The Dead Caller from Chicago

Forty-eight

The dawn had warmed the day enough to change the snow to freezing drizzle. Twice we nearly fell as I led Amanda around the garage to the Jeep. She moved stiff-legged, her teeth chattering, her eyes wide, oblivious to the frigid rain.

I eased her onto the passenger’s seat and was about to wrap her in my coat when a house door slammed behind me. I had a horrible image of Robinson on fire, coming after us. There was no time to duck back to look, no time to cover her with my coat. I slammed her door, turned to run to the driver’s side, and fell flat on the ice. I grabbed at the tail lamp, got up, and pulled myself around to the driver’s side.

A shot sounded nearby. I started the Jeep but must have pressed the pedal down too hard. The wheels spun, bit, and sent us skidding across the fresh ice to crash into a garbage drum, killing the engine.

I twisted the key, certain Robinson was but a few feet away, in flames, aiming. The engine sputtered and quit. I twisted the key again. This time the motor caught and roared into life. I let out the clutch and pointed us toward the center of the alley. We half slid, half wobbled down the alley and onto the cross street.

Four-wheel drive is nice, but nothing’s nice on ice. The street was worse than a skating rink. Every time I tried to nudge us beyond ten miles an hour, the wheels broke loose and I’d start to slide. I could only crawl, one long block at a time.

Behind me, high headlamps followed, the right size for a big SUV like Robinson’s Escalade.

Thompson Avenue, that main drag, was littered with wrecked cars. The ice storm had come too suddenly for the town’s salt truck, and early-morning drivers, passing through to jobs well away from Rivertown, were crashing everywhere, slamming catawampus into curbs and other cars inching down the street.

Yet through it all, the high headlamps stayed a hundred yards behind, almost invisible in the freezing crystal rain.

I chanced a look at Amanda. She sat stoically on the seat beside me, staring straight ahead, still wheezing deeply, desperate in her dark place to store more oxygen before someone came again with wire ties and silver tape.

I crawled west along Thompson Avenue, thinking vaguely of a hospital a few miles down the road.

I’d left my cell phone on the dash. I switched it on and called Wendell. I owed him that, and I needed help. He answered on the first ring.

“I got her, Wendell,” I heard myself shout. “I got her.”

“She’s safe?” he yelled.

“Safe, but traumatized. Your man tailed Robinson back to his house?”

“Yes, but Robinson left again, almost right away. I’ve been trying to call you.”

“Robinson’s behind me. Call your man. See if he can get between us and Robinson.”

“Let me talk to my daughter!”

I put the phone on speaker and laid it on the dash. “She’s in shock,” I yelled. “Call your man, get Robinson off my tail.”

We came to the north-south street I wanted. I took my foot off the gas and slid more than drove into a southbound turn. Halfway through, the Jeep shuddered and broke loose on the ice. Horns began blaring as we started to skid into the oncoming lanes.

I fed the Jeep more gas and found traction enough to push us into the correct lane. Amanda’s breathing began to slow, though she was nowhere nearby.

“Where the hell are you going?” Wendell shouted from the tinny phone speaker. “Robinson just turned south behind you.”

“She’s in deep shock. I’m taking her to DuPage General.”

“Bring her to me!”

“She’s not communicating. The hospital’s just a few miles ahead.”

“Damn it, Elstrom, she won’t be protected there,” he yelled. “Bring her to Lake Shore Drive.”

Her condo building was heavy with security, and Wendell could make it even heavier… but it was so many miles east.

“Is your man behind Robinson?”

“Right on his tail, but he’s driving a little crackerbox Honda, slipping all over the road. Robinson’s got a big SUV.”

I slowed. The big headlamps behind me did not.

I turned the wheel gently to the left. It was enough. The Jeep teetered and broke into a slide, but this one I’d anticipated. I turned the wheel a little more, pressed gently on the accelerator, and spun us just enough to head back north.

I watched the rearview. No headlamps were turning behind us.

“We’re good, Wendell,” I shouted at the phone. “I don’t think he followed.”

“I’m not hearing from my man,” he said.

We drove north, then east, dodging crashed cars or other cars poking gingerly along, like us. I watched my rearview incessantly for the high headlamps, but the lights behind us were ever changing, not constant. I could only hope Robinson had slid into a ditch.

Amanda sat robotlike, staring straight ahead, but her breathing had slowed to normal.

Thirty minutes later, we crawled up onto the Eisenhower Expressway and headed toward Chicago. Wendell was an incessant chatter from the phone on the dash. Sometimes I yelled something back; mostly I ignored him. Amanda said nothing at all.

Salt trucks were moving in both directions, but they made the road more dangerous. Drivers were hitting the salted spots and thinking they could speed up with the new traction, only to lose control when they hit the next slick patch. They went into the guardrails or, worse, other cars. Somehow, a thin trickle of traffic kept moving through it all, toward Chicago.

We’d just entered the city limits when a pair of taillights ahead suddenly shot across all three lanes of the expressway, headed straight for the vertical wall of a cement overpass. The hundred taillights between us lit up like gun bursts, their drivers slipping and angling to avoid being hit. Some made it; some didn’t. Cars crashed in all three lanes. The grandmother of all gridlocks was about to commence.

I couldn’t risk being stopped. The Racine Avenue exit ramp was ahead, to my right. I angled across all three lanes, half driving, sometimes skidding. High-beam headlamps flashed behind me; horns blared as I followed my reckless diagonal. Then I was there. The exit ramp loomed up. I downshifted. By some miracle, the Jeep slowed without breaking loose.

A red light stopped me at Racine. I looked over at Amanda. She seemed to be barely breathing, as though she were slipping into some deeper form of shock.

“You there, Wendell?” I shouted.

Some sort of crackling came back from my phone.

“Have a doctor waiting,” I yelled. “She’s deeper in shock.”

The phone crackled and went silent.

A pair of high headlamps was coming up behind me. The signal ahead was still red, but the headlamps behind me weren’t slowing. I watched them get larger. At twenty feet I recognized the burgundy paint and the Cadillac crest on the grill.

I ground the shifter into first gear and shot out into a hole in the traffic moving slowly along Racine.

The Escalade followed.

“Wendell, where’s your man?” I screamed at the phone on the dash.

“… to voice mail… after… rings.” Even though he was breaking up through the tinny speaker, I could hear the defensiveness in his voice. He must have heard the fear in mine. “Robinson?”

“He’s got a gun, Wendell.”

“I’ll… police!” he shouted.

“In this ice storm? Not even your clout will get them here in time.” An image flashed in my mind then, of alleys and garages. “I’m going to try to lose him,” I yelled. “Make sure people are waiting with guns.”

“They’re already-”

“Someone is following us?” Amanda asked calmly, more startling than the sound of any gunshot.

I glanced in the rearview. The big headlamps were fifty feet back. He’d not gained on us.

“A guy named Robinson. We can talk later.”

“A man was down in the basement, whistling. I could hear him through the door. Was that the man?”

“Did you see that canvas on the washtubs as we ran out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Robinson was beginning to sponge away the acrylics.”

“Leo’s.”

“Not Leo’s; mine. I made a copy.”

She inhaled sharply and began giggling, loud and hysterical. “Now what?”

“I know tricks,” I said.