The Third Rail (13 page)

"Coincidence, Michael. And how does it tie into you?"

"I was on the train when it derailed."

Surprise flickered across her face. "You must have been just a kid."

"Nine years old. So you see, there's more 'coincidence' here than just a date on a calendar."

"I still don't see it." Lawson worried the edge of a bar napkin between her fingers. "I understand what you're saying, but I just don't see it."

"Let my guy finish taking a look."

"Herbert?"

"Hubert. Hubert Russell. Give him a day or two. If nothing turns up, you close the case and head on to bigger and better things."

"When are you meeting with him?"

"Tomorrow."

"You, Hubert, and Rodriguez, right?"

"Probably."

"What's up with Rodriguez, anyway?"

"What do you mean?"

"Never mind." Lawson pushed back from the table. "Thanks for listening, Michael."

"Like you said, we all have a story."

"I have to head downtown. Go home and get some sleep. You look like you need it."

"How about my angle?"

"I'll give you a day. If there's nothing there, you sign off on your statement and we all move on."

She left without another word. I looked over at the old-timer, still sitting at the elbow. He shrugged. I climbed up on the stool next to him and bought us each a shot of Wild Turkey. The old-timer told me Lawson was a fine-looking woman. I told him she probably was, but I had something finer. And I wasn't talking just about looks. The old-timer asked me what I was doing then, sitting there with him, drinking. I thought that was a good question and left the bar, feeling a little better about things and intent on tracking down my girl.

I
found Rachel inside an examining room at Northwestern Memorial. She was lying on a gurney and staring up at the ceiling while another woman shone a light in her eyes.

"They're green and they're gorgeous," I said.

The woman snapped off her light and was about to call security when the judge intervened.

"Ignore him," Rachel said. "He's my boyfriend."

Trumpets didn't exactly sound as the last sentence rolled off her tongue, and I thought I might have been better served muttering non sequiturs with the old-timer at the bar.

"Family and friends are not allowed back here," the woman with the light said. I glanced at her name tag:
JAIME SINGER, ATTENDING PHYSICIAN
.

"Sorry," I said. "How long do you think she'll be?"

The apology seemed to buy me some rope. Jaime even smiled as Rachel sat up.

"Actually, we're just about done." The doc turned to her patient. "Your X-rays show no damage and it doesn't look like you sustained any sort of concussion. The cut on your head
isn't deep enough for stitches, so we'll just stick with the butterflies. You still have a headache?"

Rachel shrugged. "It's getting better."

Jaime took out a pad of paper and began to scribble. "I'm going to give you something for the pain. Then maybe Lancelot here can give you a ride home."

Jaime and Rachel looked at me and laughed. I didn't get it, but that didn't seem to matter. Then Jaime was gone. And we were alone.

"You okay?" I said.

"A little sore, a little light-headed, but I'm fine. What are you doing down here?"

I shrugged. "Came to get you."

She sighed and held out her arms. I pulled her close.

"What happened at the lakefront?" she said.

"We can talk about it later."

Rachel nodded into my shoulder.

"I'm sorry, Rach."

She looked up. "For what?"

"This. What we talked about this morning. Everything."

She shook her head. "This wasn't what I was talking about. What happened to me today could have happened to anyone. In fact, it did happen to a whole bunch of other people. Except much worse. And none of them even knew you."

She was right, but that didn't touch the hollow inside, the fear that flared every time I saw the emptiness in Katherine Lawson's eyes and wondered when it might again be mine. I folded my arms around Rachel, trying to capture what lay between us, trying to keep it safe.

"I love you, Rach."

She drew me down and kissed me hard. "You better, pal. Now take me home. Hospitals give me the creeps."

We filled her prescription at the hospital pharmacy and caught a cab north. On the drive home, she tucked the top of her head against my cheek and immediately fell asleep. I sat quietly, listening to the cabbie talk on his cell and watching the headlights drift past.

N
elson sat in a jet-black Chevy, engine idling, watching the front door to the graystone. He'd dumped the rifle he used to kill Robles in Lake Michigan. Then he'd slipped onto Lake Shore Drive, where he'd mingled with the bewildered, the bloody, and the freshly dead before disappearing into the neighborhood.

Now he pulled a long knife from a towel on his lap. His mind cast back to the day Robles told him about the black case and the lightbulbs. His dead friend had taken them because it was 1998 and it was just that easy. The army was giving him the shove, why not make them sweat a little? Robles didn't know exactly what the bulbs contained, just that he'd been given the job of guarding them, four hours a day, for three months inside a bioweapons lab at Maryland's Fort Detrick. That was enough for Nelson. He took the case from his friend. Then he did some digging, and turned up "Terror 2000."

Issued in 1998, the Pentagon's classified report outlined potential terrorist threats to the United States. Prominent among them was something called the "subway scenario": an
attack involving the introduction of lightbulbs filled with weaponized anthrax into a major urban subway system.

The Pentagon was so concerned about such an attack, it authorized the lab at Fort Detrick to conduct experiments on its feasibility. The testing went on for five years, from 1993 through '97. According to "Terror 2000," some scientists loaded their lightbulbs with anthrax that had been genetically modified to be harmless. Others, however, insisted on the real thing for their tests. Nelson wasn't sure which brand of bulb his friend had lifted from the lab. He was rooting for the latter, but didn't really give a fuck. The lightbulbs were in place. When they fell, they fell. And Chicago would learn to live with the consequences.

Meanwhile, there were choices to be made and smaller, more personal bits of pain to inflict. A green and white Checker pulled up to the graystone. There were two people in the back, but only one got out. It was Kelly's judge. She had a bandage on her head and kept her gaze to the ground as she disappeared into her building. Nelson waited for the cab to pull away. Then he slipped the knife under his jacket, eased out of the car, and walked toward her front door.

I
directed the cab north. Rachel had invited me to stay at her place, but I knew the day would hit hard once she got inside. So I told her to sleep in and call me tomorrow. I needed some sleep myself. And my dog could use some dinner. Or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, a nightcap seemed like it might make everything go down a whole lot easier.

I slipped in the door of the Hidden Shamrock at a little before nine, pushed past a knot of people, and headed to the back room. There was a scattering of patrons at some tables and four or five more lounging on soft couches arranged around a fireplace that looked like a living room. I skipped all of that and headed for the bar. If I'm going to drink, I want to sit on a straight-backed chair with a row of heads on either side. If I want to sit on a soft couch, I go home. That's where soft couches belong.

A bartender I didn't recognize floated over and skidded a beer mat my way. "What will it be there, partner?"

He was an Irishman. That much I knew straight off. His hair was spiked blond with silver tips. He had a lightning bolt tattooed on his hand and danced a bit in his shoes as he stood.

"Give me a Booker's neat," I said.

"Booker's neat, over." He turned, grabbed a glass, and spun back to the bar. "So what's shaking there, sir? Out for a little, you know?"

Large blue eyes rimmed in red rolled to the left, toward a couple of women perched at the end of the bar.

"I know those two. Mama." He gave out a hoo-haw like Al Pacino in
Scent of a Woman
, dropped some whiskey into the glass, and pushed it my way. "If you want to be getting the ride, there's the ticket, boyo."

I took a sip and watched myself age in a bar mirror. The Irishman, apparently, required no response and kept talking.

"Name's Des. The right honorable Desmond Walsh."

I passed along my vitals.

"They're all talking about that shit this afternoon," Des said, lifting a foot and planting it alongside the speed rack.

"Lake Shore Drive?"

He nodded. "Couple of firemen came in. Told us it was an awful fucking wreck."

I sat some more with my drink.

"Heard they killed the cunt," Des said.

"Really?"

"Coppers blew the fucker's head off. Too good for him, you ask me."

"How do you know they got him?"

Des nodded toward a bank of TVs showing the Bulls game. "Mayor's gonna be on tonight. Give us the old play-by-play."

"Thank God for Mayor Wilson, hey?"

"Thank God for them coppers. That boy was never gonna see the inside of a cell. Not in this town."

A waitress beckoned and Des wiggled his way back down the bar. The Irishman was right. Chicago wanted some blood
spilled and they didn't want to wait. Wilson understood that. So did Lawson. So did the media. They'd give people their dog-and-pony show and a head to stick on a pike. If I didn't want to partake, that was fine. But the show would go on.

I took another sip of whiskey and again considered the merits of the bar mirror on the wall. On one side of it was a charcoal sketch of Brendan Behan and an illustration of an Irish patriot I didn't recognize getting his neck stretched by the British. On the other side was a Blues Brothers poster and what looked like an old railway schedule in a cheap brown frame.

"Des."

The bartender was earnestly chatting up the waitress rather than pouring the drink she'd ordered. He grabbed the bottle of Booker's on his way back and topped me off. It was the third drink I'd seen him give away in ten minutes and I wondered, not for the first time, how the Shamrock kept its doors open.

"That picture." I nodded to the railway schedule. "Could I take a look?"

Des pulled the thing off the wall. "Wabash Railway, 1923." The Irishman looked up at me. "Don't know a fucking thing about it."

He laughed like a lunatic and made his way back to the waitress, giggling about the useless shit Yanks stick on walls. I took a closer look at the old schedule. What had caught my eye was the logo:
WABASH RAILWAY
in Old English script over a yellow background. Underneath it a black train belched smoke and steamed down a set of tracks. The design wasn't identical to the cardboard cutout someone had left on my doorstep, but it wasn't far off either. I flipped open my cell and punched in a number.

"Mr. Kelly, how are you?"

"Okay, Hubert. What's up?"

"The news is saying someone shot up Lake Shore Drive today. Then you guys shot and killed him."

"And you're thinking our case is solved?"

"Is it?"

"Keep going. There's at least two bad guys and only one of them is dead."

"You sure?"

"Yes, how's it going?"

"Slow. I got some data running on the current investigation. Checking everything against your personal history."

"What about Jim Doherty's files?"

"Just cracked them a few hours ago. Got some odds and ends popping up."

"Like what?"

"Nothing special."

"What do you have, Hubert?"

"Background stuff, mostly. Weird connections. For example, did you know there were two train crashes almost identical to yours? One in Des Moines in 1978. Another just outside St. Louis, three months before Chicago."

"Commuter crashes?"

"No, these were freight trains. No one hurt, but similar sorts of accidents, one train hitting a second and then accelerating after the initial collision."

"That is pretty random."

"There's more. Both of the freight train crashes were investigated by the NTSB. They determined that an engine-override device made by an old company called Transco malfunctioned, causing the first train to accelerate unexpectedly. In both cases the failure turned a minor incident into a major accident."

"I still don't see much of a connection to Chicago."

"Hang on," Hubert said. "I pulled the blueprints for the train you were riding in. They were in one of the files your friend Doherty gave us. The CTA had the same override device installed on your train."

"Made by Transco?"

"One and the same."

"No one ever connected the dots back to Chicago?"

"Doesn't look like it."

I took a sip of Booker's and thought about the CTA car bucking that night, the surges of power rumbling through a nine-year-old's sneakers.

"Transco no longer exists?" I said.

"Long gone."

"Who owned it back in the day?"

"It's pretty murky."

"I bet. Keep looking and remember what I told you. Think out of the box." I spun the framed photo of the railway schedule in a circle on the bar. "I got another random thing I want you to check out. The black-and-yellow logo I gave you ..."

"I ran an image search through a couple of databases, but haven't gotten a hit yet."

"That's good, kid. Listen, I want you to look up an old outfit named Wabash Railway."

"Wabash?"

"Like the street. According to their press, they ran the world's longest electrified railroad back in the 1920s. From Toledo and Pittsburgh through Chicago to the Mississippi."

"What am I looking for?"