He held his hand for the key again.
I said, “I was running scared last night. Peter Finley had locked me in a room but I got out. I’d gotten to a place where I was hiding and I called you because I needed help. I needed… I needed you. But you never called back. Why not?”
Bill dropped his hand and said nothing.
“Did you track my cell phone call to the house? Did you put Johnson’s crew onto me there?”
Bill sighed. “Look, for this to work, we needed to play it-”
“Are Sanchia and her boys okay?” I said.
“They’re fine,” he said.
“If that’s not true, Bill, I’ll-”
He looked at me hard. “You’ll what?”
I didn’t answer. I hoped I would never have to.
He stared at me and seemed to make a decision. “When you got involved at the Southshore site, we already knew what Johnson’s crew was doing. You could say, we were allowing it to happen. We’d pulled Johnson aside and made him an offer. He could go to jail for twenty years or he could help us. He’s a bad cop but he’s as smart and cool as you’ll ever hope to find. We wanted him to infiltrate the city’s street gangs as deep as he could go. We wanted names and addresses of every gang member. We wanted to know where everyone fit in the gang organizations.”
Lucinda said, “So he’s playing taxman to the gangs and collecting the information you want and money for himself.”
Bill said, “It’s brilliant. We’ll know the organization of every gang in the city. Top to bottom.”
“If it works,” I said.
He said, “When you called in the burglary at Southshore, you just about messed everything up.” He glanced nervously in the rearview mirror and out the front windshield like he thought Finley or other guys from Johnson’s crew might be coming. He said, “At the same time, Bob Monroe was grumbling and talking about taking over leadership from Johnson. That would mess things up too. So we decided to use the first problem-you-to take care of the second problem.”
I felt like Bill had punched me in the gut. “You did this without telling me or Lucinda?”
“I’ve seen you play cards. I thought we had a better chance of pulling this off if you didn’t know.” He almost grinned. I didn’t. He said, “When the gangs find out that Johnson has eliminated Monroe, they’ll wet their pants. And now Johnson comes out looking to the rest of his crew like he can do no wrong. We print up a few travel and restaurant receipts for him and he smells clean to them from now on.”
Lucinda said, “He’s really been doing solo burglaries?”
Bob nodded. “I told you, he’s bad, but he’s just bad enough that he can help us wipe out the gangs or most of them. No one wants to get in the way of that. Not the superintendent. Not the mayor.”
I thought about what he was saying. “Not the FBI.”
He nodded. “Not the FBI.”
“They backed off when you told them?”
“They weren’t happy about it but they did. In the spirit of cooperation.”
“So what now?” I asked.
“Now we wait for Johnson to collect names and information. When he does, we make a sweep unlike any sweep you’ve ever seen. Maybe we’ll even invite the FBI to the party.”
“And what happens to me?”
“Like I said, your name’s clear-with an apology.”
“You think that’ll clear my name?”
“It’s the best we can do.” He held his hand toward me again. “The key?”
“How about my detective’s license?”
“Give it a couple of days,” he said. “The department will present its findings about the Southshore shootings to the state board. The findings exonerate you. Sorry we can’t turn you into a hero on this one, but there will be no basis for suspending your license. That’ll have to be good enough.”
I wondered if I wanted the license. I said, “I want one more thing.” I gave him Rafael’s name. “When you bring down the gangs,” I said, “you’re going to cut him free without making him agree to any deals.”
“I can’t promise.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Won’t.”
I stared at him. “You used to be a friend, Bill.”
His voice softened. “I still am.”
I thought about hitting him. I thought about crying-for him, for me, for what we used to be.
I opened the van door and climbed out.
Lucinda slid open the side panel and got out too.
Her car was parked on the street. Mine was in the building garage. Getting to them seemed less of a risk than staying with Bill.
He yelled, “Give me the key!”
I held it so he could see it, then tossed it down the stairs that led to the basement. He could crawl down and get it himself. He could radio for help. He could sit in his van and wait for Finley to come and hold a gun to his head. I didn’t care what he did but I wanted him to suffer.
THIRTY-TWO
THE GATE AGENT ANNOUNCED early boarding for the flight to Daytona. The morning was bright and cold. In the first light, before Jason and I got in my car to drive to the airport, the thermometer said the temperature was twenty-three degrees. The radio forecaster said clouds would blow in by early afternoon and an inch or two of snow would fall overnight. Still, a couple of jokers who were waiting for the flight already had changed into shorts, short-sleeved shirts, and flip-flops.
Jason came back from the floor-to-ceiling window where he’d been watching baggage handlers loading luggage into the bottom of the airplane. “Where is she?” he said.
“Don’t worry, she’ll be here.”
He sat and ate the remainder of a sweet roll that we’d bought after clearing security. He’d knocked his infection and you would never know he’d been sick and in the hospital a week earlier except for the bright-red scar just above his belt where his doctors removed his appendix. When I’d taken him for his two-week postoperative checkup, Dr. Abassi had prodded the skin around the scar and told him that he still needed to take it easy.
Jason had said, “I’m eleven years old. It’s impossible to take it easy.”
The doctor had laughed and said to me, “Smart kid. You’d better keep an eye on him.”
Jason shook his head like he knew more than the adults who surrounded him. “Joe needs someone to keep an eye on him more than I do.”
“Smart kid,” the doctor said again and left the room.
Now Jason ate his sweet roll like he’d never seen a hospital bed and never would, and he checked his watch and mumbled, “She’d better hurry up.”
We all needed him to keep an eye on us.
AFTER LEAVING THE SPA Club in our separate cars, Lucinda and I had met in the parking lot at Belmont Harbor to figure out what to do next. The sun wouldn’t go down for a couple of hours, but already on the eastern horizon the gray lake water merged with the gray sky like there was no difference between heaven and earth. The illusion seemed like a dirty trick.
For Lucinda’s safety and mine, we’d agreed we should stay apart for awhile. She would bounce around from motel to motel and I would do the same. We would talk by phone. We would drive past our houses and the places where we usually spent time, and we would judge the danger hour to hour and day to day.
That first night, sitting on the slick bedspread of a cheap Northside motel, I’d called Corrine. Last time I’d talked to her, she’d told me she didn’t know if she loved me enough to stand by me with all my trouble.
Now she’d heard that the police had dropped the charges. She said, “I’m sorry that I said what I said.” When I didn’t reply, she said, “Will you forgive me?”