There was movement somewhere in the apartment. I rolled over and felt for Karen. The bed was empty. The sheets, rumpled and warm. It was still night, and I looked down the short flight of stairs toward the living room, lined with bars of light from the street. She was standing by the windows, wrapped loosely in a robe. Shadows played across her face from the moving traffic below.
“Hey,” I said.
Karen started as if waking from a dream, then looked up and smiled. Slow and lazy. “Did I wake you?”
“I thought I heard something.” I began to get out of bed.
“Stay. I’m coming up.” She cinched the robe around her waist and walked softly toward the stairs. I watched her bend down in one motion and pick up a flat black purse sitting on a table. She kept both hands on the purse as she moved, more quickly now, across the room. The purse struck me as odd. The way she was carrying it, even stranger. As she hit the first step, her right hand slipped inside the purse. I caught a glimpse of a gleaming white handle and dove for a couple of feet of floor between the wall and the bed. The first bullet burst the pillow my head had been lying on. The second buried itself in the wall above me. I hugged the rough weave of carpet. Karen kicked some blankets out of the way and moved deliberately around the bed. Then she was over me, the lower half of her face gouged by shadow, her eyes the color of machinery. Whoever Karen Simone was, she’d done this before and wouldn’t waste another bullet.
A hundred million thoughts buzzed through my brain, all pleading for attention, all demanding a reprieve. She laid the gun on my forehead and paused for half a breath. As it turned out, her final breath. The suppressed round knocked her neatly against the wall. Karen Simone landed faceup on the bed, a small hole drilled halfway between her temple and her ear. Ten feet away, a man with a rifle came up the short run of stairs. He was silhouetted by light from the living room and moved quickly to check for a pulse. Then Andrew Wallace crouched beside me and put a finger to his lips.
“She was going to kill you, Michael.” Wallace grabbed the black purse and threw it at me. Inside was a customized sleeve for the gun, as well as four different driver’s licenses and three passports. All of them had Karen’s picture and different names.
“Beacon put her into Ray’s office to get close to him. She was supposed to keep an eye on him during the trial, kill him if she thought he was going to cut a deal with the feds. When Ray disappeared with their money, they kept her in place hoping something would turn up.”
I looked at Karen, mouth open slightly, eyes already starting to cloud. Her right hand trailed off the bed. The .22-caliber pistol with the pearl-handle grip lay on the rug a few feet away. My thoughts wandered back to our night at Sterch’s—the smoke, her laughter, the beer. I thought about an e-mail I’d told her about, from a former transportation writer for the Trib. A guy who wanted to meet with me. A guy who was helping me on a case. With that mention, I’d effectively signed Jack O’Donnell’s death warrant. And I was probably looking at his killer.
“We’ve got to move,” Wallace said. The erstwhile grad student turned ninja had camo black smeared down his cheeks and across his forehead.
“Why should I trust you?” I said.
“Because I’m the guy who’s gonna get us out of here. There are three more shooters outside. They were supposed to kill Karen after she called in that she’d finished you.” Wallace pulled a .40-caliber handgun out of his vest and nodded at the bandage on my hand. “Can you shoot?”
I took the gun and began to get dressed. Wallace kept an eye on the street from the living room. We went through the kitchen and crawled out a back door that led to a deck, a flight of stairs, and an alley. There was a car parked under a streetlight at the end of the alley. I peeked over the deck railing and saw two heads in the front seat.
“There’s two back here and one out front,” Wallace said. “Good news is they’re not nearly as dangerous as Karen.”
“Bad news is there’s three of them.”
“I’ll take out the driver. When I do, you head down the stairs. See if you can tag his buddy. I’ll go back through the apartment and get the guy out front. Okay?”
I nodded and crouched on the landing. Wallace laid the barrel of his rifle over the railing. He put his eye to the scope, paused a moment, then squeezed off a round. I was halfway down the stairs as the windshield exploded, ten yards away when the passenger’s door popped open. I put two rounds through it. A body rolled out onto the pavement. I put another round in him, waited a beat, then moved closer. The guy I’d put down was dead. The inside of the car, a spray of blood and tissue. I picked up a gun that had bounced out of the car and put it in my pocket. A second windshield shattering told me Wallace had hit the third shooter. I ran toward the front of the building as Wallace came around a corner.
“Come on.”
We ran back the way I’d come, past the alley and down a couple of side streets. Wallace had a dark blue sedan tucked underneath a viaduct. Five minutes later, we were driving west on Diversey Avenue. Wallace wiped the black off his face and tossed his rifle under a tarp in the backseat. I still had the .40-cal.
“You probably have a lot of questions,” Wallace said.
“A few.”
“I’ll try to answer as many as I can, but you need to trust me.”
“We’ll see.”
Wallace pulled up to a light at Damen Avenue. The clock in front of a bank read 3:43. The intersection was empty. I could hear the first wail of sirens behind us.
“Do me a favor and toss the gun in the backseat,” Wallace said.
“There’s a twenty-four-hour pancake house called the Golden Nugget at Diversey and Western. Pull into the lot.”
“I don’t feel like pancakes, Michael. And those places are full of cops.”
I lifted the gun an inch. “Just pull in.”
I had Wallace drive to the very back of the lot and turn off the engine. A trucker came out of the restaurant with a toothpick wedged in his mouth. He started up his rig and rumbled into the night.
“I know about Beacon,” I said. “And I know about the money Ray took.”
“Then you know they want it back.”
“You worked for Ray?”
“For a long time.”
“What about Marie?”
“She didn’t know about me until recently. But she did help Ray escape. I was impressed as hell you put that together, by the way. I never would have given you those courthouse pictures if I knew what you were going to do with them.”
“Did you actually take them?”
“At Ray’s request. He thought they might come in handy someday.”
“Did Marie know about the money?”
Wallace shook his head. “At first, no.”
“And now?”
“Now she knows.”
“How was Ray able to rip off Beacon?”
“I set it up.”
“Talented guy. Why didn’t you and Ray just grab the cash and never look back?”
“Not as easy as it sounds. Besides, Marie was still here. She didn’t want to breathe the same air as him, but Ray loved her anyway. He wanted to make sure she was safe. Especially once he got sick.”
“Why hire me?”
“I told you. Ray knew Beacon would plant people close to him once he was indicted. First to make sure he didn’t flip. Then to pick up his scent once he’d skipped. Ray was convinced you were the guy to flush out any plant. He died about a month ago. I waited a couple of weeks, then sent out the e-mail hiring you.”
“And the texts?”
“It was critical that you harass Beacon. Keep ’em off balance and lure them out. I thought the texts might help things along. Honestly, it was the same idea behind having Ray’s body surface in the Ambassador. Just gave Beacon something else to think about.”
“So I was the bait, and Karen Simone took it.”
“Her background always bothered me. When she showed an interest in you, it got my attention. We broke her cover late this afternoon. I put a guy on your tail and, sure enough, she made a move.”
Karen flashed through my mind a final time—her face in the striped moonlight, hands locked together, gripping the bone-white handle of a .22-caliber pistol.
“Are you still following Ray’s plan?” I said.
“Ray was a good friend. So, yeah, I’m following the plan.”
“What’s next?”
“You put the gun in the backseat.”
I slipped it under the tarp alongside the rifle.
“And the one you have in your pocket.”
I took out the other gun and put it in the back. “Pretty good, Wallace.”
“Thank you. And I appreciate it.”
“Now what?”
Wallace pulled out a smartphone and hit a few buttons. “I’m transferring a hundred thousand dollars into your account.”
“Keep it.”
“Marie wants you to have it.” Wallace finished tapping on the phone and snapped it shut. “That’s it. Your part in this is finished.”
“Just like that?”
“Why not?”
I held up my bandaged hand. “For one thing, someone took a piece of my finger. I’d like to get a little payback. And then there’s Marie.”
“What about her?”
“Why is she driving out to the suburbs with a bag full of cash?”
Wallace paled a bit around the edges but quickly recovered. “Let it go, Michael.”
“I know about the highway accidents Beacon caused. What I figure is she’s trying to make things right with the victims by giving them some of the money. Maybe you agree with the idea. Maybe you don’t. What I don’t understand is why she has to deliver it herself.”
“That’s a personal decision.”
“Know what I think?”
“I don’t care.”
“I think she might be playing both sides of this. Her dead husband and her father.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Marie could be paying those victims because it’s the right thing to do. Or she could be working with her old man and paying them off to keep quiet about Beacon. Or she could just be in it for herself.”
“Marie was in this with Ray.”
“And now Ray’s conveniently dead. What if I told you Marie met with her father earlier today? Right after her trip to the suburbs?”
Wallace didn’t respond, but I could see the meeting with Bones had caught him off guard.
“Think it through, Wallace. If I’m right, you’d be the next logical candidate to go.”
“Where do you want me to drop you off?”
“You trust that family?”
“I trusted Ray. And I trust his wife. Most of all, I trust the money. And only I know exactly where it is. Now, where do you want to go?”