Hardball

“There you are, Vicki. One of the boys who’s smarter than he looks saw your last name on a sheet and brought it to me. Who’s Petra, Peter’s kid? What insane business did you involve her in? Does Peter know? He’ll turn your guts into sausage casing if you hurt his kid.”

“Not guilty, Bobby,” I said wearily, crawling out. “She’s working on the Krumas campaign. I don’t know why she came here or who she let in.”

I showed him the video footage and explained how she’d happened to have my front-door combination. He frowned over the photos, then demanded of the patrol units if they’d done anything to get the footage over to a video-technology team.

Once Bobby showed up, the tempo of the investigation accelerated. Aggressive cops became subdued and helpful, lethargic ones became energetic, and an evidence team magically appeared and began dusting the whole mess for prints, blood, any trace of anything. Bobby called the FBI, in case it was a kidnapping; they sent a special agent over around eleven, and I had to answer useless questions all over again.

In the middle of it all, I started getting calls from reporters, and a television crew parked outside my office. Brian Krumas himself called while I was talking to the FBI’s special agent. The candidate was at a high-end fundraiser in Hollywood, but of course his staff had heard about Petra’s disappearance. Krumas talked to Bobby and then to me.

“You’re Petra’s cousin, right? We met at the Navy Pier event, didn’t we? I’m giving you my private number, Vic, and I want you to call me the instant you have any news of her, okay?”

I copied the number into my PDA and went back to the FBI. No matter how mediagenic you are yourself-and Brian Krumas was being touted as a glamorous new Bobby Ke

When I finally got home, I didn’t sleep much. I kept jolting awake, trying not to imagine what could be happening to Petra, trying instead to think of places I should look for her, and wondering who she had invited into my office.

“You shouldn’t be talking to a lowlife like Joh

“I know just how many counts Merton was charged with. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to know he had my girl kidnapped and forced her to open your office,” Peter roared, swinging around the room to put his nose almost against mine. “If any harm comes to her because of you, whatever it is, I will inflict it on you tenfold. Do you hear me?”

I stood very still, not speaking. If harm came to Petra because of me, I didn’t think I could live with myself anyway, but her father’s wild rage was impossible to respond to. His phone rang, and he finally backed away from me to answer it.

I turned to face Rachel. “You go see Derek Hatfield. He’s a good field agent.”

“What will you do?” she asked.

“I’m putting my own best agent on the case,” I said bleakly.

My best agent had been unable to find Lamont Gadsden. My best agent had left a trail of desolation at the Mighty Waters Freedom Center. I hoped she could do a better job looking for Petra.

3

LAMONT GADSDEN AND MY COUSIN PETRA. IT WAS HARD to imagine two people with less in common: an old buddy of Hammer Merton’s from Chicago’s South Side, a Mille

Petra being my cousin, it wasn’t surprising that she looked for me when she showed up in Chicago at the start of the summer, a fresh-minted college graduate with an internship in her daddy’s hometown.

It was sheer luck, the bad kind, that I agreed to look for Lamont Gadsden. Sometimes when I want someone to blame, someone outside my family, I snarl unfairly at a homeless guy named Elton Grainger.

Elton was the unwitting deus ex machina who led me into the Gadsden morass. Elton had been working my street off and on for several years. I knew him to say “Hey” to. I bought Streetwise from him, bought coffee or sandwiches for him from time to time. Once, during a blizzard, I’d offered him shelter in my office, but he turned me down. Then, one golden June afternoon, he collapsed in front of my office.

If I’d let him lie, maybe Petra would never have vanished, maybe Sister Frankie would still be alive. There’s a lesson in that about the fate that awaits the Good Samaritan.

It happened as I was tapping in the code to my office building.

“Vic, where you been? I haven’t seen you in weeks! You’re looking good.” He flourished a copy of Streetwise. “New issue today.”

“I’ve been in Italy.” I fumbled in my wallet for the U.S. money that still looked weird to me. “My first true vacation in fifteen years. It’s hard to be back.”

“Foreign travel. I got all that out of my system at nineteen when Uncle Sam paid my airfare to Saigon.”

I pulled out a five, and Elton fell to the sidewalk. I dropped keys and papers and knelt next to him. He’d hit his head as he went down and was bleeding in an ugly way, but he was breathing, and I could feel his pulse in an irregular, feathery beat, like some fragile ballerina dancing against the music.

The next few hours were a blur of ambulance, emergency room, hospital admissions. They wanted a lot of details, but I didn’t know him except as the homeless guy who’d worked this stretch of West Town the last several years. About the only personal thing he’d told me was that he’d lost his wife as his drinking got heavier. He’d never mentioned children. Today was the first time I’d heard about Vietnam. He’d been a carpenter and sometimes still got daywork. As for health care, I couldn’t help the hospital with their paperwork. He was homeless. I hoped he had a green card for city health services, but I had no way of knowing.

I wanted to get back to my office-I’d been away ten weeks and had an entire Himalayan range of paper waiting for me-but I didn’t feel easy leaving Elton until there was some kind of prognosis or resolution in his care. In the end, it took two hours before an intern who was stretched to the breaking point came in, and that was only because I kept going to the triage nurse and pushing Elton’s case: his crisis, asking for oxygen, heart monitoring, something. He had regained consciousness while lying on the gurney, but his skin was cold and waxy, and his pulse was still very weak.

A white woman in her early thirties, who seemed to be caring for an elderly black man, gave me a wry smile the third time I went up to the counter. “It’s hard, isn’t it? The staffing cutbacks have been too steep. They just can’t keep up with the patient load.”

I nodded. “I just got back from a long stay in Europe yesterday. I haven’t adjusted-to the time zone or our health-care system.”

“Is he your brother?” She pointed toward Elton’s gurney.

“He’s a homeless guy who collapsed in front of my building.”

The woman pursed her soft rosebud mouth. “Would you like me to look in on him if they manage to stabilize him? I have friends at some of the homeless agencies here in town.”

I agreed thankfully. Finally the intern, who didn’t look old enough for high school let alone an i

“He’s got some arrhythmia going on,” the intern told me. “We’ll see how serious it is. If he’s homeless and drinking, it takes a toll.”