I DROVE THE VAN out of the neighborhood as slowly as I had arrived. I didn’t want to fishtail, I didn’t want to squeal my tires. I did have the presence of mind to make a U-turn so that I wouldn’t drive underneath the only working streetlight.
I turned left and kept driving, following a different route than I had used before I arrived. It took me a moment to realize I was heading toward the Starlite.
At the first opportunity, I pulled over. A church parking lot.
Convenient. I didn’t want to think about the irony.
Instead, I turned off the car and the headlights. I locked the doors, leaned my head back, and let myself shiver for a few moments. I couldn’t go to the Starlite. Not alone. Not without doing building recon.
Not in this mood.
I had planned to ask Voss more questions. I wanted to find out everything he knew. Then I planned to hurt him, hurt him bad enough that he wouldn’t go after kids again.
But I had thought he worked alone.
And what he said…
What he said about Lacey…
What he said…
I was shaking my head, my face warm, my scarf soggy from my breath. At least I hoped it was from my breath. I tugged the scarf down and wiped at my face.
I wasn’t done. I still had some things to do before I could go home. And those things did not include a stupid vigilante attack on the Starlite, no matter how angry I was.
Jimmy needed me. An assault on the Starlite tonight, as unpredictable as I was, would probably keep me from Jimmy for the rest of his life.
Besides, I had gotten Lacey’s attacker. The asshole got what he deserved. I wouldn’t let myself regret killing him. Althea had wanted him stopped. So did I.
So, I would wager, did Lacey.
I could tell her with a clean conscience that he wouldn’t ever hurt her again. He wouldn’t ever hurt anyone again.
That stopped my shaking. I was getting cold. I needed to leave, but before I did, I pulled the gun out of my pocket and removed the magazine. I put it in the glove box. Then I peeled off my scarf and set it on the seat beside me. I put the gun on the scarf and folded the scarf. I removed Voss’s wallet from my other pocket and used my gloves to wipe the thing off as carefully as I could. I removed the $200 and put it in my pocket.
Then I set the wallet beside the scarf.
For a moment, I debated dropping the $200 into the church’s donation box inside. But someone would remember a donation that large on a night like this. They might even remember me. Plus, I didn’t want to leave the gun unattended in my van.
I took a deep breath, feeling a little calmer, and turned the key in the ignition. The van’s engine roared loudly. I turned on the lights, put the van in reverse, backed out of the parking space, then shifted the van into drive, left the parking lot, and turned north.
The best thing I could do was leave the neighborhood. I drove slowly, one of the few vehicles on the icy streets, and headed toward the Loop.
In rush hour, this drive could take anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour. At the moment, my van was one of the few vehicles on the street. Still, I made sure I didn’t speed or make any driving errors.
I was very conscious of that gun beside me on the seat. And the wallet.
I could do something about the wallet.
As I approached a dark and deserted section of Canal Street at the very edge of the South Loop, I rolled down my window. The icy air hit my face with the force of a blizzard.
With my gloved right hand, I grabbed the wallet. I shifted it to my left hand and draped my arm outside the window. Even with the gloves and thick coat, the cold bit my skin. My eyes teared up from the wind. I reached a section of neighborhood bulldozed by the city last summer, and flicked my hand,
tossing the wallet on an unshoveled pile of snow. Then I brought my arm inside, rolled up the window, and kept driving as if nothing had happened.
Ahead of me, Chicago’s downtown rose like a bad memory. I had worked down here when I first moved to the city, before I realized I wasn’t cut out to work for someone else.
No one stood on the streets and, except for the Chicago Civic Center and the hotels on Michigan, most of the lights were off.
Good.
I took Wacker Drive and pulled into the parking lot closest to the LaSalle Street Bridge. It was the only bridge that I knew where the attendant in the bridge tender houses couldn’t see all parts clearly.
I loved the LaSalle Street Bridge. It was old and elegant, with rust-colored trusses, and a protected sidewalk. The trusses interested me the most, because they were accessible. I could stand between them and remain relatively unseen from drivers passing by.
I kept the gun wrapped in the scarf, then changed my mind. I didn’t want anyone to see me carrying anything onto the bridge. I unwrapped the gun, slipped it into my pocket, and silently cursed myself.
I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I needed to be. My own fault, really. I had let Lacey’s assault, her injuries, and her attacker get to me. I needed to reclaim a sense of—well, not calm, exactly, because calm felt beyond me. But a sense of
myself, a sense of caution, a sense of the street smarts that had helped me survive for more than forty years.
I let myself out of the van, and stared for a moment at the huge bridge rising before me. This damn city and its corruption. All around me was evidence of the way Chicago worked.
I had no idea who built this bridge. I knew only that it was a year or so older than I was, and had probably been put together with a combination of the graft and greatness that were Chicago’s hallmarks. The bridge was beautifully designed. And depending on how deep the graft went when the thing was built, it was either structurally perfect or structurally flawed.
The whole city was like that. If I had been a white man and Lacey had been my niece, I would have been able to call the Chicago police and let them handle this. They might not have arrested Voss. They might have scared him out of town, maybe even killed him. But they would have resolved this.
If I were a white man with the right connections. And those connections weren’t necessarily the connections that seemed logical. It wouldn’t matter if I had money. What I needed was clout. And right now, the clout in this city all resided with Mayor Richard J. Daley. If you didn’t have South of the Yard connections or if you weren’t valuable to him in some political way, then the cops might’ve shrugged off the news of a white girl’s rape no matter what.
Until a few years ago, according to Franklin, there were a few black politicians with access to Daley and the right kind of clout. But not anymore.
It was up to us to take care of our own, just like it had been in Memphis. And in Atlanta. And anywhere else, south of the Mason-Dixon line.
The cold hadn’t numbed me. In fact, it had awakened all of my senses. I kept my hands out of my pockets and walked along the well-shoveled sidewalk.
Once I started up to the bridge, the sidewalk wasn’t as clean. Apparently no one expected a sane person to walk across this bridge in the winter. But I wasn’t quite sane at the moment.
Besides, dozens, maybe hundreds of people had gone before me. The snow was packed and icy, not unshoveled like it had been in Voss’s neighborhood, just not shoveled as often.
I had to pick my way up the slight incline.
The breeze over the Chicago River felt like the same strong wind I had gotten through my open van window. Only this time, it brought the distinctive odor of the river: damp, mildewy, and slightly foul. The Chicago River was one of the most polluted rivers in America. The city dyed the water green on St. Patrick’s Day, but the joke was that the dye was unnecessary. Some days the river actually was multicolored with all of the oil slicks covering the water’s surface.
I reached the top of the bridge next to the ornate white bridge-tender’s house, and stood in the shelter of one of the gigantic metal trusses. I had forgotten about the streetlights. They hovered over the sidewalk at regular intervals, the bulk of their light hitting pedestrians, not the road itself.
Still, no car had gone by in the entire time I had walked up here. I doubted many would drive by as I finished my business.
I glanced at the river below. Ice had gathered near the edges, but the water still flowed freely. For some reason, this stupid river rarely froze. I thought it was the pollution, but Jimmy had learned in school that it had something to do with Lake Michigan. Maybe both explanations were correct.
If I didn’t want to toss the gun, if I just wanted to drop it, I would have to go near the center of the bridge. But the metal trusses weren’t as high there, and I wouldn’t be able to blend in as easily.Still, there were pockets of darkness between the streetlights, and I headed toward one of those.
My heart was pounding. My mouth was dry from the cold and my eyes stung. My nose had gone numb a while ago. I walked a few yards past the bridge-tender’s house. The trusses loomed to my right. To my left, an ornate chest-high railing overlooked the river. I glanced over my shoulder and saw no one on either side of me. No one in the bridge-tender’s house, no one on the road, no one walking toward me.
I reached into my right pocket, grabbed the gun, and held it over the river. Then I let go.
The gun fell straight down, not pinwheeling like I expected. For a moment, I thought it would land on one of the ice flows, but it didn’t. It fell between them, the splash loud in the silence of this cold Chicago night.
I leaned for just a moment longer. Problem solved. Easier than I expected, really. Even if someone saw me entering Voss’s apartment, there would be no way to tie me to the
man’s death. There wouldn’t even be any way to prove I knew him.
The wallet was gone. Jimmy was the only other person who knew I had had it. I wasn’t even sure if Jimmy had looked at Voss’s name, or if he remembered it.
I took a deep breath of the frigid air, felt it slide, ice-cold, through my mouth, neck, and into my lungs.
Now Jimmy and Keith were safe too. Voss could have gone after them tomorrow, searching for the little kids who had beat him up with a screwdriver, deciding to teach them a lesson. No lesson to learn, nothing to repair, nothing to fear.
Yet my heart kept pounding as if I had been in some kind of race.
Maybe I had been.
A mental race.
A race for Lacey’s life.
A race for her future.