Dirty Martini

When my feet touched land I cried out in pain from five different places at once, but I was in better shape than McGlade. His prosthesis was soaked in blood, which had leaked from where it was attached to his stump, and his shoulder was noticeably dislocated. Eyes closed. No movement at all. But his legs remained locked around my waist.

“Harry!” I yelled, barely able to hear my own voice.

A dozen things flashed through my mind. Had he been hit by some shrapnel? One of the nails from the bomb? Some sort of internal injury? A fast-acting disease from the raw sewage he’d flopped around in?

I gave McGlade a shake, and one eye peeked open.

“Is it over?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Did we live?”

I nodded again.

He smiled. “For a moment there I thought we were in trouble.”

I smiled back. “Nice work, Sundance.”

“You so owe me some sex.”

I disentangled myself from Harry and managed to stand up, albeit painfully. A few yards away, the helicopter powered off and a beaten-up Herb hopped out. He hobbled over to us, his face awash with concern.

“Jack! Are you okay?”

He came to me, approaching slowly, and I threw my arms around his shoulders and hugged him.

“Thanks, Herb.”

I felt his strong arms patting my back. “Somebody’s gotta save your ass.”

After the male-bonding, I pulled away and sized him up. Herb didn’t look much better than I did-ski

“What happened?” I asked.

“A little car trouble. Nothing serious. I was lucky my phone didn’t break; I wouldn’t have been able to call for the chopper.”

I heard a very faint sound. It was music, some heavy metal song from the eighties.

“Speaking of.” Herb pointed. “Your pocket.”

I stuck my hand in and pulled out Harry’s phone, surprised it had survived. I’d have to pick up one of these things.

“Daniels,” I answered.

“Lieutenant? Is that you? It’s Hajek, at the crime lab. Are you the one that sent me the fingerprint from this phone?”

“Yeah. What have you got?”

“I got a trace. It belongs to a postal worker named Carey Schimmel.”

I knew that name.

“He was the guy who delivered the extortion letter to the superintendent’s office, the one covered in BT.”

And it suddenly made sense why the Chemist was so paranoid about leaving prints. Postal workers are government employees, and they get fingerprinted when they’re hired. Schimmel’s prints were on file. I remembered his brief statement, and then wanted to kick myself.

“He said he wore gloves. But there were no other prints on that letter, other than from people at police headquarters. Dammit, how did we miss that?”

Hajek groaned. “It was staring us right in the face. A dozen people in the post office would have touched that letter, left some prints. But none of them did, because Schimmel was the only one who handled it. Did we even check to see if headquarters was on his route?”

“No,” I said, feeling like an ass. “Does he have a record?”

“No, he’s clean. But I’ve got his current address. He lives in Forest Glen.”

That was a Chicago neighborhood on the north side, only a few miles away.

“Call the super. Get a warrant. We’ll be there in two minutes.”

“Hold on, I’m sending you a JPEG of his driver’s license picture.”

I shared the information with Herb, and the chopper pilot, a woman called Leaky. She radioed base to get coordinates. Next, I approached Harry, who appeared to have successfully snapped his shoulder back into place, but not without consequences. He was moaning, and tears had left some clean trails in the filth on his cheeks.

“Got any morphine on you, Jackie? Or crack?”

“You’ll get some help soon, Harry.”

“Going to drop me off at the hospital?”

“No. You’re staying here.”

“No I’m not.”

“We’ll send an ambulance for you.”

“I’d like that, but I have to come with.” He pointed to his mechanical hand, still locked on to the ladder rung. “It won’t come off.”

Against Herb’s protestations, we helped McGlade into the bird.

“No grab-ass,” Harry warned him.

“I’ll try to restrain myself.”

“No reach-around either, Sir Eats-A-Lot.”

“I did save your life. How about a thank-you?”

“Be honest. The reason you came charging in here so fast is because you thought I had a cruller in my pocket.”

“God, you’re an asshole.”

Once we were airborne, I played with Harry’s phone and managed to access the Internet. After sifting through an extraordinary number of e-mails that involved porn, much of it the chunky booty variety, I found the picture from Hajek. Carey Schimmel was an average-looking white male, thirty-five years old, dark blond hair, and brown eyes. I remembered those eyes. They were the same eyes I saw in Records.

I Googled “Carey Schimmel” and got a hit that referenced a lawsuit from five years ago. An old newspaper article:

SLAIN WOMAN’S BOYFRIEND LASHES OUT

Merle and Felicity Hotham of Cicero settled out of court today in a wrongful death suit brought against the city of Chicago. The Hothams claimed the police department’s late response to a 911 call resulted in their daughter’s death.

Tracey Hotham, 29, died last August at the hands of convicted murderer Martin Welch, during an attack that lasted over fifty minutes. Hotham reportedly dialed the 911 Emergency number just as Welch entered the Chicago apartment she shared with her fiancé, Carey Schimmel. She was beaten, raped, and strangled in a 53-minute ordeal that ended just before the police arrived.

Sources say the settlement, an undisclosed sum, was well below the two million dollars in damages originally sought. Schimmel was reportedly outraged at the a

Welch, sentenced to life for the attack, is currently serving time in Joliet State Prison.

I shared this with Herb.

“I’d be pissed too,” he said. “But not enough to poison half the city and try to blow up forty thousand people.”

We set down a block away from Schimmel’s house, in an empty public baseball field. I checked my ankle holster, which still held the AMT. Leaky unlocked the helicopter’s anti-riot arsenal, and offered Herb a 40mm multi-launcher with ten nonlethal beanbag rounds. The large silver canisters were packed with gunpowder, but instead of a lead bullet or buckshot, the projectile was essentially a small, woven Hacky Sack. It hit with enough velocity to knock down a three-hundred-pound linebacker.

“You sure you’re ready for this?” Herb asked. “You look pretty banged up.”

“I’ll manage. How about you? This is a long way from Robbery.”

“I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” Herb dropped the final cartridge into the weapon’s cylinder and snapped the breach closed. “You think he’s still in town?”

I thought about the Chemist, hating the police so much that he spent years pla

“I’m sure of it. He needed to hear the boom.”

“How about the warrant?”

“Probable cause. We believe that retired CPD officer Jason Alger is being held inside Schimmel’s residence against his will.”

“That works for me.” Herb gri

He helped me out of the chopper, and we went to go pay the Chemist a visit-one he wasn’t expecting, and definitely wouldn’t enjoy.