A Bad Night's Sleep (25 page)

Lucinda said, “So he’s playing taxman to the gangs and collecting the information you want and money for himself.”

Bill said, “It’s brilliant. We’ll know the organization of every gang in the city. Top to bottom.”

“If it works,” I said.

He said, “When you called in the burglary at Southshore, you just about messed everything up.” He glanced nervously in the rearview mirror and out the front windshield like he thought Finley or other guys from Johnson’s crew might be coming. He said, “At the same time, Bob Monroe was grumbling and talking about taking over leadership from Johnson. That would mess things up too. So we decided to use the first problem—you—to take care of the second problem.”

I felt like Bill had punched me in the gut. “You did this without telling me or Lucinda?”

“I’ve seen you play cards. I thought we had a better chance of pulling this off if you didn’t know.” He almost grinned. I didn’t. He said, “When the gangs find out that Johnson has eliminated Monroe, they’ll wet their pants. And now Johnson comes out looking to the rest of his crew like he can do no wrong. We print up a few travel and restaurant receipts for him and he smells clean to them from now on.”

Lucinda said, “He’s really been doing solo burglaries?”

Bob nodded. “I told you, he’s bad, but he’s just bad enough that he can help us wipe out the gangs or most of them. No one wants to get in the way of that. Not the superintendent. Not the mayor.”

I thought about what he was saying. “Not the FBI.”

He nodded. “Not the FBI.”

“They backed off when you told them?”

“They weren’t happy about it but they did. In the spirit of cooperation.”

“So what now?” I asked.

“Now we wait for Johnson to collect names and information. When he does, we make a sweep unlike any sweep you’ve ever seen. Maybe we’ll even invite the FBI to the party.”

“And what happens to me?”

“Like I said, your name’s clear—with an apology.”

“You think that’ll clear my name?”

“It’s the best we can do.” He held his hand toward me again. “The key?”

“How about my detective’s license?”

“Give it a couple of days,” he said. “The department will present its findings about the Southshore shootings to the state board. The findings exonerate you. Sorry we can’t turn you into a hero on this one, but there will be no basis for suspending your license. That’ll have to be good enough.”

I wondered if I wanted the license. I said, “I want one more thing.” I gave him Rafael’s name. “When you bring down the gangs,” I said, “you’re going to cut him free without making him agree to any deals.”

“I can’t promise.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Won’t.”

I stared at him. “You used to be a friend, Bill.”

His voice softened. “I still am.”

I thought about hitting him. I thought about crying—for him, for me, for what we used to be.

I opened the van door and climbed out.

Lucinda slid open the side panel and got out too.

Her car was parked on the street. Mine was in the building garage. Getting to them seemed less of a risk than staying with Bill.

He yelled, “Give me the key!”

I held it so he could see it, then tossed it down the stairs that led to the basement. He could crawl down and get it himself. He could radio for help. He could sit in his van and wait for Finley to come and hold a gun to his head. I didn’t care what he did but I wanted him to suffer.

THIRTY-TWO

THE GATE AGENT ANNOUNCED
early boarding for the flight to Daytona. The morning was bright and cold. In the first light, before Jason and I got in my car to drive to the airport, the thermometer said the temperature was twenty-three degrees. The radio forecaster said clouds would blow in by early afternoon and an inch or two of snow would fall overnight. Still, a couple of jokers who were waiting for the flight already had changed into shorts, short-sleeved shirts, and flip-flops.

Jason came back from the floor-to-ceiling window where he’d been watching baggage handlers loading luggage into the bottom of the airplane. “Where is she?” he said.

“Don’t worry, she’ll be here.”

He sat and ate the remainder of a sweet roll that we’d bought after clearing security. He’d knocked his infection and you would never know he’d been sick and in the hospital a week earlier except for the bright-red scar just above his belt where his doctors removed his appendix. When I’d taken him for his two-week postoperative checkup, Dr. Abassi had prodded the skin around the scar and told him that he still needed to take it easy.

Jason had said, “I’m eleven years old. It’s impossible to take it easy.”

The doctor had laughed and said to me, “Smart kid. You’d better keep an eye on him.”

Jason shook his head like he knew more than the adults who surrounded him. “Joe needs someone to keep an eye on him more than I do.”

“Smart kid,” the doctor said again and left the room.

Now Jason ate his sweet roll like he’d never seen a hospital bed and never would, and he checked his watch and mumbled, “She’d better hurry up.”

We all needed him to keep an eye on us.

*   *   *

AFTER LEAVING THE SPA
Club in our separate cars, Lucinda and I had met in the parking lot at Belmont Harbor to figure out what to do next. The sun wouldn’t go down for a couple of hours, but already on the eastern horizon the gray lake water merged with the gray sky like there was no difference between heaven and earth. The illusion seemed like a dirty trick.

For Lucinda’s safety and mine, we’d agreed we should stay apart for awhile. She would bounce around from motel to motel and I would do the same. We would talk by phone. We would drive past our houses and the places where we usually spent time, and we would judge the danger hour to hour and day to day.

That first night, sitting on the slick bedspread of a cheap Northside motel, I’d called Corrine. Last time I’d talked to her, she’d told me she didn’t know if she loved me enough to stand by me with all my trouble.

Now she’d heard that the police had dropped the charges. She said, “I’m sorry that I said what I said.” When I didn’t reply, she said, “Will you forgive me?”

I said, “I never blamed you.”

She said, “Can I see you tonight?”

“No,” I said, “not yet.”

“Oh,” she said.

When I’d called after that, she’d sometimes answered her phone.

That first night, I’d slept hard and dreamless. In the morning, I bought the newspapers and went to breakfast. The department had issued its formal apology. News of it ran on the bottom of page six of the Local News section of the
Tribune
and page nine of the
Sun-Times
. Maybe a few readers saw it. No one would have missed the stories about the robbery and killing of the highly decorated Bob Monroe. Those stories ran on page one.

I’d driven around for the rest of the morning and stopped at Mom’s house a little before lunch. Jason had gotten well enough to come home but for the same reasons that Lucinda and I kept apart, Mom and I decided he would stay where he was.

In the afternoon, I’d driven around some more. I’d called Rafael. He’d said Sanchia and her boys were okay but were thinking of moving back to Mexico to live with her parents. I didn’t tell him that Johnson was setting up the city’s street gangs for a sweep, but when he said that he planned to keep spitting at Johnson instead of giving him names and money, I told him I thought he was smart.

In the next few days, there was no more coverage of street gangs in the news than usual, but I didn’t expect there to be. Bill’s plan, if it worked, would take months, maybe a year. If the plan didn’t work, the news would have more stories about cops killed during robbery attempts or when they crashed their cars into viaducts late at night with no one nearby to see what happened.

I slept, I ate, and I bounced around from motel to motel and stopped by my office and house from time to time. After four days, when no one from Johnson’s crew showed up to kill me, I spent more and more time in the places where I lived and worked.

One night, a little after three in the morning, I woke in a sweat. I put on clothes and went outside and opened my car trunk. I got the sack with the Baggie of cocaine and the bottle of bourbon. Inside, I turned on the hot and the cold taps in the sink and poured out the whiskey. Then I opened the Baggie and tipped the white powder into the swirling water. Flushing it down the drain felt like burning money. It felt like pulling away in the middle of sex. I climbed back into bed and stared at the ceiling. I was still staring when the sun rose.

That morning, I decided to take Jason out of school for a few days and book a couple of rooms north of Daytona.

*   *   *

THE GATE AGENT ANNOUNCED
a final boarding call. The waiting area was empty. We were supposed to be on the plane already, sitting in row thirty-one.

Jason eyed me like a parent who didn’t want to disappoint his child and said, “She’s not coming.”

I twisted David Russo’s ring on my finger. “She’ll be here,” I said.

ALSO BY MICHAEL WILEY

IN THE JOSEPH KOZMARSKI SERIES

The Bad Kitty Lounge

The Last Striptease

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

A BAD NIGHT’S SLEEP
. Copyright © 2011 by Michael Wiley. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wiley, Michael, 1961–

A bad night’s sleep : a mystery / Michael Wiley. — 1st ed.

        p. cm.

“A Thomas Dunne book.”

ISBN 978-0-312-55224-4

1.  Private investigators—Illinois—Chicago—Fiction.   2.  Police corruption—Illinois—Chicago—Fiction.   3.  Undercover operations—Fiction.   4.  Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction.   I.  Title.

PS3623.15433B34 2011

813'.6—dc22

2011005107

First Edition: June 2011

eISBN 978-1-4299-8311-2

First Minotaur Books eBook Edition: June 2011