Authors: John Shirley
Luke fired his big .45 at Wolfe, missing as Wolfe ducked to one side. The bullet shattered the window overlooking the main floor.
Verrick heard screams from the casino floor as the shot sent big fragments of window glass onto the tables down below.
Wolfe had flattened to the side of the door, pressed to the wall by the light dial.
Verrick raised the gun to fire at Wolfe, pulled the trigger—and realized the damned safety was on.
Shit.
Wolfe fired the .38 and Verrick felt something tug at his right side. He grabbed Rose and pulled her to her feet between him and Wolfe.
“Roger! Don’t!” she squeaked. “He’s going to shoot me!”
“Shaddup, Rose!”
Luke was in stepping into the room, swinging his .45 toward Wolfe—but Wolfe was hammering down on Luke’s head with the butt of his gun. Luke stumbled back. Verrick fumbled with the .25 with one hand, the other holding the whimpering Rose in front of him.
Then the lights went out. It was dark in there except for a patch of light at the door and a dusty little ray coming through the bullet hole in the window curtains.
People were shouting down the hall
. “We found a guy tied up in a closet and he...”
Verrick felt his drugginess more, with the lights out—he was dizzily aware of someone rushing past him.
It must be Wolfe. Verrick spun Rose around to keep her shielding him—and then the curtains were gone from the window, flooding the room with light.
Verrick shoved Rose away, turned, stumbled to the window—now he really was standing there naked, though nobody was looking at him—and he saw Wolfe had jumped through, carrying the curtains down to the tables.
There he was, already halfway across the room, that little backpack in one hand, the gun in the other: Wolfe running down the casino’s gaming aisles.
Verrick tried to get a bead on him with the small pistol—he fired. Missed.
Wolfe snapped off a shot at a uniformed security guard—knocked the billed cap off the guard’s head. The security guard dived down and Wolfe ran past him, out the double doors to the front corridor...
Son of a bitch. The guy might get away.
Verrick looked down at his side. Not a bad wound at all.
He turned, grabbed his pants, shouting. “Somebody get out there and stop that bastard!”
#
Wolfe had to plow his right shoulder into a heavy set black bouncer at the door. The bouncer went
Whoof!
, the air knocked out of him, and fell out of the way. Carrying the backpack, Wolfe opened the door, rushed out into the night air of the recessed doorway, shutting the door hard behind him.
The shiver-inducing blast of the Hawk almost felt good, now. At least that cold slash of air meant he was still alive. It’d been a close thing in there...
He heard shouting from overhead and remembered the sentries on the roof. How was he going to get past those guys? Soon as he ran out from the doorway they’d shoot him down with those AKs...
Then a vehicle came screaming down the streets, sirens blasting. Cops, already?
Maybe turning himself over to the cops was the best thing—he’d be alive, in their custody. For a while. But for how long, with Tranter and his kind around?
Then he realized it wasn’t a cop car—it was an ambulance. The ambulance veered toward him and up onto the sidewalk, bouncing when it hit the curb. It fishtailed to a stop with a harsh squeal and the smell of burning rubber.
The rear doors of the ambulance popped open and that EMT with the dirty fingernails looked out at him. “Get in, fast!”
Wolfe ran to the ambulance, and dived in the back, backpack in one hand and gun in the other. Bullets ricocheted off the street behind him as the sentries opened fire. Then the EMT had him by the collar, pulled him in, and slammed the rear doors shut.
The ambulance roared away down the street, driven by another, much larger guy up front. A rear window of the ambulance webbed with a bullet impact, then the columns supporting the L Train tracks were in the way, and the sentries couldn’t hit the ambulance.
It swerved around a corner, and Wolfe levered himself to a sitting position.
“Damn, that was close,” The EMT gasped, hunched over as he came and sat down on a gurney near Wolfe. “I tell you dude, don’ think Pearce is paying me well enough for this shit.”
“Pearce? How’d he know?”
“What you think, he hasn’t been following you? Them ctOS cameras, those are his eyes, man! Blume thinks they got that thing insulated against him—naw, no way! The Club still has cameras that watch big shots with the whores in case, it needs to blackmail them. And Pearce can hack the Club’s cameras well as anybody’s...”
“You going to take me to him?”
“Hey I don’t even know where he is—moved to a new safe house. No, I’m dropping you off someplace else you can lay low for a while. But you’re going to hear from Pearce. Oh yeah, you can count on that. ‘Cause you owe him, now, man. You owe Aiden Pearce bigtime, Wolfe.”
T
he mid morning light was coming pearly gray through the filtered window of Verrick’s office window.
Tranter seemed puzzled as he squinted at Verrick. “So you don’t want an APB out on this Wolfe character after all?”
Verrick shook his head. “If you can get some of the Chicago Cops in that area to look for Mick Wolfe without telling ‘em why, fine and good. If they pick him up, they should call you and you should call me. And I’ll make it worth their while to turn him over to me directly. But an APB—no. We don’t want a general alert—we don’t want the media in on it. Because, you know, the Four Clubs isn’t legal...
aaaaand
because
I
was there with a known hooker. All that could come out.”
“Oh.” Detective Tranter cleared his throat. “Speaking of that high class whore...”
“She taken care of?”
“She’s part of a new parking lot on the North side, about five feet down. As of this morning.”
“Good, good...” Rose had heard too much of what Wolfe was talking about, which had made eliminating her even more imperative. “Another thing is, Tranter, if Wolfe is caught and he talks to the wrong cops, or to federal agents, you never know what he might say. I don’t think he’s got anything that’d stand up in court, but...”
Verrick didn’t want to go on. It would mean having to explain to Tranter what it was that Wolfe knew too much about. And Verrick definitely didn’t want to give Tranter that information.
Tranter never asked about it.
Detective Tranter just stood there, waiting—and Verrick kept Tranter standing there, as if he were an NCO in the presence of a Major. Which was more or less the way Verrick thought of it. He could see rainwater evaporating from the shoulders of Tranter’s trench coat, blown in the current of warm air from the heating vent.
“The Club doesn’t want any noise made about what happened at the Four Clubs,” Verrick went on. “CPD knows all about the place, of course, but all the right people are paid off. I assume you’re getting your cut.”
Tranter shrugged. He wasn’t going to confirm or deny it.
“If the media runs a story about the fight at an illegal casino,” Verrick said, “then the CPD is going to have to make surprised noises and raid the place. No one wants that.”
Tranter nodded, slowly. “I heard Wolfe shot you. That right?”
It was Verrick’s turn to shrug. “Little bit of something in my side. Went right through. Couple of stitches. Not much of a wound. I’ve had worse.”
Actually it was bothering Verrick enough, along with his aching back, that he planned to go home after lunch. But he’d needed to put in an appearance here to seem like the iron man for Tranter and Luke—Luke Kelly was out in the hallway, keeping watch, in the unlikely event that Wolfe turned up here. There were three other guys hired from Graywater Security watching over the building—two in the alley, downstairs, one in the lobby. Real professional mercenaries.
Tranter put his hand in his coat, brought out a tissue and blew his nose. “Sorry. I think I’m getting a head cold. So you want to handle Wolfe completely unofficially?”
“That’s right,” Verrick said. “You got a problem with that?”
“No. It’s just...harder to find the prick that way, without all those eyes on the street looking for him.”
“You’re standing in the Blume building, Tranter! We’ve got ctOS in our pockets! And I’m the man with access to every security application ctOS has. Count on it, Tranter. We’ll find Wolfe. And not just him. We’ll run down that loose cannon Aiden Pearce too. We’re starting to suspect that’s who set up Wolfe’s getaway...”
#
It was an abandoned building, one of the old Projects, a ten story tenement long slated to be torn down. Most of the windows were boarded over. A fence had been erected around it, the hurricane wire now mostly knocked down.
That’s where they’d taken Wolfe...
On the outside, that’s how it looked: Just more abandoned projects housing near Washington Park in Black Viceroy territory. On the inside, that’s mostly what it was. Floor after floor with apartments missing their doors, every inch of wall, in halls and rooms, covered with spray-painted and markered tags, with graffiti of all kinds, but especially a lot of Black Viceroy insignias. Each room emptied out, the walls often broken open so copper could be torn out to sell to scavenger companies. Here and there in the hallways you might come across an old overturned doorless refrigerator or splintery bureau. Walk down those scarred up halls and your shoes crunched paint chips.
But on the seventh floor of the old tenement, one apartment was different. The door to the apartment had been replaced—the new one was double layer steel—and the one-bedroom flat had been cleaned out and simply but comfortably refurnished. It was now one of Aiden Pearce’s safehouses—so Pussler claimed, after giving Wolfe the key and taking his leave, though Wolfe had seen nothing of Pearce since coming here.
The windows were boarded up, but inside there was a working television, a radio, an operating bathroom, toilet paper, towels, plenty of functional electrical plugs with pirated power, a fairly new sofa bed and blankets, a closet in which leaned a nicely oiled pump shotgun and boxes of ammo; a PC on a desk, the PC, interestingly,
not
hooked up to the internet or wifi; a bedroom with a cot and a chest of drawers; a kitchenette with a microwave, its cabinets stocked with canned foods and freeze dried goods, instant coffee, pots and dishes and knives and forks. There was a small clothes washer, in the kitchenette, like something from a recreational vehicle, and a small dryer. There was even a bottle of damned good Scotch in a desk drawer.
Wolfe was availing himself of that Scotch right now, as he brooded on his situation. It was late afternoon following the night of the Four Clubs debacle, and Wolfe was getting antsy. He was fed and warm and comfortable—and restless.
He sat there on the sofa with a small glass in his hand, sipping the Laphroaig, looking at the television news with the sound turned off. He’d seen nothing, not a word, about his personal raid on the Four Clubs. He’d half-expected to see his face on television in a public service warning about an arch criminal with Verrick swearing he was a mad dog killer. But, nope. It was almost disappointing. More than that, it was worrisome. It suggested that Verrick was going after him some other way...
Shouldn’t have tried to strike a deal with him,
Wolfe thought.
Stupid.
He’d known instantly his former C.O. had no intention of following through on any deal. You get crazy ideas, sitting in stir in the federal Disciplinary Barracks. You got desperate notions and programmed yourself with them. Then when they didn’t work...what next?
And where did Aiden Pearce fit into it?
“Hello, Mick,” said the television to Mick Wolfe.
Wolfe sat bolt upright, spilling some of his Scotch on the floor.
Aiden Pearce was staring at him from the television screen. No doubt of the identity of this man. Those sharp emerald-green eyes, that dark-brown hair. Pearce’s face was filling most of the screen. It was gazing right at him.
Pearce smiled. “Don’t be spilling that Scotch, Wolfe. Stuff’s expensive.”
“What the hell? Why are you on television?”
“Just something I can do. I’ve rerouted a webcam transmission to this television, just this particular television set. The set has been customized. I’m reaching you through a Local Area Network I’ve set up. There’s a special switching hub—but, never mind. We can talk about all that some other time.”
“I could swear I muted that television.”
“If I can put myself up here you don’t think I can unmute the television?”
“Good point. Feels weird talking to you this way. Like hallucinating.”
Pearce chuckled. “I guess it could feel that way. But I can’t just call you on a cell phone. Not yet.”
“Haven’t got a cell phone currently anyway. I’ve got a laptop. Trying not to use it too much, in case ctOS picks up...Wait—I get how
I
can see
you
. But if you can see
me
...”