“The DPR gave this one to us.”
“Bullshit. They don’t do that.”
Chroler shrugged. “Your license is under review.”
Fighting with her would get me nowhere. I would ask Larry to do what he could. Or I would get a better lawyer.
I stood up.
“Take the newspapers too,” Chroler said. “You might learn something.”
“About?”
“Yourself.”
I picked up the newspapers, turned to go, stopped at the doorway. “You could have had me released downstairs. Why did you call me up here?”
“I wanted to give you the newspapers personally. Also I wanted to be the first to tell you that one of the wounded officers died. So that’s three dead now and two still in the hospital. Congratulations.”
FOUR
THEY’D PARKED MY SKYLARK at the curb outside the station. Couldn’t do better with a parking attendant. They hadn’t washed it, though.
I sat in my car and fingered through the newspapers while the November sky grayed against the afternoon.
The first copy of the Sun-Times ran a front-page headline that said SOUTHSIDE MASSACRE and showed pictures of the five men killed and wounded. David Russo, Tom Stanley, and Marvin du Pont, dead. Christopher Pelman and Emelio Fernandez, wounded. The article said they were experienced, dedicated cops. It mentioned the thefts at the construction site but didn’t say that officers Russo and Stanley were in with the thieves. According to a police spokesman quoted by the paper, all five were heroes who died or had been wounded protecting the city. The spokesman also said the thieves had gotten away in two dark-colored vans. A third van, left behind, was stolen. As far as the newspaper reporter seemed to know, I didn’t exist.
The Tribune had the same information, though it included a diagram showing where the cops fell and biographical sketches of the dead and wounded. David Russo, the cop I’d shot when he pointed his gun at the others, was married but had no kids. I breathed easier at the no-kids part. But his sister said he’d grown up wanting to be a cop like his dad, a story I knew too well.
By the third morning, frustration was starting to show. The Sun-Times ran a sidebar titled BLOODBATHS IN BLUE about the psychological effects of shootings on the men and women in blue. They’d also gotten my name and described me as a private investigator who’d phoned the police with news of the Southshore robbery. They mentioned that I had a checkered past but other than that they left me alone.
The Tribune was ahead of them. They’d gotten their hands on the 911 tape of me reporting the Southshore theft and broke the news that officers Russo and Stanley were involved in it. They said I was an ex-cop with a drinking problem. They’d dug through their files and come up with a photo of the newsstand I’d wiped out with my cruiser the night before the department fired me. Last time I’d seen the photo it was deep in the Local News section of the paper. Now it was page one.
This morning’s Sun-Times went hard into the story about departmental corruption, questioning if only Russo and Stanley were involved in the thefts. An op-ed article noted that no one had been arrested, wondered about a conspiracy of silence in the department, and called for an investigation. In the “Rogue Investigator” story, Detective Jane Chroler called me a person of interest. The article also connected me to Bill Gubman’s shooting two months earlier.
The Tribune article gave most of the same information and provided a time line of the shootings and investigation. It called me a person of interest again, said I was in jail, uncharged, quoted Larry Weiss calling me innocent, reminded readers of my drinking habit, and quoted an unnamed former detective calling me “dirty.”
I dropped the stack of papers onto the passenger-side floor.
Dirty.
I pulled my car into traffic. Across the street, a woman with a German shepherd was going into a redbrick building that had a sign advertising dog boarding, grooming, and training. The building had steel doors and glass-block windows that started about eight feet up from the pavement. Another prison. A white Honda SUV pulled from the curb in front of the building, made a U-turn, and fell in behind me.
At the corner, I turned west onto 18th Street and cruised in the shadow of the El tracks. I checked the rearview mirror. The SUV followed me. We crossed the brown water of the old Sanitary and Ship Canal-the rusting steel skeleton of a railway bridge in the near distance, the downtown skyscrapers beyond it. We crossed the tracks of an empty railroad yard. We passed vacant lots with broken-down trucks and piles of scrap.
The stoplight at Canal Street turned red. Afternoon rush hour was starting even in a lousy part of the city like this, and the SUV pulled close behind me. My rearview mirror showed two men. They looked thirty or thirty-five, both with short, receding dark hair that they’d messed up so it needed a comb. One of them wore black, the other a camouflage jacket. Like anyone still wore camouflage. That probably made them plainclothes cops. They stared out the windshield with faraway eyes as if I wasn’t there, which meant they probably were watching me close.
I waited until the line of cross traffic approached, then punched the accelerator. The truck at the front of the line blew its horn but I slipped in front of it. The SUV lurched and tried to follow. It had nowhere to go.
My car shot up Canal, past an old warehouse converted into a self-storage business, then past factories and more vacant lots. I searched the rearview mirror. Far as I could tell, the SUV was a half mile away.
There were no stoplights on this stretch of Canal. I blew forward to Roosevelt Road, swung around the corner, and headed east. More railroad tracks. Back across the Sanitary and Ship Canal. More vacant lots. Across Clark Street, and suddenly million-dollar condos, tennis courts, and trees surrounded me. I sighed, let the tension go.
Then I glanced at the mirror.
The white SUV had fallen in two cars back.
Traffic had thickened but the SUV wedged into the right lane and pulled within a car length. I wondered what the rush was. The men had caught up with me, so they must’ve figured out where I was heading to begin with. The SUV slid back into my lane, with a VW between us.
The stoplight at State Street turned red and I hit the brakes. I considered getting out, tapping on the driver’s window, telling the men to get lost, but the SUV pulled into the left-turn lane, rolled next to me, stopped.
The passenger-side window rolled down. The man in the black jacket gave me a tight-lipped smile.
I rolled down my window, said, “What the hell-”
He lifted a black pistol, pointed it at my head.
I didn’t need to think. My body moved on its own. My hand reached for my holster.
No gun in it.
I looked for a way out to the left, right, front, and back. Cars boxed me in.
The pistol fired-a huge sound. My vision narrowed.
I waited for the pain, thought I felt it coming. Where? I wiped my hands over my face, stared at them. No blood.
The SUV pulled away, bounced over a concrete median, completed a U-turn, and disappeared behind me.
The other cars didn’t move, though the light had turned green. A big man climbed out of a red Camry and ran toward me, shouting. I watched his hands for a weapon, saw none. Was he with the men in the SUV, coming to finish me off? I looked around frantically. What could I hit him with? My cell phone? A shoe? A newspaper?
He was outside my window, shouting. What was he saying? I forced myself to listen.
“Are-you-all-right?”
I ran my hands down my ribs, over my belly. No pain. I put my hands on my neck, looked at my arms and legs. No blood.