“Don’t be too impressed. Half of them probably report to me at work, just racking up brownie points.”

Lynch smiled. “Save your hard-ass act, Collie. I think they actually like you.”

Collie shrugged. “Tom’s in love with your girlfriend, by the way. Just thought you should know you have a rival.”

Lynch had seen Liz sitting with his nephew for quite a while.

“Yeah, well, you know what? I’m in love with her, too. Tell the kid to back off. Remind him I got a gun.”

She laughed. “John Lynch in love. My, my. It was nice of Father Hughes to come. He’s the one saying the funeral?”

“Yeah.” Father Hughes was talking to a few of his mom’s old neighbors, up by the casket.

“Kind of sad, Mom dies, and you have to recruit a priest from one of your cases.”

“Yeah,” said Lynch.

“We should have him say a rosary,” Collie said.

Lynch turned and looked at her. “Really? You even remember how?”

She shrugged. “It’s like falling off a bike, I guess. I’ll go talk to him.”

Collie went up and talked to the priest, and he made the announcement, the staff from the funeral home walking around, handing out plastic rosaries. Lynch passed Bernstein on his way up to join his sister at the kneeler in front of the casket.

CHAPTER 51 – CHICAGO

 

An hour later, everything over, Lynch and Johnson were in the hallway by the front door.

“Listen, John, I’d come over but I still owe the Trib a thousand words on this pension mess and I’m running on about two hours sleep,” Johnson said.

“It’s OK,” Lynch said. “I’m kinda washed out myself. We gotta talk though. A lot’s changed. A lot’s changed since yesterday.”

“I thought so. Last night, Hurley’s acting like he’s got a man crush on you, then I get down to the capital and Harrigan’s giving me a hard time about an interview, telling me I need to be careful about my friends, telling me I keep swapping spit with John Lynch, I’m going to find a lot of doors that won’t open for me. I guess you can be bad for a girl’s career.”

Harrigan was the speaker of the Illinois house, the top Democratic gun down in Springfield.

Lynch nodded, thought for a minute about how and what to tell Johnson. Not a trust thing anymore. He knew he could trust her. Just this whole thing had spun off into an entire new universe for him. A universe where it didn’t matter where you were, who you were, what you’d done, there were guys with guns ready to take you off the board just for a little edge. The old school part of him was saying you don’t throw your woman in the deep end of that pool. But he knew that wasn’t his call. Johnson was a big girl. And this was her game, too. Maybe the biggest story out of this town since, well, ever. She got to decide what pools to jump into all on her own. And he needed the press on this, needed to get some pressure on the other team.

“The Harrigan thing, here’s the deal. We’re off the case,” Lynch said. “The whole Chicago PD. Feds have bogarted it, which means Clarke is calling the tune, because there’s no way Hurley shows his ass to the Feds on his own.”

“Clarke as in President of the United States Clarke?”

Lynch nodded. “And the Feds have got the whole thing hermetically sealed. Got it in cover-up mode. Listen, I got a whole mess of new shit the last couple days, got to catch you up. Not tonight, though. I still got some dots to connect. But breakfast?”

Johnson nodded. “Sounds like you might be good for a girl’s career after all.”

“I don’t get you killed, yeah,” Lynch said.

A commotion came from down at the far end of the hall, somebody staggering out from the viewing room, knocking over one of the floral displays, lurching across the hallway into the men’s room. Rusty.

He’d kept to his corner all night. Collie’d gone over on her way out with the family, said her goodbyes. She was headed back up to Milwaukee. Holy Thursday tomorrow, so they couldn’t have the funeral until Monday. Catholic rules.

Rusty’d had a bottle of Jameson’s and a few glasses out on the table next to his chair all night, the ring kissers taking a slug here and there, but Rusty working his way through most of it, and he’d been pretty well lit when he came in.

One of the guys from the funeral home pushed in to the men’s room behind Rusty, some noises coming out, not happy noises. The guy came out, walked down the hall.

“Detective,” he said, “we may need some help with your uncle. He’s a little, eh, distraught.”

“OK,” Lynch said. He hugged Johnson. She pulled back, put a hand to his face for a long moment, something passing between them, something he didn’t have words for, didn’t need words for.

“Breakfast,” she said.

Lynch nodded.

Rusty was sitting on the floor of the men’s room when Lynch walked in, pants half open, a puddle of urine under his legs. He looked up, his eyes red, his face washed in tears.

“Pissed myself,” he said.

Rusty was shrunken, hollowed out, shattered.

Lynch squatted down, got the old man under the arms, pulled him to his feet. Rusty fumbled his pants closed, leaned back against the wall, panting from the small effort, tried to hold Lynch’s eyes, white hair hanging sweaty and stringy over his fleshy face, the huge head shaking back and forth.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “Not then. Didn’t know nothin’. Not for a long time. And I never did know nothin’ for sure. I didn’t know.”

Part of Lynch wanted to bury a fist in the old man’s gut. Part of him wanted to hug him. Lynch reached up and took Rusty’s chin, steadied his face, looked into his eyes.

“You didn’t want to know, Rusty.”

The old man came apart, falling forward, Lynch holding him up while Rusty wept into his shoulder.

“Pissed myself,” Rusty muttered. “Your mother’s wake and I pissed myself.”

A kaleidoscope of emotions swirling in Lynch’s head, Lynch not knowing which of them to seize on, which of them to feel. Rusty didn’t know up front. Lynch was sure of that. Probably didn’t even have a clue for a while. And he’d made a promise to Lynch’s dad the day Declan Lynch put on the uniform. Said he’d watch out for the family, it ever came to that. He’d kept that promise, the promise maybe being the reason that, once Rusty knew there might be something, that maybe his masters had had a hand in his brother’s death, that promise being the reason he never looked, never pushed it. Rusty maybe thinking there was the truth, and then there was his brother’s family, and there was no way to serve both of them.

Now Lynch didn’t know either. Didn’t know what to say, what to think, what to feel. But he knew what his father would do.

“You’re still family, Rusty,” Lynch said, turning the old man toward the door, getting an arm around him. “Let’s get you home.”

CHAPTER 52 – CHICAGO

Next morning, Cunningham stepped out his door, saw a FedEx guy with a huge box on a dolly in the front foyer.

“Hey, good timing,” the guy said. “I was just getting ready to leave. Tried the buzzer, wasn’t getting anybody. Looking for Jackson? Paperwork says unit one, so I’m guessing that’s you?”

“I’m unit one, but I’m not Jackson. He’s on four.”

“Always some damn thing,” the FedEx man said, pointing his little hand-held scanner at Cunningham and pulling the trigger. The darts were similar to a Taser, but stronger. Cunningham hit the floor in a heap, twitching. The FedEx man laid the large container flat on the floor, squatted down, opened the lid and flipped Cunningham inside. Then he pulled a small syringe out of the end of his clipboard, injected Cunningham with the sedative, and buckled the cuffs attached inside the box around Cunningham’s wrists and ankles. He clamped the top of the box shut, tipped the box up on the dolly, and walked it out the door and into his truck.