have to find them, and run each of Bonson’s recommended stocks down. Maybe it’s as simple as first letter, maybe it’s a progression of letters, maybe it’s last letter; anyway, it has to be fairly simple. So we decode it. Maybe it refers to this thing, maybe it refers to someone like Jack and Mitzi. Then we’ll see where we are.”
“That’s good,” said Denny, “but we have to keep it in evidence. I’ve already risked chain of custody with it by removing it, but I want to get to the station, log it in to evidence in the minimum amount of time-since we logged out of Unclaimed Property at 11:04, I can get it logged in by midnight; I think that’ll stand up to any court scrutiny-then you can work on it at the police station in the duty room. There’s a computer terminal-”
“I’m sure I can dig up the stock listings from that date somehow, even if I have to buy an old copy of a newspaper-”
“Oh, I’m liking it.”
“Then, if it’s something we can use, I can call Nick and we bring in the Bureau.”
“And if you can’t reach Nick, tell you what. I’m friends with a real good county prosecutor. This is a Chicago homicide, after all. These are Chicago people they gunned down. We’ll run it by Jerry and maybe he’ll take on the case. It sounds like it could go big if it’s played right, and he’d know how to play it right.”
Up ahead, Bob saw the brown mercury vapor light of the entrance to the Stevenson Expressway, a little Jetsons architecture here in the derelict section of Chicago, a construction built of concrete and machine corruption. A green sign pointed to Gary and Indianapolis, but Washington hummed ahead. The car slid under the overpass, then found itself in traffic, and came to another overhead, the ancient trusses and rivets of an el station. Rain had begun to fall lightly, scattering the light points ahead into glittery red-green stars.
“Good thinking,” said Bob.
“Oh, and one other thing,” said Washington, slowing as a light went suddenly to yellow and he knew he wouldn’t make it, while another car suddenly slid by on the left, also halting. “There’s also a possibility-”
The first bullet, passing through windshield, smeared a quicksilver maze of fractures and hit Washington in the eye, destroying it, blowing his head backward and filling the air with arterial spray.
26
Tino was the driver, Rat the shooter. Both were good at their jobs. In their midtwenties, handsome, amply tattooed, muscular, scarred, well dressed, with beautiful teeth and glossy rolls of oiled black hair, they’d come up through the Almighty Latin Kings, South Lawndale division, at one time ruling the gang’s heaviest hitters, known as the Chi-town Two Fours for their locality, which was Twenty-fourth and Drake. But the two were ambitious, without scruple, cunning and hungry, a dangerous combination. Their reputations approaching legend in gang-related street violence, they knew that the gang universe had its limits; they made a contact with a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy in the outfit, and they segued into the occasional mob hit.
It was quick, clean stuff. Tino tracked the vic, cut him off, and Rat put him down, car to car, usually a subgun, sometimes a shorty twelve. Tino was good with cars, had a genius-level reflex time, while Rat had that hand-eye thing in spades, which meant if he saw it, he put lead in it, fast. They didn’t make mistakes, they didn’t leave witnesses, and the payoffs were surprisingly generous. They hit debtors, they hit strong-arm boys, they hit witnesses, they hit Insane Maniac Disciples who’d crossed the line, they even hit a cop or two. They rapidly became known as the best in Windy, and were thinking about taking their talents nationwide, maybe flying around for guest-starring spots in wired towns like Miami, Cleveland, Detroit, even New York, though of course LA was the real center of the world as far as they were concerned, but they’d have to work out something with MS-13 before they went partying in that town. They knew you do not fuck around on MS-13 turf without MS-13 permission up front, or those crazy fucking Salvadorans will stick pliers up your anus and pull your entrails out through it an inch at a time for a very, very long weekend’s worth of dying.
This one looked almost too easy. The vics were a cop and some out-of-town cowboy guy, whatever, and they didn’t have a thought in the world that today would be their last. They were just cruising without security or even much in the way of attention paying, and the very good intelligence came from Tino’s man Vito, who repped the outfit on the South Side and had go-betweened for Tino many a time. Vito was good, solid, dependable; he owned a restaurant and wasn’t no pimp or drug lord but just a courier from the shadowy higher organization that made the big decisions and set the big policies and negotiated the rules with the various players.
Tino stole a car and picked Rat up and they met Vito behind Vito’s pizzeria at eleven that morning. Vito handed Rat a grocery bag, heavier for its size than it should have been, and Rat felt something dense and mechanical and tubular and awkward slipping around inside. It felt like something for a plumbing job. Were they going to fix a toilet?
“Swedish K, they call ’em,” Vito said. “You can run a chopper, right?”
“If it shoots, I can run it, Vito,” said Rat. “Remember, I am an artist with a Mac-10. I paint pictures with a Mac.”
“Artist my ass. This fuckin’ thing is bigger than a Mac-10. Client provided, client insisted, to be returned to client. It’s got a silencer, which is why it’s so big. Untraceable. It’s some kind of spook shit. Let me tell you, do not fuck this one up, as these customers know their business and seem to have the kind of connections that turn your mouth dry and I don’t want to have to give them bad news.”
“They scare you, Vito? They must be some heavy motherfuckers. Nothing rattles them.”
“The heaviest.”
He gave them the drill. They were to get out on the Eisenhower to Franklin Park, off Mannheim, to the Cook County unclaimed property warehouse.
“I know it,” said Tino. “My mamacita bought me a bike at auction there.”
“You ain’t looking for bikes,” said Vito. “It’s a cop Impala, gray-black, plate number K599121, you got that?”
“Got it,” said Tino, who had a talent for numbers and could remember anything.
“You follow them back into the city. It’s best to wait till they get to the South Side, which is where they’ll head. You drive careful, Tino. Stay far back, don’t rush or do anything stupid. I’m told these guys, or at least the cowboy, is tricky as hell. He’s done this kind of work, on both sides. You up for this?”
“Man,” said Rat, who’d peeked into the bag and liked what he’d seen, “I am up for anything with this cockroach killer.”
“Don’t force it. Be grown-up. You follow ’em from a long way off, you wait till they’re in traffic down here, ’cause the cop is a South Side precinct guy, and you set up next to them and you just go buzz with the buzz gun. Then you get out, you buzz each body. That gun shoots fast, watch that it don’t run out of ammo. It’s so quiet, it won’t scare the squares away. But it won’t draw cops to you either, that’s the point. You buzz each guy, put a few in the head to make sure. Then Tino uses all that magical driving power he is known for and makes you invisible in two seconds.”
“What’s paydown?”
“Oh, that’s the best part. You get ten long apiece.”
“Ten!”
Even on a cop, that was very nice.
“I told ’em, you were the best. These guys are hard but fair. You don’t need to know nothing now, and I ain’t giving you no advance because you’ll spend it on whores and Ripple, but you do this job clean and you will make many friends and set yourselves up nicely.”
“It sounds easy,” said Tino.
It was easy. They made the car in the lot and parked across Mannheim and down the block a bit. There was even a temptation to go in, hit them in the warehouse, the last place they’d be expecting it. But Tino argued no, because then what was his part in it?
When the vics emerged it was after dark, so Tino and Rat got no good look at either. They were just shapes, blurs, targets. It was better that way.
Tino watched as the Impala took Mannheim south after a daring cross-lane left turn from the lot, highly illegal but something a cop would think nothing of. That maneuver accomplished, the Impala built moderate speed, and Tino fell in two hundred yards behind, no problemo. The traffic was light and he had no trouble maintaining the distance until the vics hit the Eisenhower and took it toward downtown, again through moderate traffic at reasonable speed. The Eisenhower could be a bitch at rush hour, jamming up for miles and miles so that the fabled skyline never seemed to advance at all and it was hard to predict the way the traffic would break and squirt in segments, so you could have some trouble keeping a tail. But that never happened and the cop held in the second right lane at fifty-five, never deviating, never jumping lanes, just droning along two hundred yards or so ahead.
He even, so helpfully, signaled about a mile in advance of the turnoff at Pulaski; he signaled again when he turned left off Pulaski and then still again in another mile when he turned right down Kedzie, running through gang neighborhood after gang neighborhood, running through territory Tino and Rat knew well.
“When he passes the Stevenson,” Rat said, “another three blocks there’s that el station overhead, it’s always a choke point. He’ll stay in the right lane, we’ll breeze by and drive him into the el supports, and I’ll put the heat to ’em. Then you left and right, hit Granada, and it’s just a shot back to the Stevenson. We’ll be home before eleven.”
“It sounds good,” said Tino.
Rat slid over the seat into the rear, arranging himself against the door behind Tino. He wanted maneuvering room. “When I say, you punch down the window. Try it.”
Tino hit the button and the right back seat window hummed down, admitting a blast of fresh air. Then Tino raised it.
“Good,” said Rat.
He slipped the gun out of the grocery bag, beholding it for the first time. It looked like it felt, like some enterprise of plumbing, a joinery of pipes and tubes at right angles. It was, moreover, a kind of powdery green. A bolt riding a spring pronged from the righthand side of the main tube, just behind a cartridge ejection port; what made the thing look funny was that the tube didn’t diminish into a barrel, as on most guns, but continued, thick and long, for another full foot out, giving the whole apparatus a front-heavy look. Beyond the ejection port, that long run of tube, that was the “can,” as the silencer was called, Rat knew. This was a high-class, well- engineered professional tool, dedicated to exactly one purpose-the silent, fast extermination of the designated. He picked it up and realized that its wire stock was folded alongside. He peeled it backward by the leather-encased top strut through spring pressure, finally prying it loose, and it snapped into place, the stock fully extended. He reached back into the bag and came out with three mags, each dense for the size because each was loaded with thirty-odd 9mm cartridges, and at the top of each mag, a single cartridge was imprisoned and displayed in the lips of the magazine. Making certain it was oriented correctly, Rat eased a magazine into the
