Fire Sale

“You two have been smart about not speaking on Coach McFarlane’s phone, and you need to keep doing that, but you have to promise me that you will call Commander Rawlings in the Fourth District if you don’t hear from me by morning. Don’t talk to anyone but him.”

“We can’t go to the police,” Billy objected. “Too many of them owe favors to my family, they do what my father or-or grandfather tells them.”

I was about to say they could trust Conrad the way they trusted me, but how could I be sure of that? It might be true, but Conrad had superiors, he even had patrol officers who could be bribed or threatened. I gave them Morrell’s number instead.

“When I do come back, I’m going to take you home with me. I don’t like leaving you here with Coach McFarlane-you’re too exposed, and it puts her in danger.”

“Oh, Victoria, my life is too close to the end to worry about danger,” Mary A

I smiled weakly and said we could figure that part out later. I showed Josie the place in the curtains where she could see the street, and told her if she saw someone follow me she should call me. Otherwise, I’d see her in the morning.

I zipped up my parka, kissed Mary A

“I just wanted to say thank you for helping me out when I fell apart just now,” he muttered.

“Oh, honey, you’ve been carrying way too big a load. You didn’t fall apart-you just felt safe enough to let me know how hard it’s been.”

“Do you mean that?” His wide eyes studied me for mockery. “In my family, not even my grandma thinks it’s all right to cry.”

“In my family, we think you shouldn’t wallow in your tears, we think you should act-but we believe that sometimes you can’t act until you’ve cried your heart out.” I put an arm around him and gave him a brief hug. “Look after Josie and Coach McFarlane. And yourself. I’ll be back as soon as possible.”

The skies had cleared. When I got to my car I could see the Big Dipper low in the northern sky; the moon was almost full. This was both good and bad; I wouldn’t have to use a light to find the factory, but I’d be visible if anyone was watching Fly the Flag.

I checked my flashlight. The batteries were good, and I had a spare pair in the glove compartment. I put them in my pocket. Checked for my extra clip to the Smith & Wesson. I left my phone on until I was a couple of blocks from Mary A

Once again, I parked on Yates and walked down to the factory. The Skyway embankment loomed in front of me, its sodium lights forming a halo above the street but not shedding much light below. Most of the streetlamps were out down here at ground level, but the cold silver moon lit the streets, turning the old factories along South Chicago Avenue into chiseled marble. The moonlight cast long narrow shadows; my own figure bobbed along the roadway, like a piece of stretched bubble gum, all ski

The avenue was empty. Not the quiet emptiness of the countryside, but one where urban scavengers moved under cover of the dark: rats, druggies, thugs, all looking for a fix. A South Chicago bus labored up the street. From a distance, it looked like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood-its windows were filled with light, and the headlights looked like a grin underneath the big front window. Get on board, ride home in warmth and comfort.

I crossed the road and went into the factory yard. It had been over a week since the fire, but a whiff of smoke still hovered faintly in the air, like an elusive perfume.

Even though the traffic on the Skyway was loud enough to muffle my sounds here, I walked along the edge of the gravel drive so that my ru

I saw at once what had happened to Bron. Just as he had the heavy front load of the forklift suspended beyond the lip of the dock, ready to drop his load in the truck, Grobian had pulled away. The forklift had pitched headfirst off the dock, burying its forks in the ground. The cartons Bron had loaded on the front end were scattered in a wide circle around it. The fall itself must have broken Bron’s neck; the wonder was that Marcena had survived it.

I shone my flashlight around the ground. Sherlock Holmes would have seen the telltale broken weed, or displaced piece of stone, to say whether Marcena had been in the truck when it went over. I could only guess that her war zone training had given her a sixth sense of the danger, so that she jumped clear of the forklift as it fell.

I climbed around the machine. I looked underneath it as best I could, but I couldn’t see Marcena’s red pen. Maybe it was buried under the front end, but I’d save that possibility for last-it would mean hiring a tow truck to raise the forklift.

I moved in a circle around through the weeds and the gravel. This side of the building faced away from the fire, so I didn’t have to contend with the broken glass and charred remnants of fabric I’d found when I searched here last week, but there was still a tiresome amount of debris, jetsam from the Skyway, flotsam from the street. I’d read recently that Chicago ’s landfills were just about at capacity and we were starting to ship our garbage downstate. If all the bags and cans I’d seen on the streets today had been put into the garbage, maybe we’d have filled our landfills even sooner. Maybe litterers were saving taxpayers money.

After an hour, I was as sure as I could be in the dark that the pen wasn’t out here. I put a foot onto the forklift and climbed up onto the loading dock. I sat on the lip and stared into the tangle of brush, trying to imagine Marcena.

Now that I wasn’t moving around myself, the night noises started to sound loud. I strained to listen under the whoosh of the cars and grinding gears of the semis overhead. Were those rats and raccoons rustling in the brush, or humans?

Marcena wanted Grobian and William on tape, or chip. She saw she was onto a much bigger story than she’d thought; she knew the power the Bysens had-if she tried to publish the story, they could squash it, sue the paper, sue her. She needed their voices, saying what they were doing.

Maybe she’d had her recorder in her hip pocket, but maybe she’d put it where she thought it would pick up any private remarks the two men made. I pushed myself to my feet. Despite my parka, I was cold now, and I didn’t want to go inside the dark, cold building alone.

Billy and Josie spent a night here, I scolded myself. Be your age, be a detective. I turned on my flashlight again and went into the loading room. Shelves ran along its high walls, filled with flat cartons ready to be made into flag boxes. There were still some bolts of fabric in their plastic sheathing, waiting to be carried to the cutting area. After two weeks, a thick layer of sooty dust covered them, and the edges had been eaten by rodents, charmed to have such soft nest-building material laid out for them. I heard them scuttle away as my light drove them from their work.

I gave a cursory look around the room, but the floors were bare; I think I would have seen the recorder if she’d dropped it here in the open. I did check walls, and under the shelves, to see if it might have rolled out of sight, but found only rat droppings. I shuddered and moved quickly into the workroom where William found, or claimed he’d found, a load of sheets.