“I… I don’t have that much.”

“Then your boy dies. Nice talking to you.” He winked at Danny again, loving this, able to twist the knife in both of them at once, the adrenaline kicking hard now. He could see Danny wanting to make it better, but just as helpless as the boss man.

Watching it felt good.

“Wait!” Richard’s voice, a yell.

“If you don’t have the money, this is a waste of my time.”

“I can get it. I mean I will get it.” He stuttered like a little kid trying to weasel his way out of a fight.

“I thought so. We’ll call you again in a couple of days. Wait by the phone. And Dick? Remember that you’re dealing with serious people. Doubt it for a minute and you’ll spend the rest of your life wishing you hadn’t.”

Evan hung up the phone, pleased with himself. A nice note to end on. The guy was probably pissing himself right now, all the things he’d thought mattered to him stripped away. “Not bad, eh? I could do this for a living.”

“You stupid fuck.” Danny’s voice was strangled, his fists white-knuckled.

“What?” He smiled casually.

“We said half a million.”

“You said it, not me. Anyway, you should be thanking me – I just doubled our take.” My take.

Danny glowered at him, looking for all the world like somebody’s dad. “Half a million he could pull from his bank account,” he lectured. “Cash in an IRA, sell some stock. But a million, it makes it more likely he goes to the cops-”

“Blah, blah, blah. Look, the guy was quick enough to say he could get it when he knew what was at stake. Besides, now he knows he’s dealing with pros.”

“Evan-”

“You want to call him back?”

They stared at each other for a long moment, Danny still edgy, like he was thinking of making a play for it. Part of Evan would have welcomed that, but he knew the time wasn’t right. He eased back on his stare, put a smile in his eyes. “Relax. The hard part’s over.”

No need to push Danny too far yet. He was still useful. If Danny disappeared, bossman might panic. Better to stay cool, finish the job, and get paid.

Then he and Danny could settle any final debts.

“Cheer up, partner. It’s all downhill from here.” He almost chuckled saying it.

Danny shook his head. “Sure,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced.

Evan watched Danny climb into his truck and shut the door. He could see the man checking him out in the rearview. Evan smiled and threw a two-fingered salute, the way Dad used to. Funny how the little things stuck. Danny ignored him, started the truck. Put it in drive, signaled, and gently pulled out. It made Evan sick. Even furious, the guy didn’t have the cojones to squeal out of a parking lot.

Evan walked into the gas station and asked for Winstons. Soft pack. The Pakistani at the counter pulled them down without a second glance. Didn’t even notice he’d been in forty minutes earlier, or if he did notice, didn’t say anything about it. Evan imagined taking the gun off the Mustang’s passenger seat, coming back in here, and having the guy empty the register. But instead he paid, snagged a pack of matches, and stepped outside.

He lit a cigarette as he walked to the car. The weather seemed to be getting gloomier, twilight falling though it was only five o’clock. Dark clouds reflected the city glow in shades of gray and green. As he climbed in the car, he had an idea. It took some digging around, but he found a pen under the passenger seat. He leaned against the dash to write, 847-866-0300. Dick.

He smiled and tucked the matchbook in his pocket.

24

The hamburgers at Top-Notch had been getting smaller over the years – no way that was half a pound of meat – but they were still good, juicy and dripping cheese, and when the waitress spotted the radios Sean Nolan and Anthony Matthews always left on the table, she’d write “Police” on the ticket so the counterman rang it up half price. Which wasn’t much consolation when Matthews’s cell phone rang thirty seconds after their meal arrived. Nolan watched him roll his eyes and wipe the grease off his fingers before he answered.

“Hey. Lunch. Nolan. The Top-Notch. Yeah.” A pause. “Where?” He began patting his pockets, and Sean pulled the pen from his own and slid it across the table. Matthews nodded as he wrote on the napkin. “Okay. We’ll be there shortly.” He laughed. “No chance. See you in a bit.” He closed the phone and picked up his burger.

“What’s up?”

“That was Willie. They just pulled a floater out of the river.”

“Where?”

“You know where the Stevenson and Archer cross?”

“Yeah.” Nolan chewed thoughtfully. “A smokehound who went for a swim?” People could generally be counted on to die in stupid ways, but drugs always made it worse. He’d once handled a job where a nineteen-year-old BD, Black Disciple, had been found torched. At first he’d liked the rival Gangster Disciples for it. But the medical examiner said no, there weren’t any indications of a struggle, and no premortem injury besides the fire. Turned out the genius had fallen asleep lighting his crack pipe, caught the mattress on fire, and was just too high to notice. Another criminal mastermind.

Detective Matthews shook his head. “Not this time.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he’s got a bullet hole in his chest.”

Nolan looked longingly at the rest of his cheeseburger. Most of the time he made himself eat well, and the occasional burger was a rare luxury. He sighed. “Let’s roll.”

A gust of wind tagged them as they stepped out, the kind Chicago was famous for, brutal, cold, and hard enough you could lean into it, let it hold your weight. They’d left the blue Ford in a no-parking zone, but cops knew cop cars, marked or not. Nolan fired up the engine, changing his radio frequency from the seventh to the ninth district in case any news came over while they were en route. “He tell you where they were?”

“Just said east side of the river.”

The drive up to Bridgeport took twenty minutes, but finding the scene turned out to be easy. A dozen squad cars sat beneath the overpass, their lights painting the underside of the freeway in garish sweeps of color. Traffic racing above made the dim space hammer and thrum. One of the beat cops from the district, a tall guy with wind-burned ears and the barrel-chested look of a tactical vest under his uniform – Peter Bradley, that was his name – spotted them and came over with a grin.

“Hey, Detective. You slumming?”

“Yeah. You can go home now, Bradley – the real cops have arrived.”

The beat cop laughed, started to lead them toward the water. “Detective Jackson is down here.”

“What’s the story?”

“Couple of kids saw the body, called it in.”

“You take their story?”

“Cutting class, said they came down here to hang out. They’re headed to the ninth now. Want me to have the sergeant save them?”

Nolan nodded. It wasn’t likely they were involved, but they might have seen something useful. That was crucial these days. The running joke was that in the war on crime, the Felony Review Board was France. Way they saw it, you didn’t have a witness, may as well surrender. Nothing like CSI, teams of researchers working round the clock to make the physical evidence. Unless you were dealing with a high-profile case, somebody white and North Side, it took upward of four months to get anything more complicated than a print back from the crime lab.

Amid the sea of blue-shirted beat cops, Detective Willie Jackson was easy to spot in green corduroy pants, a purple shirt, and a fedora with – no shit – a feather in the band. Before Nolan made detective, he used to wonder why they all wore hats. Once he got bumped up, he found that standing out made it clear to everybody who was in charge. It was a little thing that made a difference. Some of the guys, it tended to be the ones who wore big mustaches, they went so far as cowboy hats. He’d just gone with a brown leather golf cap. Made the point and kept his head warm.