“So by the time the whole thing goes through the wash with the DA, the thing’s been pled down from attempted murder to some domestic violence deal. The guy does two-and-a-half years on a five-year jolt. Two-and-a-half years and two days later, I get 911’d back to the same address. The woman is duct-taped to a kitchen chair, both the kids lying on the floor with their throats cut all the way to the spine. The woman’s gutted like a fish.ME tells me he did the kids first, made her watch. The guy called it in himself. He’s sitting in the recliner in the living room when I get there, six empty Bud cans on the floor. And he tells me, ‘I told you nobody leaves me.’”
Wilson stared straight ahead, her face frozen. Hardin silent for a moment, looking for the right words.
“That’s on him,” Hardin said finally. “That’s not on you.”
She shook her head. “The first time? When I was a rookie? I knew. I looked into his eyes, and I knew. I knew, and I didn’t take the shot. I didn’t take the shot because I wanted to sleep nights. I guess I thought I could get through without ever having to kill anybody. I didn’t take the shot for me. So yeah, the woman and those two kids? They’re on me. They’re on me for not having the balls to step all the way up.”
They drove for a while. Out of the corner of his eye, Hardin could see her jaw clench and unclench, could see her lip quivering.
“All I know is this,” she said. “People get a choice to be on the right side or not. You come up on somebody who’s made the wrong choice, then you have to step up, every time. You step all the way up.”
She still had that look on her face, like she wasn’t done. Hardin didn’t know what to say.
“That black kid?” she said. “His mother should have told him not to play with guns. And whoever told him he could, they should have told him not to play with me.”
Her voice was thin and brittle, and he knew she was locking that kid away somewhere inside. She was tying another knot into a cord, a knot for the black kid on the same cord where she had tied a knot for the woman and her kids and for her brother. A cord she would whip herself with every time she failed to perfect an imperfectible world.
He thought of Africa, of the Legion, of maybe a dozen times they’d been called out for some piss-ant action because some thug somewhere had tweaked some tribal bullshit for his own venial ends. It usually ended with a mess of kids, most of them younger than the one Jeanette had shot today, stinking in the heat with their guts blown out, some of them blown out by Hardin. He’d always told himself that even a postcolonial anachronism like the Legion was on the side of the angels when it came to dealing with the Idi Amins of the world. Except it was never the Amins that ended up showing their guts to the sun.
He took her hand, and she squeezed it like she could force some kind of hope out of his pores.
And then it was over. She pulled her hand away, her face solid and unmoving now, like quick-drying cement. Her foot nudged the backpack on the floor of the passenger side. She picked it up, unzipped it.
“You want to know the bright side?” she said.
“Could use one,” answered Hardin.
She pulled the shrink-wrapped brick out of the backpack. “Now we’ve got the diamonds and at least a couple million worth of coke.”
CHAPTER 49
Gonna end up in Iowa, way the day’s going, thought Lynch. He was stuck in traffic on 88 coming up on the Route 59 exit, trying to get out to meet Perez and the Aurora PD at a scene out there.
The Downers Grove thing broke loose right after lunch. Jablonski had called Lynch and Bernstein out pretty much as soon as he got a look at it. Three Hispanics down. Based on the tattoos, looked like all three of them were mainline members of the Hernandez crew out of Juárez. And Jablonski knew the guy they found in the street – Julio Ruiz, trigger man, wheel man, guy that usually traveled with Hernandez himself. They also had a black kid who turned out to be a low-level member of one of the West Side gangs that the DEA was pretty sure was tied into the Hernandez network.
Thing was a cluster fuck. Two cartel gunmen and a civilian dead in a second-floor hallway, two outside on the street. The inside stiffs all looked like.22s. The outside guys were larger caliber – 9mms it looked like, at least until they heard different. Witness statements were all over the place as usual. Best they could piece together, the shooting was in the building first, then outside. Couple of people said it looked like a black SUV (got everything from a Navigator to an Escalade to a Suburban on the model) tried to run down a couple on the sidewalk. The man shot the driver. The black kid ran across the street, shooting at the couple, and the woman shot him. Ruiz was driving the SUV, and whoever shot him knew what he was doing, because Ruiz took three in the face and two in the chest, which ain’t bad through a windshield when you’ve got three or four tons of Detroit’s finest bearing down on you. Then, while the guy was dumping Ruiz out of the SUV, the woman walked over, capped the kid in the head. Then her and the man hopped in the SUV and took off. They found the SUV dumped about a mile north.
So a couple of interesting things. The shootings inside? It looked like Mr .22 was in play again, although this wasn’t his usual triple tap to the head. Stand up fight. The two guys were armed, both got shots off, and he took them both out.
But the real interesting thing was this. The guy who shot Ruiz? Based on descriptions, it sounded a lot like Hardin. And the women he was with? Well, the dead guys were right outside a condo with the door still open. Jeanette Wilson’s condo. And things were calming down just a touch by the time this woman strolled down the walk and parked one in the black kid’s braincase. Jablonski had shown Wilson’s picture around. Consensus was, the woman was Wilson.
That’s when Perez had called. They had another stiff, a black guy in the basement of a town house in the DuPage County part of the Aurora, just west of 59.Guy had a deal with one of those Merry Maids crews where they had the keys to get in if he wasn’t around. When they let themselves into his place, they found a bigger mess than they had contracted for. Looked like a .22 again. So Lynch left Bernstein to finish up in Downers Grove and headed west.
Aurora was a city of almost 200,000 straddling the Fox River about forty miles west of Chicago. Lynch didn’t work with suburban cops too much, but Aurora had its own gang problems, and most of their gangs were tied in to the Chicago gangs. So guys from Aurora would turn up dead in the city, guys from Chicago would turn up dead in Aurora, and guys like Lynch and Perez, they’d sort it out.
Every time Lynch had been out to Aurora before, though, it had been on the east side, usually right in by the river. This was some high-end subdivision just across 59 from Naperville. Goofy-looking McMansions were shoe-horned into tiny lots as he followed the winding street in past the White Eagle sign. He was beginning to think Perez was fucking with him until he saw the black and whites and the crime scene tape in front of an upscale townhouse. Behind the house, a couple of yuppies in ill-advised pants pretended to take practice swings, standing in the fairway while they watched the cops moving around the house. Somebody on the tee must have said something – one of the guys looked back flipped the bird, then topped his ball another thirty yards toward the green. Gapers’ block on the fairways.