Despite her spitefulness, I handed Sandra a business card. “My cell phone’s on here. If you change your mind, give me a call.”

It was only six o’clock when I walked out of the hospital. I couldn’t believe it was that early-I thought I must have been working all night, I felt so beat. I looked aimlessly around Cottage Grove Avenue for my car, wondering if I’d forgotten to set the alarm, when I remembered it was still down at the high school-I’d ridden to Hyde Park in the ambulance.

I picked up a taxi at the stand across the street and bullied the driver into going south. All the way down Route 41, the cabbie kept hectoring me on how dangerous it was, and who was going to pay his fare back north?

I refused to take part in one more fight, leaning back in the seat with my eyes shut, hoping that would make the driver close his mouth. He may have kept up his complaint, but I did fall into a sound sleep that lasted all the way to the high school parking lot.

I made my way home more by luck than skill, and fell back down into the well of sleep as soon as I got home. My dreams weren’t restful. I was back in the gym, fifteen years old. It was dark, but I knew I was there with Sylvia, Jennie, and the rest of my old basketball team. We’d run the length of the room so many times, we automatically avoided the sharp edges of the bleachers, and the horse and hurdles leaning against the wall. We knew where the ladders were, and which one had the climbing ropes looped around it.

I was the strongest: I clambered up the narrow steel ladder and unhooked the climbing ropes. Sylvia was like a squirrel on the ropes. She clung with her thighs, hauling up the underpants and the sign. Jennie, keeping watch at the gym doors, was sweating.

Homecoming was the next night, and the dream switched to that. Even in my dream, I felt thick with grievance against Boom-Boom-he’d promised to take me and now he wouldn’t. What did he see in Sandy, anyway?

It was the exposure waiting round the bend in my mind that woke me. I wasn’t going to let myself dream to the end, to Boom-Boom’s anger and my own mortification. I sat in bed, sweating, panting, seeing Sandy Zoltak again as she’d been then, soft, plump, with a sly smile for the girls, a foxy one for the guys, her shimmery satin dress a blue that matched her eyes, going into the gym on Boom-Boom’s arm-I pushed aside the memory and thought instead how I wouldn’t have known Sandy on the street today-I certainly hadn’t known her in the hospital.

It must have been that random thought that brought the punk I’d seen on the street when I was talking to Pastor Andrés back into mind, the “chavo banda” Andrés chewed out for showing up at his construction site.

Of course I’d seen him before: he’d been in Fly the Flag last Tuesday morning. “A punk one sees around, taking from jobsites, or even doing little jobs,” Andrés had said.

Someone had hired him to vandalize Fly the Flag. Was it Andrés, or Zamar, or someone Andrés knew? It was four in the morning. I wasn’t going to go all the way down to South Chicago to see if the chavo was trying for a repeat attack against Fly the Flag. But the thought stayed with me through the rest of my uneasy sleep. All day Tuesday, when I had a heavy schedule at my agency, I kept wondering about this chavo and the flag factory, about the cartons they’d been taking out of the plant that they hadn’t wanted me to see the last time I was there.

In the evening, when I’d finished my real work, I couldn’t resist going back down to Fly the Flag to see for myself what was going on. And while I was creeping around the plant in the dark, I watched it blow up.

16 Command Performance

That was the tale I told Conrad, mostly warts, mostly all.

When I finished talking, it was late afternoon. The anesthesia in my system kept pulling me under, and I drifted off to sleep from time to time. Once when I woke up, Conrad was stretched out asleep on the floor. Mr. Contreras had been compassionate enough to put a pillow under his head, I saw with some amusement; my neighbor had left while we were both asleep, but came back half an hour or so later with a big bowl of spaghetti.

At first, Conrad kept challenging me; interviewing me had him off balance, and he was jumpy, aggressive, interrupting every few sentences. I was too tired and too sore to fight. Whenever he broke in, I would only wait for him to finish, and then just start the previous sentence again from the beginning. Finally, he settled down, not even barking at me when I took phone calls-although my long conversation with Morrell made him leave the room. Of course, Conrad had calls of his own, from the medical examiner’s office, from his secretary, from the Tenth Ward alderman, and a couple of newspaper and TV stations.

While he was dealing with the media, I bathed and put on clean clothes, a tough job with the pain stabbing from my shoulder down my left arm. I risked wetting the dressing by washing my hair, which stank of smoke, and felt better for getting all the grime off my body.

I talked until I was hoarse. Not that I told Conrad every detail; he didn’t need to know about my private life, or my complicated reaction to Marcena Love. He didn’t need to know my ancient history with Bron Czernin and Sandy Zoltak, and I didn’t hand him Billy the Kid or Pastor Andrés on a platter. Still, I covered all the essentials, including a lot more detail than he wanted on the Bertha Palmer basketball program-especially when I suggested that the Fourth Police District might adopt the team as part of their community outreach.

I didn’t hide anything that I’d learned at Fly the Flag, not even my own break-in at the premises the week before, or the chavo banda I’d intercepted or Frank Zamar’s refusal to let me call the cops then. I told Conrad how Rose Dorrado had brought me into the flag factory to begin with, and then ordered me to stay away. And I told him that Andrés knew this chavo by sight.

“And that’s the whole truth, Ms. W., so help you God?” Rawlings said when I’d finished.

“Too many people doing weird things in God’s name these days,” I grumbled. “Let’s just say I’ve given you an honest factual narrative.”

“Where does this Marcena Love fit into the picture?”

“Don’t think she does,” I said. “I’ve never seen her near the factory, for one thing, and there’s nothing connecting Czernin to it, either. She might have heard something, roaming around the South Side, that’s all. I’m guessing a look at Zamar’s books will tell you what you need to know.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, I’m wondering if the guy was in a hole and was being squeezed. Rose Dorrado said he’d bought a fancy new machine he was having trouble paying for. Say Zamar didn’t, or couldn’t, respond when his creditors put dead rats in his ventilator shaft. This annoyed them enough that they made the biggest statement possible, took out his factory and him at the same time.”

Conrad nodded and switched off his recorder. “It’s a good theory. It might even be right-it’s worth looking into. But I want you to do me a favor. No, take that back: I want a promise out of you.”

My brows jumped up to my hairline. “And that would be?”

“Not to do any more investigating on my turf. I’ll get our forensics accountants to check into Zamar’s finances, and I don’t want to find that you’ve been there ahead of them, helping yourself to his files.”

“I promise you that I will not help myself to any of Zamar’s files. Which, I have a feeling, are charcoal now, anyway.”

“I want more than that, Vic. I don’t want you investigating crimes in my district, period.”

“If someone in South Chicago hires me, Conrad, I will investigate to the best of my ability.” Despite the spurt of anger I felt, I almost laughed-I hadn’t wanted to be sucked back into South Chicago, but as soon as someone told me to stay away my hackles went up and I dug in my heels.