The Bad Kitty Lounge (27 page)

The working arm swung out again, then in. Another plate of glass exploded and rained down.

Another.

Stone was destroying the building.

The working arm swung farther from the building and the cable lowered until the I-beam was even with me. The trolley that held the cable rolled toward the operator's cab, stopped.

The I-beam turned in a gust of wind, then straightened. I pointed the nine-millimeter at the crane cab window. The working arm swung toward the building.

The beam closed on me. I squeezed off a shot and then another. I was shooting at the clouds.

I dove to the floor as the beam smashed into the concrete column where I'd been standing. The steel rang like a huge bell. The beam broke from the cable, fell to the concrete floor, and rang again. Then the beam bounced over the side of the building and disappeared far below into the brown earth.

I got up on one knee and fired the nine-millimeter at the crane cab.

The glass on the cab exploded. Stone sat in the open sky with a pistol pointed at me. He fired three, four times. I ducked behind a column, waited, spun into the open, and shot at the cab.

Too late.

Stone was scrambling down a ladder.

 

WHEN HE STEPPED FROM
the last section of ladder onto the concrete base, I was waiting for him behind a pile of scrap.
He ran into the open from the steel framing, looking for me, his gun pointing everywhere except at me.

I took my time.

As he peered up at the floor where he'd tried to crush me with the steel beam, I stepped out, aimed for his chest, and fired.

His body fell back and hit the concrete.

He didn't get up. Didn't move.

I wanted to keep shooting him until the clip in the nine-millimeter ran dry. Then I would keep pulling the trigger just to hear it click. That seemed about as crazy as smashing a skyscraper with a steel beam, so I tucked the nine-millimeter in my belt and went to him.

His chest had stopped heaving. His left arm was bent back and away in an unnatural pose of the dead. I watched him like he was a curious monster, safely asleep in a cage—until I noticed he had no blood on his chest or his belly, none on his face either, except the gash where I'd hit him with the coffeepot.

I grabbed for my gun, but his eyes opened and his right hand rose from the concrete with his pistol in it, pointed at my forehead.

I put my hands in the air.

He sat up and squeezed the trigger.

But a gunshot rang from across the dirt lot. Stone spun. When he came back around, pain and shock had put a horror mask on his face. A patch of blood spread from his left shoulder toward his belly.

He turned toward the end of the building. Lucinda stood there. Her pistol was pointing at him. She looked as stunned as he did that she'd shot him. Stone steadied his gun and fired at her. Her gun arm flew sideways and her pistol soared from her
hand and hit the building wall. Stone swung his gun at my face and stumbled toward me. I reached for the nine-millimeter.

From behind me a burst of automatic gunfire cut him down. His body flew back. His gun flipped into the air, fell on the concrete next to him, bounced and bounced again and came to a rest against a steel strut. He landed on the concrete slab, dead—he had to be dead this time.

Another burst of automatic gunfire tossed his body across the concrete.

The shooting stopped, and I went to him. His body and legs had dozens of holes in them. His head was blood and splintered bone. I pointed the nine-millimeter at his chest and fired. I knew better. I knew I would have nightmares about shooting a corpse. But I fired.

When the shock and the sound passed, I looked at the building behind me. Perched inside a third-floor gap, DuBuclet's helpers, Robert and Jarik, cradled light assault rifles. Robert nodded to me with a grim smile. Then he and Jarik disappeared into the shadows.

LUCINDA SAT ON THE
dirt by the side of the building. She'd gotten her gun and had it in her lap. I ran to her and she looked at me with sad eyes.

“I froze,” she said.

I looked at her wounded arm. “How bad is it?”

Her leather jacket had a hole in the sleeve. A trickle of blood was running down her arm and dripping from her fingers. She lifted the arm, looked at the hole, and grimaced.

“I froze,” she said. “I shot him. Then I froze.”

“You saved my life.”

“I've never frozen before. I was afraid I'd hit you.”

“Can you take off your jacket?” I said.

She stood and held her arms open to me. I undressed her like a child, unzipping the jacket, slipping the sleeve off her left arm, gently sliding off the other sleeve.

The wound had soaked her cotton shirtsleeve with blood. I tore away the cloth. The bullet had taken the flesh off the outside
of her arm. Blood flowed freely but it would stop on its own or with a few stitches. I ripped away the rest of the sleeve, folded it, made it into a compress. She held it against the torn flesh and I draped her jacket over her shoulders.

I said, “How did you know where to find me?”

“You weren't at the Stones' house or office.”

“But how did you know I would be with the Stones?”

She looked at me like I was missing the point. “You were too close.”

“Yeah, so you froze—so what? How did you know?”

“Birth records. You sent me to the county clerk's office. Louise Johnson had a daughter in 1970.”

“Yeah?”

“The father was David Stone. The daughter was Cassie.”

“David Stone and Louise Johnson?”

“And daughter Cassie. I figured he had to be involved one way or another. So I went looking for him.”

That explained the photos missing from Louise Johnson's refrigerator and the frame in her hallway. The photos probably were of Cassie. David Stone had burned them and stuffed the ashes in the mouth of Cassie's mother. I figured that Louise Johnson had kept quiet about her connection to Judy Terrano because a deal she'd struck with the Stones when they'd taken her daughter must have included a vanishing act. I wondered what she got in return. Rent money and a monthly case of Bacardi?

“Thank you,” I said, because what else do you say when someone saves your life? Then, “How about Robert and Jarik? Did you bring them with you?”

“I've no idea where they came from. But I get the feeling
that William DuBuclet knows everything that happens in this city and where and when.”

I thought about Robert and Jarik knowing I was helping Stan Fleming almost before I knew it myself. “I've got the feeling you're right.”

I glanced at David Stone's dead body, flat against the concrete like gravity was pulling him toward his grave. “We should call the police,” I said. “You have your phone?”

She nodded down at herself.

I fished her cell phone out of the inside pocket of the jacket. She looked at me with those sad eyes. “I never freeze.”

I leaned over her and touched my lips to hers, kissed her. She dropped the compress, reached, and pulled me toward her. She breathed me into her like I was life itself. Then she pushed me away.

She looked at me, wild-eyed.

“It's okay,” I said.

Her voice was bitter. “Why is it okay? You could have died. I could have.”

“I didn't. You didn't.”

“Well, it's not okay.”

I had no answer for that. I sat on the dirt across from her and watched her. She looked away. I knew of nothing to say to her, nothing to say to myself. So I dialed 911 on her cell phone. I told the operator where we were and asked her to send an ambulance for Lucinda and the cops for David Stone and everything else. The operator told me to stay on the line. I hung up.

I went back to Stone. His long hair was pasted against his bloody head, all but a few strands, which blew in the wind like dry grass. His body had the shape of something that had been broken inside. I started at his collar, patting his shirt. His pants
pockets were damp with blood and urine. They held his car keys, his wallet, and a lighter. My wallet and keys, too.

I groped his legs, then rolled him over. My Glock stuck out of the back of his waistband. I stuck it into my shoulder holster, then started again from the top.

Nothing. If he had the file of land titles and deeds that Terrence and I had seen in the Stone Tower office, he'd eaten it.

I returned to Lucinda and wiped my hands on the soil until they were filthy but dry. She still wasn't looking at me, so I called Stan Fleming at the District Thirteen station. By the time I'd given him directions to Stone Tower, sirens filled the air.

FOR THE NEXT THREE
hours we had a big enough crowd in back of the building to hold a block party. The cops rigged floodlights that shined a jaundiced yellow over the dirt and reflected high into the night from the mirrored glass. The paramedics convinced Lucinda to let them take her to the hospital. The medical examiner poked and prodded David Stone's body, then put it in a bag. A forensics team did a scavenger hunt for bullets and shells. I told my story a half-dozen different times, but none of them included Robert and Jarik. Along with Lucinda, they'd saved my life. But they'd walked away afterward. I figured I should respect that, though it could cost me plenty. The cops didn't like my knowing nothing about them.

Stan Fleming came onto the dirt lot as the others finished with me, so I told my story again. He gave me a long stare when I said I didn't know who had finished off Stone. When the stare didn't break me, he said, “DuBuclet?” as if he'd read my mind.

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it does.”

“They were ahead of us on this. They knew it was David Stone.”

He looked at me hard. “All the more reason I want them in my hands.”

“You're going to arrest them for bringing down Stone? You should be shaking their hands and pinning little medals on them, but you won't and they don't want your medals anyway. They definitely don't want to shake your hand. They don't want to be connected with you. They don't trust you.”

Stan shook his head. “Ask me if I give a shit.”

I stared at him.

“I'm not arresting anyone yet,” he said. “But I want to know what happened from everyone involved, separate and together.”

“They won't tell you a thing. They'll deny they were here.”

“They'll talk to me.”

Stan had a toughness that made me wonder if he was right. But DuBuclet and his followers were tough, too. “I'll tell you what you want to know,” I said.

I gave it all to him, everything I knew and everything I suspected. I told him that David Stone had burned the Bad Kitty Lounge in 1969 and had wasted half his life in jail for lighting that one match. I told him I figured that after the fire the Stones had struck a deal with Judy Terrano involving her court testimony, making promises that involved the land where the Bad Kitty Lounge had stood and where the Stones now were building a luxury condominium tower. I told him I figured Greg Samuelson was trying to extort the Stones for a piece of the Tower and got himself shot for the effort. I told
him about the loose connection to the priest in Judy Terrano's bathtub and the close connection to Louise Johnson. I told him he could find Terrence's body in his apartment.

When I finished, Stan nodded but looked unhappy. “So why did David Stone put the ashes of the photographs in Louise Johnson's mouth?”

“The guy was into burning. Had a long history of it.”

“Maybe,” he said. “And why did he take off her pants? Why did he strip Judy Terrano?”

I shrugged. “He was a monster.”

He shook his head. “That's not an answer.”

“It's the best I've got,” I said.

He thought. “So this was about a square of muddy real estate with ashes on it?”

It was about everything, I thought. Sex. A kerosene fire. Four dead kids. Race riots. A history of blood and sperm and sweat as old as the city or older. Ash that would stay in the air for as long as the city existed and we all would breathe it and live in it. It was about the hope that in a few rooms in an all-but-abandoned building on the southwest side, the violent history of the city could go to sleep and the kids who visited could have happy dreams. Like the Bad Kitty Lounge, it was about anything you wanted it to be about. It might even have been about love.

“It was about money,” I said. “Millions of dollars. But basically, yeah—it came down to mud and ashes.”

 

AROUND NINE O'CLOCK A
young cop drove me out through the chain-link gate, past the news vans and cameras, away from the blood, and back to the McDonald's parking lot where
I'd left my car. The seagulls were gone. But next door, four police cars and an ambulance lined the curb outside Terrence's building. I knew what they were looking at inside and I never wanted to see it again.

I got in my car and pulled into the street. Jason's Gandhi bobblehead danced on the dashboard. I ripped it off the vinyl, threw it against the front window.

I yelled for a while. I don't know what I said.

At the next stoplight, I looked at the passenger-side carpet. Gandhi gazed up at me without an angry bone in his bobblehead body. I picked him up and put him back on the dashboard.

“It's okay,” I said to him. “It's going to be all right now.” And I drove home.

LUCINDA'S HONDA WAS PARKED
at the curb in front of my house. A yellow light glowed inside. I pulled into the alley, walked back, and climbed into the passenger seat.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

“You going to live?”

“They swabbed my arm with iodine, taped on some gauze, and told me to get a tetanus shot tomorrow.”

“Not even a kiss to make it feel better?”

“Not covered by my insurance. The doctor said the biggest injury will be mental. He said I should get counseling.”