“Are you all right?” the man was asking.
I stared at him, said nothing.
He leaned toward me, his hands on my door, his fingers curling through the open window. “Are you-?”
I lifted his fingers away from my car with my fingers. I rolled up the window.
He was a good man, a saint.
I had nothing to say to him, no use for him at all.
The cars in front moved. The man stepped away from my Skylark, bewildered. I let my car roll forward, accelerated through the intersection.
The next corner was Wabash. I turned, drove up the street, and turned again into a parking lot.
I cut the engine and breathed deep. The air felt thin. I tried to think-until a single simple idea grew bright. It was time to hide.
If the guys in the SUV were plainclothes, and I was pretty sure they were, then the cops were gunning for me. I could argue my innocence any way I wanted but I’d killed a man in uniform, thief or not-and the man, if not quite unarmed, had an unloaded weapon and couldn’t have shot it even if he’d wanted to. That would be enough to drive some guys in the department crazy.
It was time to hide.
How had the shooter in the SUV missed me? He was five feet away, four maybe. If he’d had long arms, he could’ve punched me without getting out of his car. How could he have missed?
Where could I hide?
I knew about a little fishing village just over the Florida border.
I also knew a store two doors from the entrance to the building where I had my office. The store advertised BEER, WINE, LIQUOR. LOWEST PRICES. It had no other name. A Polish guy named Charlie Brzowski used to run it. When I still was drinking, he knew my face better than my mom did. He was bald and heavy and picked up the bottle some himself.
I got out of my car. The bullet shot by the man in the SUV had poked a hole through the panel behind the driver-side door. Like a thumb through a pie.
The shooter had meant to miss me. He’d meant only to scare.
I looked inside the car. The bullet had stopped short of the interior paneling. It was under the skin and might rattle, metal against metal, when I drove, but it would hurt me only as much as I let it.
I locked the car.
Charlie Brzowski was gone from the liquor store. A thin Indian man stood behind the counter. He wore his green shirt buttoned to the neck and had a full head of black hair. Still the store smelled and felt the same, and the bourbon was where it always had been. I grabbed a bottle of Jim Beam Black-good but not too good.
My office was on the eighth floor of an eight-story building. A secretarial school that taught inner-city kids occupied the rest of the floor. I rode the elevator up alone. Roselle Turner, who owned and ran the school, was in her office talking on the phone as I walked by, but the students had left for the day.
A steel plate on my office door said JOE KOZMARSKI. PRVATE INVESTIGATION AND DETECTIVE SERVICES. I resisted tearing it off.
A pile of letters, bills, and take-out menus sat on the floor. Other than that, the office looked like it always did: the desk, the computer, the answering machine blinking red to tell me I had calls, the metal file cabinets, the couch where I’d sometimes slept until my nephew Jason had come to live with me. I set the Jim Beam on the desk and went to the window. On a clear day, Lake Michigan showed through a gap between an insurance building and the building to the north of it. It showed now but the gray of the lake blended with the gray of the sky so it didn’t much matter.
I picked up the mail and sat at my desk.
The menus and credit card offers went into the trash. The bills went into a separate pile, unopened. A letter on legal stationery explained that a client who’d hired me to tell her where her husband was spending his evenings wouldn’t be paying my bill because she was unsatisfied with my services. I’d followed her husband but the news that he was spending his after-work hours playing chess with an old high school friend didn’t deserve payment, as far as my client was concerned. She’d been sure he was gambling or screwing another woman and wanted me to confirm her suspicions as badly as she worried about the truth of them.
An envelope stamped with the Southshore Corporation logo contained a letter from Jen Horlarche telling me my security services would no longer be required. It was a Dear John letter, polite enough as those things go. At the bottom, she noted that she’d sent a copy to the Southshore legal counsel.
The last envelope had no return address. Inside were a little Baggie and a note. The note said, Sorry about the bad luck. Let me know what you need.-Tommy. The signature made me shudder. Tommy had supplied my needs when I’d had habits that needed supplying. I hadn’t seen him or heard from him since I’d broken the habits. Now that the news showed me washing down a storm drain, he was reaching a hand to pull me out. Drowning would be better.
I tapped the Baggie to settle its contents. Inside was enough cocaine to make three or four lines. Enough to get me started. When I needed more, I could call Tommy.
I balled up the Baggie and threw it in the garbage.
I looked at my desk, saw the bottle of Jim Beam.
What was I doing?
I dropped the bottle into the can on top of the Baggie.
I closed my eyes, breathed deep.
I waited for the tension to pass, breathed deep again, waited some more, breathed again.
What was I doing?
I pulled the bottle out of the garbage, set it on my desk, reached in again for the Baggie, and put it into my top desk drawer.
I watched the bottle as though it would talk to me.
Then I unscrewed the cap and took a drink, felt the burn and the release and the bright solution to every problem.
It was time to hide.
FIVE
THE PHONE WAS RINGING.
Someone should answer it.
Not me.
The phone rang some more.
I drank.
The machine picked up, explained I was unavailable. An understatement.
My ex-wife Corrine spoke, her voice worried. “I talked with Larry Weiss. He says the police told him they released you. I left a message for you at home, and your cell phone seems to be off. Where are you?”
I’m not here, I thought.
“I’m concerned about you,” she added and hung up.
Yeah, me too.
I left what remained of the whiskey on my desk, went out of my office, locked the door. Roselle Turner was still in her office, talking on the phone.
The elevator took me down to the street. The first dark of the evening had fallen. Streetlights and shop lights washed the pavement yellow. A couple of taxis, some passenger cars, and a city bus passed me on Wabash. I shouldn’t drive. The vendors in the newsstands that I hadn’t flattened agreed I shouldn’t. I walked toward my car.
A police cruiser came around the corner, slowed.
Panic flooded my belly. I fought it off, kept walking. I knew better than to think that every cop in the city had it out for me.
The cruiser pulled to the curb and two cops got out. “Mr. Kozmarski?” one of the cops said.
I kept walking, pretended I was someone else.
“Mr. Kozmarski?” The voice was closer.
If I ran, I would have no chance. I was drunk, tired. Maybe if I sat on the sidewalk, they would leave me alone.
“Mr.-”
I turned. “What?”
The cop almost ran into me. “We need you to come with us.”
I looked him in the eyes. He was a couple of inches shorter than my six feet but thick in the shoulders and arms, like he spent his off-hours at the gym. His partner stood behind him, about the same height but thinner, his hand on his hip near his service pistol.
“No,” I said.
My refusal didn’t seem to bother them. They seemed to think it was funny.
The lead cop held his hands together over his chest. He could pray if he wanted to. Or he could throw a forearm into my jaw.