Fire Sale

29 On the DL-Once Again

It was only later, after the IVs were pulled out of my arms and County Hospital pronounced me rehydrated and fit to leave, that I was able to make sense of the confusing swarm of cops and stretchers that descended on us, and later still that I found out where the helicopter had come from.

At the moment, though, I didn’t try to understand anything-just gave a little squawk of relief at seeing Conrad. I tried to tell him what was happening, but no sound came from my swollen, parched throat. I waved a shaky arm toward the pit. While I collapsed against the chopper’s doorway, Conrad walked over to the rim and peered down. When he saw Marcena and Romeo, he sprinted back to the ambulances and summoned a couple of stretcher crews.

I dozed off, but Conrad shook me awake. “You have to get your dog. He won’t let the techs take the woman, and we don’t want to have to shoot him.”

Mitch had been protecting Marcena all night, and he was prepared to bite anyone who tried to move her. I stumbled back down to the bottom, sliding the final four feet on my ass. That was the journey that completely finished me. I did make it to Mitch’s side, and I did get a hand on his collar, but the rest of the morning disappeared into a few fragments-Conrad hoisting me over his shoulder and handing me to a couple of uniformed men to carry to the surface-the struggle to keep a grip on Mitch’s leash all the time I was dropping down the well of sleep-waking again to hear the clean-shaven man shouting at Conrad about the chopper.

“You can’t barge in here and take private property. This helicopter belongs to Scarface.”

That couldn’t be right, not to Al Capone. I couldn’t figure it out, though, and gave up trying, just watched Conrad signal to some uniformed men to hold the guy while the stretchers were loaded. What a good idea; I wished I’d thought of it. I drifted again and lost hold of Mitch, who clambered into the chopper after Marcena.

“Better take her, too,” Conrad said to the ambulance crew, pointing at me. “She can take care of the dog, and, besides, she needs a doctor.”

He patted my shoulder. “We’re going to talk, Ms. W., we’re going to talk about how you knew to come to this place, but it’ll keep a few hours.”

And then the rotors started up, and despite the racket and the lurching, which made Mitch tremble and burrow into my side, I fell asleep again. I woke only when the techs carried me out of the helicopter into the emergency room, but the hospital didn’t want Mitch inside. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t talk. I sat on the floor next to him with my arms around his blood-stiffened fur. A security guard was trying to reason with me, and then to shout at me, but I couldn’t respond, and then somehow Mr. Contreras was there with Morrell and I was on a gurney, and asleep for good.

When I finally woke up, it was late evening. I blinked sleepily at the hospital room, not remembering how I’d gotten here but feeling too lazy to worry about it. I had that sense of pleasure in my body that comes when a fever breaks. I wasn’t sore anymore, or thirsty, and while I slept someone had washed me. I was wearing a hospital gown, and I smelled of Jergens.

After a while, a nurse’s aide came in. “So you’re awake. How you doing?”

She took my blood pressure and temperature, and told me, when I asked, that I was at Cook County Hospital. “You been asleep twelve hours, girl: I don’t know what war you were fighting in, but you definitely were going down for the count. Now you drink some juice; the orders are, fluids, fluids, fluids.”

I obediently drank the glass of apple juice she held out to me, and then a glass of water. While she bustled about the room, I slowly remembered what had brought me here. I tried out my voice. I could speak again, albeit still rather hoarsely, so I asked after Marcena.

“I don’t know, honey, I don’t know about anyone you came in with. If she was hurt bad, like you’re saying, she’d be in a different unit, you see. You ask the doc when he comes along.”

I slept for the rest of the night, although not as soundly as before. Now that the hardest edge was off my exhaustion, I couldn’t block out the hospital noise-or the parade of people who came to check on me. Leading the band, naturally, was someone from admissions who wanted my insurance information. My wallet had been in my jeans pocket; when I asked for my clothes, someone dug a nasty bundle out of the locker. By an act of mercy, my wallet was still there, with my credit cards and my insurance card.

When they woke me again for rounds at six Wednesday morning, Morrell was sitting next to me. He gave me a crooked smile.

The team of doctors pronounced me combat ready, or at least fit enough to get up and go. They asked about the hole in my shoulder, which had leaked a little from my travails but was basically healing, wrote up my discharge papers, and, finally, left me alone with my lover.

Morrell said, “So, Hippolyte, Queen of the Amazons. You survived another battle.”

“I guess they haven’t sent Hercules to fight me yet. How long have you been here?”

“About half an hour. They told me when I called last night they were going to discharge you in the morning, and I figured you might want a change of underwear.”

“You’re almost as good as a girl, Morrell, figuring that out. You can join my horde of wild women, you can set us an example of breastlessness.”

He leaned over to kiss me. “That’s a myth, you know, that they cut off their breasts. And I especially like yours, so don’t do anything rash. Although that’s the most futile statement ever made, considering the way you’ve been treating your body the last ten days.”

“Spoken by the man who still has a bullet chip near his spine.”

He handed me a carry-on bag, packed with his usual precision: toothbrush, hairbrush, bra, clean jeans, and a cotton sweater. The bra was my favorite rose-and-silver lace, which I’d left at his place several weeks ago, but the clothes were his. We’re the same height, and the clothes were a pretty good fit-although I’d never have gotten the jeans buttoned if I hadn’t been fasting for thirty-six hours.

We took a cab to my apartment, where Mr. Contreras and the dogs greeted me as a sailor returned from a shipwreck. My neighbor had bathed Mitch and taken him to the vet, who’d put stitches in one of his feet where he’d sliced it on a can or the barbed wire. After his initial ecstasy, Mitch went back inside my neighbor’s apartment and climbed up on the couch to sleep. Mr. Contreras didn’t want to leave him, so we settled in the old man’s kitchen. Mr. Contreras began making pancakes, and we exchanged war stories.

When he’d seen Mitch lead me into the swamp, Mr. Contreras had tried to follow us in the car, but the road went too far to the west of where we were walking, and, anyway, after a couple of minutes he couldn’t see us at all through the marsh grasses. He’d gone back to the place where Mitch started into the swamp, but after half an hour a state trooper came along and ordered him to leave.

“I tried to tell the guy you was lost in there, and he says, tell the local cops, not him, it’s Chicago’s responsibility, so I beg him to call the Chicago cops, and he won’t, only tells me he’ll impound the car if I don’t move it, so I had to go home.” The old man’s voice was still thick with grievance. “When I got home, I called 911, and they told me to wait until morning, and, if I hadn’t heard from you, to file a missing persons. I should have called Captain Mallory, I guess, didn’t think of that, but, anyway, by and by I heard from Morrell here, he told me about Mitch leading you all the way to that Miss Love.”

“I don’t understand that part,” I said. “Not that I understand anything right now, but-whoever attacked Marcena and Romeo must have done it around 100th and the river, because that’s where Mitch disappeared. He was following the two thugs who attacked Billy’s car, and then, all I can figure is, he somehow caught Marcena’s scent and went after her. Has Conrad been looking by the river?”

Morrell shook his head. “I haven’t talked to him since we parted company at the hospital yesterday.”

“How did you and Conrad hook up, anyway?” I demanded.

“I called him after you phoned me from your pit-do you know where you were, by the way? The edge of the Harborside Golf Course, where it peters out into a no-man’s-land leading down to the garbage dump. Anyway, South Chicago is Rawlings’s turf; I thought he was the fastest route to finding you and getting Marcena to a hospital.”

I hesitated over the question, but finally asked how Marcena was doing.

“Not good, but still on planet Earth.” He must have seen the tiny sigh of relief I gave, because he added, “Yes, you’re a jealous street-fighting pit dog, but you’re not mean-spirited. She wasn’t conscious when she got to the hospital, but they put her into a medical coma, anyway, to make sure she didn’t wake up. She lost skin over about a quarter of her body, and is going to need massive grafts. If she were alert enough to answer questions, she’d be in so much pain the shock would probably kill her.”

We sat in silence for a time. To Mr. Contreras’s consternation, I could only manage one pancake after my fast, but I ate it with about a quart of honey and started to feel better.

After a bit, Morrell picked up his part of the story again. “When Rawlings called to tell me they’d found you, I phoned Contreras, here, and got a cab to pick him up on the way to the hospital-which was a mercy, let me tell you, Queen of the Amazons, because your guard dog wasn’t going to leave your side.”

“Really?” I brightened. “Yesterday, he attached himself so thoroughly to Marcena I thought he didn’t love me anymore.”

“Maybe he just figured you were his last tie to her.” Morrell wiggled his eyebrows provocatively. “Be that as it may, if Contreras hadn’t shown up you’d probably be in County Jail right now, not County Hospital, and the dog would be dead. But it all worked out. Contreras here persuaded the Hound of the Baskervilles to let go of the security guard’s leg, I saw you into the emergency room, we waited until the charge nurse said you just needed rest and rehydration, and then Rawlings arrived, wondering if he could get a statement from you about Marcena. When he saw that was no go, we found a cabbie who’d take Mitch; Contreras set off with him. Rawlings left to do police stuff, but I went across the street to the morgue and talked to Vish; he was doing the autopsy on Bron Czernin.”

Nick Vishnikov was the deputy chief medical examiner at the Cook County Morgue, and an old friend of Morrell’s-he did a fair amount of forensic pathology for Humane Medicine, the group that had sent Morrell to Afghanistan. Because of that, he’d given Morrell a number of details he would probably have kept from me if I’d asked.

“They were beaten so badly.” I shivered at the memory of that flayed and mottled flesh. “What happened to them?”

Morrell shook his head. “Vish can’t figure it out. It’s true they were beaten, but he doesn’t think with something conventional, like clubs or whips. He says oil was embedded in Czernin’s skin. He was hit hard on the head, hard enough to break his spine, but it didn’t kill him, at least not right away. He died from asphyxiation, not from spinal injuries. But what has Vish really baffled is that the injuries are uniform across both their bodies. Except for Czernin’s broken neck, obviously. Whatever brutal hit he took, Marcena managed to avoid, which is hopeful for her ultimate recovery.”

The two men tried to think of things that would cause that kind of injury. Morrell wondered about rollers from a steel mill, but Mr. Contreras objected that those would have crushed the bodies. In his turn, the old man suggested that they’d been dragged along the road from the back of a truck. Morrell thought that sounded plausible and phoned Vishnikov to propose it, but apparently dragging would have left burn marks and distended tendons in the arms or legs.

The images were too graphic for me: I’d seen the bodies, I couldn’t deal with them right now as an academic exercise. I abruptly announced I was going upstairs. When I got to my own place, I decided to wash my hair, which the hospital had left alone when they hosed me off. I figured my back had healed enough that I could stand under a shower.

When I was clean, and had my own jeans on, I checked my messages. It was getting hard to remember that I run a business, that life wasn’t all coaching basketball and hiking across swamps.

I had the predictable queries from Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star and Beth Blacksin, a television reporter with Global Entertainment. I told them what I knew, which wasn’t much, and checked in with clients who were waiting for reports-with ever-decreasing patience.

I had a message from Sanford Rieff, the forensic engineer I’d sent the frog dish to. He had a preliminary report for me that he was faxing to my office. I tried to call him, but got only his voice mail; I’d have to wait until I got to my office and my fax machine to see what he’d found.

Rose Dorrado had phoned, twice, to see if Josie had been in the pit with Bron and Marcena. Julia answered the phone when I called: her ma was out job hunting. No, they hadn’t heard anything from Josie.

“I heard how April’s dad got killed. You don’t think they’ll kill Josie, do you?”

“Who, Julia?” I asked gently. “Do you know anything about how Bron got killed?”

“Someone told Ma they found Billy’s car all wrecked, and I thought, since him and Josie disappeared the same night Mr. Czernin got killed, some gangbanger could be out there just knocking people off and the police, like they ever care about us, they’ll never find them.”

Her voice held genuine terror. I did my best to reassure her without offering her cold comfort-I couldn’t promise Josie wasn’t dead, but it seemed hopeful to me that no one had seen her. If she had been assaulted, and by the same people who went after Marcena and Bron, all their bodies would have been found together.

“I’m going to see you tomorrow at practice, right, Julia?”

“Uh, I guess so, Coach.”

“And tell your ma I’m coming over after practice to talk to her. I’ll give you and María Inés a lift home, just this once.”

When I’d hung up, I sat down with a large pad of newsprint and a Magic Marker to write down everything I knew, or thought I knew, about what had been happening in South Chicago.

A lot of lines ran through Rose Dorrado and Billy the Kid. Rose had taken a second job, which upset Josie; the night the plant blew up, the Kid had come to stay at the Dorrados’, running away from his family. Because they objected to Josie? Because of something they were doing themselves? Then there was Billy’s car, but it had Morrell’s flask in it. Somehow, Billy had gotten involved with Bron or Marcena, or both. And Bron had had Billy’s phone in his pocket.

I remembered Josie telling me that Billy had given his phone to someone. To Bron? But why? And then had he given the Miata to Bron so that detectives couldn’t find him through his car? Had Bron been killed by someone who mistook him for Billy? Had Billy really been running away from danger, danger whose seriousness he was too naive to recognize?

The cell phone. What had I done with it. I had a vague memory of the clean-shaven man from Scarface demanding it from me, but I couldn’t remember whether he’d gotten it.

I’d dropped my dirty clothes just inside my door. Billy’s cell phone was still in the jacket pocket. As was Morrell’s thermos, or the thermos that looked like his. I’d handled it so much by now that I doubted it had much forensic value, but I still put it in a plastic bag, and went back down the stairs on slow, stiff legs. It used to be that I could have gone running after twenty-four hours of rest, but these legs were not going running anytime soon that I could imagine.