Captain Garnes laughed. “I see. Assignment like that, you’re already in trouble. What are you, a goddamn shit magnet or something? She’s in the old jail. Get her and then get the fuck out of here.”
Ed said, “Good seeing you again too, Harold,” as Captain Garnes led the cops upstairs.
Sam gave Tommy his card. “That’s us, your local shit collectors. You got problems, you let me know.”
“Thanks,” Don said and tilted his head at Tommy. “Fuck it. No more rat. We’re done. Happy Hour isn’t gonna last forever.” He shook Ed and Sam’s hands, doffed his Blackhawks cap at Tonya, and started upstairs.
Tommy grabbed the equipment, gave Tonya a nod, and followed.
Sam and Ed worked their way through City Hall, heading to the County side. The hallways were slowly beginning to fill up with people again. A deeply tanned, middle-aged guy came out of the sheriff’s office. He was dressed like a tourist, baggy shorts, even looser loud Hawaiian shirt, but he was far too muscular for a regular tourist. He had a crew cut, and scars on his scalp. He tried not to limp, but something in his right knee was sore. He kept his gaze pointedly straight ahead and passed the detectives without a glance in their direction.
Something about the lack of expression on the guy’s face set off Sam’s radar, so he filed it away, and then focused on the job immediately in front of him. Inside, they saw an empty front area. Ed signed in. Sam stepped behind the front counter and knocked on the security door. It was unlocked. Behind it, the two rooms were empty, and the cell door stood open.
It didn’t feel right. Something was off.
Sam unbuttoned his sport coat, keeping his hand near his shoulder holster. Ed sensed it too, and unsnapped his own holster.
Qween lay facedown inside the cell. Her hands were handcuffed behind her. When she heard Ed and Sam’s footsteps, she rolled over and kicked out, yelling, “Dirty motherfucker.”
“This is Detectives Ed Jones and Sam Johnson, ma’am,” Ed said.
They got a look at her face. One eye was starting to puff shut. Her bottom lip was cracked bloody. Somebody’d been using her as a punching bag. “Come git some, motherfuckers. That’s right.” She kicked out at them.
“Ma’am. We’re here to pick you up. You promise to behave, we’ll take those handcuffs off.”
“You just want to get my back turned, fucker.”
“We’re serious, ma’am.”
A pause while she thought about it. “Slide them keys over, then.”
Ed sighed, slid the keys over to Qween, then stepped back and waited. When he was a rookie, he’d learned that ninety percent of being an effective patrol officer was being patient. Give people enough time to blow off steam and calm down, they would accept the situation, sometimes willingly follow him to the station. He didn’t look at it as wasted time. It was worth going slow, instead of having some homeless prisoner puking or shitting in his car.
It took Qween a full minute to scoot over, grab the keys, and unlock herself. Ed thought she might be moving slowly on purpose; it felt like she might have done this before. She tried to pocket both the keys and the handcuffs but Ed made her give them back.
“Who did that to your face?” Sam asked.
“Who did that to yours?”
Ed tried not to laugh, but sometimes he couldn’t help himself, like when his three-year-old grandson swore.
Sam said, “Ma’am, we’re trying to help you out here. We don’t much like it when someone decides to beat up a handcuffed prisoner. You want to tell us? We’ll see to it that something is done.” He kept seeing the guy in the Hawaiian shirt.
Qween squinted at them, then snorted. “The day I need some dumbass cracker and his Oreo partner to fight my battles is the day Jesus calls me home.”
Ed brushed at some invisible lint on his suit jacket without meeting Sam’s eyes. It was his signal that Sam should drop the questions. Patience was key here. Clearly, she’d rattled something near the top of the food chain if serious heavyweights like Dr. Reischtal were taking an interest.
“You don’t want to tell us, fine. Let’s go,” Sam said.
“Where we going?” she demanded.
“To Twenty-sixth and California,” Ed said.
“Goddamnit.” She rolled her eyes. “They gone sent another goddamn stupid dick licker.”
“Excuse me?” Ed asked.
“Don’t you people ever stop to think? Ain’t nobody ever asked me why. Too busy thinking I just another crazy nigger lady. Stupid motherfuckers. Why you think I did it? Answer me that. Do this one thing, before hauling me off to another piss tank.”
“Did what? Turn a rat loose?”
“No, take a dump on the sidewalk. ’Course the fucking rat.”
“No idea.”
“You did it to prove a point,” Sam said.
“No shit. You be a regular Sherlock.”
Sam started to like the homeless woman. “Okay. I’m listening. You tell us.”
Herman was halfway through cleaning his floors when an insistent sluggishness began to take hold. He couldn’t believe it. He’d gotten nearly four hours of sleep last night, enough to keep him going at least until eleven, when he would start his second job as a cab driver, shuttling passengers back and forth to Midway. And tonight, panic had been flitting through his system because of the bodies in his secret rented room.
Still, there was no denying the exhaustion pulling at him. He finally gave up, and promised himself a short nap now, and finish the floors later. He switched off the floor buffer and went back to the desk in the maintenance room. Ever since he’d yelled at one of the cleaning women who had come down to ask for help one night, nobody ever came down here anymore during his shift, so he knew he wouldn’t be disturbed.
Part of his mind knew something was wrong, but he ignored it, attributing it to the panic he’d felt earlier with the dead bodies. They didn’t seem so important anymore. Nothing seemed important anymore. Only sleep. Shadows crowded at the edges of his vision and he had to feel around for the chair. He fell into it, but it rolled backwards and he slipped to the floor.
He didn’t get up.
CHAPTER 26
4:28 PM
August 11
Qween took the detectives back to the Washington Blue Line Station under City Hall and made Sam pay for three tickets. Sam went first through the turnstile, followed by Qween. She took her time squeezing through, enjoying the tightness around her hips. “About the only action I get these days,” she said with a lewd grin. Ed tried not to touch the bars any more than he had to. They descended into the subway down a wide set of smooth concrete stairs. The entire place needed to be repainted. The air was cool, but stale.
On the platform, they followed her through the crowd to the northbound edge and then along it. “You never see ’em in the light,” Qween explained. They reached the end, where the platform simply stopped, dropping off to the darkness of the subway tunnel. One by one, they climbed down the utility ladder and walked along the tracks ten yards up the tunnel.
“Stop,” Qween said. “Smell it?”
Sam shut his eyes and tested the air. She was right. Something thick clogged the atmosphere, stronger down in the shadows, almost enough to blot out the smell of human piss and burnt steel. He opened his eyes and found them fully adjusted to the dim light.
He saw dozens of rat corpses, curled up like pill bugs. The more his eyes adjusted to the dim light, the more rat corpses he could see. Hundreds of them. Something glinted in the wash from the fluorescents, then disappeared. Ed held up his smartphone, using a flashlight app. It was his favorite feature, once his oldest grandson had downloaded it and shown Ed how to use it. The light caught movement fifteen feet down the tunnel. It was the eyes of a living rat, which tugged at the shoulders of one of the corpses.