Текст книги "Brush Back"

Автор книги: Sara Paretsky

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

FLORAL OFFERING

Conrad hung up without remembering to ask about Fugher’s nephew. He wouldn’t forget, but if he dug up Fugher’s adoption, and his birth family, and found Viola, he might also find Sebastian. Which would be a relief. If the police took over the hunt for Sebastian I would for once get out of their way with a good grace.

I looked again at the newsprint lists I’d made yesterday. I needed to figure out which of these players knew something about my dad, which of them might have called to threaten me. And had one of them orchestrated last night’s attack?

It was a fact that my car had been disabled, forcing Bernie and me to take to the street. Which meant the personal attack was connected to the vandalism, whether thought up by the Dragons on their own, or egged to it by someone else.

Joel Previn had told me about the head-butting Mandel and McClelland encouraged their associates to go through when they handed out cases. I’d also witnessed Ira’s contempt for his son. Would either father or son have been so angry or threatened by my questions that they’d sic thugs on me?

Joel was passive enough to let someone else do his dirty work, but he’d spilled out his rage and self-loathing to me; I didn’t think he’d feel he had to maim or kill me.

But what about his father? Ira, the hero of workers and civil libertarians, it was painful to believe he’d cross that line between civility and ferality. He was so highly regarded, especially on the South Side, that I couldn’t believe he’d risk his reputation to hire thugs. On the other hand, there was a connection between him and Rory Scanlon: Judge Grigsby, who’d presided over Stella’s murder trial, had huffed to me about his friendship with Ira.

None of them would give me a convincing reason why the partners took on the defense of Annie’s killer. Was that the secret Ira, or Grigsby or Scanlon himself, was afraid I’d ferret out?

It seemed far-fetched, but the whole situation was beyond my understanding. The order of protection I’d been served to keep me from Stella, and now, the addition of Betty and Frank and their children’s names to the order, was infuriating. I couldn’t talk to them, or pound some semblance of the truth out of Frank—maybe just as well, since my pounding muscles were wobbly today.

My mechanic called as I was uselessly churning my mind. Luke Edwards makes Eeyore sound like Doris Day.

“Vic, that Mustang of yours just arrived at my place. Why’d you leave it down south all night? It’s missing the hood, the battery, the wheels and the dashboard. Besides all that, the hoses need replacing, and you’ve got 132,000 miles on it. You ever hear the word ‘maintenance’?”

The news made me feel so tired I rested my head on the desk. “You are a ray of sunshine, Luke, no matter what anyone tells you.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean? I’m merely telling you the story of your car. Why don’t you get something big and unbreakable, like, I don’t know, a decommissioned army tank. Since I’ve known you, you’ve totaled a Trans Am, an Omega, a Lynx and now this Mustang. You want me to try to repair it, it’s going to cost more than the car is worth. You gotta learn to drive a car in a way that keeps the engine—”

I sat up again. “This car was parked at a curb when all this damage happened. Even if I was Danica Patrick, I couldn’t have kept punks from stripping it.”

He grumbled that Danica Patrick wouldn’t have left her car overnight where vandals could attack it, but agreed to hold the Mustang until my insurance adjuster could get to his garage. I sometimes think Luke’s parents named him that because the sound makes you think “lugubrious,” but he’s a demon mechanic, and charges less than the dealer’s shop.

I had hoped the Mustang would make it to 175,000, but maybe the adjuster would disagree with Luke and offer to fork over six or seven thousand for repairs. Or for scrap. I got up and hobbled around my office, working the stiffness out of my joints again. As I circled back to my desk, someone rang the outside door. Tessa wasn’t in today; I went to the intercom.

Delivery for V. I. Warshawski, flowers. It was a big package, covered in florist paper. I told the delivery guy to unwrap it so I could see it on my camera feed. Sure enough, it was an elaborate arrangement of spring flowers, not a sawed-off shotgun or an RPG launcher.

I went down the hall, smiling to myself: Jake had been feeling sorry for me. When I tipped the guy and brought the flowers back to my office, I was startled to see that they were from Vince Bagby. Startled and wistful. Jake had other ways of showing his love, but flowers would have made a nice gesture.

Don’t let last night turn you against the South Side. Most of us are decent hardworking people. Sorry about your car—we can lend you a truck if you need wheels.

I smiled again, but I also taped the card to the newsprint where I’d written Bagby’s name. Under it I’d noted that he’d shown up right after the cops last night, that he knew Nabiyev and Jerry Fugher but had pretended not to, that Nabiyev had been driving one of his trucks up by Wrigley Field. And he already knew my car had been stripped. A big bunch of peonies and iris did not make these facts go away.

Is he attracted to me, or trying to distract me? I printed under the card.

MIXING IT UP

Sturlese Cement, Paving Illinois and the World, had their offices on the far northwest side of the city, a difficult destination on public transportation. I stopped at Luke’s garage, to look at the remains of my poor old Mustang, which was a heartbreaking sight, and to rent one of his loaners. He let me take a Subaru, with his usual animadversions on my driving. In addition to taking the wheels, the dashboard, the hood and the battery from my car, thieves had helped themselves to most of what was in it, except the towels I carry for my dogs. My hard hat was still in the backseat, as well. I put those into the Subaru, with Luke telling me the upholstery better not be covered in dog hair on my return, swallowed a few ibuprofen and headed north and west.

Even without Lotty’s adjuration, I would have stuck to side streets: simply moving my head between the side mirrors started the throbbing in my eye again. Spenser never complained about pain, I reminded myself, nor Marlowe, let alone Kate Fansler. Suck it up, Warshawski, don’t let those WASPs show up the Pollacks.

For the last few blocks, I followed a train of Sturlese trucks, with their distinctive blue lines weaving around their cement mixers. When we got to the Sturlese yard, the trucks peeled off to the left, where they could take on a fresh load, while I followed signs on the right to the office and visitors’ parking.

Trucks dig heavy ruts. Even at five miles an hour, I bounced enough to make my nose start bleeding. I pulled into one of the visitors’ spaces and studied myself in the rearview mirror. Blood wasn’t gushing down my face, but a large red stain covered my upper lip. Fatigue and pain had turned my olive skin an unhealthy whitish-gray. The blood added a nice touch of color, but it might also distract people from anything I had to say. I blotted it away, combed my hair, fingered the purple around my eye. Ready as I’d ever be.

On my way up the walk to the entrance I passed a silver Dodge SRT8. I squinted through the tinted windows. It had real gauges, not an iPad screen, satisfactory for a muscle car. Maybe if Frank Guzzo paid my outstanding bill I could afford a set of hubcaps.

I sighed and went on into the nondescript building that housed the offices: a working plant doesn’t waste money on corporate frills. No one staffed the entrance, but a signboard listed offices by their function, from Information Technology to sales offices for private, industrial or commercial ventures. I found Human Resources, second floor, and climbed a flight of bare metal stairs.

At the HR office, a man in a hard hat was arguing with a woman behind a gunmetal desk: he needed two more hours to round out a full workweek, but she wasn’t budging. “Sorry, Arnie, not my call, you know that. You gotta do it through dispatch.”

“Mavis, I wouldn’t be here if Shep had given me the hours, but it’s the difference between coverage and the exchanges, you know that.”

“I do know it, which is why I can’t fudge your hours: Mr. Sturlese audits those time sheets himself, and I cannot go into the computer—” She caught sight of me and broke off to ask what I needed.

The man in the hard hat moved aside so I could approach the desk.

“I’m looking for Sebastian Mesaline,” I said.

“Not on our payroll,” Mavis said.

“He was being considered for a job at Sturlese.”

“I never heard of him. They never asked me to put him in the system.” Mavis crossed her arms, her mouth set in an uncompromising line: she was queen of her fief and questions about her rule were not welcome.

“Could you look him up? Maybe someone else put him in without consulting you.”

I spelled the name. Mavis’s nostrils flared—she didn’t like being challenged, but I leaned over the desk, trying to look authoritative. Maybe I just looked scary, because she typed in Mesaline, grumbling under her breath.

“Told you!” She turned the monitor so I could see it, triumph in her face. No results for M-E-S-A-L-I-N-E. Make sure you are spelling the name correctly or start a new search.

“Who are you?” a voice demanded behind me.

I turned around to see a man about my age with a hard square face, white shirt and tie but no jacket—the uniform of managers or engineers at industrial plants.

“She came in here demanding information about some guy who never worked here,” Mavis said.

“Sebastian Mesaline,” I said. “Someone told me Sturlese might be offering him a job.”

“You his ma, checking up on her boy?” the man said.

“Nope. I’m a private investigator, looking for Mr. Mesaline.” I pulled out a card. “And you are?”

While the man frowned over my card, Arnie slipped past him into the corridor.

“You with the auto parts Warshawskis or the hockey?”

“I’m with the private investigating Warshawskis,” I said. “Looking for Sebastian Mesaline.”

“People must not want to tell you about him, if that’s how you got beat up so bad.”

I smiled. “The guy on the other end is in intensive care today, so it doesn’t hurt as much as you might think. And you are?”

He frowned some more, as if worried that revealing his name might be a sign of weakness. “Brian Sturlese. I manage this facility, and I can promise you that kid doesn’t work here.”

“Who said he was a kid?” I asked.

Sturlese gave a fake laugh. “Figure of speech.”

“What about Boris Nabiyev? He knows Mr. Mesaline because they’ve worked together on the Virejas Tower. Would Nabiyev have offered Sebastian Mesaline a job without consulting you?”

“Nabby isn’t on the payroll,” Sturlese said, flashing a warning look at Mavis. “He does freelance projects for us from time to time. Maybe one of my brothers sent him to Virejas Tower, to oversee our part of the pour.”

Mavis didn’t need any warning glares; at Nabiyev’s name she’d become a whirlwind of efficient administrator, typing so fast her fingers blurred on the keyboard, swiveling to consult documents in a filing cabinet and returning to her keyboard without looking up.

“Going back to your idea that Sebastian Mesaline is a young guy, a kid, I’m wondering if Mr. Nabiyev talked about him, if maybe he said something that stuck in your mind even if you don’t remember exactly what.”

Sturlese debated that point with himself and decided it was okay to answer. “Could be. There was a young civil engineer at the Virejas site who approached him about a job here, but Nabiyev thought he was a lightweight, and now that you mention it, it could have been this boy Sebastian.”

I nodded judicially, as if Sturlese had made a credible argument and I believed him. “Sebastian Mesaline has been missing for over a week. Is Mr. Nabiyev here now? I’d like to know the last time he saw Mr. Mesaline.”

“He isn’t here, but I’ll definitely tell him you were asking.”

I thanked Sturlese, as if he were doing me a favor, instead of helping me paint a bigger target on my head so that Nabiyev wouldn’t have any trouble spotting me when he came after me.

“If that’s all, we’re running a plant here and everyone needs to get back to work,” Sturlese said.

I bade him a polite farewell, but stopped outside the office, back against the wall, to hear what he had to say next. It was a sharp question to Mavis about what else I had said and what she had told me.

“Honest, Mr. Sturlese, she came in all huffy and puffy, wanting to know about Sebastian Mesaline, but I couldn’t tell her anything because I don’t know anything.”

“Has Nabby been around today?” Sturlese asked.

“I—he came in for a cash advance about an hour ago, but I think maybe he took off again?”

Sturlese grunted. I trotted back to the stairwell and managed to get down to the landing before he came out to the hall. Once outside, I slowed down: jogging only made my head feel worse. I trudged to my car, wondering what I’d accomplished—besides waving my arms like a demented matador in the face of a rogue bull. When I’d left Sturlese and was on Harlem Avenue, I pulled over, leaning back in the seat, pinching my nose to stop the bleeding.

The revving of a heavy engine made me look up. The driver of the silver SRT was honking at the inbound chain of cement trucks, and then gunning the engine to dart around them. A Subaru is no match for a muscle car, but I followed it down Harlem Avenue as best I could, helped by the thick traffic and stoplights—although the SRT was essentially ignoring both. I got hung up in traffic at Foster, about a mile south of the plant, and lost him.

This stretch of Harlem is one long mall. I ended up driving more than a mile before I came to an east-west through street. I was craving sleep, driving with the windows open, hoping the cold air would keep me alert, when it started to rain. I knew what Luke would have to say if I let the Subaru’s upholstery get damp so I rolled up the windows and tried singing in an effort to stay awake.

It was only a fluke that made me look to my left as I passed the Firestone outlet near Wilson. The SRT was pulling up in front of an “all you can eat” Thai buffet in a nearby strip mall.

I forgot my wounds and drove to the next mall, where I parked in the middle of a cluster of cars. One of the many items I’d lost in my Mustang’s dismemberment was a set of Bushnell night-vision binoculars. And an umbrella. Fortunately I was outside a gigantic drugstore. Even more fortunately, they had umbrellas up front, by the cash registers, so that I didn’t have to go into the neon wilderness beyond. I picked up a Kane County Cougars baseball cap to hide my black eye and red nose and plodded through the parking lot, shivering. The umbrella wasn’t much protection against the driving rain; my pantlegs were soaked by the time I reached the Thai restaurant.

The SRT was still there. I looked through the restaurant windows. Like every place in mall-land, it was enormous, with the buffet stretching beyond my sight range.

I went inside for a quick look. The place was filling up with shift workers picking up cheap, filling food on their way home. Brightly painted statuettes of deities and demons were hanging from the ceiling. I suppose it was an attempt to make the place look less cavernous, but the plastic figures looked as beaten down as the clientele. The food, colored as luridly as the figurines, took away my appetite. I pretended to study it, and finally glimpsed Sturlese at a table toward the back. He was twisting a drink around, looking expectantly toward the entrance.

I ducked my head to my chest, and shuffled to the exit. Keeping my head low, I mumbled to the bored hostess that I’d forgotten my wallet and went back into the cold. I kept the bill of the Cougars cap pulled over my forehead and the umbrella at an angle to shield my face.

After half an hour, in which I got thoroughly wet and cold, an Infiniti SUV pulled up next to the SRT. The paint was a gunmetal gray, but next to Boris Nabiyev’s face, the color seemed warm, vibrant.

I couldn’t think of any way to get close enough to Nabiyev and Sturlese to eavesdrop. Besides, I was sneezing so loudly I’d drown out their conversation. I pulled my wet jacket collar around my neck and stumbled back to the Subaru.

FAMILY TIES

It took me the better part of an hour to drive across town to my apartment, snuffling and sneezing the whole way. I’d have to have a decontamination specialist clean the Subaru before I gave it back.

I wanted a hot bath, a hot drink and bed, but Mr. Contreras saw me dragging my way up the sidewalk and came to the door, clucking over my wet clothes, my rheumy eyes, my snuffles. “Bernie’s fine, doll. You go change into something dry.”

Bernie was alarmingly fine—post-traumatic stress was taking the form of a ramped-up belligerence. She wanted to drive down to South Chicago, hunt down Insane Dragons—We will know them by their tattoos, Vic, didn’t you see last night? All those boys had dragons on their arms, the biggest one, he had a dragon on his face!

“It was on his neck,” I said dryly. “Bernie, your dad is coming to collect you. The police will shake the names of the guys who jumped us out of the one who’s in the hospital. When they’ve made an arrest, I will testify at any legal proceedings.”

“And until then, what will you do?” Her small vivid face flooded with color. “You will make out with Jake and murmur, oh, law and order will prevail if we wait a thousand years or two.”

I couldn’t help laughing, which turned into a wheezy cough. “Bernie, the people who we’re up against are so much bigger than we are—not just a bunch of street thugs, but someone from the Uzbeki Mob. Law and order may prevail at a snail’s pace, but me letting you get killed isn’t going to speed the process.”

“Those people you took me to see last night, the lawyers, the insurance man and so on, are they involved with this Uzbeki Mob?”

“I don’t know.” Peppy came over to me, rubbing against my damp jeans, but Mitch stayed close to Bernie. “After I’ve had a bath and warmed up I’m going to see if I can dig up who owns whom.”

“We need to go to South Chicago ourselves, to confront these Dragons and also this mother who murdered her child. It’s what you would have done with Uncle Boom-Boom when you were my age. Or have you gotten too old to take risks anymore?”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Dr. Lotty and Jake say I take too many risks. Anyway, although your uncle and I had some hair-raising adventures, none of them involved the Mafia or large street gangs.”

I looked at Mr. Contreras. “Will you please chain her to a radiator while I take a bath?”

Mr. Contreras followed me to the hall. “She needs something to do, doll. She slept until noon and I took her over to see the doc, like you asked, but she’s bouncing off the walls.”

“Yeah, I can tell. Think you can hold her for another hour or two? The Stanley Cup playoffs start tonight—that should keep her settled while I rest—I feel like original sin right now.”

The climb up the stairs to my own place seemed as hard a journey as the drive across the city. When I got there I sank into the tub, pouring in eucalyptus oil for my aching eyes and nose. Maybe Bernie was right, maybe I was getting too old to take the risks I needed as a private eye. Surely I could compensate by getting craftier, but when I thought of Jerry Fugher’s death, suffocating in the pet coke, I felt only scared, not crafty.

“The sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken,” I sang as I finally emptied the tub. I made myself a toddy, whisky with lemon, honey and hot water, and curled up in my big armchair in the fluffy gold robe Jake had given me for my last birthday. I logged into LexisNexis and started doing ownership searches, for Scanlon, for Nina Quarles’s firm, for Sturlese Cement. I ordered family records through Genealogy Plus. I ordered personal records on Brian Sturlese and Nina Quarles, along with Fugher, Sebastian Mesaline, his sister, Viola, the Guzzo family. Even the Reverend Umberto Cardenal.

I found a container of lentil soup in the freezer and thawed it to eat with another hot toddy, got dressed, sat at the dining room table with my printouts.

Sturlese Cement was family owned, third generation with three brothers in charge: Darius, Lorenzo and the one I’d met, Brian, the youngest. Looking at the P&L statements, I could see the brothers had gotten in over their heads: right before the collapse in the construction industry, they’d put $150 million into a building going up near Navy Pier.

Ajax Insurance had supplied the surety bonds on the project, but Sturlese had been left holding the bag when the bottom fell out of the market. The cement company seemed on their way to Chapter 11 when someone—angel or devil—bailed them out.

None of my reports could tell me who’d bought a controlling share in Sturlese—it was privately held, so they didn’t need SEC filings. Obviously Nabiyev played a role, but he looked like an enforcer, not a money man. The Uzbeki Mob is an amorphous entity, not one whose profit-and-loss statements will show up in LexisNexis, so if the Mob now owned Sturlese, it was through a shell company, but no shells were washing up on the beaches where I was looking.

Between my injuries, my cold and the second toddy, my brain was getting sluggish. I was putting all Sturlese papers away when I did a double take on the address where Sturlese’s consortium had planned to build. After that project folded, it had been replaced by Virejas Tower. And one of the investors in Virejas was Illinois House Speaker Connor “Spike” Hurlihey.

Hurlihey might not be connected to the Uzbeki Mob, but he ran the Illinois legislature as if he were a Mafia boss. That didn’t mean he hired people like Nabiyev to snuff out people like Jerry Fugher, mostly because he wielded so much power no one ever tested how far he’d go to win.

He had a right to invest in a building if he wanted to, as long as there wasn’t a conflict of interest with bills he’d put through committee. I went back to LexisNexis to look up any special legislation that affected Virejas Tower.

Two years ago, right before the public announcement of the project, the legislature voted to grant Virejas an exception to performing an environmental assessment, on the grounds that the previous project proposed for the site—the one that nearly bankrupted Sturlese Cement—had been approved by the city. However, as I discovered going slowly through the paperwork, the zoning permission had been granted “pending an environmental assessment,” which never took place.

This was a problem, because all that land on the west side of Lake Shore Drive, across from the big Navy Pier Ferris Wheel, had been a dumping ground for thorium-based gas lanterns a century earlier. Getting an environmental exception meant the Virejas consortium didn’t have to check thorium levels in the soil or take precautions against aerating them during excavation for the tower’s foundation.

That was slimy, but it also seemed to be a way of shooting the project in the foot: anyone buying or leasing at Virejas could look up the same information I had and order an environmental study before plunking down money. Virejas was going to be a mixed-use, residential and business building. Maybe a family wouldn’t think about an environmental report before buying a condo, but most corporations would. Even so, I sent Murray an e-mail with the file about the legislation attached—maybe he’d be able to do a story. Assuming his corporate masters didn’t cave in to pressure from Spike Hurlihey to keep the environmental hazards under wraps.

Rory Scanlon’s insurance agency and Vince Bagby’s trucking firms were also family owned, closely held companies, without a lot of information available. Scanlon, in his seventies now, had inherited an agency started by his grandfather during the Depression, when people used to put aside a few pennies a week for their funerals. He lived modestly, not flaunting wealth with exotic cars or multiple homes. He’d never married, but an unmarried sister lived with him. Three other sisters, who’d all left the neighborhood, had children and grandchildren. No one had ever accused him of sexual misconduct, or any other kind—which didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.

As Conrad and Bobby and Father Cardenal kept insisting, everything in Scanlon’s life seemed to revolve around the South Side—he was a frequent sponsor at fund-raisers for St. Eloy’s, for the widows and orphans of the police and fire departments, for Boys and Girls Clubs, and a slew of other civic-based charities. He also was a steady contributor to local political campaigns. I couldn’t find any records of giving to presidential or senatorial candidates, but he did his part as a Tenth Ward committeeman to keep the alderman, the state reps and the mayor well oiled.

Vince Bagby’s profile was similar—hard to get access to company reports, but lots of public good deeds in the community. No wonder both Conrad Rawlings and Father Cardenal wanted me to stop looking for dirt under either guy’s nails. In an area with 40 percent unemployment, a pair like them kept a lot of machinery oiled.

I quickly scanned Bagby’s personal history. He’d married young, been divorced five years. Delphina was his only child, apparently named for his mother, Delphina Theodora Burzle.

Burzle. I’d heard that name recently, but where? I put a query to my computer, and it came back with the file from the Guzzo case. Nina Quarles’s mother had been Felicia Burzle.

I stared at the screen and then slowly put my pen down, as if it were a heavy, fragile object. I went back to Genealogy Plus for Rory Scanlon’s full family tree—the first time round I’d only gone back to 1920.

I find genealogy tables hard to follow, but I painstakingly wrote down all the names and dates of births and marriages of the Burzles, the Scanlons and the Bagbys. The enormous families people had before World War I made it a tedious project, but in the end, I could see that Vince Bagby and Nina Quarles were first cousins. Vince’s mother and Rory Scanlon were cousins as well. Vince, twenty years younger than Rory, had grown up within two blocks of the Scanlon house.

I sat back, picturing Vince at eight or nine, trotting around after his big cousin. Rory, who liked to look after the neighborhood, would have paid special attention to a young cousin. Taken him to ball games, to the beach, to the bank, whatever the magnificent big cousin wanted, the little cousin would sign on for as well.

I checked the Sturlese, Previn and Guzzo genealogies as well, but no Burzles or Bagbys or Scanlons appeared. I’d expected Stella Guzzo to show a connection to one or the other families—it might explain why Mandel & McClelland had agreed to represent her—but the Irish family she’d grown up in didn’t connect to Scanlon, Burzle or Bagby, even when I traced them back to their first generation in America.

I couldn’t find a connection for Sebastian and Viola Mesaline, either, nor for their Uncle Jerry’s adoptive family. As for Boris Nabiyev, I dug up a meager file on him in a Homeland Security database. He had arrived in Chicago from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, eleven years ago. He had a green card. That was all the computer could tell me about him—not his address, or even his age.

On the other hand, when I looked up Spike Hurlihey, he turned out to be a cousin of Rory Scanlon’s. Hurlihey, Scanlon, Nina Quarles and Vince Bagby all grew up in the same pack. One for all, all for one. Maybe they hadn’t deliberately kept the relationship a secret from me, but I could feel them giving each other a nod and a wink on their side of the fence: we’re keeping her chasing her tail, while we write the script.

A cold anger began to build in me. I could rewrite this story. Maybe not tonight, but soon. I had learned one of their secrets and I would uncover others.

I’d lost track of the time and of my cold. It was midnight when Bernie bounced into my apartment, Mitch at her heels, announcing that the Blackhawks had lost the first game of the Stanley Cup playoffs in triple overtime.

“The Canadiens won their first game, so it’s not so bad. Papa will be here the day after tomorrow, but you have to tell him I’m not going back to Canada, not until we’ve cleared Uncle Boom-Boom’s name, and anyway, I have summer camp at Northwestern, so what’s the point? I’ll just be coming back in July.”

“Bernie, if it were up to your mother and me, I’d be packing you in a box to ship to Quebec tonight. I’ll be happier seeing your father walk off that plane than I would be looking at Stanley Cup celebrations in Grant Park. And I want you back down with Mr. Contreras tonight. It’s safer than it is up here.”

Her lips twitched—she wanted to argue back but realized in time she was out on an unsupported limb. She gave a rueful smile, an endearing Gallic shrug. We rounded up the stuffed animals she slept with, I found her cell phone charger under the sofa, retrieved her retainer from its burial ground in the sofa cushions, and loaded everything into a backpack with a change of clothes for the morning.

I got dressed myself to escort her back down the stairs to Mr. Contreras’s place. The old man was standing in the doorway, keeping a watch over the street door.

“We thought you’d be back down for dinner, doll, but then I thought maybe you’d gone to sleep. You should, with that cold and everything, but we have a plate of spaghetti for you if you’re hungry.”

“Sorry.” I kissed his cheek. “I lay too long in the bath, but I should have called.”

I wrapped up in one of his old coats to take the dogs out back for a last time. Jake was coming in the front door when I got back. I walked upstairs with him, but repeated what I’d said to Bernie.

“I don’t want to huddle alone in my place, but these people scare me. I don’t want anyone I love caught in their crossfire.”

He looked at me quizzically. “You think if they firebomb your apartment the rest of the building will escape unscathed? I’m more afraid of catching your cold than I am of Uzbeki hit men or Insane Dragons.”