“Who are you?”
“Columbus. Now where is Archie Grant?”
His eyes do that unmistakable thing where they squint as he searches his memory.
“I don’t . . .”
I smack the hard polymer of the gun down on his nose. “Ow, goddammit . . .” he manages as his hands flock to the spot.
“A bit harder and your nose breaks. And I’ll pop it right through your fingers if you don’t start talking.”
“Let me finish my goddamn sentence then,” he croaks, his voice muffled by his hands. I don’t look over at Risina to see if she’s startled by my aggression. She hangs in my periphery, immobile.
I nod and Bacino continues, his eyes watering. I gotta give him credit for keeping the tough-guy act going under the circumstances. Hell, maybe he
is
a tough guy. “Mrs. Hauser. Kindergarten teacher. Craig Captain. Father’s friend from college. Met him one time, when I was seven. John Mayfield. First man to ever cut my hair.”
He dabs his hands near his nostrils to check for blood, but his fingers are clean, and then he scrunches his nose a few times. His voice remains pinched. “I have a thing for names. I remember names from before I could read or write. Guys I met only once. Guys my father brought around for a beer after work. Some people never forget a face . . . I never forget a name. Now you said this name, Archie Grant, like I should know it but I don’t. You can pound on my nose until there’s nothing left, but I don’t know that name.”
He’s telling the truth; it’s unmistakable. How does he not know the name of the guy he kidnapped? There is only one answer. Bacino’s a lot of things, but he’s not the guy I’m looking for.
An idea starts to form in my mind. Maybe I got the end of this story right, but misread the beginning.
“You missing a skull?”
His eyes flash. “Missing?”
“No one’s stolen one of your skulls?”
“I . . .”
“You made a deal with a contract killer named Flagler.” It’s not a question.
He looks back and forth from Risina to me. “I . . .”
“He came to kill you, and you bought him off with a skull from your collection.”
Now he doesn’t protest or stammer, just lets me continue my train of thought.
“He doesn’t put a bullet in you, and you promise to give him one of your most expensive, rarest items. That’s how it went down, right?”
Bacino folds his arms across his chest and pouts. “I knew it wouldn’t end there.”
I reach into my pack and pull out the skull, the one I thought was swiped by Flagler but was actually traded to him by Bacino. A skull for a life. Bacino looks at it with the eye of a practiced collector.
“Do you know how much that’s worth?”
I shake my head.
“More than the contract on my life, I can assure you. You got it, you keep it. I know I’m not in a position to bargain, but I’ll make the same deal with you I made with the other guy. Don’t kill me and that skull’s yours. You can make a fortune off of it. It’s the head of—”
And right then, his brother opens the door holding a leather collar and wearing only a bathrobe. “What talent you got up in here, bro?”
He’s wearing a dopey grin and it takes a moment for his eyes to move from Risina to me. I can see the slow calculations take place in his head. He moves from lustfulness to confusion to understanding in the span of five seconds.
Good fences can get into a lot of places, discover a wealth of personal information, chronicle a life to a surprising degree. A pay-off to a talkative employee, a search through police records, a disguised visit to relatives or friends can prove indispensable in fleshing out a mark’s file. And in areas that are off-limits, behind closed doors, an experienced fence will make educated assumptions.
Nothing in Bacino’s file suggested he shared his late-night trysts with his sad-sack older brother. I thought we’d have another ten minutes before the bodyguards finished their smoke break, but now I understand why the guards take that break in the first place: to give these bastards some breathing room while they screw whores together. Who would want to listen to a pair of assholes slipping it to some one-night stand each night?
“Get help!” Bacino screams. It takes Ben a few seconds of blinking for the words to process. Then his lids pop open and his eyes widen as the pieces come together.
In a fistfight, the guy you’re trading blows with will often try to land a haymaker to the jaw. The punch starts from somewhere near his belt and is as easy to spot coming as the headlight on the front of a train. An experienced dirty fighter will duck his chin and crouch so that the punch connects with the top of his head, almost always shattering the bones of the punching hand. It is the hardest part of the human body, the top of the skull.
Before Ben can flee, I hurl the stolen skull at his face with everything I have. The top of the cranium connects with his forehead, making a sound like a baseball bat thumping into a wooden support beam. Immediately, he drops to the floor as his legs turn to jelly.
Spying an opening, Bacino launches out of the bed and heads for Risina, roaring like a lion. I’m not going to be able to close the distance before he gets to her, but I’m going to make him sorry if he harms her in any way. He leaps for her throat, but she swings the gun around like she’s unleashing a pair of brass knuckles, not taking the time to aim and pull the trigger, but nailing him in the side of the face with everything she has, the steel and polymer of the gun’s barrel leading the way.
The blow connects with an audible crunch, a pistol-whip, and though it doesn’t knock him out, it stuns him and shatters a few teeth in the process. Enraged, he blinks away tears and tries again, but I finish what Risina started, swinging for the back of his head with the butt of my gun, once, twice, until he falls face-down on the wooden floor.
The older brother Ben starts to groan.
“Time to go . . .”
“But?”
“He doesn’t have Archie.”
“You believe him?”
I nod and that’s all she needs from me. We’re out the door, down the stairs, through the opening and over the wall before the bodyguards tamp out their cigarettes. We’ll get a few more minutes as they mistake the moans of pain upstairs for something else. It’ll be all we need.
CHAPTER FIVE
A
ccidents don’t exist in this business. A hit man dies, a fence goes missing, a mark wanders off the side of a building on his way to plummeting ten stories: none of this is surreptitious. This trade places a premium on precise planning, on exacting detail, and if a player has his ticket punched, more likely than not, a malevolent hand, not an act of God, is behind it.
The wind has grown belligerent throughout the day, racing around corners and smacking pedestrians in the face like a schoolyard bully. The sun is nothing more than a condemned man held in chains by a wall of dark gray clouds. The sky might rain, or it might just threaten the act, as though it gets some sort of twisted pleasure out of withholding the information. Every now and then, Chicago, as a city, likes to rise up and remind its citizens she won’t be pushed to the background, she won’t blend in behind them, she’s a leading character in their life story and they’d be wise not to forget it.
The three of us, Smoke, Risina, and I, hurry under the scaffolding of some Gold Coast remodeling project and head toward a simple eatery named the Third Coast Cafe. “Pardon our progress” signs have spread across the city like kudzu. Everywhere I look, another building constructed in the late-19th century aftermath of the Great Fire is in the middle of a facelift. After the housing crash, all those construction workers had to find something to do with their time, so the city funneled stimulus dollars into the hands of no-bid general contractors. Of course, it wouldn’t be Chicago if evidence of kickbacks and greased palms hadn’t already been hinted at by the
Times.
The workers swarm the scaffolding like wasps, the wind only a nuisance. They raise equipment, bang away at walls, scrape, sand, and plaster, ignoring the weather. I guess anything becomes routine if you do it long enough.
The restaurant is half-full this time of day and customers hunch over coffee and pieces of pie, reluctant to give up their table and head back out into the wind. We slide into a booth in the back corner and order some food. Smoke’s nervousness has reached a new apex; his leg shakes up and down like a piston.
“We’re in a jam now,” he says. “We’re up against it.”
“Yeah, we’re at square zero. We haven’t even reached square one. The skull collector was an anomaly in Archie’s files, but not the one who nabbed him or wanted me.”
“We chased the wrong dog up the wrong tree.”
“I suppose we could take a look at the file again, see if we can figure out who the client was, see if he’s upset the mark is still alive.”
“Seems like it wouldn’t have nothing to do with you, though?” He’s asking more than he’s telling. He has a point, but his fidgeting grows even more exaggerated.
“What aren’t you telling me, Smoke?”
When Smoke looks up, I can’t tell if he’s surprised by my question or if I caught him by being direct. He swallows and wipes his mouth with his napkin. He looks to Risina for help, but she gives him a hard stare I didn’t know she had in her. I’ll admit it’s disconcerting, coming from her. I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that look.
“What’d’you mean?”
“You’ve grown more fidgety than a prisoner walking toward the hangman.”
“I told you, I’m nervous ’bout this whole thing.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
“You know . . .” he tosses his napkin down on the table, then points his finger at me, “this is exactly what I was worried about.
Exactly.
”
“What’re you worried about, Smoke?”
His finger hasn’t left the air. “This! You turning on me, everyone looking at me like I had something to do with Archie disappearing. You think the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw that ransom note wasn’t ‘uh-oh, you stepped in it now, Smoke?’ I’ve been scared shitless since he was taken, and I could’ve run a thousand times. Hell, I didn’t even have to come find you; I could’ve just caught the first bus to Frisco and forgot the whole damn thing. But I did because Archie said if he were ever in a pinch that’s what I was supposed to do.”
His eyes focus, like he just now realizes his finger is jabbing the air toward me, that his voice is growing louder. He lowers his finger but doesn’t lower his eyes.
“Let me tell you something about Archie and me. You won’t understand this and I don’t care if you do, but this is the truth and if that’s a sound you’ve heard before then you’ll recognize it now.
“I was twenty-eight years old before anyone believed in me. My whole life was spent with people telling me I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t smart enough, wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t solid enough, you know what I’m saying? My mom thought I looked like my father and never forgave me for that, even when I apologized. Can you imagine? Apologizing to your mom for the way you look? And all you get for it is your mother trying to beat your father’s face off your neck.
“School stopped for me when I was fifteen. Just walked away and didn’t go back. You think there were officers out there checking to see where I was? You think the school board or the principal or the teachers came around asking, ‘why isn’t Leonard in school?’ Let me let you in on a little secret: they don’t care. No one gives a shit. Just one more drop-out, one more black boy out of our hallways, out of our detention hall, and good riddance.
“My first arrest was for boosting a car. I’d love to tell you a story about how some buddy of mine talked me into it, or how I wasn’t going to do nothing but drive that car around and forget my life for a few hours, but that’d be a lie and you’re here for the truth. The truth was I knew that Cam’s Motorshop out by the airport would pay a couple thousand to strip down Hondas with no questions asked and that’s where I was heading when I got stung. I wanted the money, plain and simple. I turned eighteen exactly three days before my arrest so I did a hundred days at Cook County instead of juvey. That was about as much fun as a punch in the dick. I’m sure you’ve seen your share of hellholes but you have no idea. You have no fucking idea, I assure you.
“The second time I got picked up was across state lines. I had grown pretty skillful at jacking cars by then and I had a regular thing going with six or seven chop shops all over Chicago. This one cat named Holmes I worked with a few times asked if I could drive a hot Nissan over to Boston where his brother Todd had a shop and drive back some other wheels to Indy. Said he’d pay five gees for the trouble and that cash sounded pretty damn good to me. I don’t know what I was aiming to buy at the time, but I remember that the money would set me straight for a while. Needless to say, I saw the bubble lights go up behind me just crossing into Massachusetts, and I panicked, ended up with a helicopter spotlight over my head, six cruisers, and a set of those spikes stretched across the road to take me down to the rims. It was like a Hollywood movie except missing the ending where the good guy gets away. Or maybe I wasn’t the good guy, come to think of it.
“Anyway, state lines is state lines and I ended up in Federal without a friend in the world. I tried to call Holmes and I’ll be damned if the number done changed. I was staring three years in the face and the Fed House meant organized crime and drug traffickers and El Salvadoran gangs and Aryan brotherhoods and a whole mess of hard cases who wouldn’t think twice about putting your insides on the outside of you if you know what I’m saying.
“The second day I’m locked up . . . the
second
damn day . . . I get sucker-punched in the walkway between the chapel and the restrooms. I’m walking along and WHAM! on my back, laid out flat. Didn’t see the fist fly, didn’t see the face, just a blast of pain, blinking white lights, and I’m looking up at the ceiling. I don’t know who hit me or why they hit me or what I had to do to make it right . . . no one tells you that shit. Look at me, I’m all of five-ten and skin and bones and I was even thinner back then if you can dig that. No one helped me up and no one told me what the fuck I was supposed to do to keep from getting jawboned again.