The Skeleton's knee

26

Agnes Nilsson hadn’t reacted to Abraham Fuller’s name, nor had she remembered anything else about him, except that he, like everyone David gathered about him, had seemed diminished somehow in his presence. Nevertheless, my satisfaction at having finally linked Fuller to Pendergast remained complete. The nagging uncertainty that had come with everyone’s inability to recognize Fuller from his picture was finally quieted, along with some of my own frustration at producing so little for the time and money I had spent on this case.

Which is why, after checking into a motel on the highway heading back to the Marquette airport, I called Brandt and gave him a full report.

“Have you found anything at your end?” I asked after I’d finished.

“Yeah, actually, we have. We’ve been concentrating on Coyner, since he’s the only one we can actually lay our hands on. Kunkle remembered that when Sammie gave you her account of Coyner’s life history, she said his fortunes made an upturn ‘fresh from the funeral.’ That started him wondering about who’d paid for the funeral, since Coyner was supposedly up to his ears in debt.

“Kunkle can be a little heavy-handed, so I sent Sammie to interview the mortician. Turns out he’s ancient-at the Retreat now and a little out of it. After some head scratching, he remembered that Coyner did have a couple of unusual friends hanging around, helping with the arrangements, including the financial end.”

“Unusual how?”

“Long hair, bell-bottoms, weird smell. She showed him Fuller’s photograph, but it was too long ago and the old man’s eyes aren’t what they used to be. He said he was struck more by the clothes than the faces, anyhow. They seemed odd companions for Coyner to have. Still, it sounds right.”

“And he said there were definitely two of them?”

“Yup.”

“I’ll mail you a copy of Pendergast’s mug shot. Maybe that’ll jar his memory.”

“I doubt it. He’s half-blind. Send the picture, though, ’cause there’s more. Ron started wondering how Coyner would’ve wound up connected to two mysterious hippies. Remember Coyner shooting the bus windows at Hippie Hollow? We’re hoping to find out who was living there back then and show them Fuller’s-and now Pendergast’s-pictures. If the people we’re after were hiding out with the bus crowd, and providence suddenly came knocking in the shape of an alcoholic recluse with a shotgun, financial problems, and a shack out back, it might give us a lead on the machine gunner.”

I recalled that the State’s Attorney had once represented the denizens of Hippie Hollow. “You get Dunn to cooperate?”

Brandt laughed. “Yeah. He’s digging through his files right now. It was a pretty transient crowd, but maybe a few of them are still around. So how soon do you think you’ll be able to wrap things up out there?”

“Shouldn’t be too much longer. I’m going back to Chicago tomorrow. There’re still a few loose ends I hope to clear up fast.”

I knew that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but he paid me the courtesy of merely muttering, “The sooner the better.”

I called Norm Runnion next, but not, as it turned out, to share my good news.

“Where are you?” he demanded, his voice sharp and excited.

The hairs on the back of my neck began to tingle. “Still in Marquette. Why?”

“How soon can you get back here?”

I grabbed an airline schedule out of my back pocket, where I’d shoved it absentmindedly. “There’s a flight in ten minutes, but I won’t be able to make it.”

“Catch the one in ten minutes. I’ll call the airport and tell ’em to wait.”

“What’s happening?”

“Someone complained about the high-speed number we did on the expressway. They got the number of the guy who was tailing us. I’m about to stake his place out.”

“Is he mob-connected?”

“No-which means it has to be Shattuck. Come on, move it. I’ll make the call. Take a cab to the corner of Montana and Sheffield when you hit town and walk west on Montana. I’ll find you.”

The line went dead. It had begun to rain outside.

It was a rough flight back, especially as we neared Chicago. The small plane bucked and shuddered in the night, and the pilot came on at one point to say that an alternate airport might be necessary. I stared out the window and saw nothing besides the rain streaking by at a sharp angle.

I was worried about Norm. It was he, after all, who’d read me the rules of the game concerning the Shattuck investigation: The here and now was Homicide’s concern; past history was ours. It seemed to me that his eagerness to retire in glory might get us in some serious trouble.

We did land at Chicago, although I wished we hadn’t tried. The buffeting from the wind had turned violent, and I saw lightning from the cabin’s window as the city’s lights lurched and bounced into view. Leaning out of my seat and looking down the length of the tiny cabin, I could see the pilot and copilot through the half-curtained cockpit, their shoulders hunched to the task. The pilot was holding the wheel in a death grip, jerking it spastically to correct the small plane’s wild leaps and bounds. The copilot kept wiping his hand against his trouser leg.

The landing was by no means feather-smooth, accompanied as it was by the simultaneous crashing of several items in the galley and at least three pieces of hand luggage, but it was successful, and instantly followed by a spontaneous burst of applause from everybody on board, including, I noted glumly, the stewardess, sitting alone at the back.

The cab ride into town reemphasized why our plane should have landed elsewhere. Through near-deserted, half-flooded streets littered with debris, we drove in the midst of a near hurricane.

At Montana and Sheffield, almost directly under the elevated subway tracks, the cabbie pulled to a stop, and looked over his shoulder at me with a pity reserved for the deranged. I handed him the seventy-five dollars that had been his absolute minimum for venturing out in this filth, then struggled against the wind to open the door.

The effect of finally stepping into the storm, instead of just watching it through various windows, had a strange and contradictory impact. In one sense, it became more real because I was instantly drenched to the skin, yet in another, the threat of it lessened when I found that the wind, though both ferocious and quirky, was not enough to lift me off my feet. It was of a staggering intensity, however, and its erratic gusts, affected by the buildings all around, made progress down Montana a real effort.

I was walking near the buildings, one hand outstretched for stability, the other still hanging on to my overnight case, when I heard a loud, deep rumbling behind me, as of metal against metal. To my amazement, it was the elevated subway, still running despite the weather. Squinting against the driving, lashing rain, I could see the train’s row of brightly lit windows passing serenely by, almost all of them empty.

“Joe. In the car, goddamn it.” I looked around, trying to locate who’d called me. The street was totally deserted-dark, gleaming wet, the few lights blurred and ineffectual.

I stared stupidly down and saw Norm peering out above his barely opened window. I lurched out into the street, around the car, and half fell into the front seat, almost losing the door to the gale.

He looked at me, both amused and slightly embarrassed. “I guess you caught the plane.”

I wiped my face with my hand. “This better be worth it.”

He pursed his lips and wiped the foggy windshield with a rag from the glove compartment. “It’s that brownstone over there.”

I caught the flatness in his voice. “But you haven’t seen a thing yet.”

“Nope.” I looked down at myself, sitting in a puddle, and concentrated on lowering the adrenaline that had fueled me all the way here. “Great. So who’s supposed to be living there?” I asked.

“Guy named Russell Grange-old-time radical, according to Stoddard, although no direct link to Shattuck that we know.”

“You tell Homicide?”

He paused a moment, renewing my fears about his motives. “No. I don’t really have anything to tell ’em, except that someone from this address tailed us, which then begs the question of what we were up to at the time.”

I mulled that over. If this did turn out to be nothing, and he had told his colleagues of it, he would lose two ways, by both tipping his hand and having nothing to show for his efforts.

“Something else,” Runnion added. “I got twitchy after sending you out of town the way I did, so I decided to call Penny Nivens, just to see how she was. She’d had a visit a few hours after we left her-at her home.”

A cold wave spread down my spine. “Who?”

“I’d say Outfit boys. Two of ’em, polite but tough, scared her without lifting a finger. She told ’em what she told us.”

“How the hell did they get to her?” My question was mostly rhetorical, but Runnion’s self-conscious stillness made me look at him more closely.

He frowned and a crease appeared between his eyes, which stayed glued to the house down the street. “We…I wasn’t as clever as I thought. This guy-or whoever borrowed his car-wasn’t our only tail. My car had one of those direction-finding gizmos stuck to it-a transmitter.”

I stared dumbfounded for a few seconds, realizing only then that Norm’s sharpened interest in being here tonight had less to do with going out in glory and more to do with wounded professional pride.

“There,” he suddenly said, interrupting my reflections.

I sat forward and peered through the murky gloom. A figure had appeared in the doorway of the house, dressed in a raincoat and droopy hat.

“Check him out.” Norm thrust a pair of binoculars at me.

I brought the binoculars to bear, trying to overcome the blurring effects of the windshield, the rain, and the darkness.

“Is it Shattuck?”

“I don’t know yet.”

I saw the figure in the coat pull his hat farther down and his coat collar up. He kept his face pointed up the street, toward the Elevated’s dark, ugly overhead roadway. As he stepped from the building’s shelter and began walking away, braced as if he was on a ship’s tilting deck, I saw a gray ponytail break free of the hat and string out in the wind.

“I think it is. I can see his hair.”

Norm started his engine but stayed put. “Russell Grange’s car is parked near the end of the block. I’ll wait ’til he gets in.”

The seconds ticked by, exposing an additional disadvantage to the weather. No matter if he walked or drove, this man and we would be the only ones moving on the street tonight, as conspicuous as dancers in a morgue.

“Shit, he walked past it.”

The man in the raincoat reached the corner, instinctively looked both ways, one hand holding his hat on his head, and crossed the street, now walking directly into the wind and leaning forward at a sharp angle.

“Where’s the son of a bitch going?” Norm waited until our quarry had vanished from view, going south on Sheffield, before pulling the car out of its parking place and rolling slowly up to the corner. The El now loomed overhead, mysterious and vaguely threatening.

I wiped the mist from my side window, but the rain was like a waterfall against the outside. “I can’t see. Pull around so we can get the wipers working for us.”

Norm gunned the accelerator a bit, turned left, and we both scanned the sidewalk ahead.

We didn’t get a chance to focus, however. Without warning, like lightning bursting from nowhere, the entire windshield exploded before us. The car was transformed from a dry, warm cocoon into a screaming, glass-filled, rain-soaked bedlam before either one of us could so much as flinch. Appearing between us as if by magic, slicing the top of Norm’s head with a burst of blood, was a metal road sign, still attached to its thick javelin-like steel post.

It took me a couple of seconds to recover, to check that I was still all in one piece. I had nicks and cuts across both hands, and I assumed on my face, but both eyes were free of glass, and I could feel no pain. My major problem was simply breathing against the direct onslaught of wind and rain.

I twisted in my seat, trying to move the street sign out of the way enough so I could get a clear look at Norm. He lay slouched against the far door, his mouth open and gasping, his hands feebly moving about, as if groping in the dark. Blood covered the entire right side of his face and ran down his shirt collar.

He blinked at me a couple of times, his eyes refocusing. “Holy shit. I thought he’d shot us.”

“How are you?” I shouted over the noise. “You’re covered with blood.”

He touched his head then and looked at his red-tinged fingers, almost instantly cleansed by the rain. “It doesn’t feel too bad.” He felt again, less gingerly. “It’s just a cut.”

I could see better now, having shoved the sign back out the window. Norm had a good six-inch laceration to his scalp, cut down to the bone.

But he was back to watching the street. “I can see him. He’s headed for the El. Christ, he didn’t even notice us.”

I followed his stare and saw the man we’d been following slowly working his way up the stairs leading to the platform above, locked in his own capsule of rain, wind, and noise. He was just over a block away.

“Go for him,” Norm shouted at me. “He’ll get away.”

“You need help.”

“I can radio for it, and I’ll get troops for the stations down the line, but you got to go after him.”

“You don’t know how badly you’re hurt.”

He grabbed the rag he’d used earlier on the windshield and pushed it against the slice in his head. “There-that’s as much as you could do. Now go after Shattuck.”

I threw my weight against my door to get out, then began to run as fast I could for the station, bent double, slipping and falling constantly, peeling off my coat to cut down on wind resistance, and finally reaching the stairs, gasping for air. As I stumbled up the steps, I heard the deep rumble of a train pulling in.

I leaped over the turnstile, ignoring a startled, distant shout, and half fell into the last car, just as the doors were closing. It was empty. I paused briefly to get my bearings and began heading for the front. I didn’t know which car Shattuck had boarded, but I knew he was ahead somewhere and that it would be a miracle if he still hadn’t noticed I was after him.

The far door opened without problem, as did the entrance to the next car, which was also empty. I had my gun out and kept ducking down every once in a while to look under the seats, checking for someone waiting in ambush. I was moving as quickly as possible, almost at a run, hoping to beat the train to the next station. I knew that wherever Shattuck was, he couldn’t leave the train until it stopped moving.

I found him in the next car. Thinking it as empty as its predecessor, I pulled the door open just as the train went from above ground to below with a burst of roaring, screaming noise. The change was so sudden, so unexpected, that I instinctively dropped to the floor. Shattuck’s first shot smacked into the wall high above my head.

I could see his feet, far at the other end, and fired twice. He shot back as I rolled between two seats, and then he retreated to the next car.

I paused, replaced my spent shells with two of the six extra bullets I always kept in my jacket pocket, and quickly worked my way up to the far door.

Any doubts about the identity of my quarry were gone now. I’d seen him clearly in that brief moment-the same face and eyes that had smiled at me in the glow of a single candle so long ago. But just as I was sure it was Bob Shattuck, I was also quite sure I had no strategy to bring him under control. I was now in a simple running gunfight, which I could safely abandon now or risk seeing through to the finish.

Considering what I’d done to get this far, however, the debate barely flickered in my brain. I opened the door and stepped out between the cars, knowing he’d be waiting for me inside the next car.

I backed as far as I could into the gap between the cars, turned the door handle with my free hand, and kicked the door open with my foot; staying clear of the opening. As I did so, the train slowed and banked into a curve to the protesting shriek of all its wheels, throwing me off balance.

But no bullet came sailing through the open door.

Fighting the centrifugal force of the train, I pulled myself to the opening and peered inside. Far ahead, on the right side, Bob Shattuck was halfway out one of the broad windows. Outside, dimly lit, I could see in that split second that we were gliding nonstop through a darkened, closed station.

Then Shattuck fired again, sending me ducking back for cover.

When I looked out a second time, he was gone.

I quickly stepped into the car, saw the “North amp; Clybourn” station signs drifting past as the train finished grinding out of the curve before picking up speed once more. The dark, distant curved tile walls of the station slid by, quite slowly now, or so I thought.

As if by some act of unconscious will, everything seemed to begin moving slowly. In the passing split seconds, my gun hand came up and squeezed off three rounds at the window opposite me, reducing it to a blanched crazy quilt of cracked glass.

Without thought or apprehension, instinct having totally snuffed out common sense, I leapt off one of the benches, curled into a ball with my arms wrapped around my head, and crashed through the weakened glass window onto the platform beyond.