I pushed through the first revolving doors I came to and sprinted through the arcade. I heard steps behind me, shouts of outrage as my pursuer collided with someone, but I didn’t waste time looking back.
The envelope was digging into my rear as I ran, but the pain reassured me that I still had my precious cargo. I should have left it at Cheviot. Regrets, save them for later, I panted to myself, and sprinted around a trio of slow-moving women to the building’s rear revolving door.
Wells Street seemed to be full of messenger bikes. Real messengers? Pursuers? Impossible to tell the difference. A bike jumped the curb and headed straight at me, another was approaching from the side. I could see the glint of a pistol in the first man’s hand. As he lifted it, I pulled off my Cubs cap and rolled on the ground. When he reached me, pointing the pistol at me, I stuffed the cap into the spokes of his bike. The bike wobbled, toppled. The pistol went off. The crowd screamed and scattered, and I sprinted up the stairs to the El.
A train was rumbling into the station. I shoved past a line of commuters sliding their cards through turnstile slots. They yelled at me angrily, and the stationmaster hollered in his microphone, but I jumped over the turnstile and ran up the final flight of stairs. I managed to squeeze through the train’s doors just as they were closing.
The car was packed. I collapsed, standing against the doors, sobbing for air, while the mass of commuters pressed into me. My gun was cutting into my side, the envelope into my back. My legs were trembling from my run and from my fear. I thought of Karen back on Monroe Street. I hoped that when they saw I’d gone, they’d left her alone. Please, please don’t let her be one more person injured in my wake.
For several stops, I rode without being conscious of where I was, moving away from the doors as we pulled into a station, leaning back against them when they closed again. We were heading north on the Brown Line, I finally realized. And, wherever it dropped me, there might be watchers waiting for me. How big an operation could Dornick afford to mount against me? How many El stops could he stake out? Was I making him more powerful than he possibly could be?
I couldn’t ride the train forever. I got off at the next stop, Armitage Avenue. It’s in the heart of Yuppieville, and there was a good crowd to cover me leaving the station.
Because it was Yuppieville, it was filled with a million little boutiques. I longed for a wig, something that would really transform me, but the best I could come up with was another hat, a white golfing cap. The thousand dollars I’d cashed last week was dwindling, but I bought a new shirt, too, replacing Karen’s navy T-shirt with a white one that proclaimed G-R-R-L POWER. Maybe it would rub off on me. It had been days since I’d had dark glasses on, and my eyes were aching from the glare. I went into a drugstore and found a cheap pair. And lipstick. In a coffee shop, I picked up an extra-large herbal tea and went into their restroom to wash off and plan my next move.
When I was clean, and rehydrated, I felt marginally better. But I couldn’t imagine any course of action, no way to get out of the area, no useful destination that would help me find Petra, no way to get my photos to Freeman Carter. By now, Dornick might have scoped out Morrell’s Honda. I couldn’t take a chance on doubling back to Lionsgate for the car. I couldn’t go home or to my office, although I was halfway between the two.
Outside the store, a homeless man was hawking Streetwise. “As long as you have a roof over your head and a family that loves you,” the guy in Millennium Park had intoned yesterday. A roof that you can’t get to, a family that’s trying to gun you down. I gave the man a dollar. And thought of Elton Grainger.
He, too, was near here. When Elton wouldn’t give me a straight answer or look in me in the face, I’d been sure he’d seen Petra running from my office. Months ago, he had told me how to find his crib. I would find it. I would threaten to camp out there until he told me what I wanted to know about my cousin.
I’d been heading gradually west from the station while making my purchases. I waited at a bus stop and got on the westbound bus. I fished some singles out of my pocket for the fare, then watched through the back window as we trundled along. It was a tiresomely slow ride, but I was too spent to walk. And at least this way, I could see if anyone had spotted me.
At Damen Avenue, I got off the bus and set out on foot. Chicago streets are tangled here because of the way the river snakes through the Northwest Side. I needed to get under the Kennedy Expressway and then follow Honore to the river. A shack under the railway embankment, Elton had said.
Rush hour was over. People were beginning to fill up the restaurants that lined the streets. I felt overwhelmed with envy for the diners I could see through the windows, eating and laughing together. This was what it was like to be Elton, trudging back each night from his station outside the coffee bar on my street, a Vietnam veteran with no home and only the price of a bottle or a sandwich in his pocket.
On leaden feet, I walked under the expressway and turned east and then north again. The railway embankment was surrounded by razor wire, but there was a gap hidden by the Kennedy’s shadow. I slipped through it and crawled up the embankment. Decades of Chicagoans had tossed their garbage from their cars, and, in places along the embankment, it was waist high. I could see the path Elton had carved through the refuse and followed it up to the tracks and down the other side, where the embankment ended at the river’s edge.
I didn’t spot Elton’s shack at first, and wondered if in his paranoia he had misdirected me. However, a faint trail led through the underbrush and refuse, and I followed it to the river. The water here was a thick brownish green. Ducks bobbed in it, along with plastic bottles and sticks. There wasn’t a visible current, and mosquitoes rose in clouds from the thicket of shrubs that lined the bank.
From the river’s edge, I looked back and finally saw the shack, almost invisible against the underbrush and discarded tires. It had a faded logo from the C &NW railroad on it; I suppose they’d once used it for storage. As I got closer, I saw Elton had put a rain barrel on the roof and fixed up a showerhead. There weren’t any windows in the shack, and the boards it was built with were gray-black with damp, but he had covered any holes with a variety of metal, Styrofoam, and plastic sheeting.
I clambered up the embankment and made my way around to the side where the door was. “Elton? You home? It’s V. I. Warshawski. We need to talk.”
I rapped smartly on the panel and heard a movement from inside the shack, an intake of a sob. I pulled open the ramshackle door. My cousin Petra blinked at me from a nest of sleeping bags.
“Vic! How did you know? Who told you? Who’s with you?”
I couldn’t speak. I was so overcome with relief at the sight of Petra that I just stood there, shaking my head in wonder.
47
I WAS ON THE FLOOR, HOLDING PETRA, WHILE SHE SOBBED against my shoulder. “Vic, I’m so scared, it’s so awful, don’t yell at me. I didn’t mean… I didn’t want-”
“I’m not going to yell at you, little cousin,” I said softly, stroking her dirty hair, “when it’s my hot temper that made you too scared to trust me.”
“They told me if I talked to anyone, they’d shoot Mom and the girls and Daddy would go to prison, I didn’t know what to do. They said you wanted Daddy to go to prison, you were just using me, and if I didn’t help them, if I talked to you about what I was doing, you’d punish me and him and Mom and everyone.”