Start Shooting (41 page)

More Twenty-Trey Gangsters. Coming back to life.

I left this place twenty-nine years ago. I knew it then, and I know it now: Something very bad will happen here.

The hot, dark corridor echoes our footsteps. Cristo Rey is humid with blood and the stink of fouled clothing. The shape facing us from the shadows is the security guard, slumped to the floor. Blood fans the wall above and behind what remains of his head. I hear myself whisper, “Jesus.” We search the office—no blood, but Sister Mary Margaret is gone and so is her walker.

Hahn and I guessed wrong; White Flower Lý’s ancestor finale is at St. Dom’s. It should’ve been here, electricity, nun who can’t walk, except, except—it hits me with absolute certainty: “Lý’s gotta kill
the building
, too.”

Hahn stares.

“Lý’s murdering her past. She’s gonna let the plague go.”

We run for the car. Hahn fires the engine, wheels from Twenty-second Place to Cermak, and guns us east. “When did St. Dom’s close?”

“Ten years, twelve.” I brace into the dash, imagine Arleen trapped inside with the plague. “Jesuits tried to use it as an outreach center for prostitutes and addicts. City and some of the neighbors shut ’em down.”

Hahn pulls her second gun. “Grab the wheel.”

“I promised I wouldn’t let anyone hurt her. I fucking promised.”

“Grab the goddamn wheel.”

I do. Hahn checks the gun, then belts it. “Arleen knows my guys are dead; knows we lost her. She’ll telegraph us, do something.”

“I fucking promised.”

Hahn knocks my hand off the wheel. “She agreed, Bobby. You didn’t put her in here, your brother did.”

I glare at Hahn, bounty hunter, acid queen. “If Arleen’s not already dead, she’s not dying for your money. And you aren’t killing Ruben. Shoot him, I’ll blow you’re head off.”

Hahn guns it through the red light at Ashland. “I’m here for the money and the plague. Your sainted brother is all yours.”

My phone rings. “Arleen!” Thunder cracks in my ear, followed by crowd noise and static. “Hello? Arleen?”

Over the crowd noise Jason Cowin says, “Little Paul came in, recanted. So did the two debs who ID’d you. Everyone says Danny V made ’em.”

Hahn brakes hard, bounces me into the door, and passes on the right. “And his mom, she alive?”

“Changed her story, too. ASA charged her and put the kid in Child Services. The Irish broad in your building hasn’t folded yet, but we’re all betting she will. When she does, maybe we talk to the Mrs Baird’s driver and he changes his mind—nobody places you at Danny’s death scene, no murder weapon, all is forgiven.”

Something akin to relief pumps into the adrenaline. If I don’t die in the next ten minutes, I’ll only have to explain I’m innocent to half the people I meet. I don’t tell Jason how I feel about being “forgiven,” hit Disconnect, and re-brace into the dash. “Little Paul saw the light.”

Hahn slips lanes doing ninety, loops across the center line into oncoming headlights, slides back in, and cuts off a van slowing to turn right. “I told you I took care of it.” The van lays on his horn. Lightning cracks sideways across the sky.

I tell myself and the windshield, “Arleen and Ruben could be alive. White Flower’s gotta have her show first, before she lets the plague go.”

Hahn tells the traffic coming at us, “Show’s already started.”

Leaves and shadows brush at my ankles, then disappear into the dark of a long-dead playground. Above me, all around me, looms
the Gothic roofline of St. Dom’s. Sporadic lightning flashes the spire, painting the playground in stark, ominous shadows. Coleen and I played here as little girls. I see us in the harsh black-and-white flashes, our simple uniforms, the lies only partially hidden on our faces.

A dog barks twice. I blink, then stare out to St. Dominick’s fence. Beyond the fence are the ruptured sidewalks and dented cars that fill the shadows. And out there, beyond the shadows, is the real horror of this place. I breathe short, taste the inner city and decay, and
will
Bobby to come here where we started.

A car approaches without headlights. Ruben, not Bobby, stops at the gate my bumper pushed open a moment ago. Ruben doesn’t turn in. His phone rings in my hand. “
Niña
, take the box in the lunchroom door. The chain’s cut.”

I turn to the lunchroom doors. Doors I used till I was thirteen. Beyond them, the nuns ran a world very different from the one Coleen and I lived in a block away. Why pick this place of all the places?

“
Niña
, take the box inside. We’re done and you can go.”

My palms are sweating. My feet don’t move.

“Now,
chica
. Or be late for the Shubert.”

I stare at the red bricks around the doors, the old wood windows; a school, a convent with more ambition than money. More ambition than talent. I hold my breath, grab the box of plague, and walk to the doors. At the doors, I lower the box to the pavement, prop open the door with my foot, take another breath, slowly two-hand the box to my chest, and walk in.

Dark. Dusty. Mildew. Silent. My eyes slowly adjust. Lightning flashes the windows behind me and silhouetted shapes at a table at the far side of the lunchroom. I shuffle through the dark with my box of mass murder, careful not to bump or stumble. More lightning.

Up close, my favorite nun, Sister Mary Margaret Fey, is wide-eyed and gagged in her chair. She’s wearing the Sisters of Providence habit she hasn’t worn in twenty years. Down the table, the Japanese woman driver sits next to the male scientist from the Escalade—both wear Tyvek suits, gloves, and helmets that I don’t. I place the box in front of them and wince at Sister Mary Margaret. “What … Why’re you here?”

The Corvair mental-patient voice echoes from the dark. “You will sit.”

“Can’t.” I back up toward the playground doors. “Have to go.”

The man in the Tyvek suit lights a penlight and opens the box.

Behind me: “We are not done.” The mental-patient voice blocks the playground doors. “Go back.”

“No. I did my part—”

Ruben’s voice barks, “Sit the fuck down.”

I’m shoved forward by an unseen hand. Then shoved again and stumble to the table. The Japanese man steadies the box, glaring at me to stabilize. I sit across from Sister Mary Margaret. Her eyes are trying to explain, cutting toward the mental-patient voice.

Ruben’s voice: “Inspect the package. Get on with it.”

The Japanese man extracts the metal box I saw in the Corvair, sets the box on the table, steadies himself, then proceeds with his examination. When complete, he reexamines four vials, speaks Japanese to the woman in the Tyvek suit, and replaces the lid to the box.

The woman places both hands on the table. “We are pleased this is the Hokkaido package. We are not pleased that four vials are missing.”

Ruben’s voice: “Show us the money.”

“We must have the vials first.”

Ruben: “Guess we don’t have a deal. White Flower goes to the
Herald
. Could stop by the concert along the way. With luck, Dr. Ota will escape, use the same pals bin Laden’s family did.”

The woman says, “This is a great sum of money to not have.”

Ruben: “If I was lookin’ at it, I’d believe you.”

“Your gunmen are here.” She gestures at the dark. “This is your place of choice.”

A cloud of oleander makes me cough and the mental patient from the Corvair glides out of the dark. She places three vials on the metal box, hesitates, looking at Sister Mary Margaret, then me, then steps back into the dark. Sister Mary Margaret’s eyes are full and desperate.

The Japanese man examines the three vials with great care, then the seals, then places the vials inside the metal container with the others. He tests the air at the table, then speaks Japanese to the woman, who in turn speaks Japanese to a phone she holds outside her helmet speaker.
She lowers the phone and says, “All but three million will be brought in. When we have the last vial, you will have your last three million.”

Four minutes pass. I pat Sister Mary Margaret’s hands, try to read her eyes but can’t. Hinges creak somewhere in the distant dark. A baggage trolley materializes stacked with six large suitcases. A smallish figure in a wrinkled Tyvek suit pushes the trolley to the table and stops. The Tyvek suit speaks Japanese, probably the other Furukawa woman from the Escalade.

The seated woman says, “Three million per case. Please produce the last vial.”

Ruben steps to the trolley, hip-checks the Tyvek suit away, and pulls on the heavy trolley. The smallish Tyvek suit jams a machine pistol in Ruben’s ribs. Ruben stops. The woman at the table says, “The last vial, please.”

Ruben says, “After I look at the money.”

The woman speaks Japanese. The Tyvek suit with the machine pistol in Ruben’s ribs lowers the gun. Ruben flattens one case atop the others, opens it, and shines a flashlight on stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Ruben uses a pen to mark bills in several stacks, closes the case, then repeats the process on another. Satisfied he says, “I have five machine guns pointed at you. I have two more at the door the money came through. Tell your associate next to me to go get my other three million and I’ll ask White Flower to give you the last vial.”

“The vial first.”

“No, the money first, then the vial. That’s how White Flower wants it, that’s how it has to be.”

The seated woman speaks Japanese. The smallish Tyvek suit next to Ruben disappears into the dark. We sit silent. I hold Sister Mary Margaret’s hands. They’re trembling but squeeze mine. I don’t know a kinder woman.
Streetcar
was going to be my big surprise to her: limousine, front row, opening night.

Ruben glances his watch.

The Japanese woman and man sit motionless with their fourteen vials of plague.

Ruben speaks Spanish to the dark. I hear movement I can’t see.

A moment passes. The second Japanese woman in the Tyvek suit
reappears with another case. Except—blink, lightning flash—she’s bent, rolling the case, but seems taller? Her Tyvek suit no longer has the wrinkles at the knees.
Squint
. And her gun’s different? Following behind her is a Hispanic gangster, the Twenty-Trey muscled-up driver of the Marquis.

Ruben waits until the Twenty-Trey steps between him and the Tyvek suit, then flattens the case, opens it, and test marks the money. Satisfied, Ruben says, “Okay. Let’s give ’em the last vial. Move on down the road.”

Oleander sours the air. Ruben’s partner steps out of the dark and stops at my end of the table. Her left hand is clamped around a green topped vial; her right hand holds the pistol with the long silencer I saw in the garage. She taps the silencer in front of Sister Mary Margaret and speaks Vietnamese. Sister Mary Margaret shakes her head an inch, eyes wide at the woman, then me. The woman leans in to me, the cheap oleander overpowering. Her mental-patient voice cracks on my name. “Arleen Brennan. But you do not know me? I do not matter, even now.”

Blink. Stare. She’s Asian, fifties, Vietnamese accent …

She says, “White Flower Lý? Lý Thi Loan? Tracy Moens knows. She search for me after Dupree lawsuit is filed.”

The cheap oleander, the drinking fountain, Coleen—I push back in my chair, try to see better. Lightning flashes the windows. The face is the bad makeup from the garage, but smeared into—

Oh my God.
White Flower
. The winter of eighth grade, February 1982. White Flower had only been there a week. She and Coleen had an argument at the drinking fountain—White Flower was a postulant, no vows yet, but “living in the community,” living at the convent to see if she wanted to become a novice. Like all the other girls, Coleen and I could become postulants, too, when we were older. My head begins to throb. It always throbbed when I thought about that year. So I stopped.

I see Sister Mary Margaret, then White Flower. It’s 1982, we’re all back together again.

Coleen and White Flower are at the drinking fountain, arguing, bitter, bitter. Sister Mary Margaret separates them, White Flower goes silent, but Coleen won’t stop. White Flower’s eyes are scary. Sister Mark, our principal,
steps into the hall and silences everyone. She calls us to her office; I don’t want to go; Coleen doesn’t want to go; we’ll be in trouble with our da. We avoid trouble with our da at all costs. In the principal’s office, Coleen accuses White Flower of things … things the girl didn’t do. White Flower is very mad. Sister Mark is very mad—mad at White Flower, mad at Sister Mary Margaret. I know Coleen is lying but I stay quiet
.

My head throbs. I shut my eyes. Coleen was sorry she lied, but she just didn’t want our father to be mad, to be … involved. But he was.

Coleen and I sit as small as possible in our uniforms. Our da is on his way to St. Dominick’s. Da will miss work on the river and be soooo mad. We wait a silent hour, holding each other’s hands, knowing we will wet our pants when he begins to yell. He spanks us hard when we wet our pants. His work boots echo in the hall before he bursts through Sister Mark’s door, the whole school can hear him yelling, “Hoorin’ git Viet Communist messin’ with my girls! And this being God’s house, ain’t that a damn lie!”