She scuttled clear of the manhole, just as the bullets cracked upward. Another split second and they’d have nailed her.
Wolfe and Seline got to their feet, Wolfe taking the .45 from her and reloading it. “Weather’s cleared up,” Wolfe remarked, as he reloaded the gun. Seline busied herself putting a bandage from the backpack over her shoulder wound. The wound was fairly bloody but not serious. She took the .44 out and put the pack back on, wincing.
Wolfe looked around. They were on a block of moderately small houses, some of them boarded over; some of the street’s houses were like insistent survivors, refusing to give up. There’d be a house that was badly deteriorated, even boarded over; then a house that was in good shape, with a neat lawn enclosed by a fence. He saw no Chunkies—not yet. In places along the gutter, thin deposits of snow gleamed…
Just across the street, an elderly black lady in a shapeless black coat stumped by on her walker. She looked suspiciously at Wolfe and Seline. Possibly it was the gun Seline had in her hand…
Wolfe smiled and waved to the elderly lady. She didn’t wave back.
More bullets, fired by a UAV, sang up out of the manhole. The elderly lady said, “Oh!” and tossed the walker aside, hurried off down the avenue, almost running. Wolfe used the tip of his boot to shove the cover back over the manhole. It clanged with another bullet, and spun like a coin about to fall flat—and then fell neatly back in place.
“They going to fly up out of there?” Seline asked.
“No. They can’t fit through. By now Starling is figuring that out and looking for another egress for the damn things. They’ll come after us again from some other direction. Come on!”
Wolfe took the gun back and reloaded it; she took out her own.
“I don’t suppose there’s any point in our calling the police?” she asked, as they hurried down the road.
“Somebody’s probably calling the police right now. That old lady, I bet. But I heard on the phone hack—Tranter’s got some of his dirty cop pals posted around the area. They’re blocking it off. So they’ll probably tell dispatch that something’s going on here that isn’t going on here… and we wouldn’t get any help, anyway.”
“Okay but… you said yourself that not all Chicago PD is corrupt. Maybe we should try working with some of the stand-up cops.”
“Most of them are probably stand-up guys. But how do we decide which is which, Seline? Police records don’t prove anything. And if I try to call the cops here, Tranter’ll set me up to be arrested for some bullshit or other. They’ll take the phone Pearce gave me.” He shook his head. “When we get this file uploaded, NSA, Homeland Security, people like that will see it. We’ll look into getting in touch with them—when the moment is right. Maybe give them a clue about Purity. But even with that… I don’t know how far Purity’s tentacles extend. Or how many friends Van Ness has in homeland security… Who to trust there—that’s a hard call to make anywhere.”
He was studying the addresses as he spoke. One more block…
And then a low, dark blue sedan came cruising slowly by, heading the opposite way. The men in the car were probably Chunkies: they each had the gang’s bull’s eye tattoo. Wolfe muttered, “Get ready to vault that fence on the right, Seline, if we need to…”
The sedan got about ten yards past and then did a sudden screeching U-turn. The windows rolled down on the two nearest side windows and the muzzles of guns emerged.
“Vault it, Seline!” Wolfe shouted as he drew the .45 from his waist band and fired at the car, letting his instincts guide his aim. He squeezed off two rounds, and the bullets smashed through the windshield. He saw the driver rock back in his seat, hit, the car swerving. The bullets fired from the side windows went wild with the car’s swerving, and then Wolfe turned, vaulted the fence. Seline was crouched down, waiting for him by the front porch.
A piebald pit bull came snarling from the front door—someone had let it out to attack the intruders into their yard. Wolfe raised his gun to shoot it but Seline shouted, “No!”
She snatched up a coiled garden hose and she threw the coil of hose over the pit bull’s head so the dog was tangled, confused. It struggled to free itself and she led the way to the back of the house.
“Come on!” she yelled.
Wolfe and Seline ran into the back yard. Bullets cracked over their heads from somewhere in the street. They climbed another force, tumbled over, landed on their feet side by side.
“I can’t shoot a pit bull that’s coming at me?” Wolfe asked, as they crossed through the neatly kept-up yard.
“No! I love dogs! Don’t you shoot any dogs, Mick! He’s been trained to attack people!”
“And I’m trained to shoot at something trained to attack me! That was a pit bull!” Wolfe laughed breathlessly at carrying on an argument while they ran.
“Tough! I dealt with it!” she puffed.
“You did, I got to admit! Glad I didn’t have to kill the poor brute.”
They came to a boarded-over house, fenceless, and beyond it was the cross street.
Wolfe ran ahead, looking for the Chunkies, didn’t see them. Maybe they were thinking better of just rushing in on him. Gangs have some pecking order, some hierarchy, but they aren’t as structured as military units and that led to confusing and dissent in “the ranks”—which was a damned good thing, right now, for him and Seline, Wolfe reflected, as he led the way across the street.
“There… I think that’s it two houses down!” Wolfe said, pointing. “That’s the address!”
“That house with the huge white satellite antenna out front? Really? That obvious?”
“That’s one of those old satellite antennas, from back in the day, for television,” Wolfe said, as they strode quickly along the sidewalk. “No one knows it’s been retrofitted for this… They think it’s just old junk…”
They hurried to the rear of the house, and up the back porch steps. A piece of paper was taped to the screen door. On the paper someone had penciled a simple outline of a wolf. The drawing of the wolf meaning Wolfe, probably. Under the wolf outline was an arrow pointing downward.
Near the arrow was scribbled one word, a kind of signature: Blank.
“Looks like a message from Blank,” Wolfe said. He tore it off, turned it over. Nothing on the other side.
They went through the unlocked back doors, and looked around the kitchen. The house was empty; there were no appliances, no furnishings. The floors were neatly swept. There was a door standing open on the left. It led to a wooden stairway to a basement. The arrow had been pointing downward. Wolfe, go downward.
Wolfe drew the gun—for all he knew the Chunkies were waiting to jump him down there. He switched on the basement light and led Seline down the steps. There was an ordinary concrete basement, smelling of dust and mold, and a single naked overhead bulb. The basement contained a desk in a farther corner, and on the desk was a computer, turned on.
On the monitor screen was one word: Upload.
Wires ran from the back of the computer to its power source and to the front of the house—to the old, retrofitted satellite dish.
“What a relief to see that computer waiting for us,” Seline said.
She crossed to the desk, taking off the backpack. She drew the laptop out, set it up on the desk beside the computer, and powered it up. When it had booted, she found the jacks and plugged them in. She used the passwords and clicked to begin the upload…
The upload was going pretty quickly. Should take ninety seconds.
But as it was happening a car was pulling up outside. And another. Another after that, too, all three of them stopping with an urgent squeal of tires…