and looked at her watch: twenty minutes. Time to start moving.
She got the answering machine out of her briefcase, carried it into the library and plugged it into the phone there. Back in her office, she pulled the black sweater over her head. She left the computer on, and turned on the small Optimus stereo system. The system played three disks in rotation, and would play them until she turned it off. She left the red jacket draped over her chair.
Ready.
The building had a five-story parking garage. Carmel stepped out of the suite, checked to make sure that the security guard had moved on, and then trotted briskly down to the stairwell at the far end of the hall, and down seven flights of steps. The cops might be watching every entrance and exit to the parking garage, but, she thought, they couldn't be watching all of it. Of course, if they were, she was screwed…
But it was a good bet, she thought. She poked her head through the door on the fourth floor, saw nobody. A single empty car, a red Pontiac, sat halfway down the ramp, but she'd seen it before. Not a cop. She glanced again at her watch: one minute. She waited it out, hearing nothing at all along the concrete corridors of the building, and then opened the door again.
Here was the only spot that she'd be in the open: she walked quickly across the top of the floor, and stepped into the corkscrew exit-ramp. She heard a car moving up the entrance ramp: had to be Pam, she thought. She listened, heard the car turn into the exit spiral, and nodded. The car started down, made the turn toward her… A grey-haired old lady was looking through the windshield. Carmel recoiled, then saw the hand waving her forward: 'Get in.'
'That's you?' The car stopped, just for a half second, and Carmel jerked open the back door and flopped on the seat, pulling the door shut without slamming it. 'Get under the blanket,' Rinker said.
Carmel was already doing that, rolling onto the floor, her head on the driver's side. She pulled the blanket over her legs and lower body, and lay quietly beneath it. The entrances and exits from the building were on opposites sides: and even at this time of night, there were always a few cars coming and going.
With any luck at all, the cops on the entrance side – if there were any – wouldn't be calling out the cars coming and going, so the cops on the exit side wouldn't notice the odd fact that a grey-haired old lady in a Japanese car had gone in one side and come right back out the other…
She heard Rinker lower the driver's side window; heard the cashier mutter something, and a minute later, they were rolling out of the building.
'You can get up on the seat,' Rinker said a minute later, 'But I wouldn't sit up, yet. Let me take a few side streets, see if there's anybody back there.'
'If there are, there's nothing to do but run for it,' Carmel said cheerfully.
'Yeah, well, just stay down for a few minutes anyway.'
Rinker didn't know anything about throwing off a following car, but she'd watched enough cop shows on television to know that they might be both in front of, parallel to, and behind her. She took the car across the Washington Avenue bridge to eliminate the parallel cars, a block the wrong way down an empty one way street to eliminate the forward cars, and then quickly along a one-way frontage road in the warehouse district, looking for followers. She didn't see anybody, and that was the best she could do.
'Best I can do,' she told Carmel.
'I can't think of anything else,' Carmel said. 'Pull over; let me get in the front.'
Max Butry came from a short line of mean cops; his father was one, and so was
Max, the meanness beaten into him from a tender age. 'You don't stay alive long on the streets unless…' his father would say, following with a lecture about a specific point of manhood in which Max was faltering: 'You don't stay alive long on the streets if you hide behind your hands. What if some greaser's got a shiv, huh? He'll cut your hands right off. You gotta come down on those boys…'
And his father would come down on him, show you how you beat a guy right into the ground by getting in close and on top of him, and fuck all your cherry greaser knives.
Butry carried the attitude onto the force; and on this night carried it into the bus station. A desk clerk had called to say that two guys were smoking dope in the John, and the smog was getting so thick nobody could get in to take a leak.
By the time Butry arrived, though, the smokers had gone, and he turned around and banged back through the door.
Outside, three skaters were practicing slides off a planter onto a curb. There was nothing illegal about this, but Butry considered skateboards one symptom of the decline of American civilization, and himself, by virtue of the badge in his pocket, one of the pillars of that civilization. 'They don't gotta respect the man – hell, they probably don't even know you – but they goddamn well gotta respect the badge,' his father said. 'If they don't respect the badge, the country starts caving in. Look what they got with the niggers down in Chicago. There are places in Chicago where you can't even show the badge or the niggers'll carve you up like the Christmas turkey. And you know how that started? It started when the first fuckin' nigger saw the badge and didn't show respect and nobody called him on it. And from there, the word got around, and the next thing you know, the world caves in. You got that? Huh?'
Niggers, skateboarders, trans-gender migrants, yuppie scum, all the same stuff.
People without respect. Butry swerved out of line to cross with the skaters. One of them, the toughest-looking kid, maybe sixteen with the baggy pants and the chain billfold and a ball-point pen tattoo on his forearm, saw Butry coming and there was no respect at all in the way he looked at him.
'Hey, dickhead: get them boards outa here. This is a bus station, not a playground,' Butry said.
And the oldest kid said, 'Fuck you, asshole.'
Butry pulled his badge with one hand and his gun with the other; which would have gotten him fired if anybody else had been around to see how early it came out. 'I'm a fuckin' cop, wiseass. See the badge? Now sit on the fuckin' ground and put your hands over your heads, all three of you…'
The smallest of the kids, who looked like he might be fourteen, and had the bony look of a boy who hadn't eaten right for a month or maybe a few months, that lonely, hollow-cheeked glow of hunger like a personal portrait, said 'Fuck you, fat boy' He pulled up his t-shirt to bare his belly, and to show off a half-dozen steel rings that pierced the skin around his belly button. 'Here: you want to shoot me? Here, shoot me, asshole.'
Butry was fast, faster than the kid, who may have been slowed by hunger: Butry's hand lashed out, open but heavy as a ham, a slap that knocked the boy off his feet.
'On your goddamn knees,' he screamed. 'On your goddamn…'
At the very last second, he began to realize that he was over his head, but that very last second was too late. The young kid had come back up, on the toes of his ragged black tennies, and in his hand that pointed toward Butry's nose was a piece-of-shit two-barrel Crow derringer; you couldn't, as one of the gun magazines noted, expect to hit your target at six feet. But the gun was only nine inches from Butry's face when the kid pulled the trigger, and the. 45 slug went through the bridge of Butry's nose and out the back of his skull.
His father had forgotten to tell Butry that you don't fuck with people who have nothing to lose…
The three skaters froze in the impact of the blast, in the sight of the falling cop; then the oldest said, 'Run,' in the harsh semi-whisper of panic, and the three scooped their boards and were running across the street through the moving cars like a pack of starving terriers.
Sherrill and Black were slumped in her car, and Sherrill was talking to Lucas on her cell phone: 'I'm starting to feel like a country song,' she said. 'There's something wrong about not feeling right…'
Then their radio burped and and Black picked it up and Sherrill said to Lucas,
'Just a minute,' and then a dispatcher was screaming something about a cop down, shot at the bus station, three men running away, everybody available get to the bus station, looking for three youths possibly carrying skateboards and last seen running toward Loring Park…
'We got a call, there's a cop down, shot, we're going,' Sherrill said. And to
Black, behind the wheel: 'Go-go-go…' and Black was already going.
Carmel said, 'Listen, Pam…'
'It's Clara,' Rinker said. 'My name is really Clara. Rinker.'
'Clara?' Carmel tasted the name for a second. 'I like that. Clara. Better than
Pam.'
'Anyway, you were saying…'
