Hardball (37 page)

“I’m sorry, Vic. I know you saved my life and all and I wish you hadn’t, that’s the God’s truth. If you’da let me die, my little girl wouldn’t be in so much trouble.
Your
little girl, I mean. She’s a real nice gal, Vic. You can be proud of her. So don’t worry about me no more now, you hear? You don’t need to look after me no more, okay?”

Dornick ignored Elton’s quavery apology. “I want those negatives, Vic.”

He ordered his crew to come into the brambles after me. “Alive: I want to search her. I don’t want her dead . . . yet.”

The men crashed down the bank and into the thicket. I fired and hit one of them but missed the other two. And then they had me by the arms, and I was kicking, shooting, but the end was ordained at the beginning. They held me while Dornick ran his hands inside my clothes, squeezed my nipples.

I stomped hard on his instep and kicked back at the kneecap of the man behind me. Both men cried out. They weren’t used to pain. I broke free, but Dornick grabbed me before I could start running. He wrenched my gun away and tossed it into the underbrush. An underling held me while Dornick slapped my face. Left side, right side, left side.

“You watch too many old Nazi flicks, George.” I said. “That’s always what Erich von Stroheim does.”

He hit me again. “You’re not as smart as Tony always claimed you were. Where are the pictures?”

“Freeman has them.”

“No, he doesn’t.”
Slap.

“I put them in a FedEx box on Armitage,” I said.

“Take the shack apart,” Dornick ordered. “She wouldn’t even leave them with a messenger from Cheviot. She sure didn’t put them in a box.”

I had shot one man; the second man was holding me. Dornick held a gun on Elton while the fourth man dismantled his home. Elton gave little cries of misery as the walls were peeled apart, plastic bags torn open, his nest of sleeping bags ripped apart. It took a good twenty minutes, but the black garbage bag was gone. Petra must have grabbed it on her way out, determined to save Peter’s hide.

Dornick was angry now. He held his gun on me, and I could see the red triangle of the laser sight in the dark toying with my chest, my head, figuring where best to shoot so as not to hit his lackey.

I went limp in the man’s arms, took a breath—the kind Gabriella always wanted, down, down to my tailbone, shutting my eyes:
“Breathe, don’t think. Breathe, don’t think”—
and began my mother’s signature aria,
“Non mi dir, bell’idol mio”
(Say not, my beloved )
.

Dornick’s gun sounded, and I flinched. I couldn’t help it, ruining Mozart’s fluid line, thinking instead of breathing. He’d missed.

“You goddammed asshole, you—”

The grip on my arms loosened. I broke free. I kicked hard against the kneecap, rolled to the ground, rolled toward Dornick. Elton had seized his legs. Dornick was flailing about, trying to get an angle where he could shoot Elton and not hit himself. He was stronger than the homeless man, but all that meant was that as he thrashed about he dragged Elton with him.

I gave a primitive yell, smashed my hand into his forearm, and seized the gun. A moment later, the embankment was awash in blue.

48

UP AGAINST THE WALL . . . ALL OF YOU!

A POLICE LAUNCH HAD ARRIVED, BUT IT TOOK US ALL A few minutes to realize that. Two of Dornick’s banditti tried to run off, but the launch turned its spotlight on the shore. A couple of cops pulled out rifles and ordered the men to stop where they were. Dornick was doubled over on the ground, but he shouted for help:

“Officer down! Officer down!” he cried. “Get that bitch before she escapes. She grabbed my weapon.”

“He’s a liar,” Elton cried in a high-pitched gabble. “Vic, she was here with her girl. They were hiding from this man here. He’s a psycho. We seen plenty like him in Vietnam, rogue soldiers who start shooting their own men. He’da killed Vic if I hadn’t tackled him. And he broke my house in little pieces, just for nothing but to make me feel bad.”

“You look her up,” Dornick said. “She already murdered one cop this week. She’s out for revenge on the whole police force.”

Men in Kevlar vests jumped ashore. They covered all of us with their assault rifles and herded us onto the launch. I was shaking so badly, I almost fell into the river. The cops hoisted me over the side of the launch, and left me under guard while they went back for Dornick’s wounded thug.

Petra was sitting in the stern, wrapped in a gray police blanket. In some dim part of my exhausted mind, I felt relief at knowing she was safe. But mostly I wanted to lie down on the deck and sleep.

Once we were all on board, Dornick had the gall to try to pretend I had held him hostage—him and his three banditti—and forced them to the river, where I proposed shooting them, just as I had shot Larry Alito.

“That’s not true, Mr. Dornick.” Petra called out from the stern. “You know you tried to kill me and Vic. I don’t even know how she escaped, except I guess she’s more resourceful than you.”

That made me smile. The cops wouldn’t let me go over to Petra, so I blew her a kiss.

In the meantime, though, the river police had looked me up and found Bobby’s outstanding warrant on me. They cuffed me, and told me I had the right to remain silent, but as we rode downriver I kept repeating Bobby’s cellphone number and telling them to call Bobby before they booked me and left Dornick free to flee their jurisdiction. Petra’s insistence that it was Dornick who’d been threatening us made them decide to give me at least enough of the benefit of the doubt to call Bobby, who ordered them to bring all of us in.

At the Grand Avenue Landing station, they transferred us from the launch to a paddy wagon. It was one of the old beat-up ones, without springs or shocks. Dornick was beside himself with rage. Him, the head of Mountain Hawk Security, a twenty-year veteran, in the wagon with common criminals.

“I’m not a common criminal, Mr. Dornick,” Petra said. “And neither is Vic. And Elton sure isn’t. So please be quiet.”

Elton was having the toughest time of all of us, being crammed in with so many people. He was sweating, and his teeth chattered. And each time we hit a pothole, he seemed to think it was a grenade, and he’d try to hit the floor but was held to the seat by his handcuffs. “That one was close. Charlie’s closing in. Move your big feet,” he muttered.

“Elton. We’re in Chicago. It’s Vic. You saved my life.” I leaned as close to him as I could in my handcuffs. “Mine and Petra’s. We’ll get your house repaired. Hold on for another hour. We’re going to make it.”

“That’s right, Elton. You’re the best. It’s Petra—your girl Petra—remember?” my cousin chimed in.

Elton stopped mumbling to himself long enough to say, “You’re a good girl, Petra. We’ll get out of here alive, you trust me for that one.”

Dornick said, “Trust you, you drunken rat? Shut up! I’ll deal with you later.”

“George, you’re the rat in this van, and you are finally going to go into that big old rattrap where you belong. You know how much fun they’re going to have with you in Stateville when they learn you’re the man who tortured Johnny Merton’s boys? I do hope your will is up-to-date.”

Dornick lunged across the seat at me, but the cops riding with us held him back.

Petra huddled next to me on the narrow seat. Under her police blanket, she was still wet from the river. I clasped her hands with my own cuffed ones.

“So how did you get all these boys in blue to show up in time to save my life?” I asked.

She’d swum the river, she said, but she hadn’t been able to climb up the slick logs that lined the far bank. “There was some kind of iron ring. I got hold of that and screamed my head off. There’re these town houses up above, and someone heard me and came outside. She’d heard the shots and was feeling pretty nervous.”

The woman who responded to her screams called the police. When a squad car arrived, Petra cried out that muggers were shooting at me across the river. The cops in the squad car summoned the boat.

“Oh, Petra, little cousin, you’ve been scared, but you showed real courage and real resourcefulness. When all this is over, you keep remembering that. Put all those bad faces away in a drawer and put your own courage out in the living room.”

Petra gave a little sigh and curled against me. The cops didn’t try to pull her away.

The night wore on interminably from there. The paddy wagon unloaded us at headquarters. When we’d all been placed in a big interrogation room at Thirty-fifth and Michigan and left to glower at one another for an hour or so, Bobby made an entrance in his shirtsleeves. Terry Finchley followed, in a suit and tie, carrying a briefcase bulging with manila folders.

“Bobby! Good to see you.” Dornick switched on his hail-fellow voice, a hearty baritone. “Congratulations on the promotion. Well deserved.”

Bobby ignored him. And he didn’t look at me, either. When he spoke, it was to the air above our heads. “I’m trying to get Harvey Krumas down here. Peter Warshawski is on his way over from the Drake. We’ll wait to get started.”

Finchley unloaded his briefcase. We could all read the label on the top folder: HARMONY NEWSOME. At that point, Dornick demanded that he be allowed to call his lawyer.

Bobby, still not looking at him, nodded at Terry, who handed Dornick a cellphone.

When Dornick demanded privacy, Finchley gave his thinnest smile. “You were a cop for a lot of years, Mr. Dornick. You know the drill.”

Dornick’s eyes glittered with fury. If he managed to walk away from any charges tonight, none of us would be safe in our beds. He called his lawyer. He was short and to the point. Then I took the phone to call Freeman Carter’s cellphone.

Freeman was at dinner at the Trefoil. He first talked to Bobby, then came back on the phone with me. “You’re going to be there awhile, Vic. Don’t say anything stupid. I’ll see you by ten.”

I was astonished, looking at the clock, to see it was only a little before nine. I thought I’d been on the river fighting George Dornick my whole life. Another twenty minutes had dragged by before Peter came in, flanked by two cops.

“Petra! Oh my God, you’re safe, Petey . . . Petey . . .” He was at her side, clinging to her, but she pushed him away.

“Daddy, don’t touch me, don’t come near me . . . not until you explain what you did.”

“Don’t talk, Warshawski,” Dornick growled.

“No, you don’t need to talk, Mr. Warshawski,” Bobby agreed. “I’m going to do that. You just take one of those empty seats.”

He laid a slim file on the table: the photo book I’d sent him this afternoon. “We’re going to start at the beginning: Marquette Park, 1966. I was a rookie, and that was a hell of a time to join the police force. Another rookie in my class was Larry Alito. He had the great good luck to be partnered with Tony Warshawski . . . the best cop who ever wore this uniform.”

Bobby looked directly at me for the first time when he said that. I bit my lips together.

“Alito’s badge number was 8963. You can see it here, on the chest of the man picking up a baseball. That ball was a murder weapon used to kill a black girl in the park that day. Harmony Newsome, pride of her family, marching next to a nun. A black kid named Steve Sawyer confessed to the murder, we all know that.”

“Good police work,” Dornick said. “Case closed.”

“Bad police work,” Bobby snapped. “Case reopened. No proper forensic evidence was presented at the trial. We didn’t have the murder weapon then, but it should have been possible to tell from the bruising and contusions and so on that she’d been struck by a projectile, not by someone stabbing her in the eye at close range.”

He tossed the photo book across the table at my uncle. “You and someone else are in these pictures. He throw that ball or you?”

Peter licked his lips, but he looked at the pictures. “Harvey. He told me Dornick said that someone at the march had taken pictures. Damn it, did Tony have them all along?”

Petra was looking at her father, her face strained, very white underneath its layer of grime. When he saw her expression, he winced and looked away.

“Harvey Krumas?” Bobby said.

Dornick interrupted Peter to warn him again not to talk. “They’re recording all this, Warshawski, so shut the fuck up.”

“Lamont Gadsden had the negatives all along,” I said quietly. “He took the pictures with his Instamatic. He’s been missing since the night of the big snow of ’sixty-seven. Three months ago, his auntie hired me to find him. She filed a missing persons report all those years ago, but George and Larry or their friends treated her like scum and didn’t try to find Mr. Gadsden. Now his aunt is dying, and she wants to see him, or know where he’s lying, before she can rest.”

Dornick was fidgeting in his seat, trying to interrupt, but Terry Finchley shut him up. “Did you find him, Vic?”

I shook my head. “No, but I found these pictures. Mr. Gadsden had put the negatives inside his Bible, and he left it with his aunt the last night he was seen alive. She gave it to me last night, not knowing it held dynamite, just wanting me to return it to her nephew when I found him. It was a pure fluke that I found them . . . thanks, really, to you, George. If you hadn’t tried one fancy touch too many—fingering me for Alito’s death—I wouldn’t have been on the run. I wouldn’t have dropped the Bible. But that cracked the spine open, and the negatives fell out.”

Bobby flicked a glance in my direction. “Some time you’re going to tell me how you got out of that Lionsgate Manor without my people finding you.”

I smiled bleakly. “Magic, Bobby. It’s the only way a solo op like me can function against high-tech crap like George here has.”

“Those negatives,” Dornick said, contemptuous, “they don’t exist. You manufactured these prints . . . and not by magic. Anyone could create these out of stock shots of the riot.”

“Yes,” Bobby said. “Where are the negatives, Vicki?”

Vicki.
So we were friends again. I looked at my hands.

“Here.” Petra spoke into the silence around the table. “I took them with me into the river.” She pulled the black plastic bag from under her blanket.