Brush Back

Headlights appeared, reflected in the glass of the building across the street. A squad car making its rounds. I froze, my shape a dark silhouette. If they looked up—they shone their spot on Gate L, some ten feet in front of me, decided it was secure, moved on. The shirt under my warm-up jacket was wet with sweat. The cold wind began turning it into an ice pack against my back. Get in motion, warm those muscles up again.

Someone was coming up Waveland toward me, but I couldn’t stop now. I walked up the wall until my knees were at squat angle, got a hand up, grabbed the clay tiles at the top of the wall. One last hoist, come on, Warshawski, you fast smart detective, do it.

“What you doing up there?”

I was lying on top of the clay tiles, a beached whale. The drunk I’d passed earlier, or maybe a different drunk, was standing underneath me.

“Practicing for the Olympics,” I said. “The wall-climbing event.”

“Seems kind of a fu

“Yeah, I can’t afford a gym.”

I got to my hands and knees. My muscles were wobbly, not good, since I had a lot more stadium to cover. Right hand forward on the sloping clay tile, left knee, left hand, right knee.

“You fall, you go

I grunted. Crowd-sourcing, what a great idea. Way better to be in a gym than creeping along the clay tiles of Wrigley Field in the dark.

“You ain’t the first to be up here practicing, case you interested,” my friend said, as if the memory had just pinged a neuron. “Other person didn’t say nothing about no Olympics. Maybe they stealing a march on you, or maybe you ain’t no Olympic athlete yourself.”

I sat up, banging a knee into the edge of one of the tiles. “When was this?” I tried to keep my voice casual.

“Oh, tonight. Don’t have me no watch, can’t tell you exactly when, but when I called out, he moved fast, way faster than you, missy. If he’s your rival, you better get your faster moves worked out.”

“He? It was a man?”

“Didn’t ask for an ID. Small kid, might have been twelve or thirteen. Wore one of those big sweatshirts, got caught on the tiles. He moved like a crab through the sand with a kingfisher after him and if you’d a asked me, I’d a said he was breaking in, not training for no Olympics. What about you?”

“I think he was breaking in, too.” Bernie, Boom-Boom’s jersey hiding her breasts, small, agile, looking like a twelve-year-old boy in the dim light.

“Meaning, maybe you breaking in, too. Like the older guys coming after the boy.”

My heart skipped a beat. Two beats. “They climb up after him?”

“They not as spry as you and the boy. They saw him go over the wall. One stood on the other’s shoulders, but he fell over, they both swore a blue streak, then they tried using a crowbar on Gate L here, only then the po-lice drove by, they took off.”

“I’ll tell you a secret,” I said. “I’m not in the Olympics. That’s my kid, ru

The drunk sat on his haunches, watching me. “Yeah, I didn’t figure you for no Olympic athlete,” he said under his breath.

Ignore the grinding pain in the knees where the tiles cut through my jeans. Force the numb fingers to cling to the tiles. Inch by inch, until I felt the metal of the staircase next to me, a sharper shape in the shapeless night. I swung the right leg out and over the stairwell fence bar, slipped, fell backward onto the bleacher stairs.

“Hey! You in the ballpark now!” my cheering squad shouted. “You don’t belong in there, they go

I didn’t bother responding.

“Hey, you still alive?” the drunk shouted. “You find any beer, you drop it over the wall, you hear?”

I sat up, rubbed my tailbone. Everything in one piece. I’d done the easy part.

RUNDOWN

I skirted the bleachers and clambered into the right-field stands.

“Bernie!” I shouted. “Bernie!”

The wind whipped my voice away.

I called Conrad, message went to voice mail. I texted him and Pierre: Bernie was seen scaling the bleachers at Wrigley Field around one a.m. Two guys on her tail, my source a drunk.

Pierre replied as I was trotting along the gangway: I’m coming. Conrad, you will meet me there.

The aisle doors loomed as darker holes against the darkness of the green seats and concrete. I went into the nearest one and turned on my flash again: it was impossible to see inside. In the dark, the place smelled of stale beer and popcorn, of damp concrete.

I stopped every few yards to call her name again. My voice bounced around the concrete columns; the echo was the only reply I got.

It was no warmer inside the cement walls than it had been dangling from the brickwork outside. I swung my arms, slapped my sides, tried to restore circulation to my arms and legs, even if not in my fingers, jogging in a great circle past the closed concession stands, the locked doors in side walls that led to the stadium’s guts. It would take a hundred cops to search this place thoroughly.

Where had Bernie gone? Had she overheard me talking about the scrap of paper in Sebastian’s bag? But even if she had, she wouldn’t have known it meant—possibly meant—a meeting outside Aisle 131.

Fatigue and fear were stirring a great soup in my gut. Because I couldn’t think straight, or think of anything else, I went on down the gangway, following the ramps down to the field box level, toward Aisle 131.

I climbed the short flight of stairs that led to the stands. After being inside in complete darkness, I could make out the field and the seats in the grayer light outside. I held myself completely still, heard nothing, saw nothing move except a few stray pieces of trash.

I went back inside, trying to figure out what place Sebastian might have been meeting someone. Men’s room, smelling thickly of disinfectant layered over urine. I banged open the stall doors but the room was empty. Women’s room, empty as well. The concession stands were locked tight. I pried at the shutters, but not even a ski

There were several side doors, also locked. One door had two industrial mops wedging it shut. I took them out, but the door was locked. Maybe a janitor had been fooling around.

Bernie didn’t have picklocks, and using them was a skill I’d prudently kept to myself. She could not have opened this lock on her own.

I was close to weeping. I needed a plan, a thread to follow, but I had nothing. The men who’d been after her, who had they been, had they found another way in and grabbed her?

I shone the flash around one more time. Light glinted on metal. I knelt and saw an earring in a crack in the concrete just outside the doors with the mops through the handles. I used the edge of my pick to pry it free. A design in red and blue enamel of a flattened C embracing an H, logo of the Canadiens, inlaid in a reddish gold circle.

A chill deeper than the cold of the stadium froze my bones. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think.

You are frightened now, my darling one, and that is as it should be as we prepare to say good-bye. Gabriella’s words floated into my panic-stricken brain, her comfort to me when she told me she was dying. The brave person isn’t the one who feels no fear, but the one who continues to act, even in the middle of fear. I know your brave heart and I know you will not let fear disable you.

My brave heart. Open the damned door, stop whining, start acting.

I knelt in front of the door, flashlight in my mouth so I could use both hands on the picks. The lock was tricky and my frozen fingers kept dropping the picks. When I finally got the last tumbler in place and heaved open the heavy door, it was to see the outsize pipes and cables that ferried water and power through the building.