Текст книги "Brush Back"
Автор книги: Sara Paretsky
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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 28 страниц)
ROAD TEST
“Vic, Vic, you’re okay.”
I stood, wincing as my wounds hit me, folded her against me. “I’m okay, better now you’re safe.”
“I was so scared, I was afraid they would kill you and find me and kill me. But I ran in the street and found a police car. You’re not okay, you’re bleeding into my hair, I can feel it.”
I kept her close to me, bleeding nose or not. One of the officers started talking to his lapel mike, the other shone a flash across the vacant lot, then at the punk whose head I’d jumped on.
“What happened here?” The officer knelt, fingers on the creep’s neck, feeling for a pulse.
“Three punks jumped us. This one had my goddaughter on the ground. I managed to break free long enough to get him off her. Is he dead?”
“Nope. Pity. He’s an Insane Dragon, you can tell by the tattoos.”
Under his floodlight I saw the dragons circling the creep’s arms. He even had a dragon head on his neck, the tongue licking toward an ear.
“You need a doctor, but we need a statement, too,” the cop added.
Three more squad cars pulled up, half-blocking Commercial, their strobes pulsing like so many giant fireflies. Three officers picked their way through the rubble in the vacant lot. One of them stood in the road, directing traffic around the squad cars. Now that the police were here, passersby were starting to gather, to murmur versions of the fight to each other.
Two officers kept an eye on the growing crowd: there might be any number of Insane Dragons eager to take action against someone who’d brought down one of their own.
An SUV pulled up behind the squad car and Vince Bagby came over to the sidewalk. “Christ, Warshawski. You get involved in World War Three?”
“Sorry, sir, this is a crime– Oh, Vince—it’s you. Hey, man. You know her?”
“Boom-Boom Warshawski’s cousin, Knute. She was just at our Say, Yes! meeting with this young lady. That your Mustang that got slashed out front, Warshawski? That sucks. You should’ve come back and gotten me to give you gals a lift. This street isn’t safe after dark, you should know that.”
Vince’s arrival moved the police machinery a bit faster. Within a couple of minutes, Bernie and I were in the back of a squad car, heading to the Fourth District. The responding unit wanted to take us straight to a hospital, but I knew what that would mean: a long night in an ER far from home. I promised we would get to a doctor as soon as we were back north.
Neither Conrad nor my dad’s old crony, Sid, was on duty this evening, which meant we gave our statements without a lot of extraneous name-calling or chitchat. A sergeant brought me an ice pack for my eye and nose, and reiterated the responding unit’s urgent recommendation that I get medical attention. There are legal reasons for that aside from humanitarian ones: if either Bernie or I had serious injuries from the attack, it upped the charges against the Insane Dragon and his buddies. It also made the state’s case stronger in court.
Bagby hung around the station until we were done, telling Knute he would drive us home. I didn’t like it; I would like to have had a cast-iron assurance neither he nor Scanlon—or Thelma or Cardenal—had played a role in slashing my tires as a prelude to assault. However, Knute accepted the offer gladly. Spring nights in South Chicago, they could ill afford sending a squad car twenty miles across town to deliver us.
During the drive, Bagby tried to make conversation, but I was phoning: Lotty, to let her know we were coming to her hospital’s emergency room; Mr. Contreras, who was predictably distressed; Jake, ditto, although less volubly, and finally, hardest call, Bernie’s parents.
“We’re going to pack you up and send you back to Quebec tomorrow,” I said to Bernie as I typed in the Fouchards’ number.
“No! I’m not going.”
“Cara, I endangered your life tonight– Arlette? Hi. It’s V. I. Warshawski in Chicago . . . Not so good. I took Bernie with me to Boom-Boom’s and my old neighborhood, which is serious gang turf. We were attacked and we were lucky—”
Bernie leaned over from the backseat and grabbed the phone from me. “Maman? C’est moi.” The conversation went on in French, which I don’t speak.
“Out of curiosity, what were you doing at Say, Yes!?” Bagby asked.
“Admiring Scanlon’s organizational ability,” I said. “Energetic guy. Runs the insurance agency, keeps tabs on the kids, helps out Nina Quarles’s law clients while she’s scavenging rags in Paris.”
“You may be beat up, but you keep your sense of humor. I admire that,” Vince said. “Rory’s a good guy. Never married, gives everything to the community.”
We were on the Ryan, all sixteen lanes moving at headlong speed. Bagby was a good driver; all those years wrestling trucks into submission, he could talk and maneuver around knots of cars without losing track of either.
I leaned back against the headrest, holding the ice pack the cops had given me against my face. Lotty had been brusque on the phone, but she agreed to get me priority seating at the hospital. You’re safe? The child is safe? I’ll try to be thankful for that.
“Who’ll take over the agency when Scanlon retires?” I asked Bagby.
“Can’t imagine Scanlon quitting,” Bagby said. “As to who will take over the business, hard to know. I think he keeps hoping one of the kids he’s grooming in Say, Yes! will have the right combination of skills.”
“And your daughter Delphina will take over Bagby Haulage?”
“She’s got to stop thinking about boys and start thinking about business. Or maybe she’ll think about a boy who wants to go into trucking. How about you? You have a kid to take over your agency when you retire?”
“Nope. But maybe young Bernie will when she gets tired of hockey—she’s tough enough.”
“You have a husband who’s going to be shocked by your broken nose?”
“Are you asking whether I’m married, or whether my husband is shockable?” I said.
Vince laughed again. “Married?”
“No longer.”
Bernie handed me back the phone. She’d finished her conversation with her mother, but Arlette wanted to talk to me.
“Bernadine wants to stay in Chicago. Me, I say no. Pierre will fly to Chicago as soon as possible: he is scouting in Florida right now. But please, please do not let her go near these gang neighborhoods. I know she is imagining that she is—oh, what is the word, I don’t speak enough English anymore—where you imagine someone else’s spirit is living in you—”
“Channeling?” I suggested.
“Yes, yes. She thinks she is channeling Boom-Boom, but I cannot have her living the life you and Boom-Boom did. Comprends?”
“Yes, I agree, which is why I don’t want her to stay on.”
Bernie announced loudly from the backseat that she was fine, she had ras-le-bol with the discussion. Arlette and I finally bade each other an uneasy good-bye, neither of us happy with me or the situation.
We’d reached the Montrose exit. Beth Israel is on Wilson, a bit farther north and four miles to the east. Bagby reached the hospital without asking me for directions or consulting a GPS. When I complimented him, he gave his easy grin and said he’d been driving the city since he was sixteen.
“I’m better than a London taxi driver, Warshawski. Bet you can’t name a road in the six counties that I can’t find.”
He pulled into the emergency room entrance at Beth Israel and helped us out of the Patriot. Mr. Contreras was on the lookout and surged forward, exclaiming and scolding at the same time.
“The doc called over, doll, they got an advanced practice nurse standing by and everything else, give them your insurance card and you’ll get to the head of the line, where you belong, anyway. What’d those SOBs do to your eye?”
“Right hook, I think,” I said. “Thank God they didn’t have knucks or razors.”
“And you, peanut?” Mr. Contreras held Bernie at arm’s length. “Scrapes on your face, nothing broken.”
“Vic saved me, Uncle Sal, I don’t know what she did, this huge guy was on top of me but she got him off and—and—” She burst into tears, all the fear and helplessness of the last few hours pouring out in body-shaking sobs.
Jake had been waiting on the sideline for Mr. Contreras to get over his first burst of relief. While the old man comforted Bernie, he pulled me close to him. The pressure of his shoulder against my face made my swollen eye throb, but I clung to him.
“The first time I met you, you had me hustle you out of the building in my bass case. I thought that was the end of your adventures, not chapter 237 in the 1001 Close Shaves of Warshawskazade,” he murmured into my hair.
He led me to the counter, keeping an arm around me while I handed in my insurance cards, reminded the intake clerk that I was supposed to see someone ASAP. Lotty had paved the way smoothly: Bernie and I were taken into the examining area, shunted off for X-rays, given eye exams, salves for the raw skin, tetanus shots, a little cocaine up the nose for me to stop the bleeding.
Bernie had some deep bruising from where the Insane Dragon had been pounding on her, but he hadn’t been on top of her long enough for other more horrible damage. We’d both been exceptionally lucky.
Bernie was finished before me. I stayed to go over my police report with the cop on duty at Beth Israel, but Mr. Contreras took Bernie home.
I didn’t want her spending the night on my living room couch. I have good security, steel-plated doors and infrared motion detectors, but if I had become a target, I didn’t want Bernie near me.
As the old man got ready to leave with Bernie, I asked if he could put her up in the room his grandsons use when they visit. He brightened measurably. When Jake and I reached home about an hour later, Mr. Contreras was heating up a pot of soup, pulling out clean sheets and giving Mitch the command to patrol.
“You don’t really think some gang member is going to trek all the way up here to finish off the two of you, do you?” Jake asked. “I thought they liked to stay on their home ground.”
“I have the jitters right now. Besides, I’m responsible for her safety. I shouldn’t have taken her with me to the South Side today at all—I was annoyed that she quit her job for no reason other than she didn’t like getting up early. I was punishing her by not letting her roam the city shopping or something, and now I feel like a creep.”
“Oh, Victoria Iphigenia, you don’t control the Universe. You don’t know what might have happened to Bernadine if she’d been roaming the city on her own. Perhaps you saved her from a worse disaster by being present to protect her in the one that befell you.”
He stroked my swollen eye. “I agree with the cop down there—it’s a pity you didn’t kill the guy whose head you jumped on. Bernie was resourceful, too. She didn’t panic, she flagged a squad car. The fact that she acted, that will help keep her from lasting trauma, at least that’s what the self-help articles I read in airline magazines tell me.”
I tried to respond in kind, tried to get out of my self-recriminatory mode, but I wasn’t doing well these days, as a detective, or a guardian.
CHIN MUSIC
In the morning, I called a towing service to haul the Mustang up to my mechanic. Given the neighborhood where I’d left the car, and the distance, the cost was going to be significant. A further depressant.
Jake offered to drive me to Lotty’s clinic so she could inspect me in person. We checked on Bernie on our way out. She was still deeply asleep, with Mitch and Mr. Contreras both keeping an anxious eye on her.
When Jake dropped me at Lotty’s, he fretted about leaving me on my own, but he had students waiting for him at Northeastern. I assured him I could get around with public transportation and taxis and that I wouldn’t be going far—I don’t bounce back from street fights the way I used to.
I dozed in the waiting room until Lotty had time to see me. She studied the reports from the Beth Israel ER on her computer screen, studied my face, agreeing the swelling had gone down, that there was no damage to the cornea or retina, took the cocaine-laced padding out of my nose, assured me that I would live to be scarred another day.
She advised me not to drive for a day or two, or at least to stay off the expressways. “And—I know caution is foreign to your nature, but Victoria—please!”
She didn’t say anything else, not the words of anger or fear she sometimes gives after an injury. Somehow that made the encounter more painful.
I walked to Western Avenue from her clinic to pick up a southbound bus. All my muscles felt stiff and sore; the half-mile walk helped pinpoint every blow I’d absorbed last night. When the bus finally lumbered to the stop nearest my office, all I wanted was to lie down and sleep, but I went into the coffee bar across the street for an espresso. Maybe caffeine could compensate for painkillers and pain.
I took a second coffee to my office, did half an hour of gentle stretches, then spent what was left of the morning at work, cleaning up jobs I could manage online. In the middle of a complicated search for funds that a partner had embezzled from his small business, my phone rang. The caller ID was blocked.
“This Warshawski?”
The voice was hoarse, hard to hear.
“Think about your old man, Warshawski, think how he got treated when they sent him to West Englewood. He made the wrong people angry, and so have you. Stop before they do something worse.”
He hung up before I could say anything. My computer records incoming calls. Not legal, I know that, don’t lecture me. I played the call back four times but it didn’t tell me any more than I’d known when I heard it live.
I fingered my swollen eye. My dad had been transferred abruptly, to one of the city’s most dangerous districts, without any explanation I’d ever heard. He was a good and experienced beat cop, able to develop relationships in even the most difficult neighborhood. It wasn’t the gangbangers who almost did him in, but his coworkers. During his time in Englewood, he was shot at five times. Each time, the dispatcher claimed Tony had never radioed for backup. He found a dead rat in his locker seven times, piss in his coffee cup many times. Most terrifying, he’d found his photo on the cutouts at the shooting range.
The first shooting occurred the summer after Boom-Boom made his home ice debut. I’d finished my third year at the University of Chicago. That summer, I was working as a secretary in the political science department, commuting from home to save rent money. My dad was on the graveyard shift, and in those pre–cell phone days I spent my nights on the foldout bed in the living room, too worried to go up the stairs to my own bed, never fully asleep, half-waiting for the phone to ring with news of disaster.
Tony never told me what had gone wrong, which power broker he’d pissed off. Someone in South Chicago remembered after all this time. And knew that I’d been attacked last night. So someone had persuaded the Insane Dragons to slash my tires and jump Bernie and me. Or they were taking advantage of the attack to threaten me.
My left eye began to throb. I lay on the cot in my back room with ice on my face, trying to imagine which of my cast of characters could have known my dad, which one of them would have known why he’d been flung to the hyenas.
My cell phone woke me an hour later. I was disoriented, my hair and neck wet from the melted ice. I struggled upright in my dark back room and dug my phone out of my jeans.
It was Bobby Mallory, my dad’s old friend. He’d been one of Tony’s protégés when he joined the force, but he was a savvy player and he was finishing his career at a command post in the shiny new headquarters building on Michigan Avenue.
“Vicki, what happened last night? My secretary saw your name on an incident report and passed it on to me. Why were you tangling with the Insane Dragons?”
Bobby is the only person on the planet who is allowed to call me Vicki. I gave him a thumbnail sketch of the old Stadium events, with a detour to talk about Bernie—Bobby had been a regular at the old Stadium when Boom-Boom and Pierre Fouchard skated together.
“Bobby, I just had a threatening phone call, telling me to remember what happened to Tony when he made the wrong people angry, warning me that the same thing could happen to me. Tony never would tell me what had happened. Do you know?”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line, then Bobby said heavily, “I can’t tell you.”
“Can’t or won’t?” I demanded.
“Don’t ride me, Vicki. I was in my first command and your father was protecting me, not wanting me to know things that might make me think I had to act.”
I didn’t say anything. Bobby was leaving something out; I could hear it in the silences, in the awkward ways he was choosing his words.
“I got him out of Englewood as soon as I could, okay?” he said, close to shouting.
“Okay,” I said, very quiet. “I always thought it was the Second Area torture ring that did him in, but my phone call was so specific to South Chicago. Did my dad do something that bent Rory Scanlon out of shape?”
“Scanlon was helping your cousin get his career off the ground. He wouldn’t have done that if he’d had a beef with your dad, or vice versa,” Bobby said sharply.
“Scanlon does a lot of youth work,” I said. “He likes adolescent boys who are involved in sports.”
“A man can care about kids without there being anything dirty involved,” Bobby growled.
“Tony wouldn’t have stood for it,” I said. “It’s the only thing I can think of—Scanlon’s the one person I’ve been talking to who knew Tony from the neighborhood—you know Tony never served at the South Chicago district, but of course people in the neighborhood came to him, used him as a kind of unofficial ombudsman with the Department.”
“I called to see if you were all right, not to hear you digging up filth about a guy who has stayed in a neighborhood that most people with a choice ran away from. Including you.”
“Yeah, I’m the original turncoat. Everyone is reminding me of it. What about Elgin Grigsby?”
“Judge Grigsby?” Bobby sputtered. “Why not the governor? Why not the president? Why limit your accusations to local figures?”
My nose started to bleed again. I tilted my head back, advice from Lotty, and walked to the hallway refrigerator I share with Tessa for more ice.
“Or Ira Previn,” I said. “The priest at the local parish, he was cordial the first time I saw him, but now he’s eyeing me as if I were, I don’t know, Martina Luther. The guy who was found in the pet coke three days ago did odd jobs at the church, and he hung out with someone named Boris Nabiyev, who looks—”
“Vicki! What the hell are you doing in that rat burrow? How do you know Fugher hung out with Nabiyev?”
Bobby knew Fugher’s name, which was interesting: I hadn’t said it, but that meant it was a high-profile case. Or maybe it was the hideous and unusual circumstances of his death.
“I saw them together,” I said.
“Does Conrad Rawlings know that?” he demanded.
“I might not have mentioned it to him,” I said, annoyed that my voice sounded small.
“I’m hanging up. I’m hanging up so you can call the Fourth District and tell Lieutenant Rawlings. Nabiyev is one of the pieces of garbage the Russians tossed our way when the Iron Curtain rusted away. We’ve never been able to make anything stick against him, but I can name at least seven murders I am dead sure he committed. All of them as ugly or uglier as putting a man into a heap of coal dust to suffocate to death. You do not go near him. You stay far away from him and leave him to people who wear body armor and have thirteen thousand officers who will come to their aid if they’re in trouble.”
He hung up. I called Conrad, who started the conversation with a genial question about my health after last night’s attack. However, when he heard about Nabiyev, and that I hadn’t told him when I saw him earlier in the week, he shouted that if the Insane Dragons hadn’t already broken my nose he’d drive up to Humboldt Park and do it for me.
“I don’t know why you think you can say the first thing that comes into your head when you talk to me,” I said, “but threatening me or anyone with violence is vile. If you ever say anything like that to me again, we will never speak unless we are in court at the same time.”
He paused. “I’m sorry, Vic, but—crap! Nabiyev! He’s Uzbeki Mob, he’s—”
“No excuse for threatening me,” I snapped. “I didn’t know his name when you and I talked, nor that he was with the Mob—which I only just learned this second from Captain Mallory. Besides which, you were skating a pretty thin line with me, dragging me across town, treating me like a hostile witness, then dropping me twenty miles from home without a car but with a smart-assed comment. I’m tired of this behavior. It’s been eight years since you took a bullet that you wouldn’t have taken if you’d treated my investigation with respect. Get over it.”
He apologized stiffly. “Can you prove that Nabiyev was with Fugher?”
I texted him the photo I’d taken outside Wrigley Field.
“Before you hang up, how are you involved with him, anyway?” Conrad asked.
“I’m not. I’m looking for Fugher’s nephew, who’s been missing for over a week.”
And whose path very easily could have crossed Nabiyev’s, since both worked at the same job site.
“What are you talking about? The guy doesn’t have any living relatives.”
I’d slipped there, forgetting Viola’s panicked pleas not to tell the police about Sebastian. “Everyone has some living relative, even if it’s a third cousin ten times removed. Speaking of which, the Insane Dragons who jumped Bernadine Fouchard and me last night—have you found the two that ran off?”
“No, and the one you pounded has a broken jaw, so he isn’t saying much.”
“I’d like to know who hired them.”
“The Dragons maim and kill without needing anyone to hire them,” Conrad said.
“That’s what I thought last night. But about half an hour ago someone called to tell me that if I didn’t want the same treatment my dad got, namely my face on shooting range targets, I should stop annoying powerful people.”
“Did your caller tie the threat to last night’s attack?”
“Not directly, but—”
“What exactly did he say?”
I played the recording for him. Aside from a dry reminder about how illegal that was, Conrad said, “That wasn’t Nabiyev—he has a pretty strong accent. You do annoy powerful people, Vic. What are you working besides Guzzo and this alleged nephew of Fugher?”
“The only powerful person I work for is Darraugh Graham, and I’m not doing anything sensitive for him right now. But last night, right before we were assaulted, we were in a meeting with Rory Scanlon, Vince Bagby and the woman who runs the law office where Spike Hurlihey has ties. Father Cardenal was also there.”
“If I saw Rory Scanlon breaking into the safe at Saint Eloy’s, I still wouldn’t believe he was a criminal,” Conrad said. “I’d know he had a good reason for it.”
“Criminals always have a reason for breaking the law—usually because they think they’re better than the people whose lives they’re destroying.”
“You cut a wide swath yourself, Warshawski, so careful who you sling mud at.” He hung up.
