Brush Back

“Never mind why we did what we did. You wouldn’t understand that kind of loyalty, to family and to shared values. I’m giving you one chance to let me have the original of any other papers that came into your possession.”

“And if I give them to you?”

“Then your friends will survive to say prayers over your grave. If not, all those people, the old man, the dogs, the doctor, the musician, we will eliminate them one by one, and they will die cursing you.”

“Then if I had any papers to give you, I would do so in an instant. I don’t.”

More questions, no answers. More blows, no defense. Time lost meaning, voice lost meaning, body lost feeling.

We ended where we all knew we would, back in the pickup, out onto the docks, the hood on my head, truck driving up an incline, someone tossing me over the side, a smear of dust coming under the hood, choking me. I was on the coal mountain where Jerry Fugher died.

“That’s over with,” the smooth white voice said. “The last of the Warshawskis. They all thought they were too good for this world, and by God, they were.”

“Hey, man, you ain’tcha go

“No need,” Scanlon said. “She’ll choke to death soon enough.”

“You’re making a mistake.” It was Bagby, his voice urgent but somehow supplicating. “You don’t own Rawlings and he won’t let her death go.”

“There’s no evidence, at least not if you do a good scrub-down in your office.” A pause. “Oh, Vince, Vince, don’t tell me you had the hots for her? It wasn’t an act? You ever get inside her pants? Want the boys to bring her back to the loading bay for some action before she dies?”

Bile rose in my throat.

“You’re an asshole, Rory.”

“Hey, I look out for widows and orphans and helpless cousins.”

Feet thudding on concrete, getting more remote. I burrowed hard with my butt, made a ledge in the coke. Shifted buttock to buttock, worked my hands down behind my thighs, bunched forward in a ball, slid my hands up over my legs. I lifted my bound hands to my face and the blood pounded painfully in my fingers. I tried pushing the hood away from my head, but it was buckled behind me. I couldn’t budge it. I stood on quivering legs, fell heavily.

Hands grabbed mine. Some action before I die, you’ll see action before I die. I kicked hard.

“Hey, Vittoria, mio core. Easy does it: I play with these fingers.”

STEALING HOME

I sat on the ground, leaning against Jake’s legs while he unbuckled the hood. When he’d freed me, he helped me down the hill, our feet sliding and sinking to their ankles. I kept coughing up balls of black phlegm and at the bottom, I was hit by such a violent paroxysm that I fell again.

Jake squatted, pulling me to him, stroking my filthy hair. “I was so afraid, mio core, so afraid I wouldn’t be in time.”

The dogs had roused the whole building, he said. He’d run first to my apartment.

“I saw that the door had been broken open, but my brain wouldn’t work. And then I saw them carrying you through the gate, that foul thing on your head. I ran to the alley, but their truck was already rattling away.”

He pulled me closer. “I was afraid if I took time to call the cops, the truck would disappear. I didn’t have any phone numbers, anyway, just nine-one-one, which I called while I was driving.” He’d been frantic, trying to keep an eye on the Bagby truck, trying to explain what was happening to the emergency dispatcher.

“I hung up—I couldn’t talk and follow you, but I thought of Max. He knows everyone. He told me he’d locate your police pals. He tracked down Frank Guzzo, too, and got him to explain the likely places Bagby or Scanlon would take you. Max talked me through the route. He was way better than any GPS.” Jake gave a laugh that bordered on the hysterical.

He helped me back to my feet, waited out another coughing attack.

“So you got to the Bagby office?” I asked. “Where were you?”

“They’d left a window open. I stood under that and recorded it all, but it was agony, listening to—never mind that. I—I wasn’t brave enough to go in after you. Forgive me, Vic, but I just couldn’t do it.”

It was my turn to squeeze his shoulder reassuringly. “You made the right choice. If you’d gone in, you’d have been a hostage; we’d both be dead.”

Conrad roared up just then, six squad cars flashing in his wake.

“Five men in a truck,” Jake said to Conrad when he bounded over, roaring commands through a loudspeaker. “Two first chairs and three pit members. I stood under a window at the Bagby office and recorded their words.”

“Scanlon,” I coughed at Conrad, spitting out a mouthful of coke. “Scanlon and Bagby.”

Conrad sent his squads out to find them. He tried to question me, there on the Guisar slip, under the searchlights he’d turned on, but I couldn’t speak. Wouldn’t speak. Too many questions, too many blows. No more.

“I’m taking the lady home, Rawlings. I’ll e-mail you the recording from my smartphone.”

Jake guided me off the Guisar slip, drove me to Lotty, who’d been warned by Max that I might need reconstructing. She tucked me into her own guest bed. Over the next few days, her doorman and a private nurse kept cops and reporters at bay, even Murray, who thought he was entitled to a front-row seat.

Jake stayed close by. Even later, when I was back on my feet, resuming my workload, there were times when he thought I might have disappeared on him and he’d race to my office to check on me. He started practicing in my big workroom. The acoustics were good, so good that his High Plainsong group began rehearsing there.

“Remember I told you I’d pull you out of the tar pits if you got stuck in them?” he said the day he drove me home from Lotty’s.

“You said you’d use your bass strings,” I reminded him.

“From now on I’ll keep a spare set in the glove compartment,” he promised.

Eventually, of course, I did talk to the cops. According to Conrad’s off-the-record report, Spike had been using his many co

When the SA subpoenaed the diary extracts that Murray had posted online, I handed them over without a murmur. Even if a lab decided they were forgeries, there wasn’t any way to trace them: they had indeed come to me in the mail, with no return address, postmarked from the Loop postal station that saw so much traffic no one could remember one manila envelope. And I had never claimed they were A

The diary Frank had helped Scanlon or Bagby or Spike plant in Stella’s house was also subpoenaed. It turned out as Bernie had been insisting—Stella had given it to Father Cardenal. Having to guard Stella’s secret was probably why Cardenal’s attitude toward me underwent such a major shift.

When I finally got to see the document, I felt a certain satisfaction: Scanlon hadn’t made any effort to get old paper or to disguise the handwriting; the diary was declared fraudulent.

Kenji Aroyawa was ecstatic when two labs—my private one and the State of Illinois’s crime lab—decided my pages were authentic. He and I shared a bottle of champagne while Rafe Zukos sulked downstairs in front of his geese-in-flight painting. Zukos had bitterly opposed Ken “prostituting his art” to help anyone in South Chicago, but Ken had loved creating A

“It’s an art project, Rafe, it’s what art students do—they copy the masters to learn their craft. It takes me back to my own sensei’s studio, copying someone else’s calligraphy—not that poor little A