“I can’t let you publish these,” she whispered. “You mustn’t, you mustn’t.”
“Petra, forty years of wrong are sitting on us. On you and me, I mean. Forty years of wrong our own fathers did. I can’t even guess how many other men Dornick and Alito tortured. I can’t keep quiet, not to save Peter, not even to save Tony.”
“Oh, damn you,” she choked. “It’s like Uncle Sal says, you’re the only who gets to be right. The rest of us don’t count in your uni verse.”
“Damn you, too, Petra Warshawski. You’ve put my life in danger along with your own. If you’d told me all this a month ago, Sister Frankie might still be alive. How many people have to die to protect Peter?”
We were glaring at each other, our noses almost touching in the cramped space, both panting with fury and fear, when we heard footfalls crashing down the side of the embankment. The noise of many people, not Elton. Flashlights played around the embankment. The summer evening was ending, and the pale light coming in through Elton’s skylights had turned purple while we quarreled. I squeezed Petra’s arm and put my hand over her mouth.
The envelope of pictures… They had to survive, whatever happened to me. I looked wildly around and grabbed a black garbage bag from the pile of bags and blankets on the floor. I rolled the envelope up in it. I didn’t have time to get the bag or Petra out of the shack. I stuffed it into a crack and pushed my cousin against the sliver of wall next to the door. I stood in front of her. When the door opened, we wouldn’t be instantly visible.
I pulled the Smith & Wesson from the tuck holster, flipped off the safety, and spoke directly into my cousin’s ear. “When I say go, you stoop down, run out of there, and jump in that water. Swim across, get to Uncle Sal.”
It wasn’t a great plan, but it was all I had. Even in the purple light, I could see her eyes large and terrified in her pale face. The muscles in her throat moved, but she only nodded.
“This is the place?” The voice was George Dornick’s.
“Yes, yessir, it is.” Elton, quavering, barely audible.
“What a dump. You are a worthless piece of shit, you know that?” Dornick, amused, contemptuous. “Open the door. I want to see the girl myself.”
“You said you wasn’t going to hurt her none,” Elton was anxious. “You told me you just wanted to talk to her.”
“That’s right, dirtbag, no one’s going to get hurt. The girl needs to go home, that’s all.” That was a third man, a stranger, and when he laughed a couple of other men joined in: Dornick and two, perhaps three, subordinates.
Petra’s heart was jumping against my shoulder blades. I reached behind me and squeezed her hand. The shack door swung open. A flashlight played around the tiny space, found my feet. I dropped, rolled, and crashed into the figure behind the light, knocking him to the ground.
“Go!” I yelled, and kept rolling, away from the shack so that the second flashlight followed me. I heard Petra behind me. I fired at random to cover her dash out the door, down to the river, the moment’s hesitation, the splash as she dropped into the water. Good girl! I started down the slope after her, but the lights followed me, and someone fired. I dropped into the brush, landing on something large and sharp, rolled away again, and fired blindly toward the light.
“That’s Warshawski. Goddamn it, where’s the girl?”
“Someone jumped in the water.”
The person I’d knocked over had recovered, and I saw the flashlight beam going down to the water. A shot sang out over the river, and ducks began honking and squawking. Wings flapped, and the man shot again. Shouts sounded from the far side.
I tried working my way to the bank. An old tire and a shrub tripped me. I moved backward on my knees and one hand, keeping my gun in front of me. More shots, and then Dornick was spreading his troops in a triangle around me. Dornick shouted a command, and two guns fired in succession, one on either side.
I edged backward while he issued his orders, but the men in the triangle around me were all shining their lights into the brush where I’d landed. I was a fox in the hunt. They had light-finding, heat-seeking missiles, or some crap, that would take care of me.
“Where are the negatives, Vic?” Dornick called.
“My lawyer has them, George.”
“You never made it to your lawyer. We were there ahead of you.”
“I messengered them into town… The same time I sent Bobby Mallory his copies.”
Bobby’s name stopped him briefly, but Dornick only said, “We know you were on your way to Carter’s office. We were listening to that girl’s cellphone.”
“Girl’s cellphone? You mean the Reverend Karen Lennon? I bet you were fun as a little boy, Georgie. Bet you were the one who crawled under the jungle gym to look at your classmates’ panties. Did you start with that and then move on to torturing mice and cats? Captain Mallory isn’t going to watch your back anymore, Georgie. Not when he reads my report.”
“Without the negatives, your report doesn’t mean shit,” Dornick said. “You tell me where they are, and I’ll let the drunk go.”
“It’s okay, Vic,” Elton quavered. “You don’t have to do nothing on my account.”
“What happened, Elton?” I called. “How’d they know you had Petra here?”
“Someone in the coffee place across from your office,” Dornick said. “They told us a homeless guy had gone off with the girl, and we started shaking all the winos and weirdos in Bucktown. And a guy like Elton doesn’t take a lot of shaking before he falls off the tree, isn’t that right, dirtbag?”
“I’m sorry, Vic. I know you saved my life and all and I wish you hadn’t, that’s the God’s truth. If you’da let me die, my little girl wouldn’t be in so much trouble. Your little girl, I mean. She’s a real nice gal, Vic. You can be proud of her. So don’t worry about me no more now, you hear? You don’t need to look after me no more, okay?”
Dornick ignored Elton’s quavery apology. “I want those negatives, Vic.”
He ordered his crew to come into the brambles after me. “Alive: I want to search her. I don’t want her dead… yet.”
The men crashed down the bank and into the thicket. I fired and hit one of them but missed the other two. And then they had me by the arms, and I was kicking, shooting, but the end was ordained at the beginning. They held me while Dornick ran his hands inside my clothes, squeezed my nipples.
I stomped hard on his instep and kicked back at the kneecap of the man behind me. Both men cried out. They weren’t used to pain. I broke free, but Dornick grabbed me before I could start running. He wrenched my gun away and tossed it into the underbrush. An underling held me while Dornick slapped my face. Left side, right side, left side.
“You watch too many old Nazi flicks, George.” I said. “That’s always what Erich von Stroheim does.”
He hit me again. “You’re not as smart as Tony always claimed you were. Where are the pictures?”
“Freeman has them.”
“No, he doesn’t.” Slap.
“I put them in a FedEx box on Armitage,” I said.
“Take the shack apart,” Dornick ordered. “She wouldn’t even leave them with a messenger from Cheviot. She sure didn’t put them in a box.”
I had shot one man; the second man was holding me. Dornick held a gun on Elton while the fourth man dismantled his home. Elton gave little cries of misery as the walls were peeled apart, plastic bags torn open, his nest of sleeping bags ripped apart. It took a good twenty minutes, but the black garbage bag was gone. Petra must have grabbed it on her way out, determined to save Peter’s hide.