silver doorknob. The key was taped under a corner of the synthetic orange carpet, just to the left of the door. Robles turned the lock and walked in. It was a one-room apartment with a single light in the middle of the room and a second door that probably led to a bathroom. Directly in front of him was a set of three more windows. Larger than the one in the hal, they looked south, out over a landscape of smoke and steel. In the foreground was a curve of green girders and the Loop’s elevated tracks, wrapping around the corner at Lake and Wabash. Robles opened one of the windows and leaned into a cold draft circling up from the street. A pigeon hopped onto a ledge below him and stared. Robles ducked his head back inside and drew a shade across each of the windows. Then he walked over to a white sheet, spread out on the floor in the middle of the room. Under the sheet was a gray gun case. Inside the case, a Remington 700 rifle with a Leupold scope and a box of Winchester ammo. Robles took out the weapon and broke it down. A train rumbled by, rattling the windows in their frames and vibrating the boards under his feet. Robles smiled. They hadn’t stopped the downtown runs. Even after the thing at Southport. He didn’t think they would. No need. Not yet, anyway.
Twenty minutes later, Robles had reassembled the rifle and loaded a five-round magazine. He spread out a floor pad by the windows, cracked the middle shade to half-mast, and opened the window itself eight inches. Four trains had passed since he’d entered the apartment, about one every five minutes. On the sil in front of him was a CTA train schedule. There’d be another in a minute and a half. Robles slipped the barrel out the window and looked through the scope. It was blurry, so he adjusted, using a bil board asking Chicago to support their Bul s as a marker. Derrick Rose’s face popped up in the sight. Another adjustment, and Chicago’s savior sharpened into focus. Robles heard a rumble as a train approached the curve of track. His train. Right on time. Robles slipped his finger onto the trigger and leaned into the rifle stock. Then he pul ed his head back and listened. The scratching at the door was soft, but close and very much there. He waited, hoped whoever it was might go away. The knocking, however, persisted, grew louder, and Robles knew it was fated to be so.
He placed the gun back in its case and covered it over with the sheet. Then he closed the shade, slipped off his gloves, and opened the door just as the train rushed by. On the other side was an old face, hammered down between two shoulders and pinched with anger at a life that had somehow wound up here. Robles cared not a bit for any of that. The face was in the way. The face needed to go away.
“Sorry,” Robles said. “I was in the can. You need something?”
“Name’s Jim Halter. I manage the place.”
Halter’s smile revealed a row of large teeth that looked like unwashed elbows. His eyes were black and busy, slipping over the threshold and into the room, hungry for whatever there was to be had: a young girl, a stash of drugs, maybe a whiff of cash. Robles angled his body to give the building’s manager a better look.
“Nice to meet you, Jim. You want to come in for a second?”
Halter raised a long, veined hand to his face. The nails were calcified, the skin, spotted.
“No, no,” Halter said as he stepped across the threshold. “I just wanted to check in. Make sure you got settled okay.”
“Sure.” Robles swung the door shut.
Halter took a quick look behind him and might have been a little spooked. Then he noticed the white sheet in the middle of the room. The slippery eyes widened a bit more and a tongue moistened lips the color of liver.
“The e-mail said you’d be in today,” Halter said. “I was a little leery of leaving a key. But I guess it worked out al right.”
Robles showed him the key. “Worked out fine. Thanks.”
Halter nodded and took a second step into the room. Robles crowded close behind. The manager’s Adam’s apple rol ed in its pocket of flesh, and Robles slid the room key back into his pocket.
“What sort of business you in, sir? If you don’t mind me asking, that is?”
Halter created space as he spoke, fluttering, like an old and desiccated moth, to whatever sliver of flame lay underneath that magic sheet. Robles let him drift, fitting a six-inch hunting knife to his hand and feeling a familiar hole at the back of his throat. Wet work, Nelson cal ed it. Robles took a calming breath. Wet work it would be.
“Reason I ask,” Halter said, “I have a lot of expertise. Connections in the area.”
“You do?”
“Sure.” The manager began to turn back toward Robles, eager to strike his bargain. Eager to discover what lay hidden. Eager for his piece. The manager made it, maybe, halfway. Robles grabbed him under the chin and stretched his neck. The cut was clean. Halter col apsed in a rush of air, the wound making a sucking sound like he was trying to breathe through his throat. Robles stepped back. The manager slipped the rest of the way to the floor and lay there, wet, red, and shivering. A soft moan fol owed and a rol of eyes across the room.
“Shit.” Robles took another step back. Halter was bleeding hard, the body in spasm, but wel on its way to dead. Robles used the sheet to cover him over. Within a minute or so, the shivering had stopped and the white cotton ran crimson. Robles wiped his blade clean on the sheet and took a quick inventory. He had a smear of blood on his pants and some on his shoes. He cleaned them as best he could. Then he wiped down the doorknob and door. It would have to do.
Robles checked his watch. The whole thing had taken less than five minutes. Not a problem. He slipped his gloves back on, picked up the rifle, and headed back to the windows. He arranged the floor pad again and sat, weapon cradled in his lap. Then he closed his eyes and waited for his pulse to slow. After a minute or so, he opened his eyes, took a deep breath and exhaled. He felt good again, back in the moment. Robles raised the middle shade and reseated the rifle so the barrel was sticking three inches outside the window. He’d been half expecting something like Halter and was glad it was over. Now he fixed his eye again to the scope, scanned the tracks, and waited.
It wasn’t more than twenty seconds before a silver L train chugged around the curve and stopped, waiting for a signal to enter the State/Lake station. Robles took half a breath and curled his finger around the trigger. The scope found a middle-aged woman, pale skin and dishwater for eyes, talking on her cel phone and looking at the street below. Next window down was a white kid, greedy mouth and greasy fingers, whole-hogging from a bag of fast food. Robles moved up to the front of the train and lensed the driver, thick-featured and black, staring straight ahead at nothing but two more decades of riding the rails. For any of the three, a pul of the trigger might even be a blessing. God bless America. The train jolted and started to move again, just slow enough so it was perfect. Robles ran his rifle down the length of the first car, then the second. The process was a real mind fuck. The selection process, who lived and who died. Then the rifle stopped. She was tucked in, toward the back of the second car. Maybe two windows from the back. He sharpened his sights and tracked her as she floated by. A young woman, Latino, with dark hair and cinnamon skin, head bent at a delicate angle, reading something, probably a book she held in her lap. She glowed in the scope, a bloom of light forming around the curve of her skul and playing across the highlights of her features. She looked up, right at him, and he saw a flash of white teeth. Perfect.
He squeezed down on the shutter in his mind, captured the perfect image, even as he squeezed back on the trigger. The pul was clean, sharp, precise. He fired once to make sure the glass shattered, worked the bolt action, and fired again, a second later. Just in case there was anything left alive behind the glass. He didn’t see the woman’s head explode. Didn’t have time. Five seconds after firing, the rifle was tucked back in from the window, shade drawn tight. Thirty seconds later, the weapon was packed away. Then, he was out of the apartment and down the hal way. Robles exited by a basement door into an al ey and slipped the rifle case into a Dumpster. He walked to the other end of the al ey and stepped into the flow of people on Wacker. At the Merchandise Mart he caught the last Brown Line train before they suspended service for the day. On his way out of the Loop, Robles could see the conga dance of flashing lights from cop cars, ambulances, and fire engines, fighting their way to help a woman for whom there was no such thing. From his perch atop the elevated, he could just make out a couple of cameramen checking their gear and the first mast being raised from a television live truck. For the third time that day, Robles smiled. Then he settled back into his seat and looked out over the rooftops as his train clattered north.
CHAPTER 4
I had just finished giving my statement when a silver Crown Vic rol ed up and Vince Rodriguez got out.
“Heard your name on the scanner. Figured there were maybe a couple hundred Michael Kel ys in Chicago.
