As the police booked him at the Harrison Street Station, Kelson chattered about being an ex-cop, about the undercover work he did on the narcotics squad, about his friends, acquaintances, and enemies still on the force, and about his kittens. Then he asked to talk to his old commander from the narcotics division, Darrin Malinowski. When the officers ignored that, he asked to talk to Dan Peters or Venus Johnson, homicide cops he knew from the biggest case he’d worked since going private. ‘You wrecked a pizza,’ said one of the cops. ‘You ruined a lady’s appetite. That don’t count as homicide. Maybe sex crimes wants to talk to you. Maybe Miss Manners.’
‘Call Sheila Prentiss at the Rehabilitation Institute. Dr P. She’s my therapist – she’ll explain my deal to you.’
‘Not much to explain,’ the cop said. ‘Indecent exposure. Disorderly conduct. The lady whose pizza you sat on, she’s threatening to sue Big Pie – and you.’
‘My lawyer,’ Kelson said. ‘His name’s Ed Davies. I want him here now.’
‘For a guy that can’t keep his pants up, you got a lot of needs,’ the cop said.
Malinowski, Peters, and Johnson never came, and the police put Kelson in a cell where a guard checked on him every fifteen minutes.
‘Suicide watch?’ Kelson asked on the guard’s fifth visit.
‘Making sure you don’t hurt yourself,’ the guard said. ‘If I was anything like you, I know I’d want to.’
‘Not me,’ Kelson said. ‘I like life. Even when a punk shot off a piece of my left frontal lobe, I refused to die.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ the guard said.
‘If anything, I’m too lively – from others’ perspectives.’
‘I see.’
In the evening, Kelson felt the start of one of the headaches he got since the shooting. When he asked the guard for a Percocet, the guard said, ‘You know how many screwballs ask me screwball questions every day?’
So, with pain twisting into his skull, Kelson lay on his skinny mattress, gazing at the jail-cell ceiling. ‘Has it come to this?’ he asked. The ceiling said nothing. ‘Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer,’ he said.
At ten, the guard came by and said, ‘Nighty-night, screwball,’ and a minute later the jail-block lights went out.
When Kelson slept, his first dream started well. He was in his apartment with his daughter Sue Ellen and the kittens she’d named Payday and Painter’s Lane. Sue Ellen was teaching them to play dead – so Kelson clapped, and they leaped from their splayed backs and zipped in circles around the apartment. Sue Ellen burst into that laugh of hers that always sounded to Kelson like wonderful bells. But then Kelson turned his back – maybe he only blinked – and Sue Ellen transformed into the seventeen-year-old street dealer named Bicho who shot him in the head before he returned fire, killing the boy … or maybe Kelson shot first – that detail was lost to frontal lobe damage and the morgue – and the things Bicho was doing to the kittens no one should ever do to the living or the dead.
Kelson jerked awake, sweating, tears in his eyes. He said, ‘What I would—’ but then his misfiring synapses left him wordless. In the dark, he did the deep breathing exercises Dr P taught him, and after a while his heart stopped pounding wildly. He closed his eyes, but that only woke him more, so he went back to the breathing exercises.
The next day, Kelson sat in lockup until after two p.m., when Ed Davies bailed him out. When the police released him, Davies was waiting outside the jail with a box of Kelson’s belongings. As Kelson threaded his belt through his pant loops, Davies said, ‘I appreciate your business, but I’d be happy to miss you for a while.’
‘Think you can get the charges dropped?’
‘I’ll talk to the lady – tell her about your heroic background, offer her a pizza gift card. She’ll look as silly as you do if the news catches the story.’
‘She wants to sue.’
‘Sue a disabled ex-cop who took one in the line of duty? A man who still fights the good fight? A man who’s come back against the odds?’
‘A man who sat on her pizza.’
‘Let her try.’
Kelson took a taxi back to Big Pie to pick up his car, a burnt-orange Dodge Challenger he’d bought with his disability settlement. It was the twenty-second of May and, like most Chicago days at the end of spring, chilly and gray.
Sitting in the back of the taxi, he checked the messages on his phone. He had one from his daughter Sue Ellen, three from Genevieve Bower, and one from DeMarcus Rodman.
Sue Ellen had called the previous evening from his apartment. She’d waited for two hours for him to take her to their weekly dinner at Taquería Uptown, and now she was bored … and now she was hungry … and now she was calling her mom – and, she said, ‘Mom’s going to be mad at you. Sorry.’
The sorry broke his heart. He swore at the phone loud enough to get a look from the driver, then dialed Sue Ellen’s number. It was three o’clock, the end of the school day at Hayt Elementary, but his call went to voicemail. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said to the recording. ‘Taquería Uptown tomorrow night. If your mom says it’s OK. Extra guacamole. And I’m the one who’s sorry.’
Then he listened to Genevieve Bower’s messages.
She had first called an hour after Sue Ellen, while he was kicking back in his jail cell. ‘Surprise,’ she said. ‘Jeremy just texted. He has the shoes and everything else. He wants fifteen thousand.’ She asked Kelson to call back as soon as he got the message.
She’d called again five hours later, around two a.m. ‘I talked to him,’ she said. ‘He can’t get rid of the stuff. He says he’ll burn it if I don’t pay. He must’ve thought this would be easy.’
She’d called again in the morning. ‘Dammit,’ she said, ‘I paid you to do a job.’
Kelson dialed her number.
She picked up. ‘Where have you been?’
‘After you left, I did a striptease at the restaurant. Then I spent the evening flirting with a jail guard. I hung out in my cell today till my lawyer bailed me out.’
For a moment Genevieve Bower went silent. ‘OK, I get it. None of my business. But I paid you and that is my business. Jeremy’s threatening to burn my stuff if I don’t pay him by six this evening and—’
‘He won’t. He thought he’d unload the things he stole from you, and now that he can’t, he’s panicking,’ Kelson said, and the driver glanced at him in the rearview mirror. ‘Let him panic. It’ll be good for him. He wants two things. He wants money, and he wants out of this. The longer you wait, the more he wants out and the less he cares about the money.’
‘And then he burns the shoes.’
‘Do you want to pay him?’
‘I want to string him by the balls from a light post.’
‘Did he give you a number where you can reach him?’
‘Of course.’
‘Don’t call unless you’re willing to pay. Let him call you again, and when he does, don’t pick up. Let him leave a message. He thinks he has power over you. Let him know he has nothing.’
‘He has—’
‘The shoes are worth nothing if no one will pay him for them. Play this out for another twenty-four hours, and see what he comes back with. Unless you want to give him fifteen thousand.’
‘I want to give him a kick in the balls.’
‘I’m picking up on the theme. When he calls, which he will, let me know.’
‘Are you going incommunicado again, or will I be able to reach you?’
‘I’ll be around if I keep my pants on.’
‘If this doesn’t work, I’ll hold you responsible.’
‘You can sue me,’ he said. ‘But you’ll need to get in line.’
He hung up and listened to the message from Rodman, which his friend had left just forty minutes before Ed Davies sprang him from lockup. ‘We’ve got a problem,’ Rodman said. ‘They’re threatening Marty.’ Marty LeCoeur worked as a bookkeeper at Westside Aluminum, a tedious job that didn’t keep him from getting in deep trouble once or twice a year. Though Marty was only five feet tall and was missing an arm, Rodman claimed he’d seen him take apart men three times his size.
‘Huh,’ Kelson said to the recording. Then he called Rodman and asked, ‘Who’s threatening him?’
‘That’s the thing,’ Rodman said. ‘Can you come over?’
When the cab reached Big Pie and Kelson paid the fare, the driver said, ‘I wouldn’t want to be you, buddy.’