Trust Me

17

The first series of precise blows sent Luke reeling across the scattered sketches on Chris’s table. His face, already bruised from Mouser’s blows, hurt bone-deep. He was going to get the snot beaten out of him by this freak.

‘No quarter is given in krav maga,’ Chris said, with the calm of a lecturer. He paused to pick Luke up, hammer his chest and face with a flurry of fists, and shove him hard toward the scrawled paintings.

Luke crashed into the bad art and a table of paint supplies. He blinked past the pain in his jaw and his chest, and saw Chris sauntering toward him, snapping fingers, dancing on the balls of his feet. Luke’s hands fumbled for an improvised weapons. His fingertips roamed across brushes, spilled water bottles, a dried, dirty palette. His hand closed on a metal canister.

A spray paint can.

‘I’m Necessary,’ Chris said. ‘To be given a high place in the emerging order. Everyone then will know my name. Know my art. Know my

…’ Luke’s back was to Chris and as Chris lifted a foot to hammer a kick into Luke, Luke spun and fired a jet of red. A scarlet mist caught Chris in the face. He howled and lurched back. Crimson frosted his eyeglasses and Luke slammed a chair into his chest. Twice, hard. Chris fell.

‘They’ll know,’ Luke spat, ‘you don’t know when to shut the hell up.’ He ran for the door with five locks. He pulled on the knob but it held fast. He had to get out of here; this guy was nuts and maybe Mouser and Snow were on their way.

Looking at the garish paintings, he hadn’t noticed Chris lock the door behind him. He flipped the deadbolts. Still the door was locked. It required a key.

‘You’re not leaving.’ Chris staggered to his feet. Bleeding hard from his nose, like Luke was. Smiling through blood and red paint. ‘Not when you’re my ticket to glory, man.’

‘Give me the keys,’ Luke said.

Chris fell against a table and Luke could see a huge shard from the chair lodged near his ear, creating a bloody mess.

Luke charged toward him.

Chris yanked a drawer open.

Luke thought it would be a gun. Chris wouldn’t rely on fists now that he’d been hurt. Luke saw the fire escape on the other side of the window and ran for it.

A trio of shots shattered the window seconds after he stepped out onto the fire escape and slid down the stairs. Glass hit his hair. The sound was loud, bright in the afternoon air, cutting through the hubbub of traffic sounds of Wicker Park. He clattered down the fire escape and dropped onto the hood of Chris’s Porsche, denting it with his weight.

He heard Chris howl above him like a wounded creature.

Luke bolted out into a wide street, stumbling into the path of a taxicab, which berated him with a long drawn honk of the horn. He broke into a hard run. He had to get off the street before Chris saw him. He ran behind another squat building, decorated with garish neon, into a web of alleyways. Turn right, turn left, he came up behind a bakery that gave off a motherly scent of chocolate and almonds and a corner bar, open early for happy hour.

At the end of the alley was a construction fence. Luke scrambled over it and he heard the wail of a siren. Police. Fear opened like a fist in his chest. Someone had called, probably reporting Chris’s shots.

He ran through a passageway that backed a block’s worth of restaurants and storefronts. He thought of hiding inside a Dumpster but hiding might mean capture. He had to get free and clear of the neighborhood.

At the end of the alley, fronting onto a quiet street, a police patrol car wheeled past. Luke ducked behind a Dumpster. Peered around its edge.

The police car was gone.

He ran from the Dumpster’s shadow and tried a doorknob. Locked. He ran down to another door. Tested it. It opened onto a small kitchen way. Two men, short, Latino, glanced up from scraping a grille. Hamburger scented the air and he heard a radio playing a murmur of Spanish music.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, sidling past them and one of the cooks said, ‘What the hell, this isn’t the front door,’ in rapid Spanish.

Luke ignored him and hurried out onto the dining room floor. The restaurant was a small, spotless diner, a few tables, a chalkboard announcing burgers, sandwiches, a lunch special of meat loaf and garlic mashed potatoes. A few late lunchers sat huddled at the tables, including most of the wait staff. A waitress was erasing the boards to write the dinner specials.

Luke ran past her and the smells of comfort food and out onto a street. This avenue was busier, filled with cafes, a scattering of funky clothing shops, an Irish pub.

The police car turned back onto the street, toward him. He stepped into the nearest business, a small flower shop. The air was thick with the smell of blossoms and clean water. No one stood at the counter but the door’s attached bells jingled his arrival.

He saw a heavy plastic curtain – behind it were large plastic containers of cut flowers. He moved past the curtain, headed toward the back door.

The front door jangled behind him.

‘Hi, officer, can I help you-’ He heard a voice say on the other side of the curtain. Then silence.

The police had seen him come in. They were looking for him. Or his movements had incurred suspicion. He reached the back door, eased it open, closed it behind him. Through a small window he saw the officer move into position on the other side of the window.

He stumbled into the alley; it was already shadowed, the afternoon light dying in the narrow passage.

‘Officers!’ Chris practically screamed in his ear. ‘Here he is!’ His face was red with the slash of paint. He closed arms around Luke.

‘He shot up my studio, he’s nuts!’ Chris screeched through his painted clown’s grin.

‘Police! Stop!’ The cop hurried out into the alley.

Luke froze. ‘Help me,’ he said. ‘This guy tried to shoot me.’

The officer took a measured look at Luke’s face, seemed to study the hair, the bruises. ‘Luke Jameson Dantry. On the ground, now.’ The officer barked his orders.

Luke obeyed. ‘I’m unarmed,’ he said. ‘He fired the shots, sir, not me.’

‘Just like a criminal,’ Chris said. ‘He’s lying. I caught him.’

‘You on the ground, too,’ the cop ordered.

Chris obeyed.

Luke felt the officer patting him down, heard the clink of cuffs being removed from a belt. It took it back to the horrors of the bed in the cabin. ‘No, I don’t want to be handcuffed, please, please don’t, I’m not the bad guy here.’ His voice rose into a yell. He yanked one hand away, buried it under his chest.

The officer fought to regain control of Luke’s arms. ‘Stop resisting! Are you Luke Jameson Dantry?’ the officer yelled.

‘Yes, sir, and I have information on a dangerous group of people, please don’t, please don’t cuff me, please-’

The officer started yelling into his shoulder mike, still trying to slap the cuffs on Luke while Luke bucked and kicked. Luke turned his head and he saw a figure at the end of the alley.

Snow. Smiling at him.

Luke screamed, ‘Officer, look out!’

Her hand came up and Luke didn’t see the gun but the short sharp th-weet s were loud in the shadowed alley. The cop dropped mid-sentence, two holes painting his face. The blood hit Luke’s hands and he retreated behind the trashcans.

Done, a snap of the fingers. Luke could hear her walking toward him, the click of her boots on the pavement. Not rushing, because she didn’t know if Chris was armed. He felt he could read her mind, understand her approach.

‘You’re Chris, right?’ he heard Snow say as she came forward. Friendliness in the tone.

‘Yes, I am.’ Chris stood, with ugly triumph. His genius had finally been recognized. ‘Are you here to help me?’

‘Baby, I am,’ Snow said, and she shot him.

Chris collapsed against the Dumpster. As he died the surprise faded from his eyes, replaced by the blankness of a world without anger.

‘Come on, schoolboy, time to go home,’ she said as she approached. Luke saw the policeman’s service piece, still holstered, and yanked the gun free.

He fired a blast at Snow, wide, then fired again as she took cover behind a pile of discarded pallets. The second bullet caught her – he saw her shoulder jerk, saw a stain on her jacket. She didn’t scream. She gritted teeth, like he’d only dealt her a wasp’s sting and aimed again. He fired and turned and ran down the alley. He vaulted a fence to the other side of the street.

Her bullets powered into the fence, a bare inch from his hands as he went over the top.

He fell onto the wooden fence’s other side and ran.

He kept running, for six more blocks. No sign of her. He’d wounded her so badly she couldn’t give chase.

Sirens pierced the air. In a deserted alley Luke threw the policeman’s gun in a trashcan. If he got caught holding a dead cop’s gun…

He found a discarded newspaper and he wiped the blood from his hands and his face. He could hear the rumble of an elevated train – Chicago’s answer to the subway – and he ran until he saw the Damen station.

He fed money into a machine, it spit a card pass at him. My God. She killed a cop. I hope I killed her. The realization cut past the pain from the shrapnel. The officer radioed they had me – knew my name – and now he’s dead.

Luke stumbled onto a Blue Line train headed toward the Loop. Insanity. The officer was just doing his job. The entire city’s police force would be hunting Luke with an intensity he could barely imagine. He could not long evade their search. He sat down and studied the train’s map. His hands shook and he thought he might vomit when the train braked and then lurched back into motion. He tried not to look at anyone. No one seemed interested in him. He looked a little rough and grimy and no one wanted trouble, making eye contact with him.

What now?

He had one choice, and he had to get there before Snow and Mouser. Eric Lindoe. He had to find him.

Luke did not know Chicago well and he was unsure how to reach Eric’s bank. He got off at a station downtown. He wandered into a bookstore and used the coffee bar’s internet connection to find Eric’s business address at the private bank. It was on LaSalle Avenue, in the Financial District.

Ten minutes later, he stood outside Eric’s office in the fading sunlight. A news vendor nearby had a radio playing, and Luke drifted close enough to hear a report of a police shooting. An officer and a civilian down.

Only two. Chris was for sure dead. Which meant that he had only winged Snow, and she had slipped away. Every inch of his skin went cold. He kept seeing the officer’s face, a man just doing his job, and now dead for it. He pulled out the cheap cell phone he’d bought in Braintree, called 9-1-1, gave the operator a brief, precise description of Snow and Mouser as the shooters. Then he dismantled the phone, dropping its guts into the trash.

I’ll make them pay for you, officer, Luke thought.

Luke’s stomach rumbled. He bought a mustard-smeared hot dog and an apple juice from a street vendor and he ate the food without tasting it. Three bites into the dog, Eric Lindoe – kidnapper and murderer – hurried out of the high-windowed glass lobby of the skyscraper, glanced at his watch, and walked away. He wore a long coat, a cap pulled low over his face, dark glasses, and a look of utter guilt.

Luke followed him.