“What are you so pleased about?”
He slid the car into traffic. “Miles called me last night. He got nowhere on that astrology birth date you had, but after we’d left, he did land a couple of current addresses for our list, one of which was Penny Nivens.” He paused for theatrical effect. “She teaches ballet. I thought we could make her our first stop of the day.”
The boost this news gave me was almost immediately dampened by the dormant paranoia that had been dogging me for almost the last twenty-four hours. I peered out the back window, looking in vain for the large dark four-door of the day before. “Pull over, Norm.”
Norm stopped opposite a fire hydrant and put the car in park. “What’re we looking for?”
I straightened in my seat, quickly debating how to present my fears in a way he would accept. “If you were Bonatto, and I dropped a twenty-four-year-old bomb in your lap and walked away, having dared you to do something about it, how would you react?”
Runnion understood instantly. “We have a tail?”
“We might. I saw two guys in a car opposite your office yesterday afternoon, and I may have seen either the same guys or two others from the tour boat.”
“You didn’t tell me?”
“I wasn’t sure-I’m still not. The two in the car were chatting with a girl passing by, and the others were eating popcorn on the bridge with a crowd of other people. They didn’t do anything suspicious; I never saw them looking in our direction, and the car-when we left your office-stayed put.”
“What about the two on the bridge?”
“They walked away before we shoved off.”
“So they didn’t see us meet Huff?”
I sighed, as if hearing what he was thinking. “I don’t think so-but others may have.”
“Sure,” he muttered matter-of-factly, “Two-or three-man teams. Hard to spot.”
I looked at him in surprise, relieved by his ready acceptance, and added, “Assuming they’re there at all.”
He thought about it for a moment, put the car back into gear, and rejoined the flow of traffic. “Let’s find out.”
He continued up La Salle to North Avenue and turned left. “I’m going to take us out to the expressway, where the traffic is thinner-maybe get a fix on whoever might be out there. What kind of car was it last time?”
“Dark four-door sedan-typical narc car, really.” I planted that last idea on purpose, just to see how he’d react.
He picked it up, but cautiously. “You think they were cops?”
“They could be, especially if your Intelligence pals didn’t quite swallow your story about me.”
He absorbed that without comment.
“The other possibility is Shattuck. If Shilly couldn’t give him the answers he wanted, I’d be his only other option, and he certainly knows enough people to pull it off.”
Runnion shook his head slightly. “Christ, you sounded like such a milk run when I first met you.”
I climbed into the back seat so I could get a better view out the rear window, leaving Norm to search for cars that might be “tailing” us from the front. The traffic on North, however, was cluttered enough to make any discrimination virtually impossible. I scanned the weaving flock of cars behind us, looking for either the same one I’d seen before or the two burly men. But I saw nothing familiar-just a twisting, flowing stream of vehicles, a good half of which might have been following us.
The expressway, however, promised better results.
“You all set?” Norm called back over his shoulder. He hit the accelerator hard but held his speed at sixty-five, as any jackrabbit driver might. I studied the pattern to our rear-several cars stuck with us.
“How many?” he asked.
“About half a dozen, unless the guy is being real subtle.”
“Okay.” Norm slowed back down, activated his turn indicator, and pulled off into the breakdown lane, coming to a full stop. “We’ll give ’em five minutes, enough to force ’em either to take the next exit or pull over themselves. If they have a two-car team, that’ll probably get rid of one of ’em.”
We waited a couple of those minutes in silence, our eyes fixed on opposite horizons. “I wish to hell you hadn’t planted that ‘they might be cops’ idea in my head,” Norm finally muttered.
Now I was the one to sound surprised. “Why? You think they might be?”
“They’re capable of it. What bugs me right now is that I could call in extra units to help us out here, maybe box in whoever it is you think is out there, but I don’t want to do it ’til I know who they are.”
I didn’t respond, and he didn’t call Dispatch for help.
When we did roll again, it was at a snail’s pace. This time, I couldn’t separate anyone from the crowd. They all seemed unanimously irritated at having to negotiate around us-until we crept past the next entrance ramp.
“Bingo. One just got on. He’s way back and doesn’t seem to know what to do. He’s straddling the breakdown line.”
“All right, here goes.” Norm punched the gas pedal and we catapulted forward to eighty miles an hour. Far behind us, almost blocked by the other traffic, I could see a nondescript beige model lurch away from the emergency lane, its rear tires smoking.
“They bit-they’re coming.”
Norm risked a glance into his rearview mirror, although they were still quite a ways back. “They just keeping pace, or trying to close the distance?”
“Keeping pace.”
He accelerated more, taking some risks now that we were without doubt the fastest car in any lane. He weaved right and left, using his horn, once or twice swinging out into the breakdown lane to maintain speed. Staying as far back as they could afford, our pursuers maintained the distance.
“Still there?” Norm shouted, his voice rising above the engine’s howl.
I glanced at him to answer and wished I hadn’t. We were passing cars like they were mere pylons in a suicidal obstacle course. I saw a station wagon just ahead move to get out of our way, realize we were coming on too fast, and switch back jerkily. Norm corrected his direction at the last moment and flew past within inches of the other car’s bumper. My hands were gripping the back of the seat so tightly, my fingernails hurt.
“Still there?” he repeated.
I looked back. “Yes.”
“Okay. Hang on.”
I stared at my white-knuckled fists, wondering how I could do any better. He wrenched the wheel right, slewed across two lanes to an outburst of car horns, and launched us through the air over the top lip of an off ramp. We landed with a sickening, swerving, tire-squealing thump, and Norm pumped the brakes just enough for us to half turn, half slide our way into a cross street.
“They comin’?” I looked out the rear window and saw no beige car. “Nothing yet, but they were pretty far back.”
“Okay.” He pulled a magnetically mounted blue light from under his seat, slapped it onto the dashboard, and stuck its dangling umbilical into the car’s cigarette lighter. He then cranked the wheel hard to the left, hit a switch on his dash that started his siren howling, and proceeded as quickly as possible against the traffic of a curving one-way residential street. Several blocks later, he killed both the light and the siren, turned right, and rejoined the normal flow of cars.
“How ’bout now?”
I checked again. “Clean as a whistle.”
Penny Nivens, it turned out, did not teach ballet to the city’s up-and-coming prima ballerinas, nor had she opted to bring the arts to the South Side disadvantaged. Instead, Norm Runnion took me north, out of Skokie, where his careening, subsonic trajectory had landed us, and into the lush green embrace of Lake Forest.
A few hundred yards off the Deerpath Avenue exit from Highway 41, the standard tacky commercial mob of buildings yielded almost instantaneously to a rarefied-and artificial-ruralism, the kind I’d experienced at top-drawer country clubs and upscale modern zoos. Everything natural had been sculpted by experts to make it look “better”-no weeds, no dead branches, no rotting clumps of vegetation. The concessions to modern living had been tastefully blended in-the road smooth and gently curving to enhance that unhurried, country feeling; the sidewalks immaculate and free of cracks. Even the low-key police department, located like a discreet sentry along the main corridor to the violent wastelands, had all the bearing of a bland, retiring, almost embarrassed municipal office block.