I let myself into my office and went straight to the garbage can. I took out the Baggie and the bottle, put them in a file cabinet drawer, and locked it. No telling when Lucinda would poke around again.
Then I sat in my desk chair.
The steam radiator clanked twice and went silent. Traffic passed on the street below with a hush as soft as waves breaking on a distant beach. A car horn honked far away.
I turned the chair to the window and sat with my feet on the sill. In a lighted window of the insurance building across the street two men were arguing. In another window, a cleaning woman mopped a floor with her eyes turned downward. Most of the other offices were empty.
I swung the chair back to my desk and loaded the Ruger. Be careful, Lucinda had said. Good advice.
What were the dangers?
The police department was like a small town when it came to secrets. Sooner or later Johnson would learn that I was working with Bill Gubman. He already knew I was Bill’s friend. Unless he was sloppier than he looked, he would already be asking questions. His crew couldn’t have lasted a month unless he knew people in the department who would give him answers. What would he do when he found out I was helping Bill set him up to take a fall? Putting a bullet in my head might seem like a justifiable defense. Throw Chicago’s street gangs into the mix and I had another dozen angles to protect. Whatever else Johnson and his crew called their scheme, they were extorting the gangs. Taking a few bucks a week from each member sounded harmless until you did the multiplication. When Johnson introduced me as a money collector, the gang members would see me as an enemy and they had a long history of killing enemies.
At 7:40, I went back to the file cabinet where I’d stashed the bourbon and cocaine and unlocked it. Another drawer held shorts, a T-shirt, and a pair of running shoes-for mornings when I had time to jog through Grant Park-and a pair of baggy black pants and a black Windbreaker, for nights when I needed to be invisible. Under the clothes were a small toolbox, a ball of twine, and a roll of duct tape. I took out the pants and tape and re-locked the cabinet.
I stripped off my jeans, taped the gun to my inner thigh, and put on the black pants. Reaching the gun would take some work, but most body searches stick to the outside of the legs. Ripping off the tape might sting but not as bad as taking a bullet.
I went out to the men’s room that I shared with the secretarial school and splashed cold water on my face in the sink. The eyes that stared back at me in the mirror looked tired and scared. I tried to flatten my emotions, make my face say nothing. Corrine used to say that I looked like Lech Walesa from Poland’s Solidarity days, but forget the moustache. Maybe if I grew the moustache I could pull off a cool Eastern European look.
I went back to my office and stared across the street at the insurance building. The arguing men were gone. So was the cleaning woman. The building was a slab of concrete and glass, like a monument to the people who spent their lives there.
At 8:03 the phone rang. Raj was waiting in a car outside the building. I told him I would be right down.
FOURTEEN
WE DROVE WEST FROM my office in Raj’s SUV. He put a Cal Tjader CD on the stereo and tapped the steering wheel to the beat. He glanced at the rearview mirror, back to the street, and at the mirror again.
“Someone following us?” I asked.
He glanced again, then cut hard to the left, crossed the oncoming traffic, and shot down South Clark Street. At the corner, he stopped and looked at the mirror. “No,” he said.
We turned right and, a block later, right again. At Congress Parkway, we stopped at another stoplight. Raj flipped on his left-turn signal and I glanced over my shoulder.
A white GMC van pulled close behind us.
Even in the dark, I recognized the men in the front seat-the lead FBI agent who’d stopped me and Lucinda after we left the Daley Plaza memorial service, and the man Lucinda had elbowed in the throat. The van had on its left-turn signal too.
When the stoplight turned and Raj pulled into the intersection, I said, “Go straight.”
He gave me a look.
“A van’s following us.”
He continued straight across the intersection and glanced in the mirror.
“Fuck,” he said and accelerated.
“They’re following me, not you,” I said.
He turned left at the next corner as a light turned red. After three cars passed, the FBI agents got a chance and the van ran the light and fell in behind us.
“They stopped me earlier,” I said. “They’re investigating the Southshore shooting. David Russo’s the second cop in a couple of months to get shot when I was around. They don’t like the coincidence.”
We sped west for four blocks. The van dropped back, couldn’t get around the cars in front of it.
Raj swung around the corner onto Upper Wacker. “Who are they?” he said.
“FBI.”
“Fuck. You tell Monroe or Johnson about them?”
I hung onto the overhead handle as we accelerated. “Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“When the FBI figures out that there’s nothing behind the police shootings but coincidence, they’ll leave me alone.”
He gripped the steering wheel in both hands, leaned over it. “Meantime, you put the rest of us at risk.”
We flew north and pulled a U-turn, went down a ramp into the orange light of Lower Wacker. We were doubling back toward Congress. Steel I beams supported the street over our heads. Steel pillars on the sides and in the medians supported the I beams. It was a lot of metal that could impale us a hundred different ways as we sped past. At Congress, we bounced up an exit ramp and merged into traffic.
Raj looked in the rearview mirror. I looked over my shoulder.
The white van was gone.
Raj breathed in deep and sighed. “Thanks for telling me they were behind us.”
I let go of the overhead handle and felt blood return to my fingers. “Anytime.”
We continued to the Kennedy Expressway and turned onto the on-ramp, heading north toward the suburbs and the Wisconsin border. Raj relaxed, steering with one hand, weaving past slower cars. He gave me a quick look. “Let’s keep the FBI to ourselves, okay?”
“Yeah?”
“Johnson already doubts you. If he hears about this, you’re done.”
“How about you? You doubt me?”
Another look. “Should I?”
I shrugged. “Probably. But no more than you should doubt the rest of the guys. How about Monroe? What’s he think of me?”
He spoke to the windshield. “He figures you’ve got more to gain and less to lose than any of the rest of us.”
I thought about what Lucinda had found out about Raj. The records she’d seen made him look as clean as an eagle scout. It seemed he had the most to lose. “What about you? What do you get out of this?”
His face darkened and he said nothing. Then, still to the windshield, he said, “I’ve got responsibilities.”
“Yeah?”
Again silence. Then, “Big family.”
“How many kids?”
He shook his head. “Just a son. But my mother’s in Lebanon. I send her money. And my sister and her family. She’s got four kids. And my cousins. Too many cousins.”
I nodded. “Nothing in life is free.”
He smiled again. “It sure as hell ain’t.”
We drove for awhile, quiet.
“How about your wife?” I said. “She also Lebanese?”
He laughed. “Irish Catholic.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And from what I understand, you’ve got an ex-wife who you’re still seeing and a partner who you’re sleeping with.”
That stung. “Where’d you hear that?”
He glanced at me like that was a dumb question. “We’ve asked around.”
“Well, I’m working things out.”
He nodded. “It’s a fucked-up world.”