"You think they bumped off the guy who helped rob the place?"
"They don't seem to like loose ends." It was dusk when I left the hotel. I thought about taking a cab-limiting my exposure to whatever assassins might lurk in the lowering darkness-then said fuck it. Walking in a city like New York or Chicago is one of the great pleasures in life and no one was going to take it away from me.
The restaurant was at the corner of Dearborn and Randolph, a block or so north of City Hall.
See? Getting to know my way.
Madison is the north-south split, State the east-west. The lake is on the right going north.
Definitely getting it.
I took Michigan Street as far as Washington, then cut west across the foot of Daley Plaza, every different angle of the Picasso statue offering a different possibility, a different beast. A woman with parted hair or a ram with crushing horns. An eerie orange glow rose from the fountain tonight, the water itself bubbling up orange as if contaminated. I was around it, already looking north for a Goodman sign or banner when I heard footsteps.
Fast steps.
Thought, "Here we go," and turned to see a man in a hockey mask running at me, something down at his side just like the gunman today. Another gun? No, a knife-better than a gun here, able to go in and out silently, cut through organ meat and leave a man drowning in his own blood.
As he got close to me, he moved to my left as if to attack from the side, maybe push the knife through my ribs and into my lungs-a quick and quiet method. I moved with him to keep him in front of me and rolled at the last minute into his legs, sending him tumbling down hard onto the concrete surface. He grunted loudly as he hit. A woman behind me yelled, "Christ!" I jumped onto his back and punched him hard in the kidneys. He yowled. I grabbed his hair and knelt on the hand that held the knife. I was forcing it loose when someone jumped on my back and started pounding my head with small fists.
"Let him go," she screamed. "You're hurting him, you fucking asshole."
Of course I was hurting him. Wasn't that the point with knife-wielding assailants in hockey masks?
I got up fast and spun around, grabbed the fists of the woman-the girl-who was trying to claw me. She looked eighteen at the most. And was dressed as a witch, complete with pointy black hat and an alarming hairy wart on her otherwise smooth face.
"He was trying to kill me!" I yelled.
"You're crazy!" she yelled back. "Chris, are you okay?"
I pushed her away and turned to see the man getting up slowly. His mask had come off. He wasn't any older than the girl, a curly-headed kid with a nasty scrape on his chin, grimacing as he held the spot on his back where I'd hit him.
The knife, on closer inspection, was made of rubber.
"Oh, shit," I said, taking in the orange water gushing out of the fountain. The pumpkins mounted on poles. The girl's costume, the other people in the plaza dressed as cowboys, pirates, scarecrows and superheroes.
The festive banners that said "Chicagoween."
The date: October 31.
"I'm sorry," I said, picking up the knife and handing it back to the kid. "I forgot it's Halloween. I thought you were for real."
"Asshole," the kid said. "You really fucking hurt me."
"I should call the cops," the girl said.
I said, "Don't do that." My luck, Tom Barnett would answer the call. I apologized again to him and to the girl. I reached into my wallet and handed him three twenties. "Please," I said. "Have dinner on me."
"Like I could eat after what you did to me." But he shoved the bills into his jeans pocket. Pointed the rubber knife at me. Said, "You're lucky this isn't real."
Didn't I know it.
They walked off toward the fountain. She put her arm around his waist. He winced.
I headed for Petterino's. As I crossed Randolph, a cab nearly rear-ended a car that had stopped without signalling and blared his horn. Maybe that's why I didn't hear footsteps coming up behind me again. Didn't hear anything at all. Just became aware of the car at the curb, the man at my side, the hard press of a gun in my ribs. The shove into the back seat, the door slamming, the car exiting quickly from the curb lane into traffic. The short ride through city streets, just two turns, then over a bumpy terrain that had me bouncing on the floor of the car, a man's knees forcing me down behind the driver's seat, a gun in my neck the whole time.
Then we stopped and for the second time today I had my hands cuffed behind me. This time by Francis Curry.
CHAPTER 38
To call it an elevator was an insult to other elevators. It wasn't even a lift. A hoist, pure and simple, a technology that dated back to the building of pyramids, one weight descending to pull another upward. The higher we went, the harder the wind blew, waves of it rocking the hoist. The view was probably magnificent but obscured by walls of Plexiglas smeared with months' worth of dirt, handprints, dried drops of rain. Maybe even tears.
The car bucked harder as we rose past sixty, seventy floors, the pitch of the wind moaning like a grieving old woman as it whistled through unfinished floors of the building.
When the hoist reached the very top, Curry stepped back and took out a pistol. "You can get out first," he said. "Slowly, if I were you. Not that there's anywhere to run out there."
There was no flooring beyond twenty feet in any direction. Nothing to walk on but sheets of corrugated plastic, bridged here and there by plywood. After that it was girders only.
I stepped out as Curry directed, stopping halfway across the flooring. Not much I could do with my hands cuffed behind me.
"A little farther," Simon Birk said, and Curry waved his pistol to encourage me. I moved two steps farther out.
No walls, no ceiling. Just girders, the steel skeleton of a rising giant, through which the wind was truly whipping. My pant legs were flapping against my legs, my hair blowing straight back.
Birk said, "I wanted you to see first-hand what I'm building, since you seem so determined to bring it to a halt."
"Okay," I said. "I've seen it."
"Isn't it magnificent?"
Curry was staying well back of me so there was nothing for me to do but agree.
"Walk," Birk said, nodding his head toward the edge of the ribbed plastic floor. The surface seemed solid enough under my feet. I assumed heavier men than me had trod it. I walked. The wind got stronger with every step out.
Below us, traffic rushed through the streets. Cars, buses, trucks and subway trains, all carrying people to their destinations. To better places than I was in.
"It sways more than you'd expect, doesn't it?" Birk asked. "Up to two feet from its vertical axis. All skyscrapers do, of course. There has to be some give in them. If they don't bend, they might break. Some of the sway will be reduced when it's finished and the cladding is in place. The tenants will never really feel it. But you do, don't you? You feel you're not entirely on solid ground, am I right?"
I saw no point in disagreeing.
"There's a lesson in there, Geller. When someone gives you a chance to bend, you should take it. It beats the hell out of breaking, doesn't it?"
"I get your point," I said.
"You should have done that when it counted."
"Boss," Curry said. I turned around to see Curry's hand on Birk's arm, stopping him from moving or speaking, then pointing out ahead of us.
At the end of a girder that extended out into the blackness was the figure of a man, seated with his back to us. Curry moved over to me and stuck the barrel of his gun in my back. He slipped a key out of his pocket and undid my cuffs. "You say a word," he said, "or make any fancy moves and you'll be dead. And so will he."
"Got it," I said. "No moves."
"Be smart."
"Excuse me?" Birk called out. "What are you doing here?"