A Bad Night's Sleep (23 page)

A hand shook my shoulder. I opened my eyes, expecting to see Corrine and Jason. The room was dark. The hand shook my shoulder some more. “Wake up!” whispered a voice, a woman’s, accented Spanish—Sanchia’s voice, I realized when she whispered again, “Wake up!”

“What?” I managed to say.

“Get up!” she whispered. “You must go.”

Other voices were yelling somewhere else. Downstairs. Outside. Men’s voices.

“Who—?” And then I knew and I sat bolt upright in bed.

“Quick,” Sanchia said and she stepped out of the bedroom.

I put on my pants and shoes and followed her into the dimly lighted hall.

The men outside were quiet now.

Sanchia opened a hall closet and took out an aluminum stepladder. She set it under a ceiling trapdoor.

“That go to the roof?” I asked.

She nodded and pointed toward the side of the house. “Three houses and you go inside. They wait for you,” she said.

Men shouted outside the house again.

I climbed the ladder, unfastened a latch, opened the heavy door, and heaved myself onto a flat tar roof.

Downstairs, someone kicked the front door, kicked it again, and kicked it a third time. Wood splintered and the door slammed open.

I turned and said, “Thanks,” but Sanchia was already putting the ladder back in the closet.

Heavy footsteps ran up the stairs.

I lowered the trapdoor and heard the latch snap shut, then stood still and silent in the cold night.

A man’s voice yelled at Sanchia. Not Finley’s. The voice of one of the other men in Johnson’s crew. He wanted to know where I was.

I didn’t hear Sanchia’s answer.

He yelled louder.

She yelled back, “
¡No comprendo!
”

The night was black and a cold breeze cut through my clothes. What could I do? Sanchia had said,
Three houses and you go inside
.

I looked both ways. On one side, there were two roofs and then the church with the mural of the naked woman in a canoe. On the other side, there were just roofs, four or five feet apart on the closely built houses.

They wait for you,
Sanchia had said.

I inched quietly to the edge of the roof. In the shadows twenty feet down, garbage cans stood on the path between the houses. They would break my fall but not much.

I estimated the distance between Sanchia’s roof and the next one, breathed deep, and jumped. My foot caught the edge of the roof and I fell forward. Anyone under me would’ve thought an ox fell on the house. I got up, ran across the roof, and jumped again, landing on my feet.

Three houses.

The next gap was wider than the first two but I didn’t slow. I cleared it with plenty to spare.

In the middle of the roof, there was a trapdoor that matched the one on Sanchia’s house.

I ran to it and reached to open it but it opened as if on its own and a hand came out and then a man’s cheerful round face. “
¡Hola!
” the man said. “Come in before you freeze.”

I went down a stepladder into a dark house. “Come with me,” the man said and he led me to the stairway and downstairs. In the living room, he gestured at a sofa. “You can sleep here. I’ll get some blankets.” As he went to get them, he whistled cheerfully. It was three in the morning, a stranger had dropped through his ceiling into his house, and he was whistling.

I sat on the sofa and he brought two folded blankets and set them next to me. “Sleep now,” he said. “You’re safe here.” And, whistling, he climbed the stairs to the second floor.

TWENTY-EIGHT

THE MAN DIDN’T TELL
me his name and I didn’t ask for it. He left me with two blankets and a place to sleep, surrounded by strange sounds and smells, and I was eight miles from home and could have been on the other side of the world. I stretched out under the blankets with my shoes on.

When I closed my eyes, fear surged through me as if another hand would shake me awake and tell me to run. So I opened my eyes and stared at the dark ceiling and at a glint that bounced off the glass front of a china cabinet, or maybe it was a mirror—it was too dark to tell and I didn’t get up to find out. I twisted David Russo’s wedding ring on my finger. I counted the minutes and hours and every one of them was as dark as the last, until the first sunlight filtered into the room a little after six. I could see that the glass with the glint in it was a mirror and then I closed my eyes and slept.

I slept hard and dull, and when I woke a little after eleven, I stayed on the couch and wished I still was sleeping. The man with the round, cheerful face was in the kitchen talking with someone in Spanish—Rafael, I realized. Then a cell phone rang and Rafael answered it in English and talked some more. I tried not to listen. I stared at the ceiling and wondered if I could ever get to the place where I’d been during the good dream I was having before Sanchia shook my shoulder, a happy place with Corrine and Jason.

After awhile, the doorbell rang and Rafael went to it through the living room. He saw I was awake, nodded at me, and said, “
Buenos
.”

I nodded back.

He stepped outside to the front porch and talked for awhile, then came in again and sat on the side of the couch like a father waking up his kid. “Hey,” he said, “you got a visitor.”

For a moment that made me glad. I figured Johnson had freed Lucinda and she’d come to see me. Maybe there was no sense in it but I sat up expecting to see her.

Bob Monroe stood inside the front door. He wore the same brown tracksuit he’d had on when Finley had broken up our talk about bringing down Johnson. He looked like he hadn’t slept and his left eye was bloodshot.

“Morning,” he said. The confidence he usually had in his voice was gone.

I stated the obvious. “You got out.”

“I guess so.”

“Lucinda?”

“Your partner?” He shook his head like he was embarrassed. “They’ve still got her.”

“Why?” I said as if it was his fault.

He shrugged.

“How did you escape?”

Another shrug. “They let me go. After Finley got back from chasing you—limping and one arm in a sling—he saw the receipts on my desk and worked it out. They unlocked my door around nine this morning. Johnson’s saying he didn’t rip us off. He’s saying he’s played it straight. But they’ve got him locked in the room where you were. No chair, though.”

“What happened to Lucinda?”

“They say she caused a lot of trouble last night—scared the hell out of a seventy-year-old alderman who came out of a room while a couple of the guys were taking her from the stairwell. What were you thinking, telling her to come to the club?”

Now
I
shrugged. “I thought I could use a hand if someone locked me in a room with only a chair.”

“Seems to me you did all right without her.”

“Where is she now? Is she all right?”

He nodded. “She’s in the room next to Johnson.”

“Why?” I asked again.

This time he told me. “Finley’s still not totally convinced Johnson’s the enemy. Same with some of the others. They let me out so I could find you and bring you back. They want us to explain the evidence. They want Johnson to defend himself.”

“They’re holding a trial?”

“Something like that. They think keeping your partner will get you to come back.”

“Why do they want me so bad?”

“You gave me the bank receipts. Why wouldn’t they want you?”

He had a point, and, even if he didn’t, I needed to go back for Lucinda. But I would have liked to go back with Bill Gubman beside me and a SWAT team in front of us.

“Okay,” I said and I got up.

Rafael handed me a bag with the clothes he’d promised—a new pair of jeans, a new white sweatshirt, and a used brown leather jacket. While I cleaned up and changed into them, the round-faced man cooked us a meal of scrambled eggs and chorizo. When I came into the kitchen, Rafael and Monroe were sitting at the kitchen table and the man stood at the stove, whistling again like there was nothing he liked more than serving breakfast to cop killers, gangbangers, and thieves.

After we ate, Monroe and I drove back to The Spa Club in Monroe’s car. Outside, the sun was shining, the sky clear, the wind calm for the first time in a week. I felt like we were driving toward our deaths. I glanced at Monroe. He was watching the road, lips pursed, unhappy. Maybe he felt like we were driving to our deaths too.

I said, “What about Raj?”

The question shook Monroe out of his thoughts. “What about him?”

“Finley shot him.”

He shook his head. “No, he didn’t—not as far as you’re concerned. There’s a newspaper in the backseat. Take a look at it.”

I reached into the backseat, picked up a copy of the
Sun-Times
. The front-page headline said
COP GUNNED DOWN IN ROBBERY
. The story explained that neighbors found Raj’s body on the sidewalk outside his house after hearing gunshots. His wallet was gone. The police had no suspects, though one of the neighbors reported having seen a black male, approximately six foot two and a hundred ninety pounds, acting suspiciously an hour before the shooting.

Monroe said, “We’ll support Raj’s wife, and his kids will grow up knowing their dad was a good cop.”

“Finley gets away with it?”

Monroe shook his head some more. “Now’s not the time. Finley’s not sure whose side he’s on. He sees the banking evidence. He knows Johnson screwed him. But they’ve been buddies for a long time. If we want him on our side, we’ve got to be forgiving.”

“I’m not ready to forgive.”

“We’ll see,” he said, though I didn’t know what there was to see.

At The Spa Club, Monroe pulled through the circular driveway, passed the valet, and parked in a fire lane on the side of the building. We got out and he pocketed the keys. He said, “I want to be able to get to my car—just in case.”

I nodded. “I hope you don’t mind giving me and Lucinda a lift—just in case.”

“It’ll be my pleasure.”

We rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor.

When the door opened, the lounge was empty. No one sat at the tables. No one tended bar. No one stood at the hostess station.

“First time we’ve closed in seven months,” Monroe said.

As we stepped out, two of Johnson’s crew came from the hall behind the hostess desk. Someone must’ve been watching the elevator from the video monitor room.

One of them gave Monroe an almost friendly smile. “Hey, Bob.”

Monroe raised his hands so the men could frisk him, and I followed his lead. Then the men steered us down the hall and into the conference room.

Finley sat at the head of the table, his left arm in a cast, a bruise above his left eye. The man to his left had a bandage on his chin. I figured he was the driver when the SUV crashed into the car that Rafael’s friends rolled into the street. The other members of Johnson’s crew sat around the table. Lucinda sat between two of them. I looked her up and down. She was wearing a long-sleeved black T-shirt with a V front that hinted at the skin of her breasts. She had a bruise on her jaw and I wondered if she’d picked it up while fighting Johnson’s crew when they pulled her out of the stairwell, or if they’d come into her room and given it to her later. She locked eyes with me, no expression on her face, no fear. I couldn’t read her thoughts.

Monroe and I took two chairs across the table from her.

Finley picked up a phone, punched a few keys, and said, “We’re ready.” He did this once more, and a minute later the guy who’d been manning the video monitors came in. Then the door in the back opened and two more men accompanied Johnson into the conference room. Johnson sat in the one remaining chair and the two men stood behind him.

Johnson looked around the table like he was measuring each person. When his eyes rested on me, his lips curled into a slightly amused smile.

TWENTY-NINE

FINLEY LEANED BACK, LOOKED
at Lucinda, then me and Monroe, and said, “Okay, Bob, tell us what you’ve got.”

Monroe said, “Do you have the reports and bank receipts?”

Finley reached down to the carpet and brought up a leather case. He took out a stack of stapled packets. “Copies for everyone.” He passed the packets around the table.

I figured everyone had seen what was in them already but Monroe waited until the shuffling of pages stopped. He said, “Two days ago, Joe brought me some bank receipts. He got them before he joined us, when he was investigating us for a group of clients that included the developers of Southshore Village. The receipts worried me,” he said and looked at Johnson. “They
angered
me. Earl handpicked most of us, me included. And when we agreed to join him, we had a clear understanding. We’d work together. No freelancing. No cutting each other out of a good thing.” He looked from face to face at the rest of the crew. “We’ve all been cops long enough to know that’s what the stupid guys do, the ones we catch after one or two robberies because they turn on each other and fuck each other up.”

Some of the other guys nodded.

Monroe looked at Johnson again. “But that’s what he’s been doing. He’s been fucking us up, every one of us. So I did a little digging. I got the reports for the robberies we didn’t do but that looked like what we were doing. As you can see, the dates match the receipts.”

The guys in the crew paged through the packets and murmured. Except Johnson. He sat stone-faced and silent.

Monroe moved in for the kill. “I also remember what Earl told me when he asked me to join him. He said he’d stand by me no matter how bad the heat got, unless I crossed him by going solo and pocketing money for myself. If I did that, he said there’d be no forgiveness. I didn’t have to ask him what he meant. I understood. I’m guessing he said the same thing to each one of us here, and I’m guessing you understood too.”

More guys nodded.

Finley turned to me. “How did you get the bank receipts?”

Part of me wanted to admit that Bill Gubman had fabricated the receipts and handed the stack of them to me. I felt like the building would fall down under us if I told the truth and maybe that would be good. I said, “A woman who hired me to locate her missing son has access to credit, banking, and mortgage records. Her son was dead when I found him but she was grateful anyway. I call her from time to time when I need information.”