Cherry Bomb

I tried to get my lips to say goodbye, as my mother had done. They refused. I wasn’t ready to let go just yet. So I simply stood there and stared.

After a while, the grave digger came by with a backhoe and began filling in the dirt. Methodical. Disinterested. The elaborate ceremony of death, meant to offer comfort to loved ones, reduced to menial labor. I watched, staying put as the drizzle became heavy rain, cold, relentless, and unforgiving.

CHAPTER 4

THE MAN’S WRINKLES are caked with filth, and the layers of soiled clothing wrapped around his thin body smell of BO, urine, and worse. Alex takes no joy in slitting his throat. She mixes business with plea sure when possible, but for this old crazy bum it’s a mercy killing. Alex derives no plea sure from mercy.

She holds his shoulder, keeps him turned away so the spray of the carotid doesn’t splash her Dolce & Gabbana. He moans a little, but resigns himself to his fate quickly, collapsing into a clump of bloody, dirty rags. The alley, like most in the area, is narrow and deserted.

Alex lights a cigarette and waits for him to stop breathing. She doesn’t inhale, because she doesn’t smoke. If someone happens to walk by, a nicotine break is a good excuse for standing around in an alley.

Two minutes pass. No one walks by. For a population of six hundred thousand, there aren’t many people on the street. Maybe it’s the crummy weather.

“D…deh…deh…”

The bum is trying to talk, but he’s having some problems; most of his breath is bubbling out through the hole in his neck. She nudges a patch of unbloodied clothing with her toe.

“Last words are important. Try to finish.”

“D…deh…devil,” he manages, somewhere between a whisper and a gurgle.

Alex smiles, but only the right side of her face moves.

“The dev il isn’t real, buddy. I am.”

The bum expires, rheumy eyes going dull, and the blood finally stops pumping. Breaking his neck would have been quicker, but that would have meant getting behind him, finding a good grip. Changing her hair color is a

Alex peels back his sweatshirt, and the smell gets so bad it activates her gag reflex. She removed the bandage from her nose a few days ago, not because the break was fully healed, but because it drew more attention than her scars, even under a veil. Now she wishes she’d waited; a nose brace and plugs would have prevented this awful odor from assaulting her.

The money roll is in his pants pocket, almost the diameter of a soda can. During her stint in the marines, she knew of an MP who would roll drug dealers and pimps when he needed fast cash, the logic being they always had a wad. The downside was they also carried weapons, and had unsavory friends.

When Alex needed money, her solution was less complicated. Homeless people carry their entire fortunes on them. Though some were drunks and druggies, spending their last nickels to score, the schizos and psychotics tended to hoard cash. It took her less than an hour to find one on the street, muttering to himself. When she shoved him into the alley, he was more interested in protecting his plastic bags full of precious cans than his own throat.

She flips through the bills, which are surprisingly clean and crisp, and concludes she’s just made around six hundred bucks. Alex tucks the roll into her laptop bag, checks the sidewalk for pedestrians, then steps out of the alley and heads for her car. It’s parked on the street next to a small bookstore. A recent model Honda Accord, so popular it’s anonymous. In her younger years, she preferred to steal sports cars. But those are conspicuous.

Or perhaps, Alex thinks, I’m simply mellowing with age.

She approaches it from behind and inspects the trunk, satisfied that the car’s previous owner hasn’t begun to leak any bodily fluids. Since killing Jack’s fiancé three weeks ago, Alex has switched vehicles three times. Perhaps a bit overly cautious, but she doesn’t want to leave Jack such obvious bread crumbs. She prefers to keep the lieutenant guessing.

Exactly twenty days have passed since Alex was a guest of the Heathrow Facility, a maximum security prison for the criminally insane. She’d been put there by Jack, who had torn off half of her face in the process. The skin grafts, done by unskilled surgeons on the public dime, left Alex pink and mottled from her eye to her chin. She looked like a crazy quilt made out of Spam.

While in Heathrow, Alex had a lot of time to think. About revenge. And about the future. She pla

After a dramatic escape, Alex paid the lieutenant a visit, intending to kill her and everyone she cared about, including Jack’s mother; her partner, Herb; her fiancé; and two old friends, Harry McGlade and Phineas Troutt. But there were…complications, and everything went to hell.

Alex had been thinking about that night a lot. About how it could have gone differently. Jack and her friends got very lucky, no doubt. But Jack had also stood toe-to-toe with Alex, and broken her nose.

Alex had been in scores of fights, with both men and women. But no one had ever broken her nose before.

So, scheme number one got flushed down the toilet. But scheme number two is still viable. Scheme number two will make everything right. And there’s room for Jack to take a big role in it.

A very big role.

Alex takes out her keys and presses the button to open the car door. After she climbs in and buckles up, she considers her next move. It’s a little past two p.m. There’s time to buy some dye, do her hair, before her four o’clock date. Alex uses the onboard GPS system and searches for drugstore, finding one less than a mile away.

She chooses red for her new hair color. The dead bum would have approved.

Then Alex heads toward the Old Stone I

There will be quite a few.

CHAPTER 5

I WANTED TO GET GOOD AND DRUNK, but I’d been pretty much good and drunk for the last few weeks. Mourning. Hating myself. Wallowing in a pool of alcohol, antidepressants, and self-pity, biding time until I was able get my shit together.

The time had finally come.

I walked past acres of tombstones through freezing rain, exited the Graceland Cemetery on Clark and Irving, and hailed a taxi.

“UIC on Roosevelt.”

The cabbie glanced up at me in the rearview. I was soaked and shivering, my clothes sticking to me like they’d been painted on, my nipples jutting out like gun barrels.

“Wet out there,” he said.

I didn’t answer. He turned up the heat without being asked. I didn’t deserve warming up, but I had no will to argue.

Forty blocks later and thirty bucks lighter, I was spit out by the cab at the University of Illinois Chicago. The rain had changed its style of attack, cold fat drops replaced by wind-driven drizzle, which stung like needle pricks. The campus, normally gorgeous in the autumn, looked barren and dead. The trees were skeletons, their leafy skins shed in clumps all over the ground, brown and wet as mud.

The Illinois Forensic Science Center was on the south side of the street. Before it merged with the state police more than a decade ago, it was just known as the Crime Lab. One of the most advanced in the country, containing over fifty thousand square feet of crime-busting technology.

I showed my badge at the front desk, declined the offer of paper towels, and took the stairs to the second floor and Officer Scott Hajek, whom I’d phoned earlier.