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  “Oh, thank Christ.” She nods, takes a breath of relief, tears welling up.

  I stand up, open my good arm. “C’mere.”

  She embraces me, dissolves into full-throttle sobbing.

  “I’m sorry, Patti. I’m…sorry.”

  The doctor, his work done and not wanting to be a part of this emotional family reunion, holds up a scrip for me and mouths to me about a follow-up with my own doctor. I nod to him and thank him.

  “I need your help,” I tell Patti when she’s finally calmed down. “Carla took one in the shoulder. I think she’s fine. But that’s two of us, two GSWs.”

  “Two mandatory reports,” she says, wiping her face. “And you want me to be the responding officer.”

  “Yeah. We’ll figure it out tomorrow. We’ll get the paperwork cleaned up—”

  “Fuck the paperwork and tell me what happened.”

  I give her the Reader’s Digest version. The ambush. Two dead, one escaped, only known name is Disco. Sosh putting together a strike team right now.

  “And if I told you that you’re done for the night, Detective, that you have to go home and take it easy? No—that’s what I thought,” she says.

  “Night’s not over,” I say. “Stay here with Viviana. We need a patrol officer to keep her here. She’s gonna need detox, or in a few hours she’s gonna be tearing her skin off.”

  “I’ll make it happen. Where you going?”

  I’m going to see Carla, if she can be seen.

  Takes me a minute, but I find the trauma doc, an Indian woman named Siddiqui. “It’s a clean through-and-through,” she says. “We’ve controlled the bleeding. She won’t need surgery.”

  “I need to see her.”

  “She’ll be groggy. Might be asleep.” The doctor leads me down a hall, pulls on the curtain.

  Carla is upright on the bed, her head lolled to the right, eyes closed. Peaceful. A large bundle of gauze and tape on her shoulder, still the bandage on the side of her face, too. Beaten and battered. But no longer feeling pain.

  She opens her eyes when I walk in. “Hey.”

  “You’re gonna be fine, they say.” I take her hand, squeeze it.

  “You need to know,” she says. “You need to be ready for him.”

  “Okay. You able to do it right now?”

  She nods, faintly.

  “Then go,” I say. “We don’t have time.”

  “You remember a skell named Trino DeJesus?”

  “Trino,” I say. “Ran meth in the south suburbs. The meth king. Worked outta Cal City.”

  She nods.

  “Narcotics took him down about, what, three years ago?” I say. “Huge bust. Wiped out his whole operation.”

  Now I make the connection. She worked undercover in Narcotics.

  “So you worked Trino’s case,” I say. “You were one of the UCs?”

  She allows a smile to play on her face, only briefly. “I was the UC. I was Trino’s girl.”

  “Whoa. You got next to Trino?”

  “Yeah,” she says, “and that’s where it all went to shit.”

  Chapter 100

  IT WAS an unexpected promotion. Carla was undercover as a junkie, cozying up to one of Trino’s lieutenants, whatever scraps of information she could vacuum up. But then Trino, he sees her in a nightclub, takes a shine to her, decides that she belongs to him. Even kills the guy she was seeing, one of his own profitable lieutenants, to make sure her loyalty is undivided.

  So all of a sudden, she’s living with the guy running a twenty-million-dollar meth operation, about as deep as deep undercover gets.

  The good news: she learns a lot.

  The bad news: she’s in role, and if you’re playing a meth junkie, you score meth. That’s old hat for a UC, buying the dope and dumping it, or transferring it to your handler for evidence. You don’t actually take the shit. The department has rules.

  There are rules, and there’s reality. Especially when your boyfriend is supplying the meth, and he’s the protective, jealous type who has eyes on you practically 24-7.

  “I started scoring meth,” she says. “I couldn’t fake it. So next thing I know, the junkie I’m playing? I’m not playing anymore.”

  You hear about UCs working Narcotics ending up with addiction problems themselves. The department feigns sympathy, puts you in rehab, but that sticker goes on your file. You’re damaged goods.

  You get a brick on your career.

  Doesn’t matter you had to take the dope to keep your cover. Doesn’t matter you got inside the operation, a tremendous coup for the department. Doesn’t matter you risked your life every second of every minute of every day, smuggling information out to your people. Doesn’t matter you’re almost single-handedly responsible for taking down one of the most notorious drug empires in the last decade.

  No—if people find out you’re a junkie, you’re radioactive on the job.

  “So what did you do when it was over?” I ask. “After the bust?”

  “I kept using, that’s what I did. I was a cop with a drug habit. Didn’t take long before I was caught. Got me on video, buying it and scoring it.”

  “The feds?”

  “IAB,” she says. “Denny Porter.”

  Porter. Don’t know him. Heard the name, heard some bad things.

  “He gave me two choices. Door number one, I go down. Maybe some time in prison, but either way, I lose my star, my pension, my benefits. But most of all…” She can’t even finish the sentence.

  “Most of all, Samuel,” I say. “And door number two?” As if I don’t know.

  “He puts me to work. Be his eyes and ears. I gotta get well first, though. Three months of rehab, such as it was. Porter arranged it himself.”

  “Sweet of him.”

  “Right, but I’m no good to him with a rehab sticker on my file. So we call it cancer. I take a leave for chemotherapy, come back, and say I’m cured. Porter had a doctor who played ball, signed all the paperwork.” She smirks. “All he really did was transfer my addiction from one thing to another.”

  Ah. Okay. “So those pills you take, they aren’t ginger pills. There’s no cancer or chemotherapy.”

  “No better liar in the world than an addict,” she says. “But I’m clean of meth. I haven’t scored since that rehab. Three years clean.”

  “Good. That’s great.”

  “The pills are dextroamphetamine.”

  “Dex,” I say. Speed. Uppers. Makes sense. You can get addicted, but you’re far more functional than a meth head would ever be.

  “Porter’s my supplier. Even makes them look like ginger pills. Probably uses the same doctor who did the bullshit paperwork. He must have something on that guy.”

  “They help, those pills?”

  “They help with the cravings, yeah,” she says.

  “You still have cravings for meth?”

  She almost laughs. “Harney,” she says, “I crave meth every waking hour of every day. Only now I crave dex, too.”

  “Jesus, kid. Jesus, I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m the one who’s sorry.” She breaks eye contact, blinks away the tears. “Porter’s had his eye on you. He’s been real concerned about your interest in Evie. I was feeding him updates. I didn’t think much of it. I mean, the K-Town shooting was a turf war, right? Evie, she was just collateral damage. That’s what I thought, at least. Until that video from Latham Jackson.”

  The video that made it pretty damn clear that the shooters had nothing to do with warring street gangs.

  “So I went to Porter and called bullshit. I said now it looked like K-Town was all about the dead girl, not a drug war.”

  “And I bet he had an answer,” I say. “Let me guess. I was a corrupt cop.”

  “Fronting for a rival sex-trafficking ring,” she says. “He says he’s this close to busting you and I should steer far away from it. Told me to call in sick. Gave me some money and sent me to a water park in Wisconsin for a long weekend. He said it would all
be over by then.”

  “But you didn’t go.”

  “I pretended to. I drove my mother-in-law and Samuel to Rockford, put them up in a hotel for a few days until I could figure this out.” She lifts her good shoulder. “I didn’t trust Porter. And I trusted you.”

  And she saved my ass. I’m dead on that gymnasium floor if not for her.

  But she fucked herself. She just betrayed Porter. There’s no walking that back.

  “Then we have to take down Porter,” I say.

  She makes a face. “Seems so, yeah.”

  “You don’t sound too happy about that.”

  “You don’t get it, Harney,” she says. “Porter goes down, I lose everything.”

  Chapter 101

  “PORTER HAS me by the short hairs,” Carla says. “We pinch him, he’ll give me up without thinking twice. Probably a lot of people, to get leniency. But me included. He drops that video, I’m toast.”

  “He’s got you on video taking meth one time three years ago? C’mon, Carla, that’s not a great thing, but it’s not the end of the—”

  “No, Harney, you’re not thinking it through. Number one, the moment Porter fingers me, they make me do a urine drop. And now I don’t have Porter protecting me with a fake piss result. I’m positive for dex. So there’ll be a video of me smoking meth and a positive, current drug test for amphetamines. And there were at least a couple times over the years when Porter had someone else deliver me the dex, not him. Some skell who must have been in his pocket. I’ll give you ten to one he recorded those handoffs, too. He’s got those videos tucked away along with the one of me smoking meth.”

  Her head falls back on the pillow. Her secrets, her shame, laid bare. But more important than that, her fear of the consequences.

  “The story will be I’ve been a junkie all along. For years. Oh, he’ll have some story cooked up that paints him as the hero, how he’s been running a larger investigation into drug use by cops or something. He’ll fuck me and cover himself. He plays a long game, believe me. He’s gamed this whole thing out.”

  “We’ll think of something. You might come out of this okay.”

  “Harney.” She says it like, once again, I’m missing something. “It’s not me I’m worried about.”

  Samuel, she means, the reason for the fresh tears forming in her eyes.

  “Even if you do a stretch,” I say, “your mother-in-law can take care of Sam—”

  “My mother-in-law’s illegal,” she says. “They pinch me, DCFS takes a look, they see an undocumented immigrant as his caregiver. She gets deported. His father sure as hell won’t take him. Samuel goes into the system. He goes into a home.”

  Shit. She’s probably right about that.

  “And don’t think I haven’t thought of putting that asshole Porter in the ground,” she says. “I would. For Samuel, I would. But Porter’s too smart for that. He’s told me, more than once, he has an IAB file on me with a copy of that video. Anything happens to him, the next guy up in IAB will just have to pop a disk into a computer and see Detective Carla Griffin, in all her glory, smoking meth in an alley and scoring dex from some gangbanger. Then it’s a mandatory urine drop, and I’m done.” Her eyes close. “I’m fucked. I am.”

  I touch her leg. “Are you telling me to lay off Porter? Try to get this done without touching him?”

  She tries to smile. “I think we’ve passed that point, Detective. I think I passed it when I didn’t go to Wisconsin.”

  “Then why tell me about Porter at all?”

  “Because you need to know,” she says. “You’re going after those traffickers, you’re going after Porter, too. You can’t go in there with one eye closed.”

  I drop down in a chair, the magnitude of what she’s done settling in on me. Carla could’ve taken the easy road. She could’ve done what Porter asked, headed up to Wisconsin, buried her head in the sand, and kept the status quo.

  She risked everything to come back here and save me.

  “I won’t let anything happen to Samuel,” I say. “That’s a promise.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Harney—”

  I take her hand. “That’s a promise.”

  She gives me a look that only a mother could give, full of love, full of fear and concern for her son, fierce and protective and vulnerable all at once. “Don’t say something like that if you—”

  “Look at me.” I bring my face close to hers. “Anything happens to you, I’ll take care of him.”

  She searches my eyes. “You’d…I can’t ask you to do that,” she whispers.

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “You…hardly even know me.”

  “I know enough. I know what you put on the line for me.” I squeeze her hand. “We’re in this together, partner. Okay? Besides, who else is gonna teach that kid to throw a curveball?”

  I’ve seen plenty of women cry over the years, but never like Carla does now, relief and emotion releasing like an avalanche.

  When I reach the waiting room, Patti’s there. “Viviana’s with a patrol officer. They’re treating her.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m going with you,” she says.

  I start to shake my head, think better of it.

  “We do it my way, Patti. Or go home right now.”

  She nods. “We do it your way,” she says.

  Chapter 102

  PATTI DRIVES; I’m the passenger. We race across town.

  I grab my phone to dial Sosh and see a voice mail from half an hour ago; I must have missed it while getting stitched up. The message is from Jay Herlihy, Cook County Corrections.

  “J Crew,” I tell Patti.

  “The asshole who punched me in second grade?”

  “Yeah, and he’s really sorry. Shut up and listen.” I play the message on speakerphone.

  “Hey, bro, those tickets better be center ice. I couldn’t access it externally, so I drove over to Division 9 after my shift. Anyway, you’re right, my friend—your guy Antoine Stonewald had one visitor during that week. It was a lawyer—you’re gonna love this—V-a-s-y-l first name, last name D-i-s-c-o-v-e-t-s-k-y. Got an address and phone, too.

  “Vasyl Discovetsky is his name, player.”

  I write down the phone and address.

  “Want me to head there?” Patti asks.

  “No. Go where we’re going. It’s more important.”

  “More important than finding Disco?”

  I look at her. “Yeah,” I say. “More important than finding Disco.”

  I search my phone for the number for Clara Foster.

  “Special Agent Foster,” I say when she answers. “Billy Harney, Chicago PD. Remember the girl in K-Town? Well, I hope you didn’t have plans tonight, because I’m about to ruin your evening.”

  Chapter 103

  DISCO REACHES the end of the labyrinthine tunnel system and shoves through the flimsy push door into the final building, at the other end of the industrial park. The trip felt like an endless journey. Three times, he dropped to the floor out of sheer agony, propping up his foot to relieve the pressure and the excruciating pain.

  Took over an hour and hurt like hell, but it gave him some time to think.

  A lot of time to think.

  He hops up the short staircase on one foot and reaches ground level. Looks at his phone, which has some cell reception again.

  A single text message pops up, from Porter. A single question mark.

  He removes his night-vision goggles and props the exit door open, welcoming fresh air into his lungs. Looks out over the small parking area.

  All clear. Weapon still out, he hobbles to his car, starts it up, filled with relief that he’s done moving on foot and that he can get distance between him and this industrial park.

  He has to find some way to get a new dressing on his foot, stop the bleeding.

  And get his money. Most of all, the money.

  He sends a text message to Porter:

  We have to meet now

&n
bsp; The reply comes back before he can take a breath. Porter’s been eagerly awaiting Disco’s update, apparently. Success? Fail?

  Disco responds.

  Shit, he writes, then hits Send.

  Abort, he writes, and hits Send.

  Meet now, he writes. Same place. He hits Send.

  The reply comes quickly.

  We can still fix this, Porter tells him. I have a plan.

  You better, Disco writes back. He puts the car in gear and starts driving.

  Chapter 104

  THE BUILDING is on Rockwell, south of 26th Street. Large, two stories, wooden frame, red paint on the front.

  The alley to the side of the building is wide enough for a car, with maybe ten feet to spare. I’ve seen this alley before.

  I saw it in the photos Valerie took and clipped inside Antoine Stonewald’s file a few days before she died.

  A black Lincoln Town Car pulls past the building and stops, backs into the alley, and aligns itself alongside a door on the side of the building. A tall guy, dressed in black, opens the back door of the vehicle.

  On cue, the building’s alley door opens, and a young woman, in a long dress and heels, hair done up high, steps out of the door and into the Town Car.

  Just like in Valerie’s photos.

  “Crime in progress,” I say into my collar. “Let’s do it. Go! That’s a go!”

  A screech of tires, and an unmarked vehicle bounds into the alley, cherry lit up on the dashboard, nose to nose with the town car, before the chauffeur’s even back in the driver’s seat. Patti pulls our car up from the rear, pinning in the town car.

  Officers will be kicking in the front door of the building right now, others taking the rear entrance by force. I’m the first one to the alley door.

  I rush in—“Chicago police!”—and see an older woman, matronly, bright red hair, trying to get away in her flip-flops. I grab her by her shirt and force her down.

  “Any men in here?” I shout. “Any men?”

  “No, no men.”

  “You sure? Anybody gets shot, you take the blame, lady.”

  “No men.”

  “What about Disco? Disco here?”