Текст книги "Greed"
Автор книги: Dan O'Shea
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 24 страниц)
CHAPTER 16
Hardin knew he had to move, had to get out of town, get some space. He also needed to get off the grid. Somebody had gotten a line on him somehow, so he had to figure the Nigel Fox ID was shot. Hardin had found Nigel dead in his apartment three months back, the booze finally catching up with him. And Nigel’s passport and ID were just sitting there on his table. Date on the passport made Nigel fifty-four – Hardin would have figured he was sixty-five at least, but that’s what pickling your liver will do for you. Height and weight were about the same. He knew a guy who could swap the pictures out, and with Hardin’s gray hair, he could be a young fifty-four. Always nice to have a spare set of papers, and he didn’t figure Nigel would mind.
Nigel had gotten him this far, but from here out, Hardin was on his own.
Hardin drove the Marquis back up to the Loop. Found a metered spot on Columbus, behind the Art Institute. He dumped the Mercury there, walked to the garage, drove his rental back to O’Hare and turned it in, grabbed the L back downtown, then jumped on the Burlington commuter rail out to Aurora. Going home.
Hardin wasn’t Hardin when he joined the Legion. He was Mike Griffin. He was home on leave at the end of his second hitch in the Marines, ready to re-up, on the road to being a lifer. It was a few weeks before Christmas. He’d hooked up with his best friend from high school, Esteban Sandoval, and they were heading out to celebrate Esteban’s kid sister’s twenty-first birthday. Hardin had always been close to Juanita in a big brother kind of way. He knew she chafed a little at the whole macho Mexican culture thing, the limited expectations. She used to talk to him sometimes, and she’d written him pretty steadily while he was in the Corps. The last time he’d seen her was her high school graduation, three years back, it kind of hitting him out of the blue what a looker she was turning into, and her giving him a hug when he left that felt like something other than just goodbye. And she’d opened up a lot in her letters since then. Him too, really, going back and forth about some things he’d never gotten into with anybody else.
And now here she was, walking out with Esteban, and damn. He didn’t know what it was exactly, that line where someone’s a kid on one side of it and she’s a woman on the other. But she’d crossed it.
Griffin had plenty of dough saved from the Corps, there not being much to spend it on over in Sandland, so he was playing big shot. Dinner at Red Lobster out at the mall, and then the old Toyota dealership on New York Street that some guy’d made into a dance club. Juanita was turning some heads. Fuck that, she was turning all of them. And Griffin was falling for her. The first slow dance came on, Esteban clinched up with a girl he’d been working on since they arrived. Griffin stepped back, letting Juanita take the lead, to see if she wanted to stay out for the dance or sit it out. She took his hand, pulled him to her, and he held her as you held a woman. He felt the way she fit against him, and he wanted to say something, felt like he should say something. But she felt graceful and true in his arms and any words he thought to say seemed awkward and false. So he just held her and swayed to the music, his hand moving slowly up and down on her bare back, her backless dress open almost to her waist, hoping that the feeling of his hand on her skin was saying whatever he could not. Then he felt her lips brush against his neck as she stretched up for a minute on her toes, her mouth now right next to his ear, and she said, “I know. Me too.”
Halfway through the night, on the way to the men’s room, he told Esteban. “I think I’m getting a little thing for your sister, man. Maybe a big thing.”
Esteban grinned, slapped him on the shoulder. “Fuck, man, you just figuring that out? You two, you been a thing for a while. Better you than most of the scum in the neighborhood, dude. You gonna be a gentleman, right?”
“Part of the Marine code, hombre.”
They danced, they drank – it was the best night Griffin had had in a long time. Best night he’d had, period.
At closing time, Griffin, Esteban, and Juanita were walking out to the car. Halfway across the lot, a stretch Caddy cut them off. Tiny Hernandez and two of his goons got out. Griffin knew Hernandez ran the Latin Kings on the east side of Aurora. He was also the younger brother of Jamie Hernandez, who was a major dealer. Tiny looked like a human cement block – six feet tall, six feet thick, a flat, feral face on a stump neck.
“I been watching you, mamacita,” he said to Juanita. “You like the finest thing ever been in that dump. I’m gonna take you out, show you where the real players hang.”
“I’m not anybody’s mamacita,” Juanita said.
“Thanks for the offer, sport,” said Griffin. “But I don’t think she wants to go.”
“You got shit in your ears? I didn’t ask. Puta like that, she don’t know what she wants. Not till I give it to her.” Hernandez’s goons got a chuckle out of that.
Griffin caught the look from Esteban – no way was his sister getting in that car. And nothing good was going to come of waiting for the other side to make a move. Esteban yelled for Juanita to get inside, put his shoulder down and drove into the goon on the right – catching him in the gut, driving him back against the Caddy, hard. Griffin feinted toward Tiny, knowing the other goon would rush to help. Then he planted, turned and put the stiffened fingers of his right hand into the guy’s throat. Felt something crumple, guy’s trachea if he’d done it right. The way the guy went down, Griffin figured he was on his way to dead.
Griffin turned back to see Hernandez with his hand in his coat, a nine coming out. Griffin closed, locking both hands on the pistol, turning it down and in. Hernandez pulled the trigger, blowing a hole through the inside of his own thigh.
Griffin twisted the gun out of Hernandez’s hand as he went down. He turned to check on Esteban. The first goon had soaked up the slam against the car, and Esteban must have got in a shot to his face, because the goon’s nose was running blood. But the goon had forty pounds on Esteban. The goon got a knee up into Esteban’s groin, shoved him back, and pulled a gun.
Griffin shot him through the side of the head.
Hernandez was on the ground, cussing, blood arcing out of his thigh.
“You gonna die, you fuck. You know who I am? You gonna fucking die.”
“You first, sport,” said Griffin. “That’s your femoral artery emptying out there. Unless you’re up on your first aid, you got maybe two minutes before you bleed out.”
Hernandez looked down at the blood jetting out into the parking lot for a moment. Then he looked back up to Griffin. “Jesus, you gotta help me. I mean, this shit? We let it go, right? Shit happens. But you gotta help me.”
“No,” Griffin said, turning back toward the club where Juanita was waiting. “I don’t.”
Griffin had done all the killing, so he took the heat with the cops – said Esteban and Juanita had been inside, he’d gone out to get the car, Hernandez and his goons had said something about taking the girl, Griffin said they weren’t, and the shit hit the fan. The DA didn’t file any charges. The Aurora cops knew Hernandez, checked on Griffin’s military record, and they backed Griffin right down the line. But a week later, some dumb-ass kid, maybe sixteen, made a try for Griffin with a knife while Griffin was in the checkout line at Walgreens. He broke the kid’s arm and only had to twist it a little to discover word was out. Jamie Hernandez wanted Griffin’s head on a wall, and he’d pay top dollar to whoever delivered it. Even the Marines would be no good – Griffin had seen enough gang signs carved into enough latrines to know better.
Esteban and Juanita drove him to O’Hare the day he left for France.
“I owe you my life,” Esteban told him as they shook hands. “Anytime, anywhere, you need me, you call.”
Griffin nodded.
Juanita stepped up. “When the time is right, I’m here,” she said. She held Griffin’s face in her hands, and she kissed him, gently, but for a long time.
Hardin had been dreaming about that kiss for years.
Not always good dreams. Six months into his Legion hitch, Hardin felt clear enough to reach out to some of his Aurora contacts, just to touch base. Found out that Hernandez had killed Esteban a few months before. Which meant Juanita might be on his list, too. Made a call into the Aurora cops, but they told him Juanita had blown town, no sign Hernandez was looking for her. Just somebody at the club had told Hernandez that Esteban had been in the parking lot that night, been part of the scrape.
That put Esteban’s death on Hardin’s account. He’d skipped town, left him and Juanita behind. He’d thought about skipping out on the Legion, heading back to the US, making sure she was safe. But all that would do is put him back on Hernandez’s radar – and point Hernandez at Juanita. No, if she was safe, the best thing he could do was stay away from her.
Forever.
CHAPTER 17
“You’re one lucky fucker, Lynch,” said Detective Dick Karsten. He was an Area 2 cop Lynch knew going back to his Academy days. “Powers that be got a hard on for you. Every weird-ass case we get, they dumping it on you?”
Starshak had called Lynch and told him to get down and eyeball a crime scene on the old US Steel property on the far south side. Something about more .22s.
“Looks that way,” Lynch said. “How it’s been going? I hear you dumped that place up in Eagle River.” Karsten had flipped a handful of properties in the Northwoods over the years; guy knew his way around a toolbox. He’d helped Lynch out at his place a couple times, Lynch taking some time here and there over the years to pitch in up north.
“Sweet deal,” said Karsten. “Some trader started in on his log dream home on Big Arbor Vitae, over toward Minocqua. Know it?”
“Little west of St Germain? Yeah.”
“Place is like 3800 square feet. Guy had just got it enclosed when the market tanked. Foreclosure sharks were circling. Swapped my place for his. He still has his Northwoods love pad. I finish this out nice, I make a damn killing. Property’s got another little two-bedroom, three-season job on it, too, so I get things fixed up, I can parcel that off.”
“Sounds nice. You need some help up there, let me know.”
“Gets to where I need the unskilled labor, you’re my first call.”
Lynch laughed, looked past Karsten to where Bernstein had joined some crime-scene guys who were working around a body – big fat guy on his back. “So what have we got?”
“What you got here is Beans Garbanzo,” said Karsten.
Lynch’s face went hard. Garbanzo worked for Tony Corsco, head of the outfit in Chicago, the whole Midwest, actually. The gangbangers were bad enough, but Lynch understood them at least. You grow up in public housing, got an entire society shitting on you when they aren’t ignoring you, bad shit happens. But the fucking mob, a couple generations of wealth behind most of them, and they just keep going. Drugs, prostitution, protection, robbery, protection rackets, gambling – show them a human weakness and they’ll kill for a piece of it. Lynch had been picking up bodies with Corsco’s fingerprints on them his whole career, always watching the bastard skate. Watching the media play it like the guy was some kind of charming rogue, just another piece of local color.
Lynch remembered a night his second year out of the academy. Dead girl, fifteen years old. Her older sister waitressed at one of Corsco’s clubs, one of them where waitressing meant if Corsco wanted her on her knees giving some slimy bastard head as a favor, then that’s what she did. The older sister’d killed herself, but not, evidently before the little sister heard something. She started making some noise. A week later, Lynch is looking at her naked body in a North Side ally, not an inch of her without a bruise on it. Lynch was still in uniform at the time. Nobody ever came close to clearing the case.
What Lynch heard, though, was it was Corsco, personally. Raped her first, then took a bat to her.
“Garbanzo is Corsco muscle,” said Lynch.
“Yep. And down yonder where McCord is fucking around, you got Snakes DeGetano.”
“And they both got done with .22s?”
“I’ll let McCord fill you in on that. Don’t want to ruin his fun.” Karsten looked at his watch. “I’d stick around and help with the canvass, but canvass what, you know?” The empty US Steel site stretched almost to the horizon. “Damn, almost five. And with the cavalry here, I can make first pitch at Comiskey.”
“You mean the Cell, don’t you?” said Lynch.
“US Cellular Field my ass,” Karsten said. “Fucking deal will run out, somebody else’ll buy up the name. Be goddamn Kotex Field or something.”
“Be perfect for you pussy Sox fans,” Lynch said.
“Yeah, well, this pussy Sox fan is going to be at the game tonight. You’re gonna be here eyeballing goombah stiffs. Y’all have fun, now, you hear?”
Karsten took off. Lynch walked over and joined Bernstein.
“.22s?” Lynch asked.
“Three of them, nice grouping right in the forehead.”
“So what’s with all the blood?” Garbanzo had blood all down the front of his shirt, some more on his right leg from the knee down. Three to the head, guy should have been DOA right off. He wouldn’t have bled much, especially lying on his back.
“Some kind of trauma to the side of the head. Doesn’t look fatal, but he bled a good bit before he got shot.”
“You catch the hip holster?”
“The empty one? Yeah.”
Lynch turned to one of the techs. “You guys turn up any weapons?”
Guy shook his head.
Lynch looked down toward the second cluster of uniforms. “Guess we better go see what McCord has for us.”
It was almost half a mile down to the next body. Bernstein and Lynch stayed way to the right walking down. Little crime scene flags were sticking up out of the dirt every couple yards all the way there, and they didn’t want to step in any evidence.
DeGetano was also on his back, some blood on the front of his tracksuit from a wound in his neck. Lynch squatted down and saw a round hole. Shadow fell on him, and he could hear somebody chewing on something. McCord.
“OK, McCord, Karsten didn’t want to rain on your parade. So I give, what’s up?”
“The fat guy back up toward South Shore, he got it with a .22 for sure,” said McCord. “And what made me think maybe your guy again is there’s no powder, no stippling, nothing like that. So he got it from at least a little ways off, and the nice grouping looks a lot like your shelter guy. Now, the skinny guy here, this is real interesting. That wasn’t a gun at all.”
“I was thinking a stab wound of some kind.”
“Bingo,” said McCord.
“Except I haven’t seen a lot of round knives.”
McCord held up an evidence bag. “Killer was kind enough to leave the murder weapon in the guy’s neck.”
Lynch stood up, looked at the bag. “A pen?”
“Yep. Thought you’d like that.”
“Can I see that?” Bernstein said.
McCord handed him the bag.
“Air France,” Bernstein said. “Interesting.”
“Why?” Lynch asked.
“This Hardin guy? From Oprah? Before a couple nights ago, all we hear is he’s from Africa, right?”
“And?”
“And if you want to fly from Africa – or West Africa anyway – to the US, I’m thinking Air France may be your best bet.”
McCord bit another chunk off the Snickers bar he was working on. “Looks like we’ve got prints on the pen, so we’ll run that. If this Hardin’s in a database anywhere, you’ll have your answer. But if you want interesting, we got interesting. You get a look at the fat guy? The head trauma?”
“Yeah,” said Lynch. “Wondered about that.”
“OK, we got this one set of tire tracks that stop right here, skinny dead guy right next to them, some scuffing on the ground. The way the blood ran down the front of him, he was either sitting or standing when somebody stuck that pen in his throat, and he was dead or close to it once he hit the ground here. Otherwise we’d have more blood running down the sides of his neck. With the tire tracks and scuffing, I’m figuring he got it in the car, then got dumped here.”
McCord walked a few yards toward the lake, toward a pile of rubble. He pointed a few yards south. “We got one set of footprints to here, another that stops maybe five yards from old pen neck over there. Some scuffing on the ground here, some more over there, plus over there it looks like someone was down on the ground and there’s some blood – on the ground and on a couple of stones we found. You saw all the flags on your way down from the fat guy, right? Between here and the fat guy, we got a bit of a blood trail. Somebody was dripping. Not bad, not like shot, but dripping all the same.”
“Ah, fuck me,” said Lynch, seeing where this was headed.
McCord nodded. “Yep. Looks like somebody drove out here with these guys, stuck a pen in Skinny, dumped him, and then bounced a few rocks off the fat man. We’ll check the head wound, get some trace evidence, probably match it up to one of the rocks.”
“So some guy plays Nolan Ryan with Fatso way down here,” Lynch says, “then lets him walk most of the way back to South Shore before he drives up and shoots him?”
“Nope. Our tire tracks here? They loop around and head back out to South Shore. We’ve got Fat Guy’s footprints on top of the tire tracks in a couple of spots. So whoever did Skinny and roughed up Fat Guy, he left before fat guy walked back up there and got shot. About ten feet from Fat Guy’s body, you got another set of tracks that pulled up and then pulled away. Different tread, different wheelbase.”
“So we got Mr .22 showing up as a second act?” Lynch said.
“Looks that way,” said McCord.
Lynch blew out a breath, pursing his cheeks. “I notice Fatso’s got an empty holster. Is Skinny strapped?”
“Skinny’s got an empty shoulder rig. Haven’t done the formal test yet, but Skinny’s got some gunshot residue on his right hand. I could smell that.”
Lynch looked out at the lake.
“So some guy drives down here with Skinny and the Fat Man. Since they’ve both got holsters, we gotta figure they’re both armed. And I’m thinking our mystery guest isn’t, since he stabs Skinny in the neck with a pen instead of just shooting him. Skinny gets a shot off but misses. Then our guy disarms Skinny, disarms Fatso, throws rocks at him, gets back in the car, and leaves. Then Fatso walks back up toward South Shore, and Mr .22 pulls in, shoots Fatso dead, and he drives off.”
McCord shrugs. “How it adds up.”
Bernstein’s phone went off, the Kanye noise again.
“What the fuck is that?” McCord asked.
“Ring tone,” said Lynch. “He’s working on his street cred.”
“You threaten to shoot him yet?”
“Threatened to shoot the phone,” Lynch said. “He’s next.”
Lynch’s cell buzzed, he checked the ID. Liz. She was flying back in from her network gig that night, going to be in town for a couple of days. Between her book launch and the network gigs, it was getting hard to see her. Lynch was looking forward to it, though. He took a few steps away from Bernstein and McCord.
“Hey,” he said. “You at LaGuardia yet?”
“Yeah,” she said.
He could hear it in her voice. “But?” Lynch asked.
“But I’m on my way to LA.” A pause, like she wanted him to say something. He had nothing to say.
“I’m sorry, John; it’s some film deal thing. My agent just dumped it on me an hour ago. I know this sucks. It’s just, with everything going on right now, so much crap is up in the air.”
“Yeah,” Lynch said. “Look, I can’t really talk now. I’m down on the South Shore looking at a couple of stiffs.”
“You’re angry.”
Lynch exhaled. “Not at you. Just, ah hell. Call me tonight if you get a chance.” Lynch thinking the “if you get a chance” was a bit of a cheap shot even as he said it. She’d call. He knew she’d call.
“I will. I’ll call tonight.” In the background, some airport PA noise. “We’re boarding,” she said, “I gotta go.”
Another pause.
“Are we OK?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Lynch said, trying to sound like he meant it. She ended the call.
Lynch looked out at the lake. What he’d had with Johnson the last year, it was something he’d given up on. Figured it just wasn’t in the cards, maybe just wasn’t in him. Gotten used to being alone, stopped really trying not to be. Got to where it didn’t matter that much, sort of the way, if you don’t eat long enough, you might be starving, but you don’t really feel hungry anymore. He was hungry now. He’d gotten used to her being in his life, in his bed. Now, more and more, she wasn’t.
It had been kind of exciting at first, Johnson hitting the big time. He’d flown out to New York with her once, been wined and dined with some of the network people, the publishing people. Lynch getting the star treatment too, some guy from Harcourt and Johnson’s agent tag-teaming him, trying to talk him into doing a book too.
At the hotel that night, some five-star joint, Johnson had put her two cents in too, not really understanding why he didn’t want a bite at the apple, Lynch not sure how to explain it, just that it didn’t sit right with him for some reason, Johnson taking that as a shot at her, not how he meant it. Been a little tense then, not a fight exactly, but Lynch looked back at that moment as a kind of divide. Things had looked up until then. Seemed like they’d gone downhill since.
Lynch had read it wrong, figured it was a temporary deal, figured it would calm down. It hadn’t. Johnson was playing in a different league now. It wasn’t just the book. She was smart, beautiful – the Hastings case had put her on the radar, but she had the chops to stay on it. The Trib was pretty much a part-time gig now. TV was the big thing. And TV, for a political reporter, meant Washington, meant New York. Chicago was flyover country.
Lynch knew she was working at it, spending more time in town than was good for her, probably. And shit, she’d won the media lottery, it’s not like he expected her to give it all up. Nobody’s fault, nothing to be done about it. Didn’t mean he had to like it.
Lynch had a couple tickets to the Hawks game for tomorrow night – Minnesota in town, and Johnson being a Minneapolis girl, she liked her hockey. It was going to be a surprise. Took his phone back up, dug up Dickey Reagan’s number, reporter at the Sun-Times Lynch went way back with. Dickey was a hockey guy. Lynch figured he throw Dickey a bone, stay on his good side.
Bernstein worked the phone all the way back to the station, getting background on Hardin while Lynch turned the facts over in his head. The body count was now four: three with .22s, one with a ballpoint. He had a rich trader, an African refugee, and two mob soldiers. On top of that, he had a witness that put Hardin in Stein’s box right before the first killing, and now he had a video that tied Hardin to a movie star who happened to be in town. The only other time the two of them had been in the same place at the same time, far as anyone knew, was five years ago in Africa, and the two of them had gone at it then. This Membe guy was from Africa, but better than a thousand miles from Darfur. What’s that song from that kid’s show? “One of these things is not like the other?” Christ, Lynch would be happy if any of these things had anything to do with anything. This was like a goddamn random clue generator or something.
