Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

Days of Rage

Copyright © 2012
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © 2012 by Alptraum/Dreamstime

Cover Design copyright © 2012 WMG Publishing

First published
in 2006
by St. Martins Press

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

The Smokey Dalton Series in order:

Novels

Dangerous Road

Smoke-Filled Rooms

Thin Walls

Stone Cribs

War At Home

Days of Rage

The Day After (Upcoming)

Short Stories

Guarding Lacey

Family Affair

For Dean
,

because he understands

Acknowledgments

As always, these books come together due to a variety of people.
My husband, Dean Wesley Smith, used his architectur
al
training to draw the floor plans of the important buildings in this book, as well as helped me put a large amount of information into a coherent story.
Steve Braunginn and Paul Higginbotham acted as
my trusty
first readers.
Kelley Ragland has given me incredible advice
and support
on all of these books.
Thanks, everyone.
I appreciate all that you’ve done.

Revolution is no motherfucking game for us.

The black community has enough martyrs already.

—Fred Hampton
,

October 1969

ONE

I parked the police car in the trees, along the dirt access road.
I shut off the headlights and let out a small breath.

My eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness.

A few blocks away, I could hear the rumble and clangs from the Ford Motor
Pl
ant.
The air smelled of rotten eggs and sewage, the stink so thick it made my eyes water.

My heart was pounding.
I had to force myself to take deep, even breaths despite the smell.
For five long minutes, I sat in the car, staring out the windows, checking the rearview, hoping no one followed me.

When it became clear that no one had, I got out, closing the door carefully so that it didn’t slam.
I could see my breath.
My back ached, and blood still trickled down the side of my face.
I swiped at it with my arm, staining the sleeve of my coat.

At least I
had the presence of mind to bring my gloves.

I walked down the dirt road to the construction site.
Spindly trees rose up around me, their leaves scattered on the road.
The noise from the Ford
Pl
ant covered the crunch of my feet along the path.

Equipment sat along the edge of the canal, ghostly shapes against the darkness. I stopped short of the edge.

They had finished dredging this section last year when someone had deemed the canal deep enough.

The water glinted, black and filthy, its depth impossible to see.
Some lights from the nearby industrial plants reflected thinly on the water’s surface, revealing a gasoline slick and bits of wadded up paper.

I let out a small breath, hating this moment, seeing no other choice.

Then I went back to the cop car.
I pushed on the trunk, making sure the latch held.
Then I opened the back passenger door, rolled down the window, and went to the front passenger door, doing the same.
I saved the driver’s window for last.

I crawled back inside the car just as the radio crackled, startling me.
The thin voice coming across the static talked about a fight at the Kinetic Playground, which had nothing to do with me.

Still, my heart pounded harder.

I started the car.
It rumbled to life, the powerful engine ready to go.

I was shaking.

I kept the car in park, then I pushed the emergency brake.
I reached across the seat and picked up my gloves and the blood-covered nightstick.

I released the emergency brake, got out of the car, and leaned inside the door.
Carefully, I wedged the nightstick against the accelerator, making sure that thing flattened against the floor.

The car’s engine revved, echoing in that grove of too-thin trees.

I braced my left hand on the car seat, grabbed the automatic gear shift, and shoved the car into drive.
Then I leapt back, sprawling in the cold dirt as the car zoomed down the road.

The car disappeared over the bank, and I braced myself for a crash of metal against concrete — a crash that meant I had failed.

A half-second later, I heard a large splash.
I ran to the edge of the road and stared down the embankment.

The car tipped, front end already lost to the canal.
The brackish water flowed into the open windows, sinking it even faster.

The trunk went under last, disappearing in a riot of bubbles.
I could almost imagine it popping open at the last moment, the bodies emerging, floating along the surface like the gasoline slick, revealing themselves much too soon.

But the bubbles eventually stopped, and the car vanished into the canal’s depths.

I took off the bloody gloves and tossed them on top of the filthy water.
No one would connect them to the car.

No one would ever know.

Except me.

TWO

Three months earlier,
I
parked my panel van about seventy blocks north of the Ford
P
l
ant.

The building I’d parked near dominated one of Chicago’s oldest neighborhoods.
Once the house had been one of the nicest in the area.
Built in the Queen Anne style, the turrets remained, tall and imposing, but the rest of the house had succumbed to time and weather.
The lot had been taken apart bit by bit, and now the old house was uncomfortably sandwiched between a six-flat on the right, and a U-shaped apartment complex on the left.

The street, which had once been large and wide, had narrowed too, until it became little more than an alley between rental properties, a place for tenants to drop their garbage, park their battered cars, and leave moving boxes to rot in the humid air.

Usually
,
standing in front of neglected buildings made me sad, but this one made me uneasy.
It wasn’t the shuttered windows or the cockeyed front door, and it certainly wasn’t the overcrowding that greedy developers had forced on a once-peaceful neighborhood.

Something about the house itself seemed sinister.

I shook off the feeling and unlocked the front door.
I had a wad of keys, most of them unlabeled.
They came from the building’s manager, who had also been the building’s very last tenant.
He had died alone in his apartment, found only two weeks ago by the mailman.

By then the manager had been dead more than a week.

Knowing that history probably led to my unease.
I would be the first person to enter this place since the body had been removed.

I braced myself as I stepped inside the wide entry.

The heat was incredible.
I was instantly covered with sweat.
We were having a late September heatwave, which made every unair-conditioned building in the city hot.
But this felt worse.
It seemed like no one had turned off the building’s heat last spring.

The smell, however, wasn’t as bad as I had expected.
Just a hint of rot, not bad enough to even make me sneeze.

I expected it to be worse on the other side of the building, where the manager’s apartment was.

I shoved my clipboard under my arm, and wiped my forehead with the back of my hand.
The entry was dark, probably because the conversion to apartments had walled off the wide windows in the front parlor and the library.
I flicked on my flashlight, and ran it across the wall until I found the light switch beside the door.
The switch was old — a punch switch put in when the building was electrified, somewhere near the turn of the century.

I was here in my capacity as an off-the-books building inspector for Sturdy Investments.
I was off
the
books for a variety of reasons.
The main one had to do with the corruption that flowed through Chicago like water.
Sturdy had a long history of illegal business practices.
Laura Hathaway, the company’s new CEO and the daughter of its original owner, had decided to clean up all the problems she found.

She hired me because I was one of the few people she trusted.
Laura and I had an on-again, off-again relationship that had been mostly off since I returned from a trip back east, but she knew that I was honest and would tell her exactly what I found.

So far, all I’d found was unbearable heat.

I pushed the top part of the button, hoping that the lights still worked and that the act of turning them on didn’t start a short somewhere.
I knew, because I had checked, that this building hadn’t had an inspection or a repair call in more than a decade.
I could only hope that the newly deceased manager had handled all of the repairs himself.

A dim bulb hidden in a dirt-encrusted chandelier added a little light to the front.
It was barely enough to see by.
To my left was a door with a large
1
painted across its wood frame.
The only lock, so far as I could tell, was on the doorknob itself.

To my right, another door, this one marked with a large
2
.
And in front of me, the wide oak staircase that had once been the entry’s most important feature.

I wiped my face again.
I was losing most of my weight in sweat.
My first mission was to shut off the heat.
Then I could turn my attention the apartments themselves.

After a little more inspection, I realized there was no easy way to get from the front entry to the back of the building where the heating system had to be.
I let myself out, pulling the front door closed behind me, but not bothering to lock it.
Any determined burglar could push his way inside the building.
The door, which was obviously original, was in such a rotten state of repair that it barely clung to its hinges.

I paused on the top of the stairs, took my clipboard
,
and made a note about the door in the appropriate place on the form Laura and I had developed.
Then I went around the side of the building.

I’d already examined the foundation, and taken the necessary measurements.
I had hope.
The foundation looked sturdy enough for a seventy-year-old
,
neglected house.
There were few cracks and only a little water damage.