I TOOK MY GUN into the kitchen to clean it. I hadn’t been at the range since the beginning of summer. If I was going to be butting heads with drug lords on a regular basis, I’d better start taking target practice every day, and invest in Tasers and automatic pistols as well.
There’s no end to the armory I could get by hanging out in the right bars, but I seldom carry the one gun I do own. Having a weapon makes you want to use it, and if you use yours the other person wants to use theirs, and then one of you gets badly hurt or dead, and the one who survives has to spend a lot of time explaining herself to the state’s attorney. All of which takes time from more meaningful work, although you could argue that killing a drug dealer constitutes meaningful work.
Conrad’s warning had been a prudent one. Only a wiseass who behaved in a way unbecoming to her age would disregard it. I put on a leg holster, easiest for me to reach if I was ducking or rolling away from an attack. Ferret Downey, I wondered as I left my apartment. That had to be a nickname that Conrad had used inadvertently.
I considered stopping at Mr. Contreras’s place to pick up Mitch so I had a little backup, but then I remembered the dead Rottweiler at the meth house in Palfry. Besides, if I told Mr. Contreras what I was going to do, he’d insist on picking up a pipe wrench and joining me.
“‘She travels the fastest who travels alone,’” I announced grandly to myself. Although she shouldn’t travel so fast she plunges over the edge of a cliff.
As I got on the expressway, I tried to estimate times. Say Ferret Downey read Conrad’s message right away and took it seriously. Applied for a search warrant. Or overlooked that formality—the Supreme Court has been giving the police alarming latitude in breaking into people’s homes, cars, and even our brassieres merely on suspicion.
I was guessing that even if everyone cared enough to move at warp speed, it would take at least four hours for the police to arrive at Freddie Walker’s building. My worry was that no one would bother to check for a day or two. Police are stretched thin, they have a routine, a missing junkie wasn’t likely to generate heavy interest, either in the district or with the state’s attorney.
When I reached the stretch of Lorel where Walker operated, there were no signs of blue-and-whites, or of much else. The street had the exhausted air of too much of Chicago’s West Side. Weed-filled vacant lots, boarded-over doors and windows, a handful of emaciated men sitting on curbs, staring profoundly at nothing.
Walker’s six-flat looked as run-down as the rest of the block, the brickwork badly in need of remortaring, the paint on the window frames peeling, chunks of the concrete sills crumbling. The windows were intact, though, and had thick bars across them. The front door was solid. A camera in the lintel surveyed the front walk. The intercom by the door held only one button; no names or numbers were listed.
I stared at the entrance, trying to imagine what kind of sales pitch would not only get me inside, but back out again as well. I pressed the buzzer. No answer. I pressed again.
One of the men on the curb was watching me. “You buyin’ or sellin’?”
“Does that affect whether I can get in?”
He blinked, slowly, like a tortoise. The whites of his eyes were yellow, streaked with red—he’d been buying for far too long.
“Don’t make no difference. Nobody been answering all day. But if you’re selling, I might could arrange a buyer.”
I looked over the heavy front door. It had two locks, dead bolts of the kind that take a certain amount of effort to undo.
“Camera’s a fancy unit,” I said to my companion. “Wireless. Freddie must do a good business.”
“I guess he does okay,” the man agreed.
I don’t usually perform for an audience, but I didn’t think this yellow-eyed man would be able to describe me to anyone who asked. I went back to my car for my picklocks and a roll of duct tape.
My new friend followed me back up the walk, offering to hold the tape or my picklocks or do anything I needed. After tearing off a small piece of tape, I handed the roll to him. His hands shook badly; he kept dropping it, but watched with keen interest as I covered the camera eye.
As if he’d sent out a wireless signal himself, a few more people trailed up the walk behind us, a couple of guys and a heavyset woman about my age who was gasping for air by the time she reached us.
“What she doing, Shaq?” the woman asked. The harsh rasp in her lungs sounded painfully like my father, who’d ended his smoking life with emphysema.
“Don’t know, Ladonna,” Shaq grunted. “She breaking in, I guess. Look how she cover up the camera, simple as pie.”
Not only did I not want an audience, I didn’t want an escort, but I couldn’t think of any way to hint to my quartet to leave. I lugged over an abandoned car battery to use as a stool and started work on the top lock.
“Freddie ain’t gonna like this,” one of the other men said.
“Freddie ain’t gonna like what, Terrell?” Someone had come around the corner of the building so fast and silent he took everyone, including me, by surprise. The .45 in his hand made my entourage back away.
“Told her she shouldn’t be doin’ this, Bullet,” Shaq said, nervously sticking the roll of duct tape into a trouser pocket. “She’s like, I gotta get into this place, and I’m telling her, ‘Worth your life. White girl like you got no business here,’ but she in—”
“Yeah, Shaq, you’re a hero,” Bullet growled. “We been watching your parade of losers coming up to the door all day, but you know Freddie’s policy, man, no credit! We know when you get your Social, so you fuck off until the first of the month. You, too, Ladonna, Terrell. And you, white girl, you better explain to Freddie what you’re doing, messing with his camera and all.”
He waved the gun at me. I stepped down from the car battery. Impulse control. When would I ever learn?
Bullet pushed the buzzer, once short, twice long, and someone inside released the lock. He poked the gun into my back, the spot where the T-1 vertebra connects the neck to the torso. The hairs stood up on my neck. Fear—another impulse I couldn’t control.
“I don’t suppose your mother called you ‘Bullet,’” I said as he pushed me to the stairwell.
“Shut up!” He shoved the gun harder against my spine.
“If she thought you were special, she would have used a special name,” I mused. “Lancelot, or Galahad, or—”
“Shit-Face,” he shouted. “She used to call me ‘Shit-Face,’ which you are going to be when Freddie finishes with you. He don’t like bitches coming around messing with his business.”
“That explains a lot.”
I tripped on the stairs, twisted and shoved my shoulder into his diaphragm. He fell backward, tumbling down, hitting his head on the edge of the riser. His gun went off as he fell. The shot echoed and re-echoed in the stairwell.
Footsteps pounded on the floor above me. Shouts, “Bullet, what the fuck? You kill the bitch?”
A man leaned over the banister at the upper landing, saw Bullet, shouted for help. “Freddie! Bullet, he’s—it looks like he’s dead, man!”
“Shit, Vire, bitch shoot him? Get her, you fuck-up!”
Bullet’s body blocked most of the stairs behind me. I couldn’t get around him without exposing my back to Vire’s gun. I slung a leg over the banister and slid down to the next landing, just as Vire fired. I had a tiny edge; Vire took time skirting around Bullet on the stairs, pausing to fire wildly down the stairwell.
I reached the front door, but the locks were sealed from the inside. I pulled my gun from the leg holster, took cover as best I could in the dark at the back of the entry hall. Someone had left a bicycle. I tripped and fell heavily over it and lost my gun. I fought free of the bike and hurled it at Vire as he came up the hall toward me.
The bike caught him in the face. I scrabbled on the floor for my own gun, found it just as all the stairwell lights came on. A moment later Freddie himself appeared. He was a big, rangy guy with a scraggly beard and black hair flopping over his forehead. He picked up the bike and flung it to the ground in front of Vire.
“Who the fuck left the goddamn bike in the hall? Morons, do I have anybody but morons working for me? Who are you, bitch, and what the fuck you doing picking my locks?”
“I’m looking for Judy Binder.” I was winded; my words came out in gasps.
“Judy Binder? You kill my man Bullet looking for that wasted bitch?”
“Is Bullet dead?” I said. “I didn’t shoot him; he fell down and hit his head.”
“Yeah, you tell that to judge and jury, bitch.”
“Bitch. Fuck-up, fuck, bitch. You’d be more interesting if you developed your vocabulary.” Freddie had a semiautomatic in his right hand, but I kept my own gun pointed just below his belt buckle; this made him unconsciously put one hand over his crotch.
“I’m not talking to you to be interesting, b—whoever the fuck you are. What do you want with the Binder ho?”
“You remember Ricky Schlafly?” A moral person would just shoot Freddie and get it over with.
“Ricky? Yeah, of course I know the dude. We do—” He cut himself short. “What about him?”
“Haven’t you heard? Ricky won’t be doing business with anyone anymore. I found his body in a cornfield. Crows had plucked out his eyes. They ate his balls, too. It was an ugly sight. Makes a person think about mortality and all those things.”
“Ricky dead?”
Vire kicked the bike away and took a step toward me. I kept my own eyes on Freddie’s eyes. The wilder they got the more likely he was to start shooting.
“Ms. Binder was down there with him, but she ran away. I’m trying to find her; she’s a material witness.”
“What? You a cop?”
“A lawyer,” I said, thinking it might be marginally safer than admitting to being a detective. “We need to find Judy. Is she here?”
“She’s trouble, Freddie, told you not to let her in the door. I’ll go upstairs and take care of her.”
“Take care of this one first.” Freddie’s gun hand came up.
I hit the floor, rolling, firing, ducking behind a wedge of wall under the stairwell. Eight bullets in my clip; three gone. Freddie marching toward me, firing.
Over the ferocious noise, a bullhorn: “This is the police. Put your weapons down and come out with your hands in the air.”