Painted Black, page 9
An awkward ten minutes went by, with Jo shifting restlessly from one foot to the other. Jack looked at his watch every two minutes. They didn’t say anything, didn’t even look at each other, unless he was glancing at her as surreptitiously as she was at him. She liked what she saw. He wasn’t the type she usually found attractive—she liked them lean and lanky. But despite the fact that he was basically a stranger to her, his solid build and relaxed manner made it easy to be with him. He also looked like fun when he laughed—at least he would, she thought, if he wasn’t laughing at you.
Finally, however, Jo’s patience wore out. “Christ,” she sputtered. “How unreliable is this kid, anyway? Do you know him well enough to tell?”
“I don’t know any of them really well. They don’t let you, not at first. But I’ve got good instincts. He wouldn’t just blow us off. If he’s late, there’s a reason.” There was a furrow between his eyebrows that could have meant he was worried, or maybe angry.
Suddenly she felt uncomfortable. Guilty.
“Does he trust you well enough to come even if he doesn’t trust me?” she asked.
Jack turned toward her, the furrow deepening. Definitely anger this time.
“So what did you do to make him not trust you?”
She made it sound like nothing. There’d been a fight. She was worried he’d get hurt. That was all. So he ran instead of staying to thank her. Big deal. Surely he wouldn’t stay away because of that?
Jack sighed, shook his head. “Probably not. Hopefully not. I told him I’d be here. I told him I’d have his back.”
Unexpected tears pricked at the back of her throat. When had anyone ever had her back?
“Sounds like you’ve spent a lot of time with him.” she said. “How long have you been with Night Moves?”
“I work at the Center three days a week, and walk the streets two nights. Although sometimes I do that on my own time, too. You see more kids that way, and they learn to trust you. You can tell, usually, when you find a golden apple ripening on the tree. The trick is—” He turned away from her, facing into the wind. The incoming waves, flecked with grey foam, ran to slate blue at their depths. “You can’t always keep them from rotting.”
It almost sounded too good, the poetic metaphor, the frown shadowing his dark face. She couldn’t see his eyes. They gazed off into the distance like he’d forgotten she was there. But Jo read sincerity in his voice, in the sag of his shoulders.
“The first time I was out on the street,”—he sounded like he didn’t even remember she was listening—”I wanted to shove the whole idea. This was crazy, I thought, these kids are doomed. They’re all zoned out on drugs or booze. I wondered how many of them had AIDS already. Or would before long.
“One of them tried to hustle me.” He looked at her briefly, but he wasn’t seeing her. “He was only about twelve, I’d swear. He put the make on me, batting his blue eyes and hinting—” He turned around abruptly, as if he’d had enough of the cold, and stuck his hands in his pockets again. “Some of them don’t hint. ‘You want a blow job, mister?’ they say. ‘Twenty bucks.’”
The wind picked up just then, whipping in from the lake. Jo shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, although she wasn’t sure the weather was the only reason for her goose bumps. She wasn’t shocked. No one living in Chicago, no one living in the twenty-first century for that matter, especially a journalist, didn’t already know things like that happened all the time. It was sad, all right. On a bad day after a few beers a person could get maudlin and depressed about the state of the world if they wanted to. But it wasn’t shocking.
“How about a blanket?” Jack asked suddenly. “You’re not going to refuse a blanket, are you? Hold on a sec.”
When he returned from the car Jo noticed he didn’t look her in the eye. “Better shake it out,” he said. “The last time I used it was at Grant Park listening to a jazz concert.” He handed her the blanket, an Indian-style throw woven in black and red and gray.
“How much longer do you think we should wait?” she asked. A dead leaf and dried blades of grass drifted to the ground when she snapped the blanket in the air. She wrapped it around her shoulders.
Jack just looked at his watch again and glared down the road. He started pacing and fidgeting.
“Tell you what,” Jo decided. “If you promise to stay on your side of the front seat and let me hold your keys, I’ll sit in the car with you so you can have your cup of coffee.”
He tossed her the keys and led the way to his blue VW Rabbit. The paint had seen better days, sun faded with rusted metal worn thin on the fenders. A bumper sticker read “Biodiesel, No Drilling Required.”
She had unlocked the passenger door and was about to slide in when Jack motioned to her above the car roof and said, “Wait.” He turned to look down the road again.
Someone was walking up the sidewalk, a young boy of about fifteen or sixteen, but it wasn’t Chris. This kid was African-American, a set of headphones on under a Cubs cap. He was bopping toward them in time to the soundless music produced by an iPod clipped to the sagging waistline of his oversized jeans.
“Moon,” Jack yelled. He waved at the boy. “Over here.”
The boy stopped, his face suspended, mid-bop, his expression startled and wary until he saw who was calling him. He ran up to them.
“Jack-man, you’re still here, man. I told Chris you’d be long gone by now.”
He pronounced the words ‘long gone’ like they had more than one “o” in them. Jo wondered how he had gotten the nickname of Moon. His face was round enough and smooth, like the surface of an uninhabited planet, and his skin dark as freshly turned topsoil.
“You talked to Chris? Where is he? Is he okay?” Jack stepped forward like he wanted to grab Moon by the upper arms and shake answers out of him, but he dropped his arms and stepped back again quickly.
The third degree didn’t bother Moon at all. He just grinned at Jack and reached up to pluck the ear buds out of his ears. “Relax, man, He’s doin’ just fine. Didn’t even look scared when the sirens came screaming up. You know him, Jack-man, he ain’t scared of nothin’”
“Sirens?” Jack asked. “Chris got arrested?”
“Not the cops, man, the ambulance. Somebody must have dialed 911 when he came staggering up looking like a piece of raw meat.”
Jack apparently had more patience than Jo. He didn’t shake the boy, or jump down his throat. He didn’t even look exasperated as Moon slowly told them what happened, one backward piece by one backward piece. Finally, thanks to calm questions from Jack, the whole story came together.
Chris had apparently walked up to a gathering of kids he knew, white as a sheet except for blood oozing from abrasions on his face. He fainted, Moon said, or stumbled when he reached them, and fell in a heap on the sidewalk. “That must be when the suit from the arcade called emergency, see,” Moon said. “They don’t want no one dyin’ on ’em, man. Not good for business, you know what I’m saying?” Before the ambulance arrived Chris asked Moon to meet them and tell them what had happened.
“So I did,” Moon finished with a grin. “I hopped my little black ass over here as quick as I could, even though I figured you’d be long gone by now.”
There was that “looong gooone” again. Neither Jack nor Jo commented on the fact that his ‘little black ass’ as he called it, hadn’t been moving all that quickly when they saw him.
“Jo, the keys.” Jack held up his hand to catch them. “I’ve got to see if he’s all right. Get in, Moon.” He was unlocking his door as he spoke. Moon backed away, hands held out in front of him.
“Uh uh, no way, man, not me,” he said, shaking his head. “You ain’t gettin’ me in no hospital, man, no way. Nada.”
“You see,” Jo interpreted over the roof of the car for Jack, “what he’s saying here is that he doesn’t want to go with us.” Neither Jack nor Moon seemed to notice her sarcasm.
“That’s right,” Moon said gratefully, pointing at her with a wide sweep of his arm like he was chalking up one point for the smart lady. “I done my job. You got the message. Now I’m outta here. So long, Jack-man.” He flipped them a wave of his pale, short-fingered palm and started back down the sidewalk.
“So you’re coming with me?” Jack asked unnecessarily as Jo slid into the passenger seat next to him.
“I’m a hard woman to get rid of sometimes,” Jo said. “And I want to talk to Chris, remember?”
Half the city’s population seemed to fill the waiting room of Martha Washington hospital’s emergency care unit. Those who could sat in uncomfortable plastic chairs. The rest had to lean against the wall or each other. A bald man in a muscle t-shirt paced the length of the room with a blood-stained towel wrapped around one hairy forearm. He nearly tripped over an old woman who slumped snoring in her seat, careworn shoes thrust into the aisle. By the door a child with glazed eyes and snot clotted beneath his nose rested his head on his mother’s breast.
Somewhere an irate husband demanded a doctor for his wife: “Now, God damn it,” he shouted, “He’ll see her now.” Two men in security jackets hurried toward the sound of his voice.
Most, though, waited resignedly, staring at old magazines or a television bolted so high in one corner the sound didn’t reach Jo where she waited while Jack talked to the receptionist. She could hear the other sounds well enough: moaning, the constant wail of an exhausted child, incoherent mumbling. The smells invaded also: old urine like acrid ammonia, bad breath, dirty bodies, all mixed with the sickening, antiseptic smell of disinfectant and bug spray. The silent revolution of red and blue lights from an ambulance unloading at the door colored the scene.
Jack caught Jo’s attention across the space between them and she followed him to an area divided by a green cotton curtain dangling from runners built into the ceiling. Chris sat at the edge of a narrow bed, shoulders slumped, his left arm in a sling and a white patch of gauze on one cheek. Swollen purple flesh had narrowed his left eye to a slit, but that didn’t stop his brown eyes from lighting up when he saw Jack.
“Jack. Great. Get me out of here, man. I think they called DCFS.”
He hopped to the floor, but Jack put one hand on his shoulder. “Hold on. What about this?” He pointed to the sling. “Is it broken?”
“Just sprained. They took an x-ray. Stitched my face and my head, gave me a shot of something.” Jack examined a clotted patch of hair at the back of Chris’s head. “I’m fine, Jack, really. I just don’t want to get stuck in juvie, okay? So let’s go.” He wore the same t-shirt and jeans of earlier but with paint smudges that had dried already.
“Now just hold on a sec.” Jack grabbed Chris’s good elbow as the boy made a move toward the exit.
Chris turned; his pale face contrasted with the white bandage and purple swell of his eye. The fluorescent lighting made his pallor even more sickly, especially when framed with the tangle of dark curls. In a face that battered, it seemed impossible two eyes could still hold such expressiveness, such appeal.
“Jack, please—” Chris started.
“You’re not going with DCFS,” Jack assured him. “They let me sign you out on the condition I take you straight to the shelter so they can keep an eye on you tonight. You may have a concussion, Chris. That’s not something to screw around with.”
The tension eased in Chris’s shoulders and he sagged a little, allowing Jack to take his arm again. He even leaned on the counselor a bit as they made their way to the car. His alert look around the parking lot made it clear he was still charged up from his experience. He breathed a sigh of relief when he settled in the passenger seat.
There was a stuffed Garfield in the back seat, the kind usually gummed to an inside window. Jo picked it up as she slid inside. Stroking the soft fur soothed her somehow. As they left the parking garage she opened her mouth to ask questions, but Jack beat her to it.
“So?” he asked. “What happened?”
Chris flipped down the visor on the passenger side. In the mirror clipped to the back, he studied Jo’s reflection. She could only see his one unswollen eye above the white bandage on his cheek. Jack glanced back at her, then looked over at Chris and said quietly, “She’s okay.” Chris pushed the visor back up.
“It was Cole, Jack. I know it was.”
His voice was so low Jo had to lean forward to hear him.
“Cole?” Jack asked.
“Sidney Cole. He works at Whiteside’s.”
“He beat you up?” Jack asked.
“Yeah,” Chris said. “That, too. But what I meant was, he killed her, Jack. He killed Lexie.”
Chapter 20
The youth shelter was wedged between a travel agency and a tattoo parlor, a narrow building with three floors. Chris pulled himself up the steep stairs, Jack and Jo following behind him. He snickered. Jack and Jo. Jack and Jo went up the stairs to fetch a pail of water.
Except it was him who almost fell down the stairs, his head spinning like the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier. Jack put a hand on his back just as they got to the second floor landing. Celia, the youth worker who had let them in, followed them into the hallway.
“Everyone’s at the back watching a movie.” Celia waved left as she stepped inside. Sounds of canned gunfire and tire screeches reached down the long hallway toward them. She led them right, into the kitchen.
A huge stove with a grill and six grease-blackened burners dominated the room. Chris’s nose wrinkled at the leftover smell of cooked cabbage. He’d been at the shelter before. It was not his favorite place ever.
Jack stopped at a butcher-block table crisscrossed with dozens of knife tracks and handed Celia Chris’s backpack and some pills. “Pain killers,” he told her. “One every four hours as needed.”
Chris stumbled into the L-shaped room at the front. Long wooden tables had been set close to the kitchen entrance. Two couches, a bookcase filled with paperbacks, and box of toddler toys lined the front wall.
He sat down on the largest couch with a sigh of relief. The cushions swallowed him like a feather bed.
“So, what was the reason you went back to the funeral home again?” Jo sat on the sofa arm to nag him. She’d been doing that all during the drive over. From the kitchen came the sound of Jack chipping an ice cube tray out of the ancient refrigerator freezer.
“Looking for Cat.” His words sounded like they were strained through cotton in his ears. His head felt heavy, too, like a big assed sunflower on a dried up stem. He tried to keep it from nodding, gave up, and leaned against the sofa back. Drowsy darkness fell when he closed his eyes.
“Cat?” Jo asked. “Who’s Cat?”
“Cat’s his cat.”
Jack’s voice came from far away. Someone jostled Chris’s shoulder and he opened his eyes. He took the two pills and water Jack held out. The glass had big red flowers painted around the outside.
“Or a cat, at any rate,” Jack continued. “It’s just an old tom, but the two of them have formed some sort of unholy alliance. I’m thinking of changing Chris’s nickname to Tomcat.”
“Sounds good to me.” Chris tossed back the pills. Drinking slowly, he tilted the glass up until all that remained was the clink of ice cubes falling to lay cold against his mouth. Handing the empty glass back, he slid even further down into the sofa. He remembered to kick his shoes off before stretching out.
“Maybe I wouldn’t get in so many fights then.” Turning on his side, he tucked his uninjured arm under a limp pillow cushioning his head.
“This time you picked a fight with a ten ton truck, though,” Jack said.
“I told you I didn’t see him coming.” Jesus, leave me the fuck alone. He opened one eye and looked at Jack. “I was looking for the cat, that’s all. Cole jumped me from behind.”
“Then how can you be so sure it was him?” Jo asked. “You didn’t see the guy. That’s what you told us, anyway.”
This was bullshit. “What, so now you don’t believe me? I got no reason to lie, do I?” He avoided looking at Jack, sighed, and repeated what he had told them in the car, exaggerating each word like neither of them understood English very well. “He hit me from behind and I smashed into the door. Then he was all over me. I reached back with my knife to cut him, but I don’t know if I actually got him or not.” Confident of this part, he looked straight at them both, first her, then him. “I got away by crawling through a hole in the fence. I didn’t see him at all.”
“Then you don’t know for sure who it was,” Jo said again, but slower.
“Jesus fucking Christ.” She was so pissing him off. His face felt like melting wax but he managed to give her a look through slitted eyes.
“It was Cole, damn it.” He hesitated, his mouth set in a line. He sighed. “What the fuck difference does it make? We got to find out what he did with Lexie, that’s all. If he didn’t kill her, then where the hell is she, huh? Tell me that.”
Struggling for words. He had to say it just right. “She said she was scared of him. I told her don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. But I fucked up. She musta gone back herself later to get it—cause she’s gone. No one’s seen her all day.” He closed his eyes while he talked. It helped him remember the way he’d told it. Riley King asked her to pick up a package from Cole. When she went there, Cole told her she had to take pictures first. She freaked out and found Chris to help her. That’s it. No details. No back story.
They couldn’t know he’d left her there.
When he opened his eyes again, he was careful with his expression. Kept his words vague. “He’s weird, freaky.” The words came out shrill and he tried to get it under control. “I was going to tell you all this. Tonight. But I had to go back to see if I could find the cat. He was with me that night and I ain’t seen him since.” Wishing he hadn’t started the lie about the cat—cornered and not wanting to give them any reason to disbelieve. It was exhausting. “Tonight I was just looking for Cat.”
“He wanted to take pictures with the dead bodies, you said.” Jack’s voice made Chris shiver. He pictured Sidney Cole, wide shoulders, spiked hair, pale face. He also thought of the graceful, fragile curve of Lexie’s slender neck.
