Halfway through the night, on the way to the men’s room, he told Esteban. “I think I’m getting a little thing for your sister, man. Maybe a big thing.”
Esteban grinned, slapped him on the shoulder. “Fuck, man, you just figuring that out? You two, you been a thing for a while. Better you than most of the scum in the neighborhood, dude. You gonna be a gentleman, right?”
“Part of the Marine code, hombre.”
They danced, they drank – it was the best night Griffin had had in a long time. Best night he’d had, period.
At closing time, Griffin, Esteban, and Juanita were walking out to the car. Halfway across the lot, a stretch Caddy cut them off. Tiny Hernandez and two of his goons got out. Griffin knew Hernandez ran the Latin Kings on the east side of Aurora. He was also the younger brother of Jamie Hernandez, who was a major dealer. Tiny looked like a human cement block – six feet tall, six feet thick, a flat, feral face on a stump neck.
“I been watching you,
mamacita
,” he said to Juanita. “You like the finest thing ever been in that dump. I’m gonna take you out, show you where the real players hang.”
“I’m not anybody’s
mamacita,
” Juanita said.
“Thanks for the offer, sport,” said Griffin. “But I don’t think she wants to go.”
“You got shit in your ears? I didn’t ask.
Puta
like that, she don’t know what she wants. Not till I give it to her.” Hernandez’s goons got a chuckle out of that.
Griffin caught the look from Esteban – no way was his sister getting in that car. And nothing good was going to come of waiting for the other side to make a move. Esteban yelled for Juanita to get inside, put his shoulder down and drove into the goon on the right – catching him in the gut, driving him back against the Caddy, hard. Griffin feinted toward Tiny, knowing the other goon would rush to help. Then he planted, turned and put the stiffened fingers of his right hand into the guy’s throat. Felt something crumple, guy’s trachea if he’d done it right. The way the guy went down, Griffin figured he was on his way to dead.
Griffin turned back to see Hernandez with his hand in his coat, a nine coming out. Griffin closed, locking both hands on the pistol, turning it down and in. Hernandez pulled the trigger, blowing a hole through the inside of his own thigh.
Griffin twisted the gun out of Hernandez’s hand as he went down. He turned to check on Esteban. The first goon had soaked up the slam against the car, and Esteban must have got in a shot to his face, because the goon’s nose was running blood. But the goon had forty pounds on Esteban. The goon got a knee up into Esteban’s groin, shoved him back, and pulled a gun.
Griffin shot him through the side of the head.
Hernandez was on the ground, cussing, blood arcing out of his thigh.
“You gonna die, you fuck. You know who I am? You gonna fucking die.”
“You first, sport,” said Griffin. “That’s your femoral artery emptying out there. Unless you’re up on your first aid, you got maybe two minutes before you bleed out.”
Hernandez looked down at the blood jetting out into the parking lot for a moment. Then he looked back up to Griffin. “Jesus, you gotta help me. I mean, this shit? We let it go, right? Shit happens. But you gotta help me.”
“No,” Griffin said, turning back toward the club where Juanita was waiting. “I don’t.”
Griffin had done all the killing, so he took the heat with the cops – said Esteban and Juanita had been inside, he’d gone out to get the car, Hernandez and his goons had said something about taking the girl, Griffin said they weren’t, and the shit hit the fan. The DA didn’t file any charges. The Aurora cops knew Hernandez, checked on Griffin’s military record, and they backed Griffin right down the line. But a week later, some dumb-ass kid, maybe sixteen, made a try for Griffin with a knife while Griffin was in the checkout line at Walgreens. He broke the kid’s arm and only had to twist it a little to discover word was out. Jamie Hernandez wanted Griffin’s head on a wall, and he’d pay top dollar to whoever delivered it. Even the Marines would be no good – Griffin had seen enough gang signs carved into enough latrines to know better.
Esteban and Juanita drove him to O’Hare the day he left for France.
“I owe you my life,” Esteban told him as they shook hands. “Anytime, anywhere, you need me, you call.”
Griffin nodded.
Juanita stepped up. “When the time is right, I’m here,” she said. She held Griffin’s face in her hands, and she kissed him, gently, but for a long time.
Hardin had been dreaming about that kiss for years.
Not always good dreams. Six months into his Legion hitch, Hardin felt clear enough to reach out to some of his Aurora contacts, just to touch base. Found out that Hernandez had killed Esteban a few months before. Which meant Juanita might be on his list, too. Made a call into the Aurora cops, but they told him Juanita had blown town, no sign Hernandez was looking for her. Just somebody at the club had told Hernandez that Esteban had been in the parking lot that night, been part of the scrape.
That put Esteban’s death on Hardin’s account. He’d skipped town, left him and Juanita behind. He’d thought about skipping out on the Legion, heading back to the US, making sure she was safe. But all that would do is put him back on Hernandez’s radar – and point Hernandez at Juanita. No, if she was safe, the best thing he could do was stay away from her.
Forever.
CHAPTER 17
“You’re one lucky fucker, Lynch,” said Detective Dick Karsten. He was an Area 2 cop Lynch knew going back to his Academy days. “Powers that be got a hard on for you. Every weird-ass case we get, they dumping it on you?”
Starshak had called Lynch and told him to get down and eyeball a crime scene on the old US Steel property on the far south side. Something about more .22s.
“Looks that way,” Lynch said. “How it’s been going? I hear you dumped that place up in Eagle River.” Karsten had flipped a handful of properties in the Northwoods over the years; guy knew his way around a toolbox. He’d helped Lynch out at his place a couple times, Lynch taking some time here and there over the years to pitch in up north.
“Sweet deal,” said Karsten. “Some trader started in on his log dream home on Big Arbor Vitae, over toward Minocqua. Know it?”
“Little west of St Germain? Yeah.”
“Place is like 3800 square feet. Guy had just got it enclosed when the market tanked. Foreclosure sharks were circling. Swapped my place for his. He still has his Northwoods love pad. I finish this out nice, I make a damn killing. Property’s got another little two-bedroom, three-season job on it, too, so I get things fixed up, I can parcel that off.”
“Sounds nice. You need some help up there, let me know.”
“Gets to where I need the unskilled labor, you’re my first call.”
Lynch laughed, looked past Karsten to where Bernstein had joined some crime-scene guys who were working around a body – big fat guy on his back. “So what have we got?”
“What you got here is Beans Garbanzo,” said Karsten.
Lynch’s face went hard. Garbanzo worked for Tony Corsco, head of the outfit in Chicago, the whole Midwest, actually. The gangbangers were bad enough, but Lynch understood them at least. You grow up in public housing, got an entire society shitting on you when they aren’t ignoring you, bad shit happens. But the fucking mob, a couple generations of wealth behind most of them, and they just keep going. Drugs, prostitution, protection, robbery, protection rackets, gambling – show them a human weakness and they’ll kill for a piece of it. Lynch had been picking up bodies with Corsco’s fingerprints on them his whole career, always watching the bastard skate. Watching the media play it like the guy was some kind of charming rogue, just another piece of local color.
Lynch remembered a night his second year out of the academy. Dead girl, fifteen years old. Her older sister waitressed at one of Corsco’s clubs, one of them where waitressing meant if Corsco wanted her on her knees giving some slimy bastard head as a favor, then that’s what she did. The older sister’d killed herself, but not, evidently before the little sister heard something. She started making some noise. A week later, Lynch is looking at her naked body in a North Side ally, not an inch of her without a bruise on it. Lynch was still in uniform at the time. Nobody ever came close to clearing the case.
What Lynch heard, though, was it was Corsco, personally. Raped her first, then took a bat to her.
“Garbanzo is Corsco muscle,” said Lynch.
“Yep. And down yonder where McCord is fucking around, you got Snakes DeGetano.”
“And they both got done with .22s?”
“I’ll let McCord fill you in on that. Don’t want to ruin his fun.” Karsten looked at his watch. “I’d stick around and help with the canvass, but canvass what, you know?” The empty US Steel site stretched almost to the horizon. “Damn, almost five. And with the cavalry here, I can make first pitch at Comiskey.”
“You mean the Cell, don’t you?” said Lynch.
“US Cellular Field my ass,” Karsten said. “Fucking deal will run out, somebody else’ll buy up the name. Be goddamn Kotex Field or something.”
“Be perfect for you pussy Sox fans,” Lynch said.
“Yeah, well, this pussy Sox fan is going to be at the game tonight. You’re gonna be here eyeballing goombah stiffs. Y’all have fun, now, you hear?”
Karsten took off. Lynch walked over and joined Bernstein.
“.22s?” Lynch asked.
“Three of them, nice grouping right in the forehead.”
“So what’s with all the blood?” Garbanzo had blood all down the front of his shirt, some more on his right leg from the knee down. Three to the head, guy should have been DOA right off. He wouldn’t have bled much, especially lying on his back.
“Some kind of trauma to the side of the head. Doesn’t look fatal, but he bled a good bit before he got shot.”
“You catch the hip holster?”
“The empty one? Yeah.”
Lynch turned to one of the techs. “You guys turn up any weapons?”
Guy shook his head.
Lynch looked down toward the second cluster of uniforms. “Guess we better go see what McCord has for us.”
It was almost half a mile down to the next body. Bernstein and Lynch stayed way to the right walking down. Little crime scene flags were sticking up out of the dirt every couple yards all the way there, and they didn’t want to step in any evidence.
DeGetano was also on his back, some blood on the front of his tracksuit from a wound in his neck. Lynch squatted down and saw a round hole. Shadow fell on him, and he could hear somebody chewing on something. McCord.
“OK, McCord, Karsten didn’t want to rain on your parade. So I give, what’s up?”
“The fat guy back up toward South Shore, he got it with a .22 for sure,” said McCord. “And what made me think maybe your guy again is there’s no powder, no stippling, nothing like that. So he got it from at least a little ways off, and the nice grouping looks a lot like your shelter guy. Now, the skinny guy here, this is real interesting. That wasn’t a gun at all.”
“I was thinking a stab wound of some kind.”
“Bingo,” said McCord.
“Except I haven’t seen a lot of round knives.”
McCord held up an evidence bag. “Killer was kind enough to leave the murder weapon in the guy’s neck.”
Lynch stood up, looked at the bag. “A pen?”
“Yep. Thought you’d like that.”
“Can I see that?” Bernstein said.
McCord handed him the bag.
“Air France,” Bernstein said. “Interesting.”
“Why?” Lynch asked.
“This Hardin guy? From
Oprah
? Before a couple nights ago, all we hear is he’s from Africa, right?”
“And?”
“And if you want to fly from Africa – or West Africa anyway – to the US, I’m thinking Air France may be your best bet.”
McCord bit another chunk off the Snickers bar he was working on. “Looks like we’ve got prints on the pen, so we’ll run that. If this Hardin’s in a database anywhere, you’ll have your answer. But if you want interesting, we got interesting. You get a look at the fat guy? The head trauma?”
“Yeah,” said Lynch. “Wondered about that.”
“OK, we got this one set of tire tracks that stop right here, skinny dead guy right next to them, some scuffing on the ground. The way the blood ran down the front of him, he was either sitting or standing when somebody stuck that pen in his throat, and he was dead or close to it once he hit the ground here. Otherwise we’d have more blood running down the sides of his neck. With the tire tracks and scuffing, I’m figuring he got it in the car, then got dumped here.”
McCord walked a few yards toward the lake, toward a pile of rubble. He pointed a few yards south. “We got one set of footprints to here, another that stops maybe five yards from old pen neck over there. Some scuffing on the ground here, some more over there, plus over there it looks like someone was down on the ground and there’s some blood – on the ground and on a couple of stones we found. You saw all the flags on your way down from the fat guy, right? Between here and the fat guy, we got a bit of a blood trail. Somebody was dripping. Not bad, not like shot, but dripping all the same.”
“Ah, fuck me,” said Lynch, seeing where this was headed.
McCord nodded. “Yep. Looks like somebody drove out here with these guys, stuck a pen in Skinny, dumped him, and then bounced a few rocks off the fat man. We’ll check the head wound, get some trace evidence, probably match it up to one of the rocks.”
“So some guy plays Nolan Ryan with Fatso way down here,” Lynch says, “then lets him walk most of the way back to South Shore before he drives up and shoots him?”
“Nope. Our tire tracks here? They loop around and head back out to South Shore. We’ve got Fat Guy’s footprints on top of the tire tracks in a couple of spots. So whoever did Skinny and roughed up Fat Guy, he left before fat guy walked back up there and got shot. About ten feet from Fat Guy’s body, you got another set of tracks that pulled up and then pulled away. Different tread, different wheelbase.”