Fire Sale (25 page)

The man—I looked and looked away. Not Morrell, how could it be? The black spots in front of my eyes grew and danced, blotting out the gray sky and the mangled bodies. My gorge rose and my empty stomach heaved. I turned away and vomited up a trickle of bile.

28

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, No, It’s…

I
pulled myself together by force of will. I desperately needed water; my legs were trembling as much from dehydration as from shock and exhaustion. I was tempted again by the bourbon in my pocket, but if I drank whiskey now, on my empty, dried-out stomach, I’d just get sick.

I crouched next to the bodies. The man was taller and broader than my lover, or than Billy.

Think, Warshawski, save the melodrama for the daytime soaps. Romeo, I supposed. Romeo Czernin. He looked very dead to me, but I tried to find a pulse in the purply pulp that had been his neck. I couldn’t feel any movement, but my own fingers were so numb I might be missing it. His skin was still warm; if he was dead, it hadn’t been for long.

Mitch was anxiously licking Marcena’s face. When I dragged him aside to put a hand against her neck, I did feel a faint, erratic beat. I pulled out my cell phone, but using it as a flashlight must have drained the battery—it was completely dead.

I struggled to my feet. The garbage trucks might be a half mile away, a long trek across this terrain, but I didn’t know anyplace closer to go for help—I certainly couldn’t make it back the way we’d come in the hopes Mr. Contreras was still there with the car.

“Will you stay with her, old boy?” I said to Mitch. “Maybe if you lie against her, keep her warm, she’ll live.”

I gave him a hand signal, the command to lie down and then to stay. He whimpered and looked at me uncertainly, but settled down again next to Marcena. I was starting to hoist myself up the side of the pit when I heard a phone ring. It was so unexpected that I thought I was hallucinating again, phones in the middle of nowhere, fried eggs might fall at my feet in a second or two.

“Marcena’s cell phone!” I laughed a little hysterically and turned back to her.

The ringing was coming from Romeo’s body, not Marcena’s. It stopped, message going to voice mail, I guess. I stuck a squeamish hand into his coat pockets and came up with a bunch of keys, a pack of cigarettes, and a fistful of lottery tickets. The phone started ringing again. His jeans pockets. His jeans were torn and plastered to his body by his drying blood. I could hardly bear to touch them, but I held my breath and stuck a hand into the left front pocket to extract the phone.

“Billy?” A sharp male voice spoke.

“No. Who are you? We need help, we need an ambulance.”

“Who is this?” The voice was even sharper.

“V. I. Warshawski,” I croaked. “Who are you? I need you to call for help.”

I tried to describe where I was: close to the CID landfill, close to water, probably Lake Calumet, but the man hung up on me. I called 911 and gave the dispatcher my name and the same vague description of my location. She said she’d do her best to get someone to me, but she didn’t know how long it would take.

“The man is dead, I think, but the woman is still breathing. Please hurry.” My voice was such a hoarse thread by now that I couldn’t sound urgent or pathetic; it was all I could do to get the words out.

When I’d hung up, I took off my coat and laid it across Marcena’s head. I didn’t want to move her, or even try CPR. I didn’t know how bad her internal injuries might be, and I could kill her by pushing broken ribs into her lungs, or something equally horrible. But I felt a stubborn conviction that her head should be warm; we lose most of our body heat through our heads. My own head was cold. I pulled my sweatshirt up over my ears and sat rocking myself.

I had forgotten about Mr. Contreras. I’d abandoned him back on 100th Street two hours ago. He could be resourceful; maybe he’d find me, find us. And Morrell—I should have thought of him sooner.

When he answered the phone, I astonished myself by starting to cry. “I’m out in the middle of nowhere with Marcena, she’s almost dead,” I choked out.

“Vic, is that you? I can’t understand a word you’re saying. Where are you? What’s going on?”

“Marcena. Mitch found her, he dragged me through the swamp, I can’t explain it right now. She’s almost dead, and Romeo is lying next to her, he is dead, and if someone doesn’t get here soon she will be, and maybe I will be, too. I’m so thirsty and cold I can hardly stand it. You’ve got to find me, Morrell.”

“What happened? How did you end up with Marcena? Were you attacked? Are you all right?”

“I can’t explain it, it’s too complicated. She’s not going to make it if we don’t get an ambulance.” I repeated what little information I could give on our location.

“I’ll climb up to the top of this pit thing where they’re lying so someone can spot me, but I don’t think there’s a road very close to here.”

“I’ll do my best for you, darling. Hang on, I’ll figure out something.”

“Oh—I forgot. Mr. Contreras. He dropped us off, and now he’s probably half crazy with worry.”

I tried to remember my plate number, but I couldn’t. Morrell repeated that he’d do his best for me, and hung up.

Mitch was lying next to Marcena, his own eyes glazed with exhaustion. He had stopped licking her, was just lying with his head on her chest. When I started up the side of the pit again, he lifted his head to look at me but didn’t try to get up.

“I don’t blame you, boy. You stay put. Keep her warm.”

It was only an eight-foot climb to the top. I dug my fingers in the cold clay and pushed myself up the side. In my normal state, I could have run up, but now it seemed just about insurmountable. This isn’t Everest, I thought grimly, you don’t have to be Junko Tabei. Or maybe I did: I’d be the first woman to climb not Everest, but a pit near Lake Calumet. The National Geographic Society would wine and dine me. I got my hands over the lip of the pit and pulled myself onto the springy turf. When I looked back down, Mitch had stood up, and was walking nervously between Marcena and the side I’d just climbed.

I gave him another hand gesture to lie down. He didn’t obey me, but when he saw I wasn’t moving out of his range of vision he returned to Marcena and curled up next to her.

I stood with my hands in my jeans pockets for a bit, watching the army of blue trucks crawling around the landfill. It was funny that I could hear the engines: the trucks looked so far away. Maybe I was close enough to walk to them, really. Maybe I only thought they were far off because I’d lost my sense of time and space. When people fast for a long time, they start seeing visions. They think angels are coming down from the heavens to them, just like I did now, I could see it dropping from the clouds, a giant shape that was coming toward me, with a horrible racket that blocked out every thought I’d ever had.

I put my hands over my ears. I was losing my mind—this wasn’t an angel, it was a helicopter. Someone had taken my SOS seriously. I stumbled toward the machine as a stranger in a leather bomber jacket jumped down, ducking to get clear of the blades.

“What’s going on here?” he demanded when he’d run across the turf to me.

“They’re down there.” I pointed into the pit. “Get your stretcher crew out; I don’t know what kind of injuries the woman has.”

“I can’t hear you,” the man said irritably. “Where the hell is Billy?”

“Billy?” I croaked, putting my lips close to his ear. “You mean Billy the Kid? I haven’t seen him since church on Sunday. This is Marcena Love. And I think Romeo—Bron Czernin. They need to get to a hospital. Don’t you have a stretcher on that thing?”

The words came out agonizingly slowly. The man recoiled as my fetid breath hit him. He belonged to a different species than me: he was alert, he’d breakfasted, I could smell coffee on his breath, and a heavy dollop of after-shave on his skin. He’d had a shower, he’d shaved. I probably smelled like the landfill itself, since I’d spent most of the night walking through the garbage-laden swamp.

“I’m looking for Billy Bysen. I don’t know anything about these people. How come you answered his phone?”

“It was in the dead man’s pocket.”

I turned away from him and stumbled over to the helicopter, remembering only at the last second to stoop under the blade. The motion sent me sprawling, and the clean-shaven man dragged me to my feet, yelling at me to tell him where Billy was. He was getting really annoying, like the boys on the playground chanting “Iffy-genius” at me, and I wanted to take out my Smith & Wesson and shoot him, but that would really get my father mad. “You can’t go around telling your schoolmates I’m a cop and I’ll arrest them,” he’d said. “You can’t go trading on my badge. You solve your problems without using a club on people. That’s the only way good cops and honest men and women act, you hear me, Pepperpot?”

I twisted out of the shaved man’s grip and flung myself into the helicopter’s open door. The pilot looked at me without interest and turned back to his instruments. I didn’t think I could climb into the helicopter on my own, and I couldn’t make myself heard above the racket of the rotors. I clung desperately to the struts while the clean-shaven man grabbed my sore shoulder and tried to pry me loose.

Suddenly, the racket of the engines stopped. The pilot was taking off his headset and getting out of his seat. The world around me was filled with flashing reds and blues. I looked around and blinked at the array of cop cars and ambulances.

The man let go of my shoulder as a familiar voice spoke behind me. “That you, Ms. W.? I thought I told you to stay the hell out of South Chicago. What you been doing down here? Bathing in the landfill?”

29

On the DL—Once Again

I
t was only later, after the IVs were pulled out of my arms and County Hospital pronounced me rehydrated and fit to leave, that I was able to make sense of the confusing swarm of cops and stretchers that descended on us, and later still that I found out where the helicopter had come from.

At the moment, though, I didn’t try to understand anything—just gave a little squawk of relief at seeing Conrad. I tried to tell him what was happening, but no sound came from my swollen, parched throat. I waved a shaky arm toward the pit. While I collapsed against the chopper’s doorway, Conrad walked over to the rim and peered down. When he saw Marcena and Romeo, he sprinted back to the ambulances and summoned a couple of stretcher crews.

I dozed off, but Conrad shook me awake. “You have to get your dog. He won’t let the techs take the woman, and we don’t want to have to shoot him.”

Mitch had been protecting Marcena all night, and he was prepared to bite anyone who tried to move her. I stumbled back down to the bottom, sliding the final four feet on my ass. That was the journey that completely finished me. I did make it to Mitch’s side, and I did get a hand on his collar, but the rest of the morning disappeared into a few fragments—Conrad hoisting me over his shoulder and handing me to a couple of uniformed men to carry to the surface—the struggle to keep a grip on Mitch’s leash all the time I was dropping down the well of sleep—waking again to hear the clean-shaven man shouting at Conrad about the chopper.

“You can’t barge in here and take private property. This helicopter belongs to Scarface.”

That couldn’t be right, not to Al Capone. I couldn’t figure it out, though, and gave up trying, just watched Conrad signal to some uniformed men to hold the guy while the stretchers were loaded. What a good idea; I wished I’d thought of it. I drifted again and lost hold of Mitch, who clambered into the chopper after Marcena.

“Better take her, too,” Conrad said to the ambulance crew, pointing at me. “She can take care of the dog, and, besides, she needs a doctor.”

He patted my shoulder. “We’re going to talk, Ms. W., we’re going to talk about how you knew to come to this place, but it’ll keep a few hours.”

And then the rotors started up, and despite the racket and the lurching, which made Mitch tremble and burrow into my side, I fell asleep again. I woke only when the techs carried me out of the helicopter into the emergency room, but the hospital didn’t want Mitch inside. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t talk. I sat on the floor next to him with my arms around his blood-stiffened fur. A security guard was trying to reason with me, and then to shout at me, but I couldn’t respond, and then somehow Mr. Contreras was there with Morrell and I was on a gurney, and asleep for good.

When I finally woke up, it was late evening. I blinked sleepily at the hospital room, not remembering how I’d gotten here but feeling too lazy to worry about it. I had that sense of pleasure in my body that comes when a fever breaks. I wasn’t sore anymore, or thirsty, and while I slept someone had washed me. I was wearing a hospital gown, and I smelled of Jergens.

After a while, a nurse’s aide came in. “So you’re awake. How you doing?”

She took my blood pressure and temperature, and told me, when I asked, that I was at Cook County Hospital. “You been asleep twelve hours, girl: I don’t know what war you were fighting in, but you definitely were going down for the count. Now you drink some juice; the orders are, fluids, fluids, fluids.”

I obediently drank the glass of apple juice she held out to me, and then a glass of water. While she bustled about the room, I slowly remembered what had brought me here. I tried out my voice. I could speak again, albeit still rather hoarsely, so I asked after Marcena.

“I don’t know, honey, I don’t know about anyone you came in with. If she was hurt bad, like you’re saying, she’d be in a different unit, you see. You ask the doc when he comes along.”

I slept for the rest of the night, although not as soundly as before. Now that the hardest edge was off my exhaustion, I couldn’t block out the hospital noise—or the parade of people who came to check on me. Leading the band, naturally, was someone from admissions who wanted my insurance information. My wallet had been in my jeans pocket; when I asked for my clothes, someone dug a nasty bundle out of the locker. By an act of mercy, my wallet was still there, with my credit cards and my insurance card.

When they woke me again for rounds at six Wednesday morning, Morrell was sitting next to me. He gave me a crooked smile.

The team of doctors pronounced me combat ready, or at least fit enough to get up and go. They asked about the hole in my shoulder, which had leaked a little from my travails but was basically healing, wrote up my discharge papers, and, finally, left me alone with my lover.

Morrell said, “So, Hippolyte, Queen of the Amazons. You survived another battle.”

“I guess they haven’t sent Hercules to fight me yet. How long have you been here?”

“About half an hour. They told me when I called last night they were going to discharge you in the morning, and I figured you might want a change of underwear.”

“You’re almost as good as a girl, Morrell, figuring that out. You can join my horde of wild women, you can set us an example of breastlessness.”

He leaned over to kiss me. “That’s a myth, you know, that they cut off their breasts. And I especially like yours, so don’t do anything rash. Although that’s the most futile statement ever made, considering the way you’ve been treating your body the last ten days.”

“Spoken by the man who still has a bullet chip near his spine.”

He handed me a carry-on bag, packed with his usual precision: toothbrush, hairbrush, bra, clean jeans, and a cotton sweater. The bra was my favorite rose-and-silver lace, which I’d left at his place several weeks ago, but the clothes were his. We’re the same height, and the clothes were a pretty good fit—although I’d never have gotten the jeans buttoned if I hadn’t been fasting for thirty-six hours.

We took a cab to my apartment, where Mr. Contreras and the dogs greeted me as a sailor returned from a shipwreck. My neighbor had bathed Mitch and taken him to the vet, who’d put stitches in one of his feet where he’d sliced it on a can or the barbed wire. After his initial ecstasy, Mitch went back inside my neighbor’s apartment and climbed up on the couch to sleep. Mr. Contreras didn’t want to leave him, so we settled in the old man’s kitchen. Mr. Contreras began making pancakes, and we exchanged war stories.

When he’d seen Mitch lead me into the swamp, Mr. Contreras had tried to follow us in the car, but the road went too far to the west of where we were walking, and, anyway, after a couple of minutes he couldn’t see us at all through the marsh grasses. He’d gone back to the place where Mitch started into the swamp, but after half an hour a state trooper came along and ordered him to leave.

“I tried to tell the guy you was lost in there, and he says, tell the local cops, not him, it’s Chicago’s responsibility, so I beg him to call the Chicago cops, and he won’t, only tells me he’ll impound the car if I don’t move it, so I had to go home.” The old man’s voice was still thick with grievance. “When I got home, I called 911, and they told me to wait until morning, and, if I hadn’t heard from you, to file a missing persons. I should have called Captain Mallory, I guess, didn’t think of that, but, anyway, by and by I heard from Morrell here, he told me about Mitch leading you all the way to that Miss Love.”

“I don’t understand that part,” I said. “Not that I understand anything right now, but—whoever attacked Marcena and Romeo must have done it around 100th and the river, because that’s where Mitch disappeared. He was following the two thugs who attacked Billy’s car, and then, all I can figure is, he somehow caught Marcena’s scent and went after her. Has Conrad been looking by the river?”

Morrell shook his head. “I haven’t talked to him since we parted company at the hospital yesterday.”

“How did you and Conrad hook up, anyway?” I demanded.

“I called him after you phoned me from your pit—do you know where you were, by the way? The edge of the Harborside Golf Course, where it peters out into a no-man’s-land leading down to the garbage dump. Anyway, South Chicago is Rawlings’s turf; I thought he was the fastest route to finding you and getting Marcena to a hospital.”

I hesitated over the question, but finally asked how Marcena was doing.

“Not good, but still on planet Earth.” He must have seen the tiny sigh of relief I gave, because he added, “Yes, you’re a jealous street-fighting pit dog, but you’re not mean-spirited. She wasn’t conscious when she got to the hospital, but they put her into a medical coma, anyway, to make sure she didn’t wake up. She lost skin over about a quarter of her body, and is going to need massive grafts. If she were alert enough to answer questions, she’d be in so much pain the shock would probably kill her.”

We sat in silence for a time. To Mr. Contreras’s consternation, I could only manage one pancake after my fast, but I ate it with about a quart of honey and started to feel better.

After a bit, Morrell picked up his part of the story again. “When Rawlings called to tell me they’d found you, I phoned Contreras, here, and got a cab to pick him up on the way to the hospital—which was a mercy, let me tell you, Queen of the Amazons, because your guard dog wasn’t going to leave your side.”

“Really?” I brightened. “Yesterday, he attached himself so thoroughly to Marcena I thought he didn’t love me anymore.”

“Maybe he just figured you were his last tie to her.” Morrell wiggled his eyebrows provocatively. “Be that as it may, if Contreras hadn’t shown up you’d probably be in County Jail right now, not County Hospital, and the dog would be dead. But it all worked out. Contreras here persuaded the Hound of the Baskervilles to let go of the security guard’s leg, I saw you into the emergency room, we waited until the charge nurse said you just needed rest and rehydration, and then Rawlings arrived, wondering if he could get a statement from you about Marcena. When he saw that was no go, we found a cabbie who’d take Mitch; Contreras set off with him. Rawlings left to do police stuff, but I went across the street to the morgue and talked to Vish; he was doing the autopsy on Bron Czernin.”

Nick Vishnikov was the deputy chief medical examiner at the Cook County Morgue, and an old friend of Morrell’s—he did a fair amount of forensic pathology for Humane Medicine, the group that had sent Morrell to Afghanistan. Because of that, he’d given Morrell a number of details he would probably have kept from me if I’d asked.

“They were beaten so badly.” I shivered at the memory of that flayed and mottled flesh. “What happened to them?”

Morrell shook his head. “Vish can’t figure it out. It’s true they were beaten, but he doesn’t think with something conventional, like clubs or whips. He says oil was embedded in Czernin’s skin. He was hit hard on the head, hard enough to break his spine, but it didn’t kill him, at least not right away. He died from asphyxiation, not from spinal injuries. But what has Vish really baffled is that the injuries are uniform across both their bodies. Except for Czernin’s broken neck, obviously. Whatever brutal hit he took, Marcena managed to avoid, which is hopeful for her ultimate recovery.”

The two men tried to think of things that would cause that kind of injury. Morrell wondered about rollers from a steel mill, but Mr. Contreras objected that those would have crushed the bodies. In his turn, the old man suggested that they’d been dragged along the road from the back of a truck. Morrell thought that sounded plausible and phoned Vishnikov to propose it, but apparently dragging would have left burn marks and distended tendons in the arms or legs.

The images were too graphic for me: I’d seen the bodies, I couldn’t deal with them right now as an academic exercise. I abruptly announced I was going upstairs. When I got to my own place, I decided to wash my hair, which the hospital had left alone when they hosed me off. I figured my back had healed enough that I could stand under a shower.

When I was clean, and had my own jeans on, I checked my messages. It was getting hard to remember that I run a business, that life wasn’t all coaching basketball and hiking across swamps.

I had the predictable queries from Murray Ryerson at the
Herald-Star
and Beth Blacksin, a television reporter with Global Entertainment. I told them what I knew, which wasn’t much, and checked in with clients who were waiting for reports—with ever-decreasing patience.

I had a message from Sanford Rieff, the forensic engineer I’d sent the frog dish to. He had a preliminary report for me that he was faxing to my office. I tried to call him, but got only his voice mail; I’d have to wait until I got to my office and my fax machine to see what he’d found.

Rose Dorrado had phoned, twice, to see if Josie had been in the pit with Bron and Marcena. Julia answered the phone when I called: her ma was out job hunting. No, they hadn’t heard anything from Josie.

“I heard how April’s dad got killed. You don’t think they’ll kill Josie, do you?”

“Who, Julia?” I asked gently. “Do you know anything about how Bron got killed?”

“Someone told Ma they found Billy’s car all wrecked, and I thought, since him and Josie disappeared the same night Mr. Czernin got killed, some gangbanger could be out there just knocking people off and the police, like they ever care about us, they’ll never find them.”

Her voice held genuine terror. I did my best to reassure her without offering her cold comfort—I couldn’t promise Josie wasn’t dead, but it seemed hopeful to me that no one had seen her. If she had been assaulted, and by the same people who went after Marcena and Bron, all their bodies would have been found together.

“I’m going to see you tomorrow at practice, right, Julia?”

“Uh, I guess so, Coach.”

“And tell your ma I’m coming over after practice to talk to her. I’ll give you and María Inés a lift home, just this once.”

When I’d hung up, I sat down with a large pad of newsprint and a Magic Marker to write down everything I knew, or thought I knew, about what had been happening in South Chicago.