“Which means they’re burying the real owner’s name.”
“Precisely,” she said. “Now I have to exhume the body. I’ve been following the paperwork for the last couple of hours. So far, I’ve gone through five LLCs registered in five different states, but the same partner is listed as the managing member. I have six more companies to unwind.”
“Longer the rod, bigger the fish.”
“Didn’t know you fished.”
“I don’t. Just sounded good.”
“You always find a way to make me smile. Don’t worry, it’s gonna take a little more time, but I’ll get the real name.”
“Working like this, I’m gonna have to start paying you.”
“A lot more than lunch on Michigan Avenue.”
“You keep forgetting about the value of the company,” I said. “Remember, that’s priceless.”
27
I SAT OUTSIDE the makeshift church an hour ahead of the service starting time. I wanted to make sure I saw Stanton enter the building and that there was no deviation from his normal routine. Success in operations like this heavily depended on predictability and consistency. A short old man scuffling with a small limp and wearing a Chicago White Sox cap was the first to arrive. He pulled out a wad of keys, fumbled for a few seconds, then unlocked the door and entered the building. Darkness had just fallen, and the neighborhood was settling in for the night.
Half an hour later, a young woman pushing a stroller with one hand and holding a toddler in the other walked up and negotiated the door before entering. Minutes later they started arriving in clusters of two and three. I recognized the old woman I had sat next to a couple of weeks ago. The boy who had assisted Stanton in the service walked up from the south side of the street and opened the door. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen. He wore a pair of white earbuds and bobbed his head slightly. He was wide at the shoulders, with long arms. This was the first time I had noticed the gold earring in his right ear. He waved at another teenager walking in his direction from the north. They ducked through the unmarked door together.
Minutes later, a small blue Toyota pulled up. Stanton quickly jumped out of the back seat, talking on the phone. He stood outside for a minute; then when he finished his conversation, he opened the door and entered the building. Now that I had confirmation, I started my van and pulled out to Ashland, then swung a left on the next street, then another left into the alley. I wanted the van facing east so I could see anyone walking across the alley.
I drove slowly past the metal dumpster resting against the side wall of the church. The building across the alley had a small side door with a light over it that was turned off. There weren’t any cameras covering the alley, but to be certain, I had already hit the switch that lifted the back license plate frame of the van, rotating it up one slot to reveal an Indiana license plate I had taken from a scrapyard less than a year ago. I was positioned so that Stanton would have to walk by me when he entered the alley. The darkness in the alley wouldn’t let him see inside the van.
It was seven o’clock. I turned on the radio to the classical offerings of WFMT and waited.
THE FIRST PARISHIONER crossed the alley at 8:14 p.m. The service was letting out. Stanton was probably shaking hands and making plans to see everyone next week. Little did he know it would be the last time he saw them.
I unlocked the van’s interior cage door, which led into the back cargo bay, then unlocked the back doors and stood behind the rear of the van, out of view from anyone crossing or entering the alley. I tapped a few buttons on my phone and turned on the camera in the front window so I could see the entrance to the alley. The video lit up the display. I sat and waited.
At 8:29 p.m. he came into view. He was alone with the garbage bag. He looked up for a second, a little surprised to see the van, but he kept coming anyway. He walked by and headed for the dumpster fifteen feet behind me. When he was a few feet past, I stepped around the van and swung the hard rubber nightstick, striking him across his upper back with enough force to knock him to the ground.
He dropped his cell phone and let out a yelp of agony that was more from the surprise than the immediate pain of the blow. I quickly threw a burlap bag over his head, lifted him up, and pushed him in the back of the van. I grabbed his phone, closed the doors, restrained his wrists, then sat him up. I walked through the interior cage door, jumped behind the wheel, and backed down the alley, away from the building and onto Ashland.
I drove west a few blocks to avoid any of the people still walking home from the service, then pulled the car over, jumped out, and smashed the phone with my foot. I picked up the pieces and threw them in a nearby trash can to make sure there would be no way to digitally track where I was taking him. I pulled away from the curb, then looped around east toward the lake and our remote destination in southeast Chicago, where the US Steel plant had been abandoned some twenty-five years ago. Over four hundred acres of waterfront property once known as South Works sat vacant and unproductive, a cruel reminder of the neighborhood’s illustrious past and cataclysmic demise. Several years ago, I had purchased a small, unremarkable house on a forgotten street just along the southwest edge of the vast property.
I had grown tired of the unfair justice where evil, unrepentant monsters whose sole intentions were to
