I said, “I never blamed you.”
She said, “Can I see you tonight?”
“No,” I said, “not yet.”
“Oh,” she said.
When I’d called after that, she’d sometimes answered her phone.
That first night, I’d slept hard and dreamless. In the morning, I bought the newspapers and went to breakfast. The department had issued its formal apology. News of it ran on the bottom of page six of the Local News section of the Tribune and page nine of the Sun-Times. Maybe a few readers saw it. No one would have missed the stories about the robbery and killing of the highly decorated Bob Monroe. Those stories ran on page one.
I’d driven around for the rest of the morning and stopped at Mom’s house a little before lunch. Jason had gotten well enough to come home but for the same reasons that Lucinda and I kept apart, Mom and I decided he would stay where he was.
In the afternoon, I’d driven around some more. I’d called Rafael. He’d said Sanchia and her boys were okay but were thinking of moving back to Mexico to live with her parents. I didn’t tell him that Johnson was setting up the city’s street gangs for a sweep, but when he said that he planned to keep spitting at Johnson instead of giving him names and money, I told him I thought he was smart.
In the next few days, there was no more coverage of street gangs in the news than usual, but I didn’t expect there to be. Bill’s plan, if it worked, would take months, maybe a year. If the plan didn’t work, the news would have more stories about cops killed during robbery attempts or when they crashed their cars into viaducts late at night with no one nearby to see what happened.
I slept, I ate, and I bounced around from motel to motel and stopped by my office and house from time to time. After four days, when no one from Johnson’s crew showed up to kill me, I spent more and more time in the places where I lived and worked.
One night, a little after three in the morning, I woke in a sweat. I put on clothes and went outside and opened my car trunk. I got the sack with the Baggie of cocaine and the bottle of bourbon. Inside, I turned on the hot and the cold taps in the sink and poured out the whiskey. Then I opened the Baggie and tipped the white powder into the swirling water. Flushing it down the drain felt like burning money. It felt like pulling away in the middle of sex. I climbed back into bed and stared at the ceiling. I was still staring when the sun rose.
That morning, I decided to take Jason out of school for a few days and book a couple of rooms north of Daytona.
THE GATE AGENT ANNOUNCED a final boarding call. The waiting area was empty. We were supposed to be on the plane already, sitting in row thirty-one.
Jason eyed me like a parent who didn’t want to disappoint his child and said, “She’s not coming.”
I twisted David Russo’s ring on my finger. “She’ll be here,” I said.
Michael Wiley
Michael Wiley is the author of The Last Striptease (St. Martin's Press), which won the Private Eye Writers of America and St. Martin's Press prize for best first private eye novel in 2006.
Michael grew up in Chicago and has lived and worked in the neighborhoods and on the streets where he sets his Kozmarski mysteries. He now teaches literature at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. As part of this other life, he has published books on Romantic Geography (Macmillan-St. Martin's Press) and Romantic Migrations (Palgrave Macmillan). No one shot at him when he was writing either of them.
