Like I thought, he’s an amateur; he jerks his head to track my position, as conspicuous as if he’d rung a bell. I pull out my cell phone, pretend to check who is phoning me, then put the phone to my ear and pantomime a conversation while I really snap photos of the man through the window. They may not be perfect shots, but they should be enough.
A clerk stands near the back, sorting new arrivals.
“Bathroom?” I ask in her language and she points me to a short hallway. I quickly pass it and duck out the delivery entrance, slipping into an alley. I hurry to the nearest intersection where the alley meets the driveway and wait.
I don’t have a weapon, so I’m going to have to use his.
I hear his hurried footsteps approaching, and I am right, he’s an amateur, no doubt about that. If he’s been in this line of work, he hasn’t been doing it long. He’s making as much noise as a fireworks display. In another minute, he won’t be making any noise at all.
He swings around the corner in a dead sprint, and it only takes a solid kick to his trailing leg to send him sprawling, limbs akimbo, like a skier tumbling down a mountain. Before he can right himself, I am on him, pinning him to the cement with my knee in the small of his back. A quick sweep of his waist and I have his gun, a cheap chrome pistol I’m sure he bought in the last day or two, after arriving in the country. A second later, it is out and up and pointed at the back of his head.
Before I can pull the trigger, he shouts “Columbus!”
I roll him over and have the gun under his chin. His eyes in that wide face are wild, feral, like a cornered wolf. No, whatever he is, he’s no professional.
“What do you want?” I spit through clenched teeth. I like him scared and I mean to keep him that way.
“I came to find you…”
“No shit,” and I thumb the hammer back, cocking the pistol. I hope the gun isn’t so cheap as to spring before I’m ready to pull the trigger. I want to find out who the hell this guy is who knows my name and how on earth he found me before I plant him.
He winces, his face screwing up like he tasted a lemon, and then he bellows, “For Archie. For Archibald Grant… your old fence!”
Whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t that.
“Archie?”
“Yeah man, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Archie’s been taken.”
We sit in the back of a chicken-and-pork restaurant, drinking San Miguels.
“What’s your name?”
“I go by Smoke.”
And as if the mention of his name turns his thoughts, he pulls out a pack of Fortunes, pops free a cigarette, and lights it with a shaky hand. I guess he hasn’t quite calmed his nerves after having his own gun cocked beneath his chin.
“Then tell me something straight, Smoke… you’re no bagman.”
He blows a thin stream out of the side of his mouth. “No… shit no. I just handled things for Archie… a ‘my- man-Friday’ type setup. Whatever he needed me to track down, that was my job.”
“A fence in training.”
He nods. “I thought about trying my hand at the killing business, but I wasn’t sure I had the chops for it.”
“Now you know.”
“You’re right about that.”
“How’d you find me?”
“Archie liked to tell stories about you, said you were the best he’d ever seen. Said if he ever got in a tight spot, I’s to open an envelope he kept in a safety deposit box at Harris Bank on Wabash. That’d tell me where to find you. He told me this pretty soon after I started there…”
“How long…?”
“Over a year. After his sister died, he came back to Chicago a bit lost. I knew him from his prison days.”
Ruby. His sister’s name was Ruby, and she was one of the good ones. I had a real fondness for her; I like to think we were cut from the same cloth. Then Ruby had caught a bullet in that mess in Italy two years ago that made me want to leave the game forever. And here it was, all coming back.
“I meant, how long has Archie been missing?”
“Not missing. Taken. There’s a note.”
He shifts to reach into his pants pocket and withdraws a single sheet of paper, folded into quarters, then hands it over without the slightest hesitation. As I unfold it, he takes another drag, squinting his left eye as the smoke blows past it, toward the ceiling.
“Goddamn, it’s nice to smoke indoors. They don’t let us do that shit in Chicago no more.”
The sheet is standard white typing paper, the kind found jamming copy machines throughout the world. Block letters, written in a masculine hand with a black Sharpie: BRING COLUMBUS HOME. OR YOU’LL GET GRANT BACK IN A WAY YOU WON’T LIKE.
I look up, and Smoke is studying my face.
“Why didn’t you tell me this was about me?”
Smoke shrugs. “I’m telling you now.”
When I level my eyes, he puts his palms up like a victim in a robbery. “I didn’t mean nothing by it. Just didn’t know how you’d react. They ask for you and I immediately come find you. I wasn’t looking to do an investigation… wouldn’t know where to begin. But your name was on there clear as crystal and this seemed like a straight-up emergency, so here I am. Didn’t want you to have the wrong idea.”
“When was the last time you saw Archie?”
“I was at his place the night before… wasn’t unusual for us to be up ’til eleven-thirty, twelve, goin’ over all the goin’s on, but mostly talking shit, you know? I think I left around midnight, but I don’t remember looking at a clock. It was late, though.
“Next day I was supposed to meet him for eggs and bacon at Sam amp; George’s on North Lincoln, but Archie never showed.”
“That unusual?”
“First time ever. I knew something was up before the waitress set down the menus. He always beat me there. Always. Say what you want about Archibald Grant, but he’s a punctual son-of-a-cuss.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “So what’d you do?”
“I got up, left a buck on the table for coffee, and headed to Archie’s place. Banged on the door, but no answer. The lock wasn’t forced or nothing, so I opened it and poked my head in.”
“You have a key?”
“Yeah. Archie gave me one.” He says it defensively, but I shake him off like a pitcher shaking off a sign from the plate.
“Keep going.”
“Not a sound in the joint. Air as still as a morgue.”
“No sign of a struggle?”
“Not in the front room, no.” He leans forward, lowers his voice. “But in the bedroom, he must’ve put up a hell of a fight. Blood everywhere, lamps knocked over, mirror broke, bed knocked to shit. I knew it was bad, bad, bad. My first thought was he was dead, truth be told. All that blood. Someone must’ve stuck him and dragged the body away. But then I saw the note.”
“Where?”
“Living room table.” He tamps out another cigarette from his pack and lights it off the end of the first, dropping the original into a plastic ashtray when he’s done.
“You think the note was put there for you to find it?”
“Don’t know who else it’d be for. I’m the only one he lets into his house.”
“And you have absolutely no idea who did this or why they want me?”
“Swear on every single family member’s name, living and dead.”
As a professional killer, I have to read faces the way a surgeon examines x-rays. A purse of the lips, a
