Greed: A Detective John Lynch Thriller (22 page)

Red Shirt was sprinting across the street, pistol out, ducking down. As the kid cleared a parked car onto the walk he brought his gun up, snapping off shots. Hardin heard Wilson fire from just behind him and to his left, saw some spray fly off the kid’s hip. The kid went down, his gun rattling on the walk. Hardin turned to see Wilson coming out of her crouch, her S&W in hand.

All up and down the street, people where scrambling into stores, ducking behind cars, lots of cell phones coming out.

“Let’s take the SUV,” Hardin said. “Get a little distance, walk back for the car later.”

Wilson nodded. Hardin opened the driver’s side door, the Hispanic behind the wheel slumping out. Two in his head, at least two in his chest. He was gone. Hardin dumped him in the street.

He looked up. Wilson was standing over the kid on the walk. The kid was squirming on his back, holding his hands out in front of him. The kid’s 9mm was just off to his right.

“I got nothing ’gainst you, lady. I was after that other guy.”

“He’s my guy,” she said.

The kid’s hand moved toward his gun. Wilson gave him a double-tap to the head, put the S&W back on her hip, turned and climbed into the SUV.

“Don’t ever shove me like that again,” she hissed. “You have to trust me to cover your six, not go all Sir Galahad on me.”

“Sorry.”

Her head swiveled, checking Main as they pulled out. “You see Hernandez?”

“No.”

She slammed a fist on top of the dash. “Fuck. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!”

 

Hernandez and Miko heard the shots from the far side of the building and jogged toward the corner. They got a view just in time to see the SUV blow north up Main, Julio down in the street, the kid down on the walk. They instantly turned and started walking west.

“Walk up a bit, call the LK crew out in Aurora, have somebody pick our asses up,” Hernandez said.

Miko nodded.

“No uniforms, nobody in raid jackets closing the ring. This wasn’t any DEA sting.”

Miko nodded again.

“Gonna have to think on this.”

Miko nodded again. Nothing to say.

 

CHAPTER 48

 

Hardin punched it, shooting up a block, turning in, winding through a neighborhood, creating some distance before the cops got to the scene. Wilson had gone quiet.

“That was a little cold,” he said. “The kid.”

A pause. “Yeah,” she said. Strange look on her face, lip quivering a bit.

He waited.

“I got called out on a domestic my third week on the force down in Wichita, some beat-to-shit rental house.” Wilson was talking, looking straight out the windshield, perfectly still, nothing moving but her mouth. “We get inside, in the kitchen, this guy’s got his wife in a half nelson, got a butcher’s knife to her neck. The kids are screaming, the wife’s eyes are rolling around, and the guy’s yelling about how nobody leaves him. My training officer stays in front of him, holding his attention, and I work around to the side. At one point the guy starts gesturing with the knife, waving it at my partner, trying to make some point, and my partner gives me this look telling me to take the shot. I mean, it’s like three feet – no way can I miss. And instead I start talking to the guy, trying to calm him down. I get him to drop the knife, to let the woman go, he lets us cuff him, and everybody tells me what hot fucking shit I am.

“So by the time the whole thing goes through the wash with the DA, the thing’s been pled down from attempted murder to some domestic violence deal. The guy does two-and-a-half years on a five-year jolt. Two-and-a-half years and two days later, I get 911’d back to the same address. The woman is duct-taped to a kitchen chair, both the kids lying on the floor with their throats cut all the way to the spine. The woman’s gutted like a fish.ME tells me he did the kids first, made her watch. The guy called it in himself. He’s sitting in the recliner in the living room when I get there, six empty Bud cans on the floor. And he tells me, ‘I told you nobody leaves me.’”

Wilson stared straight ahead, her face frozen. Hardin silent for a moment, looking for the right words.

“That’s on him,” Hardin said finally. “That’s not on you.”

She shook her head. “The first time? When I was a rookie? I knew. I looked into his eyes, and I knew. I knew, and I didn’t take the shot. I didn’t take the shot because I wanted to sleep nights. I guess I thought I could get through without ever having to kill anybody. I didn’t take the shot for me. So yeah, the woman and those two kids? They’re on me. They’re on me for not having the balls to step all the way up.”

They drove for a while. Out of the corner of his eye, Hardin could see her jaw clench and unclench, could see her lip quivering.

“All I know is this,” she said. “People get a choice to be on the right side or not. You come up on somebody who’s made the wrong choice, then you have to step up, every time. You step all the way up.”

She still had that look on her face, like she wasn’t done. Hardin didn’t know what to say.

“That black kid?” she said. “His mother should have told him not to play with guns. And whoever told him he could, they should have told him not to play with me.”

Her voice was thin and brittle, and he knew she was locking that kid away somewhere inside. She was tying another knot into a cord, a knot for the black kid on the same cord where she had tied a knot for the woman and her kids and for her brother. A cord she would whip herself with every time she failed to perfect an imperfectible world.

He thought of Africa, of the Legion, of maybe a dozen times they’d been called out for some piss-ant action because some thug somewhere had tweaked some tribal bullshit for his own venial ends. It usually ended with a mess of kids, most of them younger than the one Jeanette had shot today, stinking in the heat with their guts blown out, some of them blown out by Hardin. He’d always told himself that even a postcolonial anachronism like the Legion was on the side of the angels when it came to dealing with the Idi Amins of the world. Except it was never the Amins that ended up showing their guts to the sun.

He took her hand, and she squeezed it like she could force some kind of hope out of his pores.

And then it was over. She pulled her hand away, her face solid and unmoving now, like quick-drying cement. Her foot nudged the backpack on the floor of the passenger side. She picked it up, unzipped it.

“You want to know the bright side?” she said.

“Could use one,” answered Hardin.

She pulled the shrink-wrapped brick out of the backpack. “Now we’ve got the diamonds and at least a couple million worth of coke.”

CHAPTER 49

 

Gonna end up in Iowa, way the day’s going, thought Lynch. He was stuck in traffic on 88 coming up on the Route 59 exit, trying to get out to meet Perez and the Aurora PD at a scene out there.

The Downers Grove thing broke loose right after lunch. Jablonski had called Lynch and Bernstein out pretty much as soon as he got a look at it. Three Hispanics down. Based on the tattoos, looked like all three of them were mainline members of the Hernandez crew out of Juárez. And Jablonski knew the guy they found in the street – Julio Ruiz, trigger man, wheel man, guy that usually traveled with Hernandez himself. They also had a black kid who turned out to be a low-level member of one of the West Side gangs that the DEA was pretty sure was tied into the Hernandez network.

Thing was a cluster fuck. Two cartel gunmen and a civilian dead in a second-floor hallway, two outside on the street. The inside stiffs all looked like.22s. The outside guys were larger caliber – 9mms it looked like, at least until they heard different. Witness statements were all over the place as usual. Best they could piece together, the shooting was in the building first, then outside. Couple of people said it looked like a black SUV (got everything from a Navigator to an Escalade to a Suburban on the model) tried to run down a couple on the sidewalk. The man shot the driver. The black kid ran across the street, shooting at the couple, and the woman shot him. Ruiz was driving the SUV, and whoever shot him knew what he was doing, because Ruiz took three in the face and two in the chest, which ain’t bad through a windshield when you’ve got three or four tons of Detroit’s finest bearing down on you. Then, while the guy was dumping Ruiz out of the SUV, the woman walked over, capped the kid in the head. Then her and the man hopped in the SUV and took off. They found the SUV dumped about a mile north.

So a couple of interesting things. The shootings inside? It looked like Mr .22 was in play again, although this wasn’t his usual triple tap to the head. Stand up fight. The two guys were armed, both got shots off, and he took them both out.

But the real interesting thing was this. The guy who shot Ruiz? Based on descriptions, it sounded a lot like Hardin. And the women he was with? Well, the dead guys were right outside a condo with the door still open. Jeanette Wilson’s condo. And things were calming down just a touch by the time this woman strolled down the walk and parked one in the black kid’s braincase. Jablonski had shown Wilson’s picture around. Consensus was, the woman was Wilson.

That’s when Perez had called. They had another stiff, a black guy in the basement of a town house in the DuPage County part of the Aurora, just west of 59.Guy had a deal with one of those Merry Maids crews where they had the keys to get in if he wasn’t around. When they let themselves into his place, they found a bigger mess than they had contracted for. Looked like a .22 again. So Lynch left Bernstein to finish up in Downers Grove and headed west.

 

Aurora was a city of almost 200,000 straddling the Fox River about forty miles west of Chicago. Lynch didn’t work with suburban cops too much, but Aurora had its own gang problems, and most of their gangs were tied in to the Chicago gangs. So guys from Aurora would turn up dead in the city, guys from Chicago would turn up dead in Aurora, and guys like Lynch and Perez, they’d sort it out.

Every time Lynch had been out to Aurora before, though, it had been on the east side, usually right in by the river. This was some high-end subdivision just across 59 from Naperville. Goofy-looking McMansions were shoe-horned into tiny lots as he followed the winding street in past the White Eagle sign. He was beginning to think Perez was fucking with him until he saw the black and whites and the crime scene tape in front of an upscale townhouse. Behind the house, a couple of yuppies in ill-advised pants pretended to take practice swings, standing in the fairway while they watched the cops moving around the house. Somebody on the tee must have said something – one of the guys looked back flipped the bird, then topped his ball another thirty yards toward the green. Gapers’ block on the fairways.

Lynch parked, badged the uniform at the end of the drive. Guy told him Perez was in the basement.

Lynch could smell the blood before he got to the bottom of the stairs. When he got down, he saw Perez over near an L-shaped office setup. Lots of computer equipment, three different monitors, a rack of boxes and wires – routers and servers, Lynch figured. And a black guy in his boxers, his legs duct-taped to one of those fancy office chairs with that hi-tech mesh for a seat. Some duct tape also hung from the arm of the chair. The guy’s head was down on the desk – or most of his head. Looked like some of it was splattered on the monitor in front of him.

Perez saw Lynch, walked over.

Lynch nodded toward the body. “So what have you got here?”

“Stiff’s name is Robert E. Lee,” Perez said.

“Ironic,” said Lynch.

Perez shrugged. “My people are just Mexicans who got stuck on the wrong side of the Rio Grande when you guys stole Texas. I got no dog in that fight.”

“You said .22s?” Lynch asked

“Three to the back of the head,” said Perez.

“Awful lot of blood on the floor,” said Lynch.

“Pedicure,” said Pérez. “Your .22 buddy took off a couple of his toes with something before he plugged him.”

“Could see where that might be persuasive,” Lynch said “Any idea what he was after?”

“Last thing Lee printed out was this.” Perez handed Lynch a sheet. Jeanette Wilson’s name and address. Mr .22 had been a busy boy today.

Lynch nodded, looked up at Perez, who had a little grin on his face.

“What?” said Lynch.

“Jenks!” Perez called. A metrosexual-looking guy in civilian clothes walked over – flat-front pants, shirt in a you-can’t-buy-me-at-Penny’s shade of blue, some of those hipster, steel-framed glasses. “Show Lynch here what ol’ toeless had been up to.”

 

“Guy’s got a great set up,” said Jenks. He and Lynch were sitting at a wet bar across the basement from Lee’s office area, Jenks on a laptop at the end of a cable that ran over to the dead guy’s computer equipment. The crime scene techs were still busy with the body over there. “Highest speed wireless pipe I’ve ever seen. Would’ve been tough to crack it, except he had a pad in his desk with all his passwords in it. Stupid, but we all do it, right?”

“I just plug into my cable box,” said Lynch.

Jenks shrugged. “OK, so anyway, I start poking around, just looking at recent files, IP addresses, shit like that, and one of the things I get is this.” Jenks popped up a series of pictures of Hardin in Chicago: the traffic cam shot Lynch had seen on Columbus, Hardin in front of the Hyatt on Wacker, Hardin’s rental in the Grant Park Garage.

“Can you tell when he pulled those?” said Lynch.

“First one, the shot of the car? That was the morning after the Stein shooting.”

Couple days before we started looking for it, thought Lynch.

“You know how he got them?”

“Watch this,” said Jenks. He hammered at some keys. Kid had fast hands. A video feed popped open. Columbus Street – same angle as one of the Hardin shots they’d been using. It had to be the same camera, except on this screen the cars were moving, people were walking.