"Yep. A day late and a dollar short. Close the case out from under him, it'll hurt more than your right hook."
Her smiled broadened. "I feel like chatting with the Disciples. You want to come?"
"This one is all you. I got a date." Galway patted his stomach. "Pompeii, bowtie pasta with garlic." He made a pistol of his right hand and shot her.
The department's Ford smelled of cigarettes. She rolled the windows open and jammed the AC on, hot breath blasting in her face. What she should do was go back to the station and put in another couple hours of data crunching. This was only a gang-on-gang shooting, and closing it wouldn't matter enough to anybody to get her out of her chickenshit assignment. But revenge was its own reward.
She turned up her police radio as she pulled away from the curb. There was something comforting about the steady tones. It felt like the voice of Chicago itself, like the city was speaking to her. Cruz sometimes left it on in the background at home, when she was reading or making dinner.
Right now, all Chicago had to say seemed routine: a domestic call where a woman was threatening her husband with a broken bottle; a noise complaint from Oak View Terrace; an accident at Halsted and Sixty-fourth.
Then, just as she was about to turn it back down, another item came on. The voice didn't change, spoke in the same measured voice as always.
But before it had finished, she'd spun the Crown Vic in a squealing turn and jammed on the gas.
January 22, 1993
Eddie Murphy is killing him.
On the screen, the comedian is talking about grandmothers, how they're always cold, always asking what time it is. This may be the funniest thing Jason has ever heard. He's only met his grandmother once since he was old enough to remember, on a trip to Spokane, two weeks of Mom and Dad fighting in the car. But he can picture her crabbed up in a shawl, telling him he's nasty, then asking what time it is.
There is sick fire in his belly.
Michael nudges him, passes the near-empty bottle, red label with black domed buildings, somewhere in Russia. Jason wonders if the vodka actually comes from Russia. Wonders if there really even is a place called Russia, if there's anywhere but fucking Crenwood. Crenwood and Spokane. This strikes him funny too.
He twists off the red plastic cap and drinks. The liquid is warm and thick, and scours his throat. Acid curdles in his stomach. He fights a grimace, fakes appreciative noises. Turns to hand the bottle back to his brother, feeling a strange lightness inside.
Turning, he explodes.
Fire pours out of him, bile spilling up through his nose, a spray of wet heat across Michael's chest and lap. It spatters and soaks and drips. The sick is bloody with the fruit soda they used to chase the Popov, and as he looks at it, Jason thinks of the old expression, puking your guts out, and then the world tilts to black.
He wakes in bed, in a beam of sweaty sun.
At first there is only the throb and ache of the room, but then memory hits, and shame runs through him like warm water. His dirty clothes are gone, his mouth is clean. Somehow he doesn't smell like vomit.
Michael.
Jason groans. Hating the humiliation he knows will come, hating himself for failing this test of manhood. Hating that his brother witnessed it, saw him for a baby. Knowing that he will never hear the end of it, that every friend will laugh, every girl will giggle.
But he's wrong.
Michael never says a word.
CHAPTER 7
Traffic on the Kennedy was steady, so Jason fumbled his phone out and tried all of Michael's numbers again. The same thing – voice mail, voice mail, technical difficulties. He cursed under his breath, then shut the phone. Beside him, Billy stared out the window.
"Kiddo?" Jason tried for a gentle, avuncular voice, the kind that belonged to someone who hadn't woken with a hangover and a woman whose last name he didn't know. "You feeling any better?"
The only response was Billy's fingers tightening on the armrest.
Twenty minutes ago, when Jason had yanked open his apartment door, he'd found his nephew trembling, clothing filthy and torn. A small leaf hung orange in the tousled mess of his hair, and it made him look like a corpse, some broken thing washed up on the banks of a desolate river. The boy hadn't said a word since, not as Jason took in the enormous pupils and shaking hands that meant his nephew was in shock, not as he'd run his hands over Billy's thin limbs to check for wounds, not even as Jason had gathered the boy into a bear hug and told him everything would be all right.
It was nothing, Jason told himself for the hundredth time. Some sort of kid stuff, some miscommunication or accident. Maybe Billy had been with a friend and they'd gotten in a fight. Or maybe he'd somehow gotten lost. Chicago would seem an enormous and scary place to an eight-year-old alone. Hell, sometimes it seemed that way to him.
"I met with the cops."
"You mean you informed on a gang?"
Jason heard Michael's words again, clear as broken glass, but pushed the thought aside. Michael was fine. He had to be. Everything had to be.
He turned onto Damen, driving though déjà vu. Not twenty-four hours ago he'd ridden this same route, past the same closed shops and narrow crooked houses, the same boys on the corner daring him with their eyes. Cracked pavement and exhaust haze, broken glass firing glints of too-bright sun. Damen Avenue, just like yesterday.
Then he reached his brother's block, and realized that it was not at all like yesterday, that everything was not fine.
Everything was a thousand miles from fine.
Over there was the extensions place, Lauretta's, the African queen on the sign slightly darkened. Lauretta who babysat Billy from time to time, who liked Jason because both her boys were Army, too. Then, on the other side, the little storefront diner, one of the front windows spider-webbed so that you couldn't read the specials, something about two eggs and ham on the bone. Michael's bar was supposed to sit between them.
But somehow it had been exchanged for a reeking ruin.
Timbers twisted and scorched into bubbles of ash lay amidst bricks licked black by flaming tongues. Fire had eaten everything, left behind only a charred carcass. A twisted gothic cathedral decorated with spires of cinders and rubble. Firemen moved through the debris like acolytes of flame.
Some part of Jason expected to hear foreign tongues, the alien wailing of the women. He'd lost count of how many burnt-out buildings he'd seen, of the missions to secure-and-contain, of triaging tiny broken bodies and calling for the medics. For a moment he found himself back in it, boots on the ground in the desert's wrathful heat. Sulfur in his nostrils and sweat in his eyes. That was the world to which this kind of destruction belonged. Half a world away amidst people who spoke a different language, worshipped a different god. That was where buildings burned out, where survivors were left to gape at the ruins of what had been real.
Not here. Not his brother.
And on the heels of that thought, another. Billy.
Idiot!
He jerked to the curb, screeching to a halt in front of Lauretta's shop. Scrabbled at his seat belt, then unbuckled his nephew. "Don't look." He pulled the boy out of his seat, dragged him into an awkward embrace. "You don't have to." Billy was light as rags, warm and shuddering rags. His breath came heavy and wet, spit and snot and tears soaking the shoulder of Jason's T-shirt. They sat in the rattle of the air conditioning, Jason holding his nephew, stroking his hair. Telling the boy not to look even as he himself stared.