Kelson drove back to Rodman’s apartment, tailed again by Nuñez’s men, and jogged up the front stairs.
Little Marty LeCoeur still slept in the bedroom, while the others watched TV coverage of the police sweeping the city. Doreen sat up on the couch, though her eyes had a Demerol glaze. On ABC, news cameras showed the aftermath of a raid of Toselli’s Dearborn Park townhouse. A couple of dozen police cars and tactical vans were crammed into the little court outside the house. Plainclothes cops carried boxes out of the front door. The reporter had to shout over the beat of a hovering helicopter. Standing by one of the tactical vans, Toselli’s mother talked with two officers.
‘Nice lady,’ Doreen mumbled.
‘Huh?’ Francisca said.
Rodman thumbed the remote, and the channel jumped to NBC. Toselli had just called the news program, and the station was playing the audio. He ranted about failures of departmental leadership, kids who fall through the cracks, wrongheaded crime-fighting practices. He sounded more than a little crazy.
Doreen said, ‘He’s doing … it.’
‘What?’ Cindi asked.
‘Shh,’ Rodman said.
Toselli said the police wouldn’t find him, because he was gone – gone and never coming back. He was done hurting others, done getting hurt.
‘Ha,’ Doreen said.
Toselli said he loved his mom. He loved his dead sister Inez. He loved his dead nephew Alejandro.
Doreen mumbled, ‘He’s so … damn … good.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Kelson asked.
‘It’s an act,’ she said. ‘Dis—’ for a moment she lost the second half of the word – ‘Distraction. You lower your guard. He’s coming after you.’ She smiled at Francisca. ‘And you.’ The smile fell. ‘And me.’ She wiggled a finger at Rodman – ‘I don’t know about you’ – then at Cindi – ‘You, he doesn’t know about … but he’d be happy to have you.’
‘No one’s guard is down,’ Kelson said.
‘If you blink,’ she said, ‘if you look at your … shoes – he’s so quick, so damn … good. If you take your eyes off for one moment—’
‘We get the idea,’ Rodman said. ‘So how do we beat him at his own game?’
‘You don’t. It’s’ – she did something with her mouth and lips that looked like an old woman adjusting her false teeth – ‘impossible.’
‘One of his friends picked him up when he got loose,’ Kelson said. ‘Where can we find them?’
She shook her head. The TV ran more video of the raid on the Dearborn Park townhouse.
Rodman said, ‘How many guys can he round up to back him?’
She said, ‘When you think you’ve got him, he’s got you. He likes … corners.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Kelson said.
‘Back him into a corner … he likes that.’
On the TV screen, the plainclothes cops ran out of the front door of the townhouse. Other cops backed from the sidewalk to the opposite side of the court. At the same time, a special operations truck, carting an object that looked like a bathysphere, drove past the police cars and over the front curb. Two men wearing helmets the size of an astronaut’s climbed out.
Rodman asked Kelson, ‘Did you see anything that looked like explosives?’
‘Nothing,’ Kelson said.
‘You wouldn’t,’ Doreen said, as the men in helmets went into the townhouse. ‘You should turn that off – if you don’t want to see it.’
‘I don’t mind fighting him in a corner,’ Kelson said.
Her face looked sour as she fixed her eyes on the screen. ‘I hate watching this.’
Kelson turned off the TV. ‘Where—’
Just then, on the other side of Rodman’s living room, a spray of bullets smashed the two front windows and tattered the plywood covering the one Toselli shot out earlier.
Francisca screamed. Kelson, Cindi, and Rodman ducked to the floor. Doreen sat on the couch, indifferent. ‘See? That’s what I mean.’
Little Marty emerged from the bedroom, wide-eyed and furious. With his pistol in his hand, he drifted to the wall by one of the blown-out windows and shot down at Toselli and two other men – the hard-faced one who had picked up Toselli at the Northwest Side parking lot and a stocky black man with a tightly trimmed beard. Nuñez’s men were nowhere in sight. Kelson and Rodman crawled to the windows and, after another spray of bullets pocked the plaster ceiling, also fired down at the street.
For ten minutes, Kelson, Rodman, and Marty shot from the windows, and Toselli and his men dodged from parked car to recessed doorway, spraying the building with automatic gunfire. Cindi called 911 and, with the calm voice of a woman who worked in an emergency room, explained what was happening, then explained again when the operator didn’t get it – and no, Cindi could do nothing to quiet the noise that made her hard to hear.
When a chunk of ceiling plaster fell on the couch inches from Doreen’s head, Francisca got on her knees and shoved her like a queen on a barge across the apartment to a sheltering wall.
Doreen said, ‘If he wants to, he can.’
‘Can what?’ Francisca asked.
‘Kill us all,’ Doreen said. ‘If he wants to.’
In the pauses in the clattering gunfire, approaching sirens wailed. Still Kelson, Rodman, and Marty shot down at the street. Still Toselli and his men fired into the apartment, filling the air with strange dust.
Until they stopped.
And the dust filtered to the floor.
Then Kelson, Rodman, and Marty stood in the hard silence of the apartment, and a gentle March breeze played through the blown-out windows. They looked at each other, checking for wounds.
As the first squad car turned a corner and headed for the building, Rodman asked, ‘Ready for them?’
‘All my life,’ Kelson said. But when he glanced at Doreen and Francisca, Doreen gave him a look that bored through her narcotic dullness and seemed to plead for help. So he said, ‘But get her out of here.’
There was no time to argue or ask why. Two more squad cars came around the corner and skidded to a stop behind the first. Kelson’s companions could act on his wish without hesitating, or they could give Doreen to the cops.
Rodman said to Marty, ‘Take her down the back.’ And to Cindi, ‘Can you go with them?’
‘Where?’
Kelson dug his keys from his pocket and gave her the one for Nancy’s house – which would be empty if Nancy had taken Sue Ellen to a hotel. He helped Doreen to her feet between Cindi and Francisca and ushered them out of the back door.
When he returned to the front, seven squad cars were parked on the street, and four cops, pistols in their hands, came up the stairs, stopped at the second-floor landing, and charged up the next flight.
When they reached the landing, Rodman stood in the open doorway with his hands over his head. Kelson stood beside him, hands over his.