Smoke looks our way, drops his cigarette to stamp it out, and his eyes search mine for, I don’t know, understanding? Clarity? Acceptance?
I’ll never know because the scaffolding crashes down like an avalanche, collapsing on top of his head, and kills him instantly.
CHAPTER SIX
We’re in the kitchen, through it, heading out the back and I haven’t let go of Risina’s arm as I clench it in a vise grip. I only had a split second to react. I heard a sound like metal snapping and the whirr of a tension line releasing, all in the span of a crack of lightning, and as the scaffolding started to collapse, I shot my hand out, a miracle lunge, closed my fingers around Risina’s arm and jerked her back into the cafe only a second before she would have been crushed. I didn’t have time to warn Smoke, couldn’t have shouted if I’d wanted to. The only thing I had time to do was watch him take the brunt of it, five stories of structure raining down on top of him like a machine press.
Accidents don’t exist in this business.
Risina’s natural instinct was to look back as the realization of what happened hit her. She wanted to help, to see if anyone could be rescued, to see if anyone was hurt but alive, but she’s new to this world and I have to keep her moving, even if it means I bruise her arm because I will not let go.
Everyone hurries toward the front of the restaurant while we rush out the back.
“Wait, wait, wait,” she’s saying but I’m not waiting, not allowing her to break stride. A half block down the alley I finally loosen my grip and she practically falls over as she jerks her arm away.
“What’re you doing?” she shouts. Her Italian accent kicks in when she’s angry. “We have to see if-”
“We have to get out of here.”
“But what if we can-”
“He’s dead, Risina. I saw the structure come down on top of him.”
“But how… how did it…?”
“I don’t know, but we need to keep moving-”
“It was an accident… we have to-”
“Listen to me! I told you when we started you have to follow my lead, and that’s what I’m telling you now. We have to keep moving-”
“I’m not going to leave until-”
“That was no accident!” I say through clenched teeth.
My words hit her like an uppercut. Her whole face changes as the anger peels away. Her feet start up again and I don’t need to grab her arm to lead the way. “What do you mean?”
“I mean it was supposed to come down on us.”
We spill out of the alley onto Division Street and join a crowd that drifts out of a bar, then change our pace to match the jostling pedestrians, to get lost in them, and she doesn’t say another word though I can see her face pulled tight in my periphery.
I don’t think we’re being followed.
Archibald Grant’s office is deserted, but it won’t be for long. Two forces are at play against us: word travels fast in this business, and power vacuums fill quickly. Some time in the next twenty-four hours, someone is going to find out Smoke died outside that Gold Coast restaurant. Without him around, a few of Archie’s men are going to swoop in here like vultures and clean this place out, take the chairs, take the desks, take anything of value they can get their hands on and sell the lot to the highest bidder. The furniture isn’t where they’ll land the real money, though. Someone who guarded Archie or one of his bagmen will know the value in the files, the contracts, the information. A rival fence will pay handsomely for access to Archie’s work, and some underling will soon attempt to provide it.
“So why are we here now?” Risina asks. “You want the files for yourself?”
“Not the files. File.”
“I don’t understand…”
I’m already ripping through the cabinets, looking for the stack Smoke slid over to me when we were trying to find an anomaly in the contracts over the last couple of years.
I had found an anomaly all right, but I didn’t realize it at the time.
Accidents don’t exist in this business.
“Help me find a file with the name ‘Hepper’ at the top. First name was something like ‘Jan’ or ‘Janet.’”
We start pulling stacks out of the cabinet and blitz through them. I’m only looking at the names on the first page, the names of the targets. If it’s not a match, I toss it to the floor and pick up the next.
None of the names in the initial stack look familiar, must not be ones I fished through the other day. I grab another batch and start flipping pages when Risina pipes up, “Ann Hoeppner?”
“That’s it!” I say, more excitement in my voice than I meant. She hands the dossier over and I open the cover. “Yeah, this is the one.”
Risina blows a stray hair out of her face and places her hands on her hips. “Can you please tell me what this is about?”
I hold up the file. “Accidents don’t exist in this business,” I tell her. And in a few minutes, to prove my point, I’m going to set this office on fire.
In the contract business, hit men employ various methods to kill marks. There are guys who specialize in long-range sniper rifles, guys who work in close with handguns or knives, guys who ply their trade with car bombs or poison or good old-fashioned ropes around the throat. There are experienced vendetta killers who’ll carve up the target or take a piece of the body to bring back to the client, but Archie stayed away from that type of play. Vendetta killers leave an unseemly mess. Mafias like to contract these kinds of hits, but mafias have long memories and hold grudges. Archie knew it’s best not to step into that particular sandbox unless you’re prepared to get dirty.
But Ann Hoeppner’s killer utilized a different method.
Ann was a thirty-eight-year-old college English professor in Columbus, Ohio. She wasn’t married, had no kids, and lived alone just off the Ohio State campus. Normally, college professors don’t make a lot of money, don’t have fancy cars or houses, but Ann had a bank account that would make most Wall Street brokers buckle at the knees. Her grandfather had been a scientist and inventor whose most famous creation was the self-starter for automobile engines. When he retired, he held one-hundred-and-forty-three patents, owned two companies, and was one of the richest men in the Northeast. Ann gave her high school valedictorian speech in a crowded auditorium at the age of eighteen. She told her grandfather’s life story to a bored audience, the exception being the ninety-four-year-old subject of the speech, who watched with moist eyes and rapt attention. He died seven days later.
When an attorney read the contents of the will the following week, everyone in the family was shocked to learn Ann was the sole beneficiary. Even as precocious as she was, the amount of the inheritance humbled and terrified her. Her parents, who had thought the old man senile, were genuinely delighted. Her cousins, aunts, and uncles were not.
Ann spread the money around to her extended family, though open hands were stretched in her direction for the rest of her life. She put most of the windfall into various investments and savings plans and bonds and retirement funds and went about her life as though nothing had happened. Sure, she paid for her tuition, room, board, and books, but never spent extravagantly. She drove a small SUV, lived on campus and ate in the dorm cafeteria. None of her fellow students knew she could have bought and sold the campus ten times over.
She wanted to be an English teacher and nothing, not even the kind of money that determined she’d never have to work a day in her life, deterred Ann from her goal. Nine years of school later, she received not only a doctorate degree but also an offer to teach at her alma mater.
Ann was in her tenth year of teaching when she died. The English building, Denney Hall, is a five-story glass and stone building on Seventeenth Avenue, not far from the football stadium. It has functioning elevators, but Ann liked to walk the stairs to get to her office on the top floor.