A Bad Night's Sleep (12 page)

“They stopped me earlier,” I said. “They’re investigating the Southshore shooting. David Russo’s the second cop in a couple of months to get shot when I was around. They don’t like the coincidence.”

We sped west for four blocks. The van dropped back, couldn’t get around the cars in front of it.

Raj swung around the corner onto Upper Wacker. “Who are they?” he said.

“FBI.”

“Fuck. You tell Monroe or Johnson about them?”

I hung onto the overhead handle as we accelerated. “Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“When the FBI figures out that there’s nothing behind the police shootings but coincidence, they’ll leave me alone.”

He gripped the steering wheel in both hands, leaned over it. “Meantime, you put the rest of us at risk.”

We flew north and pulled a U-turn, went down a ramp into the orange light of Lower Wacker. We were doubling back toward Congress. Steel I beams supported the street over our heads. Steel pillars on the sides and in the medians supported the I beams. It was a lot of metal that could impale us a hundred different ways as we sped past. At Congress, we bounced up an exit ramp and merged into traffic.

Raj looked in the rearview mirror. I looked over my shoulder.

The white van was gone.

Raj breathed in deep and sighed. “Thanks for telling me they were behind us.”

I let go of the overhead handle and felt blood return to my fingers. “Anytime.”

We continued to the Kennedy Expressway and turned onto the on-ramp, heading north toward the suburbs and the Wisconsin border. Raj relaxed, steering with one hand, weaving past slower cars. He gave me a quick look. “Let’s keep the FBI to ourselves, okay?”

“Yeah?”

“Johnson already doubts you. If he hears about this, you’re done.”

“How about you? You doubt me?”

Another look. “Should I?”

I shrugged. “Probably. But no more than you should doubt the rest of the guys. How about Monroe? What’s he think of me?”

He spoke to the windshield. “He figures you’ve got more to gain and less to lose than any of the rest of us.”

I thought about what Lucinda had found out about Raj. The records she’d seen made him look as clean as an eagle scout. It seemed
he
had the most to lose. “What about you? What do you get out of this?”

His face darkened and he said nothing. Then, still to the windshield, he said, “I’ve got responsibilities.”

“Yeah?”

Again silence. Then, “Big family.”

“How many kids?”

He shook his head. “Just a son. But my mother’s in Lebanon. I send her money. And my sister and her family. She’s got four kids. And my cousins. Too many cousins.”

I nodded. “Nothing in life is free.”

He smiled again. “It sure as hell ain’t.”

We drove for awhile, quiet.

“How about your wife?” I said. “She also Lebanese?”

He laughed. “Irish Catholic.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And from what I understand, you’ve got an ex-wife who you’re still seeing and a partner who you’re sleeping with.”

That stung. “Where’d you hear that?”

He glanced at me like that was a dumb question. “We’ve asked around.”

“Well, I’m working things out.”

He nodded. “It’s a fucked-up world.”

That made me grin. “Yeah, it is.”

FIFTEEN

WE DROVE NORTH FOR
an hour through suburbs with lakefront mansions, then onto a dirty strip of highway lined with dimly lighted signs for auto body shops, tire dealers, and trucker motels. Eventually the businesses were replaced by farms. Before the state line, we passed another lighted sign, for the Mount Rest Cemetery. Then a billboard welcoming us to Wisconsin loomed up on the roadside and we drove on in the dark.

A few miles later, we got off the highway and rode through an industrial strip at the edge of a town called Pleasant Prairie. We took some more turns and suddenly, even with the windows closed, the air felt cold and damp and smelled of pine. We were near Lake Michigan. An asphalt road led us past houses and cottages and, as we came around a bend, past a strip of beach where the whitecaps on the lake appeared and disappeared in the headlights. A couple minutes later, we arrived at a lone house surrounded by trees at the end of a gravel driveway. Raj turned the wheel and we went in.

A Mercedes SUV, a rusted Chrysler LeBaron, and about a dozen other cars lined the driveway. The house was bright, inside and out. Spotlights rigged to tree branches with extension cords threw an orange glow and long shadows over the yard. As we parked, two men got out of a nearby car and started toward the house. They wore loose blue pants, black high-tops, and nylon Windbreakers. One had a black skullcap with a Nike swoosh. The other had shaved his head clean and had a tattoo that said
STREET
in block letters on the back of his neck.

Another car pulled next to us, windows tinted, music pounding. The bass beat made the dashboard rattle in the SUV.

“Ready?” Raj asked.

The duct tape holding my gun to the inside of my thigh pinched my skin. “Ready,” I said.

We got out and walked to the house. It was a big log cabin, the kind you can have designed and built by a company that does nothing else. I figured the side facing the lake would have big windows and a wood deck with a Weber grill on it.

“Whose place is this?” I said.

“Peter Finley’s. He calls it a fishing lodge, but mostly he comes up here and gets drunk.”

On the front porch, Finley and another cop I recognized from the Southshore construction site were checking for guns while a little crowd of guys who I figured were gang members watched. Raj stepped up to the other cop and raised his hands. The gang members laughed while the cop frisked him. “Feel him good,” said one of them.

I stepped up to Finley and raised my hands. He swept the tops and bottoms of my arms with his fingers, traced my ribs, back and front, and ran his hands down the outside of my legs. Then he brushed the inside of my legs. He barely paused when he touched the Ruger, but he looked at my eyes.

I stared at him, silent.

“Of course,” he said. He turned to the guys who’d arrived in the car with pounding music. “Next.”

Inside, the house had been designed with an open floor plan. The walls were knotted pine paneling, the ceiling too. Framed prints of deer and moose hung on the walls. There were a lot of chairs and sofas and at one end of the room a large stone fireplace with a wide hearth. In the kitchen, two refrigerators stood side by side with enough space to hold a dozen cases of beer and as much trout as Finley could catch. The wall facing the lake was all windows. Outside the windows, lighted with more spotlights, was a wood deck with a Weber grill on it.

The living room was crowded with gang members, mostly in pairs, along with Johnson’s crew. There were a lot of tattoos, plenty of cornrows and shaved heads, some skullcaps, baseball caps, and bandanas. A couple of guys wore sunglasses, though the sun wouldn’t shine for another ten hours. They drank from cans of beer that they’d taken from a big bin of ice on the floor in the center of the room. Everyone was quiet, almost polite.

Earl Johnson stood by the fireplace and explained the deal. He wanted each gang to give him a list of active members. Then, each gang member would be responsible for paying ten dollars a week and in return Johnson and his crew and anyone else they had access to in the department would leave the gang members alone as long as things didn’t get too out of hand. He said, “The first thing you’re wondering is why you’ve got to give us a list of your names.” Most of the gang reps nodded. “From our side of the bargain,” he said, “it’s simple business sense. If we don’t have the names, we don’t know if you’re ripping us off. From your side, we’ll know who to let slide. If your name’s on the list and we catch you being a bad boy, we apologize for inconveniencing you. Meantime, we spend all the extra time we’ve got hassling your competition—the guys whose names aren’t on your list.”

He paused to let the gang reps think about the plan. The look in their eyes said most of them bought it or weren’t ready to oppose it. So Johnson introduced Bob Monroe as his number two man and Raj and me as the guys who would be coming around to collect money.

“Any questions?” he asked when he was done.

“Yeah,” said a man in the back. He was a dark-skinned Latino wearing a white muscle T-shirt. “Who the fuck d’you think you are?”

Johnson smiled calmly. “You know who we are, Rafael. We’re the guys who can make life good for you.”

“Life’s already good.” He looked around the room for support. Three or four of the others nodded but no one said anything.

Johnson kept the smile. “Any other questions?”

“So, what happens?” said a guy in a sweatshirt and tattoos that reached from his collar to his chin. “Once a week you come to the neighborhood and we line up with our dollar bills?”

Johnson answered like he was talking to a smart student. “Each week you collect the money yourselves, based on the list of names you’ve given us. Then Raj and Joe come out and meet with a representative from your gang and collect it. The representative could be you or it could be someone else. There will be extra benefits for the representative.”

“Like what?” called someone else.

“Like extra protection from us and a little money back directly to you.”

Rafael, the big Latino man, said, “We don’t need protection.”

Again, Johnson smiled, though you could see that his patience was running out. “Then you just get the satisfaction of playing by the rules.”

A skinny man in jeans and a turtleneck sweater leaned back in his folding chair and looked at me. “I seen you on TV. You the cop killer.”

I shook my head. “Must’ve been someone else.”

“No, no,” he said cheerfully. “It was you. They said you also shot another cop. Didn’t kill him, though.”

It would do no good to explain that I hadn’t shot Bill Gubman, that I’d seen someone else shoot him and, depending on who you talked to, I either was responsible for allowing him to get shot or was the one who saved his life. I said, “Now would be a good time to shut up.”

He grinned. “Yeah, you the guy on TV.”

Monroe smiled. “It’s true that Joe killed a man last week and that the man was a cop,” he said, “but he hasn’t been charged and he won’t be.” I’d played my part though I hadn’t meant to. Monroe must’ve figured that a man who could shoot a cop and get away with it would worry even the toughest gang member. That’s why I was there.

Rafael, the Latino in the muscle shirt, wasn’t worried, though. He shook his head. “I’m not giving you no money.”

Johnson shook his head too. “Yes, I think you are.”

“Yeah? When’s that?”

A happy idea occurred to Johnson. “What the hell. Tonight. Before you leave, each of you will pay your first ten dollars. You’ll see how easy it is.”

The other gang members mumbled and looked at each other. Three of them fished into their pockets and pulled out a bill or two. Rafael watched them, disgusted. Then he shrugged, stood up, and made to reach into his pocket for his wallet.

He didn’t complete the action.

He spun, picked up the chair he’d been sitting on, and threw it through a plate-glass window facing the back deck.

In a flash, Johnson, Monroe, and Raj pulled out guns that they’d hidden under tables and chairs. If you’d blinked you would’ve thought they were magic. They pointed the guns at Rafael.

Rafael’s partner and three other men in the crowd pulled out guns and pointed them at Johnson, Monroe, and Raj. Not as fast but just as deadly.

I fished in the front of my pants but couldn’t get at the Ruger fast enough to make a difference.

The men with the guns faced off, no one moving, no one saying a word.

Then the door from the back deck opened.

Johnson, Monroe, Raj, and the gang members swung so their guns pointed at the two men and the woman who walked through it.

The men were Peter Finley and the other cop who’d been checking for weapons when we came in. They held the woman by the wrists and ignored the guns that were pointing at them. “We found her outside,” Finley said to Johnson. Then to everyone else, “Anyone know who she is?”

I raised my hand slowly.

“Hi, Joe,” the woman said.

“Hi, Lucinda.”

Johnson kept cool. He lowered his gun before anyone else and set it on the table in front of him, harmless for the moment but still in easy reach. Three of the gang members lowered their guns. Monroe and Raj tucked theirs away. Rafael’s partner pointed his at Johnson until the room calmed, then tipped it toward the floor but with his finger still on the trigger.

Johnson cocked his head and looked at Lucinda. “What are you doing here?”

She said nothing.

“I asked her to come,” I lied.

Johnson glared at me and turned to the crowd. “If we’d all do as we’re told, this would work a lot better.” He looked from face to face to see if everyone was listening, and added, “That’s my nice way of warning you not to ignore me.” Again, he looked at me. “We’ll talk about this later.” Then, back to the crowd, “There’s a bed in the back. Which one of you wants her?”

Uneasy laughter filled the room. A few of the gang members volunteered. Two offered to share her. Lucinda pulled against the hands that were holding her wrists. The skinny man who’d said he saw me on TV spoke to Johnson, “That ain’t funny and it ain’t cool.”

Johnson smiled at him and turned to Finley. “Would you please walk the lady to her car?”

“I’ll take her,” I said.

He turned on me. “No,” he said. “You stay here.”

Lucinda gave me a look and a nod to say it was all right.

I figured she had a better chance if she went with Finley alone than if I crossed Johnson. I said, “Whatever.”

Finley and Lucinda left and Johnson turned back to Rafael. His voice was calm but vicious. “You fucked up big. We invite you to talk and you start throwing furniture. Look around and start thinking. All these other guys are in. For a few bucks each they’re buying security and peace of mind. They’re eliminating the competition. They can do their business and we’ll leave them alone. You know what we’ll do with all that time we save when we’re not hassling them? We’ll be busting
you.
Six months from now, there won’t be anything left of you and your friends.”