The Dead Caller from Chicago

Nineteen

My teeth had begun chattering when I hit the outside air, but it wasn’t from the cold. It was jitters. I was trailing a man trailing a man, and one of them was sure to be packing a gun.

I ran up the gangway. I’d shoveled well enough, but there was still too much ice and snow for silence. Each of my footfalls ground down hard, echoing loudly off the bricks in the narrow passageway and announcing that I was there, a third man in the night.

I stopped at the front and edged out just enough to see. Light came from the streetlight down the block, at the corner past the excavation. At first I saw nothing, but then one of the shadows in front of a house four doors down changed shape. A man was moving there, hunched down, tight against the houses. His feet crunched noisily on the crusted snow. He wasn’t worried about that. The houses were dark. No one would be out.

Except this night. Another man followed fifty yards behind, tight to the same dark buildings. He, too, moved low, but he was going slower, stepping more deliberately, careful to not alarm the hunched figure in front.

A loud crack filled the night. The trailing man had snapped a branch.

The hunched figure in front spun around and rose. In that instant, he was backlit by the pale milky light at the corner, a man wrapped so thickly against the cold he appeared more square than tall. He stood frozen, straining to hear.

The trailing man melted into the darkness of the bungalows.

I eased back a little into Leo’s gangway, still watching.

The bundled-up man dropped back into his hunch and hurried toward the end of the block.

The trailing man stepped out from the shadows and followed.

I moved behind them. I didn’t know who was leading, or following, or what I could do. It was a fool’s mission I was on, and I’d come unarmed.

The bundled-up man stopped just before the excavation, at the house slated for demolition. Again he turned to look back. Satisfied that he was alone, he ran up the stairs of the vacant house.

The trailing man reemerged from the shadows and began running across the frozen lawns. No longer was he worried about being heard; his quarry had gone inside. He turned and ran up the stairs of the empty bungalow. A door banged loudly against an interior wall.

I was still two houses back when flashes, bright and blue, lit the front windows, one, two, three. Gunshots, muffled by thick old plaster and old glass.

I ran up the steps. The old door, stripped of its knob and latch, was ajar. I slammed through it and stopped.

A man stood in the center of the room, indistinct in the haze of gunpowder lit faintly from the streetlamp outside the window. His body was rounded by the coats he wore, probably two. A long-barreled revolver dangled heavy in his right hand.

He turned slowly to look at me, seemingly unsurprised by the new intrusion.

Behind him a man lay with his back against the wall facing the dining room, where a small sofa or a piano topped with graduation pictures might have once stood. Three spots made black by the gauzy gray light showed on the blank wall, higher up. Bullet holes, surrounded by splatters made large by the heavy gun.

Relief touched at my chest. I took a breath, then another.

I said his name. “Leo.”

“You’re here for your friend?” he asked, in a slow, soft monotone I’d never heard. He was in shock.

“What?”

“You’re here for your friend?” he repeated, in that same chilling, slow voice.

“Leo!”

“Leo?” He did not know the name.

“Damn it, I’m Dek. Dek Elstrom.”

He might have made a smile. By then, I wasn’t watching his face. He’d raised the heavy, long-barreled revolver. His knuckles got larger as he began to squeeze the trigger.

I dropped and charged; the gun fired. I hit him low at the knees, not knowing whether I’d been shot. There’d never been weight to him, and he crumpled like rags. Something thudded a few feet away. The gun, coming loose from his hand.

I flipped him over, waiting for pain, but he’d missed me. I got him in an easy chokehold. He didn’t fight; he didn’t yell. None of his senses were working fast enough for those.

I got up to my knees and leveraged us both up to stand. He was dead weight and barely breathing.

“What the hell have you been doing here?” I managed, loosening my arm a little around his neck.

He shook his head, heavy with shock.

“Walk with me,” I said.

He offered no resistance. I removed my elbow from his neck, and we walked slowly toward the back of the house. The layout was identical to Ma’s, built in the same fast binge in the late 1920s when America, and Rivertown, were solid in their hope for the future.

We walked through the kitchen. The cabinets, counters, and doors had been ripped away.

As I thought, his clothes were piled in the back bedroom, the bedroom that was his in another bungalow, just a few houses down. He was a man of habit. I’d have to come back for them.

I put an arm across his shoulders and turned back toward the front room. His revolver glinted dully on the floor. I picked it up and jammed it in my peacoat.

We walked outside, my arm ready to grab him if he tried to bolt. But he went passively down the steps and down the blocks to the Jeep, and got in as solemnly as a scolded child.

He sat erect, unseeing, as we drove away. His eyes didn’t flicker as we passed the neon carnival that was Thompson Avenue, nor did anything within them flash in recognition when I got to the turret. This Leo had never been there before. We climbed the wrought-iron stairs to the second floor.

I sat him in the La-Z-Boy. His head fell to his shoulders. He was asleep.

He wore two coats. I inspected the thick wool outer one for signs of blood splatter. There seemed to be none. A thin insulated windbreaker was underneath. There appeared to be no blood evidence there, either, but that didn’t mean a crime lab examiner wouldn’t find some. I unbuttoned his topcoat but left it on. Later, I’d get him to change clothes and ditch what he was wearing.

I had rope that I used to secure my ladder when I climbed more than two stories. As he softly snored, I tied him loosely to the La-Z-Boy, around the chest, around the legs. He didn’t stir even when I duct-taped his wrists together.

I knew that if I paused to think, I’d realize I was acting like a crazy man. Leo needed medical help. I had to go out again, though, and I couldn’t risk leaving him loose, perhaps to wander over to Thompson Avenue and announce he’d just killed somebody.

I tugged at the rope. It was taut.

Now I had to clean things up.