Painted Black, page 3
“Police! Somebody call the police! Thief!” The last word was so high and drawn out hairs stood straight the hell up on the back of Chris’s neck. It almost drowned the scream of sirens headed their way. Chris let go of the bag to shove with both hands. The screamer went over easy. The resulting shrieks sounded loud enough to raise the fucking dead.
Chris grabbed the bag and ran, tripped over it, ripped it, got it tangled on the corner of the dumpster. Giving it up, he let go and raced to the mouth of the alley. Headlights blinded him. He stopped, hands held out in front of him. Like that was going to keep him from getting his ass killed. A car came straight at him.
Chapter 6
Jo paused before getting in her car and looked down the street. Shadows pressed against the pools of light cast by each lamppost. A late night lake breeze brushed a few strands of hair against her cheek.
She wanted to run, weaving between light and darkness like a time traveler through alternate dimensions. She’d come outside prepared to run, stretching limbs and lungs until the ache in her calves and adrenaline in her brain stripped away thought and held the gloom at bay. After that she could finally sleep, too exhausted for nightmares.
But she’d promised Keisha. “I don’t want to read about your dead body with my morning coffee, woman,” Keisha had told her once. “You want to jog, do it during decent hours. That’s danger enough for anybody in this neighborhood. Unless you got a death wish or something.”
Or something. More a dare than a death wish.
So she decided on a late night drive instead. The intensity of the scene with that young girl was still fresh in her mind. She wanted to mull it over a bit, cruise the Lakeview neighborhood. Maybe jot down names of a few of the funeral homes near where they’d found her. A homeless man in a glass coffin. Jo shook her head and angled forward out of the tight parking spot with a spurt of loose dirt under the tires.
Instead of testing her body’s limits, she tested the car’s. Gunning up to every stop, she leaned on the brake pedal. Jarring loose images half memory, half nightmare.
A shadow stretched across the pavement, flowed up the curb, stopped short. Flashbulbs popped and brought the shadow to life, but not the boy sprawled on the street, one leg thrown out, arm reaching with fingers splayed.
Tempting disaster and detection, she punched it, flat-lining up Lake Shore Drive at a good fifteen over the speed limit.
An open newspaper. Large block letters: “BOY FOUND MURDERED.” Subhead: “Local Resident Accused of Molesting Six-year-old.”
Jamming into higher gear, she popped the clutch just enough to make the engine kick a bit.
Just say no, Daddy, that’s all I want to hear. Just say no.
She reached the north end without killing anyone, her face wet with tears she didn’t remember shedding. Even along the waterfront there were signs the city never slept. Cars curved on and off the access ramps, shadows moved under trees along the now-closed Belmont Harbor.
She exited at Belmont and cruised westward. Lovers, groups of youth, and old men weighted down with overstuffed duffle bags strolled the sidewalks. At the heart of the neighborhood, kids stood soliciting spare change on the corners, sharing cigarettes in the doorways, and harassing yuppies.
A siren came screaming toward her from the rear and she slowed, then stopped. The police car squeezed between Jo and an old van in the opposite lane.
Another siren came from the north and Jo’s reporter instincts kicked in. She’d spent two years running down police reports for one inch shorts to use as fillers for The Trib. Just because she didn’t get paid to do that anymore didn’t mean she no longer itched every time a siren sounded.
The police car turned up Sheffield. Jo went a block further to go up Kenmore. She tailed the cop car from one block over for another two blocks, till it wailed to a stop halfway between School and Roscoe. Jo found an alley mouth and started to turn. A shadow jumped out in front of her.
She’d killed a deer once in Iowa. Seventeen and driving for less than a year. The fog had been thick, but she knew the road, no houses along that stretch of country, just a straight line directly into town. The thud of muscle against metal. The carcass tossed in the air, slammed down on the front hood, slid toward the windshield. She’d seen those images in her dreams for at least two weeks after.
Tires screeched like a scream in her head. Jo lunged forward against her seatbelt. Her head whipped back with a painful snap to her neck. She stared horrified through the windshield of her car.
Wild-eyed, a youth stared back at her. Hunched over, inches away from the front grill, he stretched his arms above the car hood. Black, jaw-length ringlets swung forward to frame his face. In slow motion, he took a deep breath like he was surprised to be able to.
Slowly, his hands came down to rest on her car and for another two seconds, they locked eyes. Then, some sound from behind him made the boy turn and, with a last glance her way, run off down the street.
Jo was still trembling when the policeman stepped out of the shadows at the alley mouth. He looked up and down the street and then at her. She resisted an urge to put the car in reverse and peel backward, in a panic like she’d done something wrong. But no, she hadn’t hit the boy. He’d been fine, running down the street with no limp, no broken bones. There were no blood trails left behind as evidence of their close call.
The officer said something, then moved closer. Jo rolled her window down so she could hear him.
“You see anybody run out of here?” he asked.
“Sort of,” she answered. “I thought I saw someone take off down the street.”
Her distrust of cops came from a place she knew made no sense, tied to childish fears and resentments. Yet she did little to try to overcome her irrational reaction. Anger had to be directed somewhere.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “Robbery?” With two fingers, she picked up the reporter’s ID she kept on the dash and waved it at him.
“Attempted anyway.” The cop looked about 22 at most, and seemed more interested in Jo than the kid he should be chasing. He smiled and leaned down to look in at her. “You’re out kind of late for chasing stories.”
The comment lacked imagination as a pickup line yet carried none of the edgy tone of an official interrogation, so Jo chose to ignore it.
“Where at?”
“Funeral home down the—”
“Bates,” the cop’s partner interrupted. This guy looked forty-something, paunch dipping over his belt buckle, stride straight and sure. No smile.
The rookie snapped into cop mode. “No sign of him, Jerry. This lady saw him take off down the street but didn’t get a real close look.”
Jo noted their interchange with one part of her brain. The words “funeral home” had her synapses sizzling and stirring. Coincidence, it had to be a coincidence.
In this neighborhood? Mere blocks from where Lexie had practically choked when asked about a job at a funeral parlor? What kind of reporter would let a coincidence like that go uninvestigated?
“Take her name and number,” the older cop was saying. “In case we want to ask her something later.”
Jo provided the requested information, assured them she that, no, she really could not give an accurate description of the suspect, then backed away from the curb and eased down the narrow street. Two blocks later, she found a parking spot.
Chapter 7
Coward. You coward. You dirty … fist rattling the rotted shed door … fucking … again, harder, wood cracking, flesh scraped from knuckles … coward … snap of splintered pine as his fist broke a termite-weakened plank. Chris ripped off the half-split board and swung it hard against the brick cornice of the shed. Red dust puffed in the yellow lamplight and chunks of mortar crumbled to the alley like hail.
“Hey, get the hell out of here,” someone yelled from an upstairs window, “before I call the cops.”
“Call the fucking cops, moron,” Chris shouted back, but moved on, long strides through dark shadows, head ducked.
Cops, or Cole—were those the only options? Pretty sad fucking day when you hope your friends do get picked up by the pigs.
Shadows fogged his brain even after he reached Belmont and Halsted. A weight that hunched his shoulders and kept his eyes on the ground. The Night Moves van was where he expected it. On the corner, fifteen or twenty kids gathered around it, munching PB&Js, drinking pop, talking to the volunteers. Chris saw a few people he knew, but not her, not Lexie. Too early yet, maybe. She could still come. She would come, once she got away, once she realized this was where he’d be waiting.
He stopped in the bank parking lot, settled his ass on the wire-wrapped top of the chain link fence, and leaned backwards against the concrete wall. Hanging there, rear end sagging, he coiled forward in an upright fetal curl.
He kept thinking about the formaldehyde he’d left behind. They needed that shit to get King off Lexie’s back but he just dropped it and ran. Lexie’d kill him. King would kill her. And shut up to the little voice inside saying King killing her might not be the worst thing to worry about.
“What the fuck happen to your hand, Cry?” It was Moon, mouth full of peanut butter and bread. He leaned one hip against a fence post and took another huge bite without swallowing.
Chris lifted his right hand and stared at it. Blood thickened at each knuckle, skin peeled back. He couldn’t feel a thing. As soon as he thought that, pain wrapped around his whole hand.
“It’s nothing,” he mumbled, then rammed the fist into his thigh to deepen the pain, to waken his rage. “Mother fucker.”
“You drunk as a skunk.” Moon grinned. “’Less you found something better’n booze since you left us. What up?”
For a sec, Chris thought of a plan. Him and Moon going back there, breaking in the joint for real. They could get Lexie out and make off with twice as much stuff as he’d left behind. Then he remembered the rumor that Moon had started working for Riley King just last week. Not running drugs—King’s other line of business. Skin business. Loitering around Waveland and Halsted in tight pants with a big ass bulge in your crotch. Take me for a spin, mister, I’ll let you ride long and hard and wet.
If word got out Lexie failed twice, she might not get another chance. The days when it was Cry and Moon against the world were no more and it was best to forget all about that.
“You seen Teach around?” he asked Moon.
“Nah, he’s staying at the shelter, remember? They gotta be in by eleven so’s they don’t turn to pumpkins.”
Plan B, then, Plan B. But what the hell was Plan B? He reached for the bottle in his back pocket. That last swallow would numb the pain, clear his head. But he stopped, remembering where he was. No alcohol near the Night Moves van. He risked getting them in trouble just having the bottle this close and being this piss-assed drunk.
“What day is this?” he asked.
“Hell, Cry, I don’t know. Friday maybe. Yeah, Friday, ’cause the church on Wellington had their drop-in supper tonight.”
Jack worked the street on Fridays. Jack Prescott, from the Night Moves Center. “You want to talk to someone, Chris,” he’d said just last week, “you know where to find me.” Question was—did he want to talk about this?
He jumped off the fence, which recoiled with a rattle and shiver along with wire.
“Where you goin’?” Moon asked.
“I gotta piss.”
He also had to think. He relieved himself in a pile of urine-stinking debris near the back door of the Cocoa Cabana, then moved farther down the alley to a dumpster stuffed with flattened cardboard. Pieces had fallen over the lip, probably from some wino pulling out a couple good sleeping mats for the night. Chris kicked one of them into a shadow by the dumpster and sank down on it. His nose wrinkled at the musty, moldy smell.
The Captain Morgan came out at last. The bottle tilted up and warm rum slid down his throat to curl cozy heat in his stomach. He threw the empty bottle against the opposite wall with a satisfying shatter. Pulling his knees up, he rested his head on his arms.
The sobs happened without tears, stealing his breath, once, twice.
“Fuck.” He jerked upright. “Fuck this.”
What did he care? What was Lexie to him? Why couldn’t he let it go? She’d survived on the street without him before they met. Why did he always feel like he had to fix things?
Because someone had to.
He could pull the pieces together if he tried hard enough. Lexie in that place. Jack in the neighborhood. Gum still jamming up the door lock.
He just needed a Plan B.
Chapter 8
Midnight interviews at funeral parlors—not exactly the way they mapped things out in Journalism 405: Strategic Communication Research. But then nothing about Jo’s situation now related to what life had been back then.
“You can’t handle the big city,” her father had said when she told them her plans at graduation. “You’ll be murdered and in the headlines before you ever break print in one of those papers.”
Then she sprang the announcement of her internship at the Chicago Tribune. He acted like they’d hired her just to piss him off.
But Jo and Chicago understood each other. Five years in the city had taught her street sense. It certainly couldn’t throw her anything worse than small town Iowa already had.
Across the street, two guys walked in shadows. Neither looked her way. When she got back to the alley entrance, the stain of blue and white lights still revolved at the far end. The police were parked there, talking to neighbors maybe, calling in the report. But cops she could interview anytime. A trip to the station tomorrow, a flash of her reporter’s ID, and she’d get everything she could out of them.
The opportunity she couldn’t pass up, however, beckoned from an open door about halfway down the alley, spilling light onto the bricks.
She approached slowly. A ripped garbage bag caught on the corner of a dumpster fluttered in the slight breeze. The building opposite the open door had vague light behind one window, but otherwise seemed silent and unoccupied. An aluminum can rattled somewhere as a gust of air nudged it along the tarmac.
“Hello?” Jo rapped her knuckles against the open door and leaned over the threshold. “Anybody here?”
Inside the unoccupied room was a cluttered desk with two well-worn leather chairs. A pastoral print hung slightly crooked behind it. And along the wall, lit by an incandescent lamp, lay a white-haired man in a glass coffin.
“May I help you?”
Jo jerked around, hand fisted with the blade of her car key like a lethal spike between two fingers. Standing in the alley with hands clasped, the man who had alarmed Lexie at Felipe’s earlier that night waited for an answer.
“I’m—Jo Sullivan,” she started awkwardly, shoulders and fists tensed. “From Winds of Change. I heard the sirens, the police car. I thought I’d stop and see—I’m a reporter,” she added, not sure she’d been clear at first.
“The thief,” he sputtered, crossing his hands against his chest. “My God, yes, so terrifying. My heart—I thought it would burst from my chest.” He shuddered with the violence of a sheepdog throwing off rainwater and glanced both ways down the dark alley. “Please, let’s go inside.”
The lenses of his wire-rimmed spectacles caught the office light streaming from behind Jo. The refraction hid his eyes behind circles of what looked like shattered glass. Jo stepped aside so he could pass. Hesitatingly, she followed him inside. She shut the door but stood with her back close to it.
“This is my office,” he was saying. “I’m Dean Whiteside of Sloan and Whiteside. I was working at my desk, you see.” He walked to it as he spoke. “I often work late—so quiet, peaceful. I heard voices outside.”
He sat behind the desk and motioned to one of the leather chairs in front of him. Jo did not move.
“Voices, at this time of the night. So naturally I was worried—suspicious you might say.” His eyebrows drew together in a V as he looked at her. “Such a terrible neighborhood. You see such terrible things these days.”
Voices, he’d said. So the boy must have had an accomplice. What had happened to—Her attention strayed to the glass coffin. She tried to focus. “Someone was trying to break into your office?”
“No, no, not here. Across the alley. Our work area. I peeked outside and saw a young man sneaking in through the door. Big, broad shoulders—very scary looking. Terrifying, I tell you.”
Jo pictured the boy pinned in her headlights: thin, starved-looking face, eyes wide and doe-like.
“Naturally I called the police right away, but then I started to think. What if he destroyed equipment? Murdered my assistant while he slept? The police take so long to respond to distress calls—it’s alarming, really, very little protection in this miserable city.”
He stopped then, and waited. His smile, chipped from ice, did nothing to warm the opaque grey of his eyes. Under that look, Jo felt like a Luna moth flying into an entomologist’s laboratory. Except for that and Lexie’s fear earlier, Jo might have relaxed, dismissed him even.
Meeting his gaze straight on, she took a chair finally. From the corner of her eye, she could still see the glass coffin and its occupant.
“So you went over there to take a look?” she asked.
He told her what happened then, what little there was to tell. He’d hesitated outside, and in a moment the thief had burst from the building, attacked him, and threw him to the alley. Then ran off leaving the loot behind.
“Formaldehyde?” she asked when he told her what the boy had been trying to steal. “What would he want that for?”
“Who knows these days? Perhaps in his desperate, drug-crazed state he just grabbed whatever he could without even thinking about it.”
Jo had listened to it all with only half her attention. The rest of her was acutely aware of the coffin she itched to ask about.
“Ms. Sullivan,” Whiteside said.
