A Matter of Honor

Chapter Seventeen

Lasari lay on his back and watched the pinpoints of light playing on the ceiling. The bathroom door was ajar and the bulbs around the mirror refracted light from cologne bottles on the dressing table, Bonnie’s empty wineglass and the illuminated hands of the alarm clock beside the bed. She had fallen asleep in his arms and he didn’t want to awaken her. It was almost half-past two.

With a sigh Bonnie turned on her side, away from him, stretching her legs and putting both hands under her cheek. The faint light was white on her shoulders and he could trace the slim, delicately ridged outline of her spine from her neck down to the small of her back. He pulled up the blanket and tucked it around her shoulders.

Her phone began to ring.

“Want me to get it, Bonnie?” he asked, but she had come awake instantly and reached for the phone, her arm like ivory in the dappled shadows.

“It has to be for me,” she said, and then, “Hello?”

She listened for a moment and then he heard the sharp intake of her breath as she swung her legs over the side of the bed and pushed her hair away from her face.

“Christ!” she said, the single word straining the muscles in her throat. “Christ, Doobie!”

Lasari snapped on the bedside lamp. Bonnie sat with her back to them, but with her face turned in profile so he could see the stricken look in her eyes.

“Where’d they take him? Where did it happen?”

Lasari got out of bed and reached for his clothes. As he pulled on his jeans, he whispered, “What is it, Bonnie?”

She made a silencing gesture with her hand and shook her head. Tears formed in her eyes. Lasari took her robe from the foot of the bed and put it around her shoulders.

“But he’s not dead, he has a chance they say...” She listened and then said, “Hold it, Doobie.” She swiveled around and began writing rapidly on a phone pad.

Lasari buttoned his shirt and went into the kitchen, turned on the stove under a kettle and opened closet doors. He found instant coffee and two mugs, and when the kettle whistled he poured the boiling water over the coffee. The shower in the bathroom was running.

Lasari carried the mugs of hot coffee into the front room and set them on a table near the door. Then he returned to the kitchen and knocked some ice cubes loose from a freezer tray. The ice had dissolved into slivers in the mugs when Bonnie came into the room wearing slacks and a sweater and belting her raincoat. Her face was white and still with shock, almost expressionless.

“Here’s some coffee,” Lasari said. “It’s cool enough to drink.”

“Mark Weir was shot about an hour ago. That was his partner who called me, DuBois Gordon. He wasn’t with him. God knows what Mark was doing at Cabrini Green alone. Good God, he should be smarter than that!”

“How bad is it, Bonnie?”

She shook her head. “They don’t know yet. He’s at Henrotin Hospital.” Her lips were stiff, the words slurred as if they were too painful to utter. “The ambulance took him to Henrotin. That’s West Oak Street, number one, one, one. It’s about eight blocks from Cabrini Green, no more than that. Henrotin... emergency surgery.”

“I’d better come with you,” he said.

“No, no, Duro, please!” she said quickly. “Almost the last thing Mark said was for you to wait here, not to go into the street. I’ll call you from the hospital if Mark’s going to make it...” Her voice was almost a whisper. “... or else I’ll be right back, Duro.”

He touched her cheek gently but his face was hard and thoughtful. “This changes things, Bonnie. I’ll wait here still six o’clock, that’s all I agreed on. Your lieutenant’s one thing, God help him, but I’m another. I’ll do better on my own.”

She nodded and said, “I understand. I’ll knock three times when I come back, three sharp raps and you’ll know who it is. Three, Duro. Don’t open for anyone else...”

In the elevator to the garage Bonnie felt in her purse for the key ring. She clenched it in her hand, the keys glinting sharply as she checked them through her tears.

Central had reached Sergeant Gordon at home. Mark had been conscious when he got to the hospital, Gordon had been told. Staff had met the ambulance at the emergency entrance with plasma and oxygen. Mark’s eyes were in focus, the head nurse reported, and he was breathing on his own when the aides lifted him from the stretcher to the gurney. The doctor on duty asked the lieutenant what happened, who had shot him, but the patient had frowned and slipped into unconsciousness without being able to speak...

The sublevel parking area in her building was lighted by a series of overhead bulbs encased in heavy metal frames. A patterned grid of light and shadows was thrown across the pavement and parked cars.

As Bonnie hurried across the garage, separating the car key from others on the ring, a shadow fell across her face and she turned, sucking in her breath. A tall man she did not know was facing her, his arm already swinging toward her face. She had never been struck so hard in her life. The jaw and cheek went numb and her vision was distorted into surrealistic patterns by a pressure that seemed to be exploding inside her head.

She was on her knees, whimpering, the key ring on the cement floor beside her, when the man’s hands closed on her shoulders, lifted her to her feet and slammed her against the car.

She thought she heard movement from behind parked cars but could see no one. Sergeant Karl Malleck held her with one hand, putting the bulk of his body between her and the two men standing in shadows.

“Lady, we think you’re harboring a deserter,” he said. “You cooperate with us, we’ll overlook—”

She drew her breath to scream but the man slapped her so hard that the sound died in her throat and blood spurted from her lip.

“Don’t give us any goddamn hysterics or heroics, lady.” Malleck put a hand in her hair and gripped it tightly, forcing her head back until Bonnie’s eyes were staring straight up into the lights.

“All right, I’m gonna ask you just once,” Malleck said. “These good men are going upstairs now and get that deserter. You got a signal to alert him, some way to let him know it’s his sweetie? Tell us your plan and there won’t be no trouble. The boys will knock or ring like you say and they’ll take Mr. Lasari nice and quiet.”

Bonnie drew a deep breath and fought back hysteria. The pain in her scalp was excruciating. With explosive strength she spat directly into Malleck’s face.

He smiled amiably and said, “I like that, ma’am. Shows spirit.”

“You animal,” she said, “you sadistic, fucking animal.”

“But I never like a cunt with a dirty mouth,” Malleck said, his voice almost conversational. “Never. Some ladies think it’s smart, a sexy turn-on, but I find it disgusting.”

Joe Castana glanced down and saw Bonnie’s key ring on the garage floor. He bent to pick it up, concealing the keys in the cup of his hand. He looked at his watch and then at the empty car ramp leading outward to the street.

“You’re calling the shots, sir, but we ain’t got all night,” he said.

“Little lady,” Malleck said, “I want to make myself clear. You keep up this dirty talk and refuse to cooperate and the boys will kick in the door to your apartment, then they’ll kick the deserter’s face in and then they’ll take him away nice and quiet. You go on being a foul-mouthed cunt and it’s gonna cost that ginny his teeth.”

“Four knocks,” she said. “Four sharp ones. I said I’d knock four times.”

Her mouth was so full of blood that the words were muffled and indistinct. “What’s that, Miss?” Malleck said. “Speak up.”

She swallowed and said, “Four times... four knocks, goddamn you!”

“There goes that dirty mouth of your again,” he said. “Okay, boys, you heard her. Go up and get the yellow bastard. Mark the sonofabitch up good, make sure he puts up a light. We’ll want pictures if there’s a court-martial...”

Malleck’s hand was still clutching her hair, holding her head rigid, but Bonnie could hear the footsteps of the two men receding toward the elevator. Before she could try to scream Malleck struck her again with his open hand and she fell to the floor beside the car, her handbag tumbling from her limp fingers. Her hair spread against the oily concrete floor and a ray of light fell across her throat, limning the pulse of her bruised carotid artery.

Malleck knelt beside her, flexing his big hands. He crouched in the half shadow until the floor indicator above the elevator stopped at number ten.

At that moment headlights flashed into the garage and a car came down the ramp from the street level. Malleck moved closer to Bonnie’s sprawled figure, concealing her fallen body with his bulk.

The car pulled into a parking slot on the opposite side of the garage. A man climbed out, staggering slightly as he slammed the car door. He tried to lock the car, but the keys dropped from his hand. Twice he circled the car, moving his feet over the floor in a shuffle. Then he laughed with drunken annoyance, left his car and disappeared through a door that led to the street lobby of the building.

Within a few moments the man returned with a uniformed doorman carrying a flashlight. Malleck noted that the elevator had started down, passing from the tenth floor to the ninth, then the eight, enroute to the garage.

The doorman found the tenant’s car keys, locked the car door and dropped the keys into the man’s coat pocket.

Bonnie stirred slightly. Malleck drew back his arm and waited, concentrating on the pulsing blue vein in her neck.

As the doorman and the swaying tenant went out of view, the doors of the garage elevator slid open and Neal and Castana emerged with Duro Lasari supported between them, his head hanging forward from his sagging shoulder, a bright smear of blood on his mouth and forehead.

Malleck chopped his big hand down at Bonnie’s pulsing throat but the delay caused by the drunken tenant had broken his concentration and the knife-hard edge of his hand missed the carotid artery and struck her slender jaw instead, sending a ripple fracture through it with a sound as delicate as a snapping twig.

Scrambling to his feet Malleck ran to his parked car and pulled open the trunk. The two soldiers threw Lasari’s limp body inside, slammed shut the lid and within seconds the car had roared out of the underground garage, braked at the street exit, then moved out smoothly to merge with the Chicago night traffic.