Sleep Tight (15 page)

 

Deep in the tunnel, Lee leaned against the hood of his Mercedes and hit the button to make his watch glow. Fuck. Kimmy was going to give him hell later, guaranfuckingteed. He was supposed to take her out to some restaurant with an unintelligible name that all the papers had been raving about. Didn’t look like that was going to happen anytime soon this evening. And he couldn’t call her, because there was no reception in the tunnel.

She was such exquisite eye candy that he’d taken to pulling her in close when the cameras were around, even the stupid kid, but he still didn’t know if he was going to keep her around for the long term or not. She had a body that wouldn’t quit, and had even started wearing the handcuffs that he liked in bed, but goddamn, she could be one hell of a cunt sometimes.

As soon as he left the hospital, he’d called his uncle. Phil audibly winced when Lee told him the detective’s names.

“Look, those guys are fuckers,” Phil had said. “Two pissed-off drunks. They’ve been with the department enough years that they’ve got some clout. You go up against them, it’s expensive. You’ll win, sure. But it costs. You want my opinion? It’s not worth it. These guys, they’ve been known to hold grudges for years. I’m telling you, treat ’em like a hooker with herpes. Steer well clear.”

“Understood.”

“So. No loose ends then? Nothing that can connect you with this trouble?”

“Hell, no.”

“Are you positive? Think carefully before you answer.”

“I don’t see how.”

“So there are loose ends.”

“No. Dammit, no.”

“You sure?”

“Shit.” Lee rubbed his face. “Fine. I’ll take care of it.”

“You better.” Phil hung up.

Lee called a guy he knew out in Elgin, named Robert Earl Bailey, a guy with certain skills. Robert Earl didn’t have much of a chin, just a gentle bump from his mouth on down to his Adam’s apple. His eyes didn’t play well together, they kept threatening to find separate things interesting. Despite looking like he was a step away from assisted living, he’d worked at a Wal-Mart, a Best Buy, a fireworks factory, a gun store, a gun range, and a law enforcement and surveillance supply warehouse. He was a licensed transporter of dangerous materials, and had driven for Lee several times before.

He also knew more about the cleansing effects of fire than anyone else Lee knew. Lee had used these skills to collect insurance on a house he had been renting out in the suburbs. Robert Earl, who preferred people use his full first and middle names, had started replacing the floor and left a mixture of solvents and oily rags in the corner overnight and left the concoction to ferment and do all the work. The house had been empty, and no one had noticed until it was too late. The fire had gutted the house before the fire department had even been called.

However, these heavy rock walls were going to require a bit more than tamping the lid down on a paint can and walking away.

The bodyguard had left the headlights on, illuminating Robert Earl Bailey. He was about twenty yards down the tunnel, assembling all his shit where the tunnel opened up into the vast space filled with garbage and hazardous waste. He had been kneeling in the same spot for damn near half an hour, preparing the explosives. Robert Earl might be an expert in all kinds of useful shit, but he was fucking slow.

 

 

Back at his house earlier, Robert Earl had brought his supplies out to the car from his basement, and the bodyguard had balked at putting all that shit in the trunk.

“What happens, we hit a pothole?” the bodyguard, Bryan, had demanded. Bryan didn’t like Robert Earl, probably because the bodyguard was black, and Robert Earl had a giant Confederate flag hanging in his living room.

Robert Earl had snorted. “It’s harmless. Watch.” He’d dropped the heavy duffel bag on his driveway. Lee and Bryan had flinched. Robert Earl had giggled like a toddler who had just inhaled half a gallon of birthday ice cream. “See? Harmless. Until you send an electric current through it. Then it goes bang.”

Now, an hour later, down in the tunnel, Bryan kept pacing, saying, “We shouldn’t be here tonight. It’s not smart, you being this close.”

Lee waved that away. “Sometimes, you gotta make sure something is done right. That means being hands-on.”

Bryan exhaled in a hiss. “Boss, I’ve been with you on some crazy shit, and most of it turned out okay. Some things, though, you and I both know, they sometimes turned out not to be good ideas. Hindsight being twenty-twenty and all that, and I gotta say, this does not look like a good idea. Just walk away. Nothing down here tied to us.”

“They start poking around down here it won’t take a fucking genius to start looking around at waste disposal companies. And believe me, they’d start at the top. With me. This way”—meaning sealing off the tunnel—“they got nothing.”

“You telling me you can blow up a tunnel this size under the city of Chicago and nobody’s gonna notice?”

“We’re not gonna blow it up. Robert Earl’s just gonna make the roof cave in. Just seal it off. He says all they’ll see is a blip, if they notice it at all. Just a burp.”

Robert Earl came jogging back to the car, fiddling with the remote detonator. He put it on the hood between them and said, “Don’t touch this,” giving Bryan a meaningful look. He retrieved a box of drill bits and scuffled back where he had laid out the assembled explosives.

He hit the trigger on the De Walt twice, tightening the drill’s grip on the bit. The high whine filled the tunnel and echoed back into the darkness beyond the reach of the headlights. He rolled a pair of orange foam ear plugs between his thumb and forefinger and screwed them into his ears.

Lee and Bryan glanced at each other, then stuck their fingers in their ears.

Robert Earl braced himself against the wall and wedged the bit into a seam he’d chipped out earlier. He flexed his grip on the DeWalt, squeezed the trigger, and leaned into it, putting some weight behind the spinning bit.

This time, the drill’s engine was engulfed in the sound of the grinding howl of the bit chewing into the rock wall.

Shards of something reflective flickered in the darkness beyond Robert Earl. Lee pushed off the car and took several steps forward. He turned back to Bryan and yelled over the sound of the drill, “Did you see that?”

Bryan squinted, put his hand over his eyes. “What?”

“I don’t know. . . .” Lee moved back and stood in front of the right headlight. His voice trailed off. Then, in the darkness of his shadow, he saw them. Hundreds of red eyes, glinting at Robert Earl. He pointed.

“Holy fuck.” Bryan jumped off the hood and went for his gun. “Hey!” he yelled at Robert Earl, but the sound was swallowed by the sound of disintegrating rock. Bryan squeezed off two shots at the rats.

Robert Earl released the trigger, peering through the cloud of dust at the drill. He’d heard something, but couldn’t tell if it had come from the drill or something else.

Bryan walked past him and fired three more times.

That got Robert Earl’s attention. His head flicked around, but his hips and feet didn’t move, anchored into the wall with the drill.

Back at the car, Lee snatched the remote detonator off the hood.

Bryan emptied the clip. He dropped it, slipping it into his jacket pocket, loading a fresh one in less than two seconds. He squeezed another burst into the darkness.

“Let’s go,” Lee shouted.

Bryan either ignored Lee or couldn’t hear him and fired once more. He paused for a moment, ultimately realizing his bullets were futile. There was a moment of stillness. Bryan flinched at something. He hopped backwards, twisting in midair, and started running full out for the car.

Robert Earl watched him run past, hands still on the drill.

The rats swarmed out of the gloom and launched themselves at Robert Earl, slashing with inch-long teeth and ragged claws. The combined weight of the attack knocked him off his feet. His screams echoed through the tunnel. He managed to struggle to his feet once, standing against the onslaught. He ripped a rat away from his face. Most of his nose was still between a rat’s front teeth. Other rats dangled from his arm. He stumbled forward a couple of steps, swayed. Rats writhed around his legs. One of them chewed through his Achilles tendon. He took one more step and the ankle gave way.

He fell into the swarm and disappeared.

Thousands of rats exploded out of the cloud of dust, a tsunami of rats shooting up the tunnel.

Lee saw very quickly that most of the rats were still chasing Bryan. He jumped behind the wheel and slammed the door. Bryan was halfway to the car.

More rats poured from the shadows, a goddamn tidal wave.

Lee said, “Fucking Christ,” and started the car. He jerked it into reverse and hit the gas.

Bryan faltered, and risked a look behind him. “Oh fuck, oh fuck!” he yelled and ran even faster.

Lee guided the car by keeping an eye on the side mirrors. He flicked the detonator’s protective cap open. When he judged the distance from the explosion to be at least fifty yards, he hit the brakes. The rats kept coming. Lee armed the detonator. Bryan ran and yelled, “Wait, wait, wait!”

Lee waited until Bryan was nearly to the car and clicked the button. Thunder erupted in the dust. The blast cracked the windshield and knocked the bodyguard on his face. Billowing clouds obscured the view and Lee couldn’t tell what had happened to the structure of the tunnel. Pieces of rats splattered across the hood.

Bryan got up and held his head, making an irritated noise in his throat. He coughed and spit a wad of bloody phlegm at the ground. He pulled open the back door and fell into the backseat. The front half of a rat was stuck to his chest. He grabbed hold of one ear and peeled it off. Shredded internal organs came loose and plopped into his lap. He flung it out into the tunnel and slammed the door.

Lee watched the swirling nightmare of dust and smoke through the windshield for a moment, turned around to face the back window, and hit the gas. The Mercedes scraped the side of the tunnel once or twice, but Lee didn’t slow down.

 

Ed’s phone chirped, and he jerked awake. For a moment, he couldn’t figure out where he was. All he knew was that his back hurt. He blinked sleep from his eyes, and found himself in the front seat of their Crown Vic. A black metal fence loomed in front of the hood.

Sam was behind the wheel, slumped against the driver’s door, sunken eyes forever staring blearily at the world in that perpetual early-morning haze. “Morning.”

Ed rubbed his burning eyes and twisted around. They were parked in the small lot of a 7-Eleven. His hangover was awful. He tried to remember the night and had the oddest feeling he’d just stepped sideways at the right moment, dodging some speeding eighteen-wheeler.

Ed took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Bits and pieces were coming back to him, especially the icy cloud of dread that settled around his chest, as if a corpse’s hand had fallen on the back of his neck and squeezed.

He hadn’t felt anything like it in a long time. 1968. He’d been sixteen, edging in close to the back of the crowd amassed at the corner of Balbo and Michigan, anxious to see the unrest, curious to see the anger at the government for himself. The closest he’d gotten was State Street, and when the cops arrived on Michigan and uncertainty seeped through the crowd, he’d bolted. The politics of the time weren’t that important to him; the protests took a backseat to trying to get laid.

Later, having no luck with the ladies, he’d taken another hike up into the South Loop.

The streets were so empty it felt like a dream. He could smell the bitterness of something, maybe tear gas, in the air. He and his buddies heard the diesel roar of a bus, and hid behind cars along the curb, laying down in the gutters as it passed. The bus ran without lights, not even headlights. The streetlights gleamed dully off the scratched windows; the inside of the bus was darker than the sewers. It rolled through a red light, and in the wash of the stoplight, Ed could see the silhouettes of twenty or thirty riot cops.

Ed felt his insides clench, and for the first time in his life he’d faced the very real possibility of getting stomped and beaten to death by a squad of licensed white men. The bus kept rolling down Wabash and turned left, toward the lake. As soon as it was out of sight, Ed and the rest of his boys had sprinted west down Roosevelt.

The soldiers last night had given Ed the same feeling.

Last night scared him.

The soldiers last night hadn’t done anything threatening, exactly. But they hadn’t exactly been your typical weekend warriors either. They’d been older, for one thing. They wore a hell of a lot of extra gear for guys who supposedly did this soldiering thing once a month. They seemed awfully prepared for a bunch of gas-station attendants and insurance salesmen.

And why the hell were they at the hospital?

Ed dug his phone out of his sport coat. Checked the number. Carolina. He exhaled slow, knowing this wasn’t going to be good. “Hey, baby.”

Tommy clawed his way into the light. He tried to grab a breath, but something was in the way. He coughed and gagged. Something was blocking his airways; something had been shoved up his nose and down his throat. He went to grab for whatever it was, to rip it away, but he couldn’t move his hands. It felt like he was drowning. Agony ricocheted through his body, and his lungs screamed silently for air.

“Calm down and open your mouth,” a voice commanded.

Tommy’s mouth opened and snapped shut, gasping for air. Whatever was in his nose slid away, leaving a burning path down the back of his throat. Air, sweet air, rushed in, filling his lungs and his blood bubbled with oxygen.

His panic slowly subsided, and the overwhelming light in his eyes swam into focus as a row of buzzing fluorescent bulbs. He blinked, and he jerked his head around, trying to see more, trying to figure out where he was, trying to figure out what had happened. He remembered little beyond riding the elevator with Lee . . . and beyond that, nothing, just a dream of being underwater.

He saw that he was in some kind of hospital room, but he couldn’t move from his position, lying flat on his back on some sort of unyielding bed. He felt straps binding him tightly across his chest, his waist, and his knees. His wrists were also secured. He whipped his head to the side. Some kind of thick plastic covered the walls and maybe the floor, but he couldn’t see from his bed.

“I told you to calm down,” the voice said again.

Tommy whipped his head to the other side.

A gaunt face, covered in a blue surgical mask and small round glasses, loomed over him. “My name is Dr. Reischtal.”

A visibly nervous nurse stood next to him, looking as though she wanted to bolt for the door. She wore a surgical mask as well and rubber gloves over her uniform. Tommy couldn’t tell if she was more afraid of him or the doctor.

Dr. Reischtal unhooked one half of his surgical mask and let it hang from one ear. He said, “We have removed your feeding tube and oxygen. You are perfectly fine and able to speak. So just relax.”

Dr. Reischtal’s tone was anything but relaxing. Still, Tommy tried. He forced himself to slow his breathing, to stop fighting the straps. It took a while.

Dr. Reischtal was impatient. “Do you need a sedative?”

“No. No thanks. Untie me, and I might feel better.”

Dr. Reischtal actually smiled, as if he’d just found small joy in watching an enemy stumble and fall and impale himself on a wrought iron fence. “I have a few small, but important, questions for you, Mr. Krazinsky.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“To begin with, Mr. Krazinsky, you need to understand that you are the possible vector for an infectious disease the likes of which humankind has never seen.”

 

 

“Don’t you ‘hey, baby’ me,” Carolina’s voice was loud enough for Sam to hear, loud and clear. “All night, and not a word? I thought we were past all this bullshit.”

Sam gave Ed a nod and stiffly climbed out into the early morning light, giving his partner some space. The sun was hitting the tops of the buildings, lightening the shadows, bringing out the details of the gray and vacant streets. He wondered if his sport coat and shirt smelled and couldn’t remember when he’d last changed his clothes.

Inside the 7-Eleven, Sam nodded at the clerk as he went into the restroom. He locked the door behind him and pulled off his vest. Using the underside of his fist to hit the hot water handle, he held a few towels under the ten-second dribble. He wiped off his face and the back of his neck and tried not look at himself in the mirror.

He thought about the soldiers from last night to distract himself.

Goddamn. Once he’d seen the guns, he’d known damn well they weren’t National Guard. Shit, they weren’t even regular Army. Or Marines, for that matter. They wore National Guard uniforms, but several key items were missing. All rank insignia had been stripped. And no name tags. Instead, they had a series of numbers on their backs, up high, on top of their shoulders, so someone could keep track of them from a helicopter. Or a satellite.

It looked like the uniforms were supposed to simply maintain the illusion of U.S. soldiers, at least from a distance.

The National Guard didn’t carry weapons like this. Sam read all the gun magazines that were left around the police station. Some of the assault rifles the soldiers carried he’d recognized. Others had been modified beyond measure and he could only guess at the caliber, let alone the makes and models of the guns themselves.

These guys were well-financed, well-organized, and professional to the bone. Whoever was now in charge of the hospital had some serious muscle behind them.

And when the closest soldier had said, “Sir, my superiors would like to apologize for their behavior last night,” the hairs on the back of Sam’s neck prickled. Something was seriously wrong. “If you would follow me, I can escort you to my boss, who would like to apologize in person.” The soldier stepped aside, clearing a path to the restricted elevator.

Before he realized what he was doing, Sam had a hand on Ed’s arm, stopping his partner. He said, “Uh, you know what, guys? It’s getting awfully late.” He made up some bullshit about checking in with the watch commander and how this wasn’t their only case. The whole time, Sam had the gut-churning feeling that if they got into the elevator, it was inevitable that these soldiers would take them to a basement somewhere under the emergency room and shoot them in the head. Whoever was in charge of the hospital could explain the deaths any way they wanted.

Ed had immediately sensed his partner’s hesitation and didn’t try to argue. They strolled out the front door and climbed into their Crown Vic, feeling the soldiers’ eyes on their backs the entire time. They ended up just a few blocks north, at Monk’s, and at midnight, when the bar closed, they found a 7-Eleven and spent the night drinking vodka and orange juice, trying to figure out their next move.

Sam took a leak and washed his hands and face again. He pulled out his phone and dialed the nursing home in Skokie. Despite the time, almost five o’clock, and her age, almost ninety-two, he knew she wouldn’t be sleeping. She’d be sitting up in bed, watching the Weather Channel. Her cell phone would be on the nightstand alongside the remote control for her adjustable hospital bed. Sometimes, she wouldn’t have the strength or coordination to open the phone, so she would gently tap the edge of the phone on the corner of her night table, like she was cracking an egg where she wanted the fluid shell of the yolk preserved.

“Hello?”

“How are you feeling, Mom?”

“Oh, you know, I’ve been better. Still, I can’t complain. And you? How’s life with the Chicago Police Department?” She would then go on complaining for a full five minutes, sometimes making jokes about how much it hurt getting off her ass and getting to the bathroom. At least she had stopped asking when he would get married again.

At some point, Sam would invariably say, “I’m doing well, Mom.”

This morning, his call was interrupted by a call from Ed.

Ed said, “Turn on your radio.”

Chicago detectives, like all Chicago police officers, were required to carry department-issued radios at all times. Most detectives clipped them into their bulletproof vests, another pain-in-the-ass direct order, but left the radios off. They knew the boss would use the phone. Almost all the time.

“Listen, sorry, Mom, I just got a call from headquarters. I have to hang up now. I will call you later, okay?”

“Well, if you have to leave your mom worried sick and everything just because of work, I understand,” she said, both of them knowing damn well she didn’t.

“I’m glad, Mom. Bye,” Sam said, switching on his radio.

“—and therefore, district commanders will be in contact with their individual teams. All department personnel are required to report for duty, regardless of rank. This message will repeat every five minutes.” A click. “All department personnel are on high alert for persons exhibiting unusual behavior.”

What the fuck constitutes unusual behavior?
Sam wondered.

“Specifically, be on the lookout for signs of an addict undergoing severe withdrawal symptoms. Pale skin. Uncontrollable shivering. Sweating. Bloodshot eyes.”

Sam unwrapped a stick of nicotine gum. Were they fucking serious? By now, he was at the car.

“You hearing this
Dragnet
shit?” Ed asked, holding up his radio.

The radio continued. “First responders are required to wear appropriate protection when in contact with anyone displaying these symptoms. Members of law enforcement are directed to transport any individuals exhibiting these symptoms to Cook County General Hospital, where a team of emergency personnel has been established to counter the situation.”

Sam and Ed looked at each other.

Ed’s cell phone rang again. “Fuck. It’s Arturo.”

“Might as well answer it. Get it over with.”