Thirteen Million Dollar Pop fb-3 Page 4

  How the hell did I end up here? he wondered.

  He glanced at the envelope on the edge of the desk, holding three thousand dollars he couldn’t really afford. Melting ice clinked in his glass and he took a sip of the sour-tasting small batch bourbon that was supposed to be so smooth and looked out over the city. Twinkling lights and the occasional monorail-like movement of a car along St. Clair were the only indications of life out there.

  The musical ringing of his cell phone startled him and made him angry all at once. It was going to rouse Lori, and she was going to leave. He crossed quickly to his desk to answer, and his anger grew when he saw the name of the incoming caller: Lowell Gantcher. He would have loved to have let the call go to voice mail, but that would be four more rings, four more times through the brassy samba figure that was his ringtone, and Lori would certainly be gone by then. He snatched the phone off the desk.

  “What is it?” he said by way of greeting.

  “I want to talk to him,” Lowell Gantcher said on the other end of the phone. The connection was so clean it was as if he were in the room.

  “No,” Shugie Saunders said.

  “What do you mean, no?” Gantcher asked.

  Shugie let silence reinforce his answer, and heard the regretful sound of rustling in the bed behind him. He glanced back and caught a profile view of Lori’s rounded breast, the curve of her back, as she reached for a piece of clothing in the near darkness.

  “Come on, Shugie, don’t gate-keeper me. You’re standing in between Bernie and me, and I’m reduced to leaving messages like some kind of jerk off.”

  “Then stop leaving messages.”

  “I just want to talk to him.”

  “Not now.” It was a conversation they’d had a dozen variations of over the past few months, as things had tightened to the strangle point on the business front and as the political picture grew more clear for Kolodnik. Lowell Gantcher was an important builder who held some sway in certain business matters around the city, but for him to call Shugie, insisting on a conversation with Kolodnik now, revealed thinking that verged on the delusional.

  “He’s my partner, for god’s sake,” Gantcher insisted.

  “Was,” Shugie corrected. “He doesn’t touch that investment anymore.” Then he felt a tap on his shoulder, a few fingernail tips dancing like ballerinas along his clavicle. Shugie turned to see Lori standing there, dressed, her sandy blond hair bed-ruffled, and her eye makeup gone slightly raccoon. He loved seeing her this way. She looked five years younger than her already youthful twenty-three, and it also meant that they’d been together, that he’d had her. He raised a single, feeble finger for her to wait one minute.

  “He’s in public service now. He considers you a friend, but that’s all. He’s got to weigh the public good and many other interests against those of the gaming industry. Perhaps you can talk to the trustee overseeing the blind trust-”

  “Fuck you, Shugie,” Gantcher said.

  “I’m going,” Lori mouthed to him.

  Disappointment and fury met in Shugie’s chest and he vented it on Gantcher. “This conversation is over,” he said icily and hung up.

  Lori already had the envelope in her hand as he tossed the phone down on the desk. Her hand crushed the paper softly, and she let him wrap her in an embrace that had a similar effect. He breathed in the scent of her hair-a synthetic fruit smell-that delighted him to his core. She stepped back.

  “When am I going to see you again?” he asked.

  “Just call me.” She smiled. Of course.

  “Better question: when are we going to take this to the next level?” he said, as lightly as he could.

  “Same old question.” She sighed. “You know the deal, Shugie: overnight is no problem if you tell me in advance and you’re willing to spend the eight. And you can book a weekend.”

  “Sure, just go on the Web site, and you’ll need your own room. Right?”

  “Just for a few hours a day. It’ll still be a great time. And you don’t have to go on the site, you can text me,” she corrected.

  “You know that’s not what I meant,” he said, hating how it sounded.

  “I know,” she answered, and he swore he recognized real feeling under her words. He embraced her again, nuzzled her neck, and then she was gone as if he’d been holding a ghost.

  He knew exactly how he’d ended up here.

  11

  C’mon, Frank, Behr urged himself, get up.

  When he had woken, he hadn’t felt much like working out, but the idea of skipping two days in a row didn’t sit well with him either. He pictured the two turning into a hundred and saw himself fat and logy and permanently planted in a rocking chair or, worse, a desk chair. So he’d put on T-shirt and shorts, drank some water, and got his ass out there. Now he had a kettlebell, a cold black chunk of iron that resembled a cannonball with a handle and weighed fifty-six pounds, in his right hand and was in the middle of a set of Turkish get-ups. The exercise consisted of lying on his back, arm locked out straight overhead, and then climbing to his feet, arm still straight up, and dropping into a lunge before rolling onto his back again. And then, of course, it was rinse and repeat for twelve reps each arm. It was full-body torture that involved pushing the muscular, ligamentous, lactic acid, and cardiovascular systems to their limits. Arms, legs, core, and wind-there was nowhere to hide and there was just no way to do them fast enough so that he wasn’t doubled over and panting by the end. The bottle of expensive grape juice he’d drunk that was now rolling around in his gut didn’t help much either.

  Behr tried to distance his mind from the exertion, to take the focus off the pain of what he was doing, and to think about what he always did these days: the moment in less than four weeks when his soon-to-arrive son would be born. He and Suze had found out it was going to be a boy a few months back at an ultrasound.

  “There it is,” the technician said. “You want to know?”

  “No, we just want you to know,” Behr had answered.

  “Yes, tell us please.” Susan laughed. She was generally amused at the semirude utterances he inadvertently dropped. But that didn’t stop her from spreading some diplomacy around.

  So, his second son was on the way. The one he’d be able to hold, to feed, to take places, teach, and to support. To support. It stopped him. It was the question that weighed heavy on him now, and it always would. He remembered that much from the first time around. It was what pushed him to go ahead and give up his own business and take the Caro job. A fallow period is one thing when you’re the only one eating spaghetti at home three weeks in a row, Behr thought. But with mommy and baby, that kind of struggle just wasn’t acceptable. And he couldn’t forget the fact that in three and a half years’ time he was looking at preschool and private school bills, which was going to be required barring a miraculous turnaround by the city’s abysmal public system. At times like this the steady paycheck was mighty welcome. Which was why it was of no use to him for his thoughts to keep drifting back to the night in the parking garage. The sledgehammer pounding of the rounds hitting cars had a physical quality as he remembered it. The air around him had been so disturbed it was like being in the wake of scores of tiny fighter jets buzzing by.

  Behr stood between sets, and paced around the small patch of grass, getting his wind back. The attempt was made on Kolodnik the night before he was announced as the governor’s choice for the vacant Senate seat. Political assassinations didn’t happen in America more than about twice a century, and more often than not they concerned a psychopath working out some inner drama on a public stage. They sure as hell didn’t happen in Indianapolis, aka Nap Town, the city that never wakes. But the cops would have to be blind not to see it as such. As an investigator, Behr needed to not leap at the obvious, and as a Caro investigator he needed to not worry about it at all and instead focus on his cases, which meant the Payroll Place robberies.

  Then there was the wine. He hadn’t been very communicative with Susan t
he night before about receiving the gift-if that’s what it was. The reason for that was it had made him uncomfortable. A few thousand bucks’ worth of cabernet-on one hand it was uncalled for. It was more than was necessary. Behr had been doing his job, what he was paid to do, and he’d been protecting his own ass too. On the other hand, what kind of gesture was it from a rich man such as Kolodnik? Did a man like Bernie Cool think the value would be lost on someone like him, or that he’d be overwhelmed by it? It seemed the case of wine and the note was supposed to put final punctuation on the matter. But was it a thank-you or was it grease?

  Behr picked up his kettlebell and retook his starting position on the ground, lifting the weight overhead. He sucked in a deep breath and climbed to his feet. He didn’t know much about the Turks, or what had pissed them off enough to create something as nasty as their get-ups, but by the end of the set there’d be nothing in his head except blinding white pain. He lunged and rolled back to the ground and tried not to extend the pause.

  Get the hell up, Frank, Behr told himself again, and he did. He kept on getting back to his feet.

  12

  Altgeld Gardens-Alligator Garden as the locals called it-was a place that struck fear into the hearts of white Chicagoans. Waddy Dwyer knew that, and it followed naturally that that’s where he was. He needed weaps, and he couldn’t be buying them from the Walmart. That’s why he’d called his contact and had come here. Besides, he’d been outside the Green Zone in Baghdad after dark. He’d walked the streets of Al Mazraa in Beirut. He’d done solo night ops in Grozny, Chechnya, so the pair of blackies in front of him was hardly going to make his knees quake.

  “Have you got H and K? Or SIG?” Dwyer asked.

  “Nah, man,” the kid answered. The kid was lean, maybe eighteen years old, and was named Blaze. That’s whom he was supposed to ask for, anyway, according to his contact. He’d approached the kid in front of the cluster of decrepit government-built row houses.

  “Are you him?” Dwyer had asked.

  “I’m Blaze, as in Johnny Blaze,” the kid had said, whatever the fuck that meant. “You the English guy?”

  “I’m a Welshman,” Dwyer corrected pointlessly.

  The kid had shrugged and started walking toward one of the buildings. Dwyer followed and another kid, a big one with a black nylon stocking on his head, had fallen in behind.

  Now they were all crammed into a small, airless storage room that smelled of old marijuana and was filled with pressboard desks and other cheap furniture.

  “Look, look, look, we don’t got no high-end SIGs and shit. We got Taurus. We got these Colts …”

  Dwyer shook his head. He didn’t love his choices.

  “We also got this AK …” Blaze pointed to a battered weapon that looked as if it’d been recovered from a cave in Waziristan.

  Dwyer shook his head. Tempting though it was to wrap his hands around the familiar wood grips of a Kalashnikov, he couldn’t see himself waltzing around U.S. cities with an assault rifle.

  “What’s your personal gun, then?” Dwyer wondered.

  “My personal gun?” Blaze asked back.

  “That’s right. You’re armed, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I’s motherfucking armed.”

  Blaze lifted the basketball T-shirt that went down to his knees and showed the butt of some kind of chromed-out heavy-caliber automatic. It was exactly the kind of flashy nonsense Dwyer didn’t need. At least now he knew what the kid was holding when it came time for them to try and rob him.

  “Lovely,” he said. “Let me look at the Colt.” Blaze handed it over and Dwyer was pleased to see that it was a.45 ACP, but that the make was actually Ceska Zbrojovka. The CZ 97 B was a good gun, not off the Springfield production line, and had a smoother action and better balance than those did. Dwyer didn’t bother asking how they’d come up with a Czech-made gun, as he quickly racked the slide, removed the slide stop pin, and broke down the automatic. He inspected the recoil spring, barrel, and trigger action. The weapon was sound. “Okay, this’ll do. I’ll have it with four magazines.”

  For a moment Blaze’s shrewd look went blank.

  “Clips, man,” Dwyer said. “Four of ’em.”

  “I got two,” was the answer. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the way it was. Then a dull black object that was leaning against the wall in a dark corner of the room caught Dwyer’s eye. “Is that for sale?”

  Blaze looked at his hulking companion and they laughed. “Homeboy likes the shotty,” Blaze said. He went and picked it up, then crossed the room and rested it on a desk. It was a short-barreled Saiga 12-gauge automatic shotgun. An impressive close-quarters weapon designed for leveling men in enclosed spaces. And if things went poorly, it was equally useful for getting out of the same spaces-three or four rounds fired into a wall and there would no longer be a wall, and escape could be made. Dwyer inspected the shotgun and saw it was in working order and that it was loaded with 00 buckshot.

  “I’ll have both,” Dwyer told them, putting the shotgun back on the desk.

  “Wasn’t gonna sell the Saiga,” Blaze said, “but a’ight. I’ll do both for twenny-fi’ hunned.” The price was too high by half, but Dwyer didn’t waste time.

  “Done,” he said. Then he pulled one of the packets of American cash off his abdomen. Proper tradecraft would have had him secreting the money in five hundred or thousand dollar increments all over his body. But he came in here recommended and hadn’t wanted to waste time. His mistake became clear the minute the two salesmen saw the five-thousand-dollar brick he had started peeling bills from.

  “You want something else?” Blaze asked. “Can’t let you be leaving with all that cash.”

  “No, just the CZ and the Saiga,” Dwyer said.

  “Go on, buy a Taurus.”

  “I don’t want a mingy Taurus.”

  “Well, likes I said, we can’t let you be leaving with all that cash.” Blaze’s voice had changed when he said the last. Dwyer felt it and had looked up from counting money in time to see the big fellow reaching for the Saiga on the desk. Dwyer bunched the cash in his left hand into a fist and swung a thousand-dollar hook that drilled the big man in the throat. The man’s face registered surprise, then crumpled into pain, and he went off his feet sideways. He landed, gurgling, on the floor. Dwyer lunged across the space between him and Blaze and grabbed the wiry young man’s wrist, which had been diving for the heavy chrome auto at his waist. Dwyer yanked the wrist down and held it firmly in place against the kid’s body. The other hand caught him by the neck. He stared into Blaze’s eyes and let the kid feel his superior strength.

  “I was wondering whether you was gonna be twats, and now you’ve gone and done it.” For a moment the only sounds in the room were Dwyer and Blaze breathing through their noses, and the big fellow gasping wetly on the floor. “Now, do you scruts want two grand for the guns, or do you want to fucking die?”

  Moments later Dwyer stood at the trunk of his rented Lincoln Town Car with the.45 tucked in his waistband at his lower back, and put the shotgun, now wrapped in an old towel, in the spare tire well under a piece of carpet. He closed the trunk and saw Blaze and his friend framed in the doorway of the building he’d just left. They paused when they saw him there. Blaze raised his thumb and forefinger at Dwyer and mimed firing a single shot. Dwyer ignored the gesture, got in the car and on the road for Indianapolis.

  13

  Behr’s bag clinked softly as he walked through the Caro offices. He sat at the desk and set five bottles of fine wine on the corner. Half the case, minus the one he’d drunk the night before. He figured that was fair, considering what he’d done to get it. The other half case was at home, lying sideways, waiting for another day.

  “What’s this?” his coworkers asked of the bottles as they passed by his desk.

  “Client gift. Grab one,” Behr answered. There were only a few takers, a few more raised eyebrows, and by the end of the day there was still one bottle left. Maybe when it got down to
one, it didn’t look like much of a display. Or maybe the office preferred drinking harder stuff.

  In between those visits Behr cranked away on his Payroll Place file. It was click, jot, scroll, and cut and paste as he got through four background checks, going alphabetically, searching databases in order to view past employment history; former residences; and credit, motor-vehicle, and criminal records. He went as fast as he could, but it took hours by the time the searches were done and the reports were written up. The last one was a killer because the employee’s name, Edward Charles, was a common one, and dozens of hits came up that had to be combed through and canceled out against his social security number. There were some speeding tickets, a DUI, a personal bankruptcy in the pool. The checks sketched in a bland picture of an employee base that didn’t tell him very much. He had dozens more to do. He was feeling buried. Each time he looked up from his work that last bottle of Harlan Estates caught his eye. And each time he tried to go back to what he was doing, it took him longer and longer. Finally he acknowledged why, picked up his desk phone, and dialed a familiar number.

  “Downtown District,” an assistant answered.

  “Lieutenant Breslau, please,” Behr said and his call was put through.

  “Breslau,” came the voice over the line. Behr was surprised he didn’t have an assistant, or maybe he or she had stepped away.

  “Frank Behr,” he said. There was a pause and some rustling of papers.

  “What can I do for you, Behr?” Breslau said in a low-effort attempt at cordiality.