“What’s happening?”
“Someone complained about the high-speed number we did on the expressway. They got the number of the guy who was tailing us. I’m about to stake his place out.”
“Is he mob-connected?”
“No-which means it has to be Shattuck. Come on, move it. I’ll make the call. Take a cab to the corner of Montana and Sheffield when you hit town and walk west on Montana. I’ll find you.”
The line went dead. It had begun to rain outside.
It was a rough flight back, especially as we neared Chicago. The small plane bucked and shuddered in the night, and the pilot came on at one point to say that an alternate airport might be necessary. I stared out the window and saw nothing besides the rain streaking by at a sharp angle.
I was worried about Norm. It was he, after all, who’d read me the rules of the game concerning the Shattuck investigation: The here and now was Homicide’s concern; past history was ours. It seemed to me that his eagerness to retire in glory might get us in some serious trouble.
We did land at Chicago, although I wished we hadn’t tried. The buffeting from the wind had turned violent, and I saw lightning from the cabin’s window as the city’s lights lurched and bounced into view. Leaning out of my seat and looking down the length of the tiny cabin, I could see the pilot and copilot through the half-curtained cockpit, their shoulders hunched to the task. The pilot was holding the wheel in a death grip, jerking it spastically to correct the small plane’s wild leaps and bounds. The copilot kept wiping his hand against his trouser leg.
The landing was by no means feather-smooth, accompanied as it was by the simultaneous crashing of several items in the galley and at least three pieces of hand luggage, but it was successful, and instantly followed by a spontaneous burst of applause from everybody on board, including, I noted glumly, the stewardess, sitting alone at the back.
The cab ride into town reemphasized why our plane should have landed elsewhere. Through near-deserted, half-flooded streets littered with debris, we drove in the midst of a near hurricane.
At Montana and Sheffield, almost directly under the elevated subway tracks, the cabbie pulled to a stop, and looked over his shoulder at me with a pity reserved for the deranged. I handed him the seventy-five dollars that had been his absolute minimum for venturing out in this filth, then struggled against the wind to open the door.
The effect of finally stepping into the storm, instead of just watching it through various windows, had a strange and contradictory impact. In one sense, it became more real because I was instantly drenched to the skin, yet in another, the threat of it lessened when I found that the wind, though both ferocious and quirky, was not enough to lift me off my feet. It was of a staggering intensity, however, and its erratic gusts, affected by the buildings all around, made progress down Montana a real effort.
I was walking near the buildings, one hand outstretched for stability, the other still hanging on to my overnight case, when I heard a loud, deep rumbling behind me, as of metal against metal. To my amazement, it was the elevated subway, still running despite the weather. Squinting against the driving, lashing rain, I could see the train’s row of brightly lit windows passing serenely by, almost all of them empty.
“Joe. In the car, goddamn it.” I looked around, trying to locate who’d called me. The street was totally deserted-dark, gleaming wet, the few lights blurred and ineffectual.
I stared stupidly down and saw Norm peering out above his barely opened window. I lurched out into the street, around the car, and half fell into the front seat, almost losing the door to the gale.
He looked at me, both amused and slightly embarrassed. “I guess you caught the plane.”
I wiped my face with my hand. “This better be worth it.”
He pursed his lips and wiped the foggy windshield with a rag from the glove compartment. “It’s that brownstone over there.”
I caught the flatness in his voice. “But you haven’t seen a thing yet.”
“Nope.” I looked down at myself, sitting in a puddle, and concentrated on lowering the adrenaline that had fueled me all the way here. “Great. So who’s supposed to be living there?” I asked.
“Guy named Russell Grange-old-time radical, according to Stoddard, although no direct link to Shattuck that we know.”
“You tell Homicide?”
He paused a moment, renewing my fears about his motives. “No. I don’t really have anything to tell ’em, except that someone from this address tailed us, which then begs the question of what we were up to at the time.”
I mulled that over. If this did turn out to be nothing, and he had told his colleagues of it, he would lose two ways, by both tipping his hand and having nothing to show for his efforts.
“Something else,” Runnion added. “I got twitchy after sending you out of town the way I did, so I decided to call Penny Nivens, just to see how she was. She’d had a visit a few hours after we left her-at her home.”
A cold wave spread down my spine. “Who?”
“I’d say Outfit boys. Two of ’em, polite but tough, scared her without lifting a finger. She told ’em what she told us.”
“How the hell did they get to her?” My question was mostly rhetorical, but Runnion’s self-conscious stillness made me look at him more closely.
He frowned and a crease appeared between his eyes, which stayed glued to the house down the street. “We…I wasn’t as clever as I thought. This guy-or whoever borrowed his car-wasn’t our only tail. My car had one of those direction-finding gizmos stuck to it-a transmitter.”
I stared dumbfounded for a few seconds, realizing only then that Norm’s sharpened interest in being here tonight had less to do with going out in glory and more to do with wounded professional pride.
“There,” he suddenly said, interrupting my reflections.
I sat forward and peered through the murky gloom. A figure had appeared in the doorway of the house, dressed in a raincoat and droopy hat.
“Check him out.” Norm thrust a pair of binoculars at me.
I brought the binoculars to bear, trying to overcome the blurring effects of the windshield, the rain, and the darkness.
“Is it Shattuck?”
“I don’t know yet.”
I saw the figure in the coat pull his hat farther down and his coat collar up. He kept his face pointed up the street, toward the Elevated’s dark, ugly overhead roadway. As he stepped from the building’s shelter and began walking away, braced as if he was on a ship’s tilting deck, I saw a gray ponytail break free of the hat and string out in the wind.
“I think it is. I can see his hair.”
Norm started his engine but stayed put. “Russell Grange’s car is parked near the end of the block. I’ll wait ’til he gets in.”
The seconds ticked by, exposing an additional disadvantage to the weather. No matter if he walked or drove, this man and we would be the only ones moving on the street tonight, as conspicuous as dancers in a morgue.
“Shit, he walked past it.”
The man in the raincoat reached the corner, instinctively looked both ways, one hand holding his hat on his head, and crossed the street, now walking directly into the wind and leaning forward at a sharp angle.
“Where’s the son of a bitch going?” Norm waited until our quarry had vanished from view, going south on Sheffield, before pulling the car out of its parking place and rolling slowly up to the corner. The El now loomed overhead, mysterious and vaguely threatening.
I wiped the mist from my side window, but the rain was like a waterfall against the outside. “I can’t see. Pull around so we can get the wipers working for us.”
Norm gunned the accelerator a bit, turned left, and we both scanned the sidewalk ahead.
We didn’t get a chance to focus, however. Without warning, like lightning bursting from nowhere, the entire windshield exploded before us. The car was transformed from a dry, warm cocoon into a screaming, glass-filled, rain-soaked bedlam before either one of us could so much as flinch. Appearing between us as if by magic, slicing the top of Norm’s head with a burst of blood, was a metal road sign, still attached to its thick javelin-like steel post.