8

The address on the driver’s license took me back to the neighborhood near the school. I drove slowly, aware of my gun. I had never removed the damn thing from my pocket. I was also aware of my pounding heart.

The doctor’s words ran through my head: She was smaller than I would have expected, not completely developed. Her assailant did a lot of damage just by—um—just by—I mean, he tore her up. We did what we could but she’ll be in pain for a while. We’re giving her antibiotics, which should take care of everything, including VD if she caught something like that….

And I saw the look on Franklin’s face change at the word VD, first because he didn’t understand the acronym, and then because he did.

I thought for a moment that Franklin would walk away, but he didn’t. He clung to Althea, whose expression never altered. She had expected this. She had known what was coming. She would get the family through it.

But as the doctor continued, she looked at me, her flat expression instructing me. I had better do something, or she would.

Marvella stood just behind them, listening carefully. She would handle the family stuff, the woman stuff, the emotional stuff. At least tonight.

Tonight, I had to take care of everything else.

I left while Jimmy and Keith were still in the cafeteria. I didn’t want Jimmy to ask again if he could go along. He had done a fantastic job, but he didn’t belong at my side.

Marvella was going to take him home, and if I hadn’t arrived by eleven, she promised to call Laura.

As I drove down the roads I’d sped through that afternoon, the lack of traffic surprised me. So did the darkness. It felt like I had been in that hospital half my life. Night fell early in January, but it was already six-thirty, and sensible families were home.

Most everyone else was off the streets. It had gotten colder, with just enough of a wind to make the air bitter. No one was out unless they had to be.

Like everything else in Chicago, crime went inside in the winter.

I flashed on the interior of that hotel: dark, filthy, stinky. I would never get it out of my mind, and neither would Lacey. On her bad days, she would always return to that room, to that man, pounding her with his fists, holding her down with his body—I took a deep breath. I had to unpack my anger slowly or I would make mistakes.

The doctor said: The next few weeks will be critical. We’ll see how she heals. She might need more surgery. At the

moment, we believe we’ve repaired the damage. If we haven’t, we might have to go in again, remove things—Ten minutes, maybe less. That was all it had taken this bastard to change Lacey’s life.

Ten minutes, plus a few weeks of wooing. Some promises. Modeling. Damn that promise. Lacey was pretty. She wanted out. She thought she could trade in on her looks. He had

flattered her, coddled her, made her feel even more special.

And then he had locked her in a room, slapped her across the face, and shoved her against a filthy bed.

If we didn’t handle this right, if Althea and Franklin didn’t handle this right, Lacey would be broken forever. If we handled it right, she would be different. But alive. Strong.

With a future.

If we handled it right.

I turned left. Streetlights had burned out here. The bastard’s address was in a once-great neighborhood, about three blocks from the Starlite. About three blocks from the school where pretty little girls grew up into pretty naïve teenagers, easy prey for a bastard like this.

The building stood in the middle of the darkened block.

This block didn’t look that different from the block I lived on. Stately old Victorians converted into apartments. Four-plexes scattered on the once-large lawns. Buildings crammed against each other, with makeshift fire escapes, doors marring the front of once-pretty homes.

The bastard lived in a three-story building shoved between two Victorians. A six-plex, then. I hoped to hell he didn’t live on the top floor. His address suggested a ground floor apartment, but I’d been surprised before.

I parked in a puddle of darkness, half a block away from the nearest working streetlight and across the street from the apartment complex. Thank God the van was filthy. The license plate was covered with snow-dirt. I’d made sure of that when I left the hospital. Nothing about this van could connect it to me.

I left my hat on the seat beside me. I didn’t want to risk losing it in the wind. But I had rolled a thick scarf around my neck, and made sure I wore my expensive leather gloves.

Then I got out slowly, easing the door closed so it didn’t bang. None of the buildings had exterior lights. The neighborhood was dark and dangerous, exactly what I needed.

I walked carefully around the van. The neglected block hadn’t seen a plow in weeks. The snow had packed down and turned to a slick of ice that didn’t have sand or salt on it, but did have ruts through a central path that cars had carved all on their own.

I picked my way across, then reached the sidewalk—or what had been a sidewalk, but what was now a trail of iced footprints deep in the frozen snow.

I didn’t stop. As I approached the building, I realized the house wasn’t a six-plex. It was an eight-plex at least, with basement apartments down a small flight of stairs framed by a rusted iron railing.

I went up the steps to the door buzzers. The bastard’s address wasn’t inside the house. His door was outside, one of the basement apartments to the side, which surprised me. I figured a thug like this would have money. Anyone who lived in a basement apartment in Chicago clearly had no money at all.

Basement apartments flooded. In bad snow storms, their doors froze shut or got blocked by accumulating snow.

Basement apartments were for the losers, the near-homeless, the hopeless.

The stairs had been salted and shoveled, the area in front of the door clear of snow and ice. Bastard didn’t want to get blocked in.

The door didn’t have a deadbolt or a security buzzer. I had initially planned on knocking, telling the bastard that I had his wallet and maybe he wanted it back, but I decided against that.

Why warn him? A lock like this I could slip open with a slice of my guitar pick or open with the lock picks in my van.

Or hell, I could kick the whole thing in. But that might wake the neighbors.

I decided to use the guitar pick first and see what happened.

Then I might consider breaking the damn door down. Or maybe even knocking like a civilized man.

I gripped the knob loosely in my leather gloves. Moments like this justified their expense. My hands wouldn’t slide off the metal, no matter how slick it was.

Then I slid the pick against the latch, and pushed ever so slightly, hoping the door wouldn’t rattle.

It didn’t. It eased open, and a cloud of marijuana smoke hit me. I leaned back, took a deep breath of fresh air, and then pulled the scarf over my nose and mouth. It wouldn’t take out all of the smoke, but it would ease the effects.

I couldn’t have my judgment or my reactions affected here.

Not if I could help it.

I pulled my gun, flicked the safety off, and then stepped inside. I eased the door closed behind me. I was in a narrow entry, filled with coats and boots. Ahead of me was an equally narrow hallway. Light poured out of one room to my left.

Directly in front of me, the flickering light of a television set illuminated a cluttered couch and a thin brown carpet.

I walked quietly, not that it mattered. The television was turned to one of Jimmy’s favorite programs, The Mod Squad, and the familiar pulsing music played underneath some really bad “hip” dialogue.

There were no other doors in the narrow hallway. The gun and I peered into the lighted room. It was a galley kitchen with a tiny table on the far wall. The faint odor of rotted garbage

rose from the sink, which was full of slime-coated water.

I blinked, then headed toward the television room. I passed a bathroom large enough for a shower and a toilet. There was no sink. I didn’t see any other doors and certainly no windows.

Not only was this a basement apartment, but it was a studio basement apartment with only the most basic amenities. This thing was an afterthought.

I leaned against the door frame and peered into the room.

Two windows covered the back wall. They were six feet above the floor, and not wide enough for an adult to get through.

They provided some light and maybe a bit of fresh air on hot days. No wonder this place smelled. Nothing could refresh the air in here.

The couch was pushed against the wall. In the center of the room was an easy chair with the room’s only inhabitant. The glow of a cigarette tip indicated he had inhaled. The stench told me the cigarette was marijuana.

No one else was in the apartment.

He was so engrossed in a fight between Linc and some bad guy over Julie that he didn’t see me.

I flicked on the overhead light, and took two steps into the room, making certain to train the gun on him. The light was thin, but it startled him. I was prepared for it, and still blinked as my eyes adjusted.

I stopped in front of the television and turned it up. The dialogue and the music forced me to shout. “Clyde Voss?”

He sat up, the recliner moving with him. Even if he didn’t answer me, I knew this was the guy. His face was black-and- blue, and several cuts covered his hairline. Jimmy had injured him badly.

“Who wants to know?” he asked, his voice barely audible over the television. He reached slowly toward the drawer in a nearby table.

“If you have a gun in there, you leave it,” I said. “Or I’ll shoot you where you sit.”

He was tall, but not muscular. He had a blanket around his waist, and his eyes were red from the dope.

“Who are you?” he asked, and it would have sounded tough if his voice hadn’t shaken.

“I’m the guy with your wallet,” I said. “You dropped it when you ran away from that little girl you were raping this afternoon.”

He held up his hands. “I could use it back,” he said as if we were in a negotiation. We weren’t.

He didn’t know that yet.

“I’m sure you could,” I said. “There was damn near two hundred dollars in it.”

“You can keep that,” he said a bit too fast.

“As what?” I asked. “Payment for the girl you brutalized?” “Whatever you want to call it,” he said. “I got some pot here. We could share.” He wasn’t getting it.

“How kind of you,” I said. “Did you offer that little girl some pot?”

“You know her?” he asked, finally catching a clue. “Yeah,” I said.

“Well, you know she’s not going to have anything to do with me. It’s over with that one. It’s really not a big deal.”

The music continued behind me, the pulsing beat making my heart race. “Really?” I asked. “Not a big deal.”

“No, I mean, these things happen, and sometimes they don’t work out. She wasn’t right for us.”

The “us” stopped me. “Us?”

“You know,” he said. “I don’t do this for fun.”

Then he grinned. The grin made my finger twitch. Only my brain stopped that finger from pressing the trigger right then.

“Well,” he said, “maybe I have a little fun.”

The rage I’d been holding back rose. I took a deep breath, forcing myself to tamp it back.

“Do your employers know that?” I asked.

He shrugged, that idiotic grin remaining. “They don’t care. They just want the girls in the right shape.” “And that is?”

“Pliable, if you know what I mean.” “Tell me,” I said.

His grin faded just a bit. He swallowed visibly. “I…um… after, I give them something for the pain. Then I pass them along to the right guy.”

“You carry an unconscious girl from that hotel?”

“No,” he said, as if I were stupid. “I move her to a back room. They take care of her there. Keep her until she’s ready to work.”

My stomach turned slowly. Whether it was his words or the stench or both, I did not know.

“How long does that take?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Days. A week. Depends on the girl. They all come around. I get to test them later. They have experience then. They’re not so tight. They don’t fight either. Which is

too bad. The best ones fight at first, and that makes it easier—”

My gun went off. The report echoed in the small space. Clyde Voss’s face was gone, a bloody mess in its place. The room smelled of gunpowder, blood, and that ever-present marijuana. The cigarette had fallen on his blanket and was burning a hole through it.

My hand shook. Dammit. I should have kept him talking. I needed to know more.

I couldn’t know more.

I couldn’t have listened to him any longer.

I flicked the safety back on and slipped the gun into my pocket. Then I clicked off the overhead light, and made myself walk down the hall.

People noticed running black men. Even black people noticed running black men. Even in neighborhoods like this where no one saw anything ever. People noticed.

I tapped the scarf, glad I had it on. I made it to the door, opened it, peered out to see if neighbors were responding to the gunshot.

So far, no one had come down the stairs.

I let myself out, pushed the latch lock, and closed the door. Then I walked up the steps to that trail of icy footprints, and retraced my steps, reminding myself with every footfall to move deliberately, as if I belonged.

No lights had come on. In fact, some lights had turned off.

The windows across the street appeared empty. So far as I could tell, no one watched me.

The gun felt heavy in my coat pocket.

I thought I’d feel better. But the trembling had worked through me. And one word kept echoing in my head.

Us.

He had said us.