not shot. I don’t think so. We’d see a different blood pattern on the floor, on the walls. When someone takes a bullet, a part of his insides usually comes out. So you’d see some other matter besides blood.”
“Then what do you think? He was stabbed?”
Before I can answer, Smoke returns holding a small kitchen knife, a screwdriver, and a letter opener, presenting all three items like a kid excited to please his teacher.
“The opener,” I say. A few minutes later and I fish the bullet out of the wall, then toss it to Risina. “That’s a .22 slug. Look at the size of it and try to commit it to memory. It’s a low caliber round out of a small gun. An assassin’s weapon. I’ll get ahold of some other calibers so you can compare them.”
I turn to Smoke. “Archie have a .22?”
“Yeah.”
“He keep it under the mattress?”
“Yeah.”
I lift it up, but the gun isn’t there.
“Well, he got one shot off before they fought over the pistol. I’m saying ‘they’ ’cause I’m guessing it was at least two guys.”
“Why?”
“Well, I could be wrong, but I think one held him up while the other one went to work on his face. That’s why you have the blood here, in a circle, after they broke his nose and most likely knocked him out. They held him up while his head hung. It’s hard to hold an unconscious guy still, and his head lolled a bit. That accounts for why there is so much blood on the floor. A stab wound would pour straight down and soak the victim’s clothes. A broken nose? That’s a gusher, and if they’re holding him upright, it’s just going to get everywhere.”
It’s Smoke’s turn to ask a question. “Why would they do that?”
I shrug. “They wanted information on me and the muscle went too far? They wanted to beat on him for putting up a fight, pulling a gun? Who knows? But they were careful not to step in the blood, which means the fist work happened after the initial fight. Anyway, none of this matters all that much until we figure out who’s holding Archie and why they want me.”
Risina turns the bullet over in her fingers and holds it up close to her eye like a jeweler examining a diamond. “But we know now it was more than one guy.”
“We know it was more than one guy here in the room. But maybe they were only hired muscle . . . not necessarily the guy looking for me. Either way, the person who wanted Archie snuck two or more guys into this place, which is no easy feat, I know from experience, and got them out of the building while transporting an unconscious resident.”
“They’re professionals. Like you.”
I nod and chew my lip. I had come to that conclusion within five seconds of entering the room, but I wanted Risina to arrive at it on her own.
“So what now?”
“Now we bang on a door.”
Bo Willis is a big man, not quite forty, who looks like his monthly trip to the pharmacy includes a permanent prescription for Lipitor. He was a Chicago cop for twelve years but quit when he didn’t make detective the second year in a row. Being a cop means taking a lot of ribbing from your fellow officers, and I’m sure he received his fair share after failing his detective exams or getting passed over. Bo joined a private security firm, the kind that requires short-sleeve blue uniforms and patches with names on them. He was content to punch the clock and collect his sixty-five a year, though he did it with a scowl on his face. His first couple of years he spent on a bench at an airport warehouse. The last three, he held down an Aero chair behind a security console in Archibald Grant’s building.
We didn’t have to knock on his door; Bo eats breakfast each morning at a place called Willard’s Diner, occupying a booth near the front where he can spread out his newspaper. He looks up for a moment when Risina walks by, and follows her with his eyes until she passes. I want her to hear my conversation with the security guard, but I make a mental note that I’m going to have to talk to her about her appearance. In a business where invisibility is a weapon, I can’t afford to have Risina turning heads by simply walking into the room.
I give Bo a few minutes to settle into the sports page and then slide into the booth opposite him. He starts, unused to having his territory invaded, and that’s a good place to put him: uncomfortable, on defense before he even knows he’s entered the arena.
“This is my booth, guy,” he says when I just stare at him. He has a flat Midwestern accent, and his voice comes out a little pinched, like air escaping a punctured tire.
“I know it’s your booth, Bo. It’s your booth every goddamned morning.”
“Do we know each other?” He’s somewhere between puzzled and pissed. For a big guy, that voice is high, and does his tough guy stance a disservice. I wonder if it cut into his effectiveness as a cop. I wonder if he’s been battling it his whole life.
“You don’t know me, but I know you.”
“Listen, if this—”
“Shut up, Bo. Shut up and use your ears. You’re going to have the opportunity to open your mouth again, and when you do, I want it to be to tell the truth.”
“I don’t—”
“Who paid you to look the other way on March 25th?”
He blinks once, twice, swallowing hard. He’s a headline in large type, as easy to read as the newspaper in front of him. “I don’t—”
“I’m going to describe your sister’s house to you, Bo. It’s on Wilmette Avenue, about thirty minutes from here, a white clapboard two-story number with a green mailbox out front. Your nephew, Mike, occupies the bedroom in the upper right corner and your niece, Kate, right? She sleeps in the lower left below a pink Hannah Montana poster. Your sister, Laura, she’s been living alone now for what? Two years?”
Bo’s face turns bright red, like a brake light. His voice rattles now. “I don’t know who you think you are—”
I cut him off. “I’ll tell you. I think I’m the guy who will kill your sister, your niece, and your nephew in the next hour if you don’t tell me exactly what I want to know. And when I get done killing them, I’ll head to your parents’ house in Glen Ellyn. The brick number set back from the street with the two-door garage? Eventually I’ll come back for you, Bo.”
He starts to open his mouth, but I’m quicker. “I know you were a cop. I know you still have friends on the force. But I’m going to tell you as directly as you’ll ever hear anything in your life: you and your friends have never dealt with someone like me. There’s already a file on your family that will read ‘unsolved homicide’ if you don’t tell me exactly what I want to know.”
He lowers his eyes, and I’ve got him. I growl through clenched teeth, “Who paid you to look the other way?”
For a moment, he doesn’t say anything, just pushes waffle crumbs around the table. Then, so softly I almost don’t hear him, “Not look the other way . . .”
“Speak up.”
“Not look the other way. He paid me to leave. To get up and head out. Said he’d only need an hour. Gave me two thousand bucks. I didn’t know what he was up to, I swear.”
“What’d he look like?”
“White guy, little dumpy to tell you the truth. Shaved head . . . just a regular guy, you know?”
“Accent?”
“I don’t know. East Coast, I’d say, but I don’t know. He didn’t say much. Just said ‘two grand, walk away, one hour.’ That was it. He handed me the money and I took off, you know? I don’t need any Mafia trouble if you know what I’m saying. Cooled my heels in Sharky’s down the street. Looked at my watch and the hour was up. Gave it an extra half hour just to make sure I didn’t walk in on something I didn’t want to see. But when I came back, everything was the same.”
“Video?”
“That was the thing. Of course, I looked over the last hour’s video. Or I was going to. But it was all erased, like the hour didn’t happen. I don’t even know how to work the console other than to hit rewind and play, but he knew how to do it. And there was nothing there.”
He shakes his head, remembering. “I held my breath the next day, expecting to hear about some big theft, but nothing. No one ever complained, and no one came to me and said anything illegal happened, so I just . . .” He glides his hand out like an airplane taking off and says, “pssssh.”
“Until today.”
“Yeah.” Now he looks up and meets my eyes. His expression is resigned, like a kid caught stealing, sitting in the store manager’s office, waiting for his parents to show up and mete out some punishment.
I stand, and he can’t help but exhale, relieved. Curiosity gets the best of him, though. “So what was taken?” He looks up with expectant eyes.
I don’t answer and head for the door.
“So that’s why you had Smoke put a file together on the security guard.” I had asked him to do so a few days before, and he had come through quickly. The file was green but not bad; it contained what I needed to make an effective threat.
Risina walks next to me as we move north up State Street. We stop in a sporting goods store, and I move to a rack of ball caps.
“Yeah. Like in most businesses, information is key. The more you have, the more specific you can get, the more effective your threats are. What you have to do is plant images in your mark’s mind and let the threat spread like a virus. Let his imagination do the job for you. You don’t have to be particularly intimidating, you just have to know a few pointed facts about his family, about their names, about their houses, and the mark wilts like a picked flower. That’s what a good fence does . . . gives you the information that gives you the power.”
I pick out a blue Cubs hat and then move over to women’s clothing where I select a pair of baggy warm-ups and a large, plain T-shirt. “Try these on.”
“You’re shopping for me now?”
“Until you figure out how to blend in a little better, yes.”
She looks over the clothes I hand her, wrinkles her nose, and heads to the changing booths. If she thought being a female contract killer meant leather pants and stiletto heels, she’s learning the opposite now. That shit looks good on a silver screen, but’ll get you killed in Chicago.
After a minute, she exits, and it’s all I can do to keep from laughing. Her hair is tucked up under the cap and the clothes fit like a kid trying on her dad’s softball uniform. But the effect works: it’s impossible to see what kind of a body she has under the clothes, and with the cap lowered, the top half of her face is in shadow. It’s not perfect—you don’t want to go too far the other way so that someone thinks “why’s a beauty like her wearing dumpy clothes?”—but it’ll do for now.
Archie’s office is in an old aluminum manufacturing plant on Harrison. Risina, Smoke, and I sit in a conference room, a stack of files on a long wooden table.
“This is everything, Smoke?”
“All the files in the last six months, plus a few Archie was putting together.”
“Okay, each of us takes a third. Sing out if you read anything that jumps out at you.”
“Meaning?”
“I don’t know. We’re tracking breadcrumbs looking for red flags. I don’t know why someone wants to find me, so we have to work off the assumption that Archie’s abduction is a factor. There are plenty of ways to try to find someone, but they chose to rough up Archie, which makes me think there’s a personal connection between the kidnapper and him. Maybe it has something to do with a hit he fenced, and usually these types of things are immediate, so I thought we’d narrow it down to the last six months. He keeps thick files. Just look for anything that . . . anything that looks abnormal. That’s the best I can think of to do to get started.”
Risina nods as Smoke divides the folders and slides her a stack. If she’s surprised by the amount of professional killings contracted in the last six months just by this one fence, she doesn’t show it. I think I know why. Here is something she can relate to, something in which she excels: literature. She opens the first file and burrows into it like a mole. I watch for a moment, thinking about that first time I saw her on the Via Poli in Rome, surrounded by all those austere books. This is a different kind of reading—a long way from Dickens and Walpole and Dante—but compelling just the same. After a moment of watching her, I pull a file off the top of my stack and get to work.
The first few files are typical assignments: eight-week jobs in various corners of the country. One shooter was assigned to each, and the jobs were all completed on time. Nothing remarkable about the marks: a lawyer, a construction contractor, a horse jockey. Guys who had no idea death was coming for them until the moment their bells were rung.
The fourth file is interesting. Archibald used one of his contract killers—a woman named Carla—to settle an old personal score back in Boston. Archie took down a rival fence who had set him up on an aiding and abetting charge.