The Red Book Read online

  “My name is Peter Dobrescu. I am the director.”

  “The director of what?”

  “I am the director of the…facility.” He says the name in Romanian, then realizes I won’t understand it. “Timi’s Children,” he says. “We are…orphanage.”

  “An orphanage?”

  Right—that would fit. Evie could have come from an orphanage.

  “I am trying to identify a young woman who died,” I say slowly. “I am wondering if she came from your orphanage.”

  “When was she here?”

  I don’t know. But I can’t imagine the traffickers raised Evie from childhood. They brought her over probably, what, a few years ago? I give him my best guess.

  “You have her name? Photograph?”

  “All I know,” I say, “is I believe her first name was Evie. And yes, I have photographs.”

  He tells me to email him. He gives me the address.

  Good; this is good. The universe is getting smaller.

  “The Jane Doe? She came from an orphanage?”

  I look up, turn. Carla is at her desk, her bag over her shoulder. I didn’t notice her come in. And Carla, it seems, didn’t so much as place down her bag, not wanting to interrupt me.

  She must have seen me on the phone and wanted to know what I was doing. She came around behind me quietly, while I—dumb shit that I am—was focusing on communicating overseas with a guy who was finally leading me somewhere.

  I have to be more careful. SOS detectives don’t have strict hours. We work our cases when we work our cases. Carla’s earlier than usual, here before eight, but I should have had my eyes open, prepared for that. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

  “Oh, it sounds like a dead end,” I say, a lame attempt to downplay the whole thing.

  “What do you got so far?” She drops her bag and looks over at my desk. It’s all I can do not to cover it up, which of course would give away how much I don’t want her to know what I’m doing.

  Especially if Patti’s right and Carla’s got eyes on me.

  What can I do? I have a phone charger strung across my desk that’s connected to a cell phone with an evidence tag, plus a pad full of notes.

  “I’ll help you,” she says. “You’re right; we should ID her.”

  “Yeah. I’m just doing it in my spare time. Not a high priority.”

  She gives me a look. I’m forcing this. I’m obviously making this a priority.

  And now she’s volunteered to help.

  “Hey, we’re on for the canvass this morning.” Soscia, walking in, changing the subject. “We execute the warrant tonight.”

  A case Soscia’s been working up. We agreed to help.

  “Right, right, right,” I say.

  When all I want to say is shit, shit, shit.

  Chapter 64

  “BEEN WORKING this for a month,” Sosh says from the front seat. Rodriguez is driving. Mat’s no fool. People who’ve been in a car driven by Lanny Soscia usually volunteer to take the wheel for their own safety. Sosh considers stop signs, traffic lanes, and red lights purely optional, and he has the attention span of a toddler. There are crash-test dummies that have been involved in fewer collisions.

  This is Pred turf, the southwest side, Little Village. Los Depredadores Latinos, the Latin Predators, got their name from a press conference Mayor Daley—Richie, not his old man—once held in Pilsen, talking about street gangs preying on our youth. They apparently decided to take it as a compliment.

  We drive along 26th Street, where we won’t stand out among the heavy traffic, passing colorful murals on brick walls, panaderías and Mexican grocery stores, pushcart vendors selling fruity ice cream or corn dipped in butter.

  “I could eat,” Sosh says. That’s a headline right there—Sosh is hungry.

  Carla, seated behind Sosh and next to me, elbows me and gestures out the window. “That laundry,” she says, pointing to a store with a large green awning bearing the word lavandería. “My grandfather used to own that.”

  “No shit?” I say. Other than having met her son, Samuel, and knowing that she’s not married, I don’t know a lot about Carla. Does having a grandfather in Little Village mean she’s Mexican? My money says she’s biracial, but Sosh thinks she’s PR, a hundred percent. Neither of us has the stones to ask her. “You grow up here?”

  “I moved around. Spent some time by Marshall Square after my parents got divorced.”

  Rodriguez says something to her in Spanish, so quickly I couldn’t make it out, and she returns the volley even more quickly, fluently. They laugh.

  So that probably confirms the Latina part. Most cops know some Spanish—I do—but she speaks it like she’s been speaking it her whole life.

  “Hey, no habloing languages I don’t understand,” says Sosh.

  “That rules out English,” I say. I turn to Carla. “Bilingual?” Hoping it might give me some further insight, that she might elaborate.

  “Tri, actually,” she says. “French, too.”

  French? That muddies things. “I can go as far as un, deux, trois,” I say.

  “Okay, here we go.” Rodriguez hangs a right, and we’re in a residential neighborhood now, a large park to our left, brick tenements to our right. Rodriguez takes a left around the other side of the park. “It’s on the next corner,” he says. “The yellow brick.”

  He’s not gonna pass it. Too noticeable. But Mat pauses the ride for a bit at the stop sign so we can scope it out. Nondescript, just a brick three-flat, an alley behind it. On the front stoop, there’s a teenager in long shorts and a T-shirt, wearing an orange bandanna, looking at his phone.

  “That’s lookout number one,” says Sosh. “Unarmed.”

  “Where’s number two?” I ask. We drive away.

  “Rooftop,” says Carla. I look at her. We haven’t worked this case. We’re just assisting on the execution of the search warrant.

  “Don’t look so surprised, Harney. I cut my teeth in Narcotics.”

  That much I did know about Carla—several years in Narcotics, some undercover.

  “She’s right,” says Rodriguez. “Rooftop. He’s not up there now, because the shipment isn’t here. It will be tonight. We don’t have aerial, but we think he has a twelve-gauge or a Tec-9 up there. We’ve seen both.”

  “He probably has both,” says Sosh.

  “What about rear entry?” Carla asks.

  “None,” Sosh says. “Well, not really. There’s one back door you can only open from the inside. Steel-reinforced, looks like. Our intel says it’s got an alarm on it. But anyway, the Preds parallel park a truck right up against it. That truck only moves when the shipments come. They take the H in through the back door, park the truck back against it, and set the alarm.”

  “We can’t cut the alarm, either,” Rodriguez adds. “Not without it tripping a detector. We might as well call them up and tell them we’re coming.”

  “Roof entry?” I ask.

  “Nope. Only way to the roof is the rear fire escape.”

  “Only way in this place,” says Sosh, “is the front door.”

  “That sounds like fun,” I say. “You have diversion?”

  “We got two diversions,” says Sosh. “We’ve been running a UC past the place every evening for three weeks. She’s from the Fifteenth. She walks some little dog right after eight thirty and stops and flirts. You gotta see this filly in her halter top and tight little shorts.”

  Carla rolls her eyes. She gets it, but still.

  “And the other diversion?” I ask, to change the subject.

  “Tonight,” says Rodriguez, “they’ll be shooting off fireworks in the park at eight thirty. Some spring-fling party or something.”

  Which explains why we’re doing this tonight.

  So Carla and I will take out the rooftop lookout while the undercover subdues the kid on the porch. Once the lookouts are out of the picture, the patrols can roll in with the wagon, and Sosh and Rodriguez will lead twenty cops up to the third floor to me
et our friendly neighborhood heroin traffickers.

  Mat’s right about fireworks. We don’t get this just right, there’s going to be plenty of them.

  Chapter 65

  THE PATROL officers are in full go mode—helmets and vests, handguns and rifles. Sosh gives them a pep talk outside the wagon, then shuts them inside.

  “It’s humid as shit out here,” Carla mumbles, adjusting her vest, checking her piece.

  “You good to go on this?” I say to her under my breath, away from the others, only for her ears. My mother had chemo before she died, and it sucked the life out of her. But she was almost twice Carla’s age. Carla looks basically okay, if heavy eyes and a drawn expression count as okay. It’s how she looks all the time.

  She makes a face. “We’re not going to do this every day, are we? Just assume I’m fine unless I tell you I’m not. Don’t make me sorry I told you.”

  “Right, got it. I won’t bring it up again.”

  She holsters her weapon, and we jump in our car.

  Eight twenty-five. The sun has fallen, and it’s near blackness where Carla and I stand in the alley down from the house’s rear parking lot. I see the UC pass by, walking the dog she’s been walking every night. Even from a distance, I see what Sosh means. Long legs, denim shorts so small they look like underwear, a halter top. That lookout on the front porch is gonna have plenty to occupy his attention.

  So is the guy on the roof, if we have any luck here.

  “UC’s in place,” Sosh buzzes in my ear. “The rooftop is checking her out.”

  “We’re going,” I say.

  “Green means we’re good. Orange means we’re fucked.”

  Orange being the Predators’ color.

  Carla and I move down the alley, staying close to the wall, out of view of the rooftop for as long as possible. Carla has jumped in front of me. We didn’t really talk about an order. Maybe she feels like she has something to prove.

  We stop at the clearing into the parking area behind the building. Peek out. Sure enough, a blue truck is parked sideways across the rear door. Up at the roof level, there’s nobody looking down. We just have to get to the fire escape unseen.

  I hear the man’s voice, up on the roof, calling down, not catching every word but hearing chiquita, which tells me he’s shouting to our undercover, flirting with her.

  Carla and I run on our toes to the fire escape.

  We freeze when we hear two quick pops, look at each other until we’re sure it was the start of the fireworks, not gunfire. The noise will cover us, but still, we gotta be quiet as mice climbing this fire escape.

  And quick, too.

  “Ready?” she whispers.

  I nod to her. “Don’t forget the First Commandment.”

  Thou shalt not get dead.

  I try to move past Carla, but she whispers “Ladies first” and flies up the first set of stairs, again on her toes. She’s lighter and nimbler than I am, and it’s all I can do to keep up without pounding the stairs and risking announcing our presence.

  We’re both out of gas after a quick climb up three stories, but the adrenaline is boosting us like a drug. More pops from the fireworks in the park across the street, plus the guy on the rooftop shouting something I can’t make out.

  The pounding of my pulse drowning out much of the sound.

  Carla climbs up the final half set of stairs, crouched low. Looks at me below her, nods. Peeks up over the roof’s concrete abutment, pops back down. Nods to me again. It’s clear. He’s not looking our way.

  More pops from more fireworks.

  Carla pulls out her sidearm, peeks back up, then hauls her leg over the concrete abutment and disappears from my view onto the roof. A nice fluid movement, better than I could manage.

  As I bound up the stairs to follow her, gun drawn, I hear a loud thump—

  “Motherfuck! Loco, loco!” a man’s voice cries.

  And I know everything’s gone to shit.

  Chapter 66

  “ORANGE ON the roof! Orange!” I yell as I raise my head and Glock over the concrete abutment. From the other end of the roof, the lookout is running toward me, a Tec-9 in one hand, a phone in the other, trying to dial, trying to tip off his colleagues inside. When he sees me, he drops the phone and stops, using his second hand to brace the extended magazine of his semiautomatic pistol.

  I put two bullets in his chest, center mass, putting him down as a spray of gunfire from his weapon shoots upward at the sky. Then I hike a leg up and jump over the embankment, a fall of a good five feet, more than I’d expected. I land hard, a sharp pain in my shoulder, but bounce up and pivot behind me.

  In my ear: “Unit 4 to the roof! All other units, we are green! We are green! We are green!”

  In front of me: the end of a struggle between Carla and another lookout—a second one on the roof, one we didn’t fucking expect. The man, bodybuilder huge, a meaty bicep wrapped around Carla’s neck, lifting her off her feet, a gun planted against her temple. Carla half dazed, a bloody gash on her left cheek, blood streaked down her face.

  “Drop it!” I shout, getting to a standing position. “You got nowhere to go!”

  “Drop the gun or I kill her, poli!” He’s scared, his eyes searching around, realizing there is no way off this roof other than the fire escape by my position. Scared and cornered, in this situation, isn’t good.

  And I don’t know whether this guy’s clean or hyped up on something. Too dark to get a good look at his eyes.

  Best move he could make: shoot me, knowing how hard it would be for me to return fire with Carla in the way.

  I have a head shot, though. He’s taller than Carla by a foot. Am I confident enough in my shot in the half darkness?

  My pulse rocking so hard, the pop-pop-pop from the fireworks lighting up the sky, adding just enough light for me to see his face for a second, scared and scary, and Carla trying to squirm, the intensity in her eyes.

  “Drop your fuckin’ gun or I’ll do her!” he spits.

  “There’s no way off this roof!” I yell. “Look around you. Where you gonna go?”

  “You want me to do this bitch? Huh! You want me to?”

  Below us, the squeal of brakes, flashing of police lights. If he thought he was trapped before, now he knows it for sure. He’s not getting off this roof. He could surrender or he could go out shooting.

  Surrender. Give it up.

  He looks over the roof down at the parking lot, panicking, his gun wavering off Carla’s temple—

  Carla’s left hand flies up, pushing his forearm, moving the gun away from her head. His gun goes off, a flash, a bullet whizzing past me.

  I fire once, twice, blowing off the top of his head.

  Chapter 67

  THE EMT closes the back door. The ambulance takes off.

  Carla’s on the bed but sitting up, holding gauze to her face, though it’s been taped on. They’ll stitch her up at Stroger, which is where we’re heading.

  “How ya doin’?” I say.

  She closes her eyes, angles her head. “Throat hurts more than my face.”

  We roll along, the siren blaring, slowing at times but never stopping.

  “Something for the pain,” says the EMT, holding a needle.

  “No,” says Carla. “No painkillers.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  Maybe it’s a thing with the cancer medication, some worry about drug interaction. Or maybe she’s trying to be tough. If it were me, I’d take all the Demerol they’d give me.

  “Sosh says sixteen arrested,” I say. “Over eight kilos. About six hundred thousand in cash on hand.”

  “Sosh said only one lookout on the roof, too.”

  Apparently, when Carla looked over the embankment, she saw only the one lookout, as promised, standing at the opposite end of the roof, gawking at our eye-candy undercover down on the sidewalk. What she couldn’t see, and what we weren’t told, is that a second guy was sitting against the back
embankment. She all but fell on top of him when she jumped over, and he skulled her with his Ruger, opening a huge, gushing wound on her cheek and nearly knocking her unconscious.

  I’m impressed she held him off at all, keeping him from shooting her, wrestling with a guy who could bench-press four of her, all while suffering a concussion.

  “That guy was gonna do me,” she says, her chest suddenly heaving. “Holy fuck, I thought I was gonna die.”

  “It’s okay; it’s okay.” I pat her leg. “Relax. We had a happy ending.”

  Is she right? Hard to say. That guy wasn’t getting off that roof. He had to know that. Would he have given up, dropped the weapon? A lot of people would in that situation. But I didn’t give him that opportunity. Carla took her chance to knock away the gun from her temple, and I didn’t hesitate to fire. It’ll be righteous on review, I’m sure, especially because his weapon discharged in my direction, but I’ll always wonder if I could’ve talked him down.

  “No maybe about it, Harney.” Her momentary panic attack subsiding. “I couldn’t breathe. He cut off my oxygen. He had me off the ground. That arm of his was like a noose to me. I had maybe thirty seconds.”

  “I didn’t know. Couldn’t see well enough.”

  Her hand flails out toward me. At first I don’t get it, I don’t understand, like she’s trying to signal me or something.

  Then I realize. I reach for her hand. She holds mine tight.

  I look at her. Her eyes misty. Her lips trembling.

  “Kept thinking of…”

  “Samuel,” I finish.

  “Who’d take care of him, if I died.”

  I thought she’d mentioned something about a grandmother. “Not his father?”

  She makes a noise, not a pleasant one. “Not the child-raising type.”

  “Right.”

  “He’s an asshole,” she says. “Can’t have a single thought for anyone but himself. Presents on Samuel’s birthday if he remembers. Sometimes Christmas. He wouldn’t take him. He wouldn’t. I know he wouldn’t.”

  “Well—”

  “His mother, my mother-in-law, or ex, I guess—she stays with us. But she’s seventy-nine. If I went down…”