Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (52 page)

“We did,” I said.
“And this colored boy is proving himself as trustworthy as you are.”

“The twenty’ll hold me,” he said.

“Nothing will hold you,” I said. “Get your money from Faulds.”

And then I hurried out of the diner.
I had to get to the Queen Anne before Twombly reached Faulds on the phone.

FIFTY-TWO

Every city had dumping grounds.
The cops used them, the gangs used them, and in some places, organized crime used them.
I had known this.

I guess I never figured the cops were still using the Queen Anne because on the South Side they didn’t bother hiding the bodies anymore.
They left them on the street after shooting them in broad daylight, like they had done with the Soto brothers.

Which explained why business had dropped off at the Queen Anne.
As black and Puerto Rican gangs grew in stature and number from the late 1950s on,
the police stopped feeling the need to hide the “accidental” deaths of people in custody, and the outright murders of people they didn’t want to bring to trial.

And why not? The police knew Chicago’s white population wouldn’t object.

Even white bodies could be tossed into gangland territory, and the gangs would get blamed, not the police.

The dumping areas had moved aboveground.

And because of that, because my history with Chicago was relatively new, I never once considered the modern police force among my suspects.
As collaborators, yes.
But not instigators.

Of course, Faulds wrote the report on Hanley, and of course, Faulds listed someone else finding the body.
If Faulds hadn’t been so detailed in his report, I wouldn’t have thought anything was wrong.

Faulds had discovered Hanley.
Faulds, who had a key to the building.
Faulds who had probably come in to give Hanley his monthly payoff.

I was nearly to the Queen Anne. I didn’t remember most of the drive.
I knew I was probably going too fast, but I hoped no cops were watching, not this early on a Sunday.

Because Twombly would find the nearest pay phone — maybe he’d even use the diner’s phone — and he’d tell Faulds we were investigating his old dumping ground.

Then he’d tell Faulds that I had shown disgust when I learned Twombly’s connection to the Queen Anne, and that I had refused to pay the bribe.

Faulds would know what that meant, just like Twombly had.
Faulds would know that he couldn’t buy me off.
He would come after all of us — me, Minton, and LeDoux.
He might even go after Laura, if he thought she knew too much about that house.

I pulled into the neighborhood and saw nothing out of the ordinary — no people on the streets, which I was getting used to around here
,
no unusual cars parked along the curb.
I started to turn into the driveway beside the Queen Anne when I saw the nose end of a squad car.

My chest constricted.
He was already here.
He must have been on duty and close by, and he’d come.

He’d come.

The squad was too close to the building, the kind of close you got when you were hiding something.

I parked him in, then got out.
Halfway to the front of the van, I stopped.
The position of that squad car bothered me.

It was too close. It prevented anyone from getting out of the house too fast — they’d have to run past that squad first, or run over it, or squeeze by.
It also prevented anyone from getting in too quickly.

Something was happening in there.

Something I hadn’t anticipated.

I hurried to the passenger side of my van, unlocked the door, opened it, and took out my gun.
I made myself move slowly, made sure the safety was off, made sure the gun was loaded, then grabbed my coveralls and tossed them over my arm, hiding the gun.

I didn’t want any neighbors panicking because a black man with a gun was on the streets. I
didn’t want anyone to call more police.

My breath sounded raspy to my own ears.
I made myself walk around the building, checking as I went by to make sure the front door was closed.
I didn’t see any movement through the stained glass.
I doubted Minton and LeDoux had gone back to painting up front.

In fact, I was gambling on that.
I hoped they were hiding behind the secret door in the basement, and no one had found them yet. I hoped Faulds was off-duty, and had simply requested a squad to check out what was going on in the house.

I doubted I would be that lucky.

I barely made it around the squad.
The radio was on, crackling, words lost to the static.
I climbed up the back stairs, breathing shallowly.

The main door was open but the screen was closed.
Through it I thought I heard voices, faint as the radio voices.
A cry reverberated, then stopped mid-thrum.

A shiver ran down my back.
I opened the screen, went in, and then closed it, keeping my hand on it until the latch caught. The last thing I wanted was a thud that might alert people to my presence.

Something banged — slapped — pounded.
I couldn’t quite identify the sound.
I walked along the edge of the floorboards, cursing myself for not paying attention all these weeks to see where the creaks in the floor
were
.

I guess I never thought I would need it.

The place smelled of fresh paint overlaying that sour odor of death, and there was a new smell — the lingering cigarette odor that trailed a smoker like a cloud.

I opened the basement door, doing
it
slowly and carefully so that there wouldn’t be any excessive noise.
I wedged my coveralls against the jamb, preventing the door from closing all the way.

More voices, louder now.
Male. I didn’t recognize them.
Still faint enough that the words were lost.

Then that sound again, and this time I recognized it.
The thwack of something solid — a bat, a stick, a piece of wood — against bone.

I drew my gun, elbow tight against my ribs, and eased down the stairs sideways so that my back was to the wall.
I didn’t want any surprises — didn’t want someone to join me from above, didn’t want someone to shoot me from the side.

My breathing was still ragged and I struggled to control it.
Even my heartbeat sounded too loud.

Another scream, this one bone-joltingly loud.
A man’s scream, the sound of someone beyond pain, beyond any thought at all.
And more thwacks.
Half a dozen of them.
Then a voice, “Fuck! He passed out.”

I had reached the bottom of the stairs. The door to the boiler room stood open.
I swept the area, gun ahead of me like a shield, one hand supporting my wrist, the other holding the gun itself.
I wanted to run into the back — I knew they were in the back, the sound told me that — but I couldn’t.

I had to make sure they hadn’t left a guard in the boiler room.

The search seemed to take forever.
From the secret room: grunts, closed-mouth cries, someone trying to be tough.
And no questions, just that thwacking noise, as if the hitting were more important than anything else.

The rooms checked out.
No one had been inside. Even my bag of evidence remained on its table, untouched, as if it interested no one.

The boiler room was my next challenge.
I had to get past that god-awful machine to the cabinet and into the back before the cops knew I was there.

My plan ended at that: I didn’t know what I would do when I got inside.

Surprise was all I had.

I hoped it would be all I needed.

Going around the boiler was no problem. Getting my bulk through the cabinet quietly was the issue.
I reached the area near the secret door, was relieved to see that someone — in a fury? — had yanked the cabinet aside.

The secret door was revealed in all its depravity, a narrow opening carved out of a wall.

A thwack, the sickening crunch of breaking bone, a whimpering cry filled with shame.

I swallowed, my breathing finally under control.
I made sure my grip on my gun was firm, my body as calm as it could be, my mind clear.

I stepped into that doorway, saw four men, two sitting on chairs that hadn’t been there this morning, one body leaning over, held in place by ropes only, blood dripping on the floor.
Someone standing behind him, and someone — Minton! — in the middle on another chair.

A man, standing, took a swing at Minton’s head with a nightstick, and as he followed through, like a baseball player happy to connect with the game-winning homer, he saw me and shouted.

His partner whirled, gun already in hand, and fired, the sound
an explosion in the tiny space.
The bullet pinged the brick above me, sending mortar and chunks at me — tiny bits of shrapnel, shredding my skin, narrowly missing my eye.

I fired at the shooter — another explosion — then at his partner
,
who had dropped the nightstick for a gun.
Clouds of mortar dust and smoke from my weapon’s discharge rose around me, but I fired in the same two places again, hoping I hit the cops.

Hoping I hadn’t hit Minton or LeDoux.

Wondering if LeDoux was even alive.

The shots reverberated in my ears, but nothing pinged around me.
No more shrapnel.
No movement. Nothing.

My breathing echoed in my own head, too loud, the only sound I could hear except the memory of those shots.
The air smelled like gun powder. Then sulfur, then blood.

My eyes teared, cleaning out the smoke and the dust.
I stepped closer, knowing I could die doing that, knowing that I would already be dead if those cops could shot me again.

Shapes rose in the dust-filled half
-
light from those bulbs we’d put in a week ago.
LeDoux, still hunched in his chair, his torso held in place with ropes — dead? Unconscious?

Fuck!
Someone had said.
He passed out.

A body on the floor beside him, face gone.
Another body in front of Minton, still moving, clutching at a blood-covered chest, gun at his side.
Not going to shoot, not yet
,
anyway.

Minton’s left cheekbone had caved in, but his jaw was so swollen that it looked like he’d swallowed that baseball.
He said, “Untie me,” and I didn’t understand his words so much as divine them.

My ears weren’t working because of the noise.

I doubted his were either.

I shoved the gun away from the man still clutching at what remained of his chest, hoping that son of a bitch would die soon
,
because I didn’t know what I would do with him if he lived.
My whole life would get real complicated then, and I couldn’t handle complicated, not at the moment, not when blood was dripping into my own eyes, and I was shaking from adrenaline, and I needed to see if LeDoux was bleeding to death.

I looked at the other guy as I crouched behind Minton’s chair.
I’d been right: no face.
Not breathing.

I’d killed him, but with the first shot or the second, I couldn’t tell.

I didn’t really care.

It took three tries to wrap my shaking fingers around the ropes that these cops had used to tie Minton in place. Two more tries to get the knot loosened.

Finally it all came apart, the ropes falling away like unraveling fabric.
Minton leaned forward — how painful that must have been, all the blood rushing to his battered face — and untied his own ankles.

Then he came up, the second cop’s gun in hand.

Before I could stop him, he shot the clutcher in the face — once, twice, three times — then kicked him, and burst into tears, his entire body shaking.

My ears were numb
.
I hadn’t really heard those last three shots: I’d felt them.
The room had shaken.
I thanked whatever god was listening that we were in a brick-enclosed basement.

Even though it sounded like bombs going off to me, to the neighbors those shots had probably sounded like faraway car backfires, if they’d sounded like anything at all.

I took the gun from Minton, emptied the clip, stuck it in my pants.
Put the safety on my own gun and headed to LeDoux, who seemed impossibly far away.

His mouth was bleeding. He was missing teeth along the top.
The right side of his face was covered with large
,
purple blood-blisters — he hadn’t been hit as hard as Minton, but he’d been hit hard enough.