The Red Book Read online

  I hand Spaulding my card. “The anonymous number’s on there,” I say. “Nobody has to know how I got my information. Nobody knows this conversation even happened. But I need it by tomorrow.”

  “We have video of the shooting, by the way,” Carla says. “So don’t try to pin this thing on Pope Francis or Bozo the Clown.”

  We don’t have video of the vehicle occupants or the shooting itself, only the car. But it’s good improv by Carla. Smart. If Jericho thinks we have faces on video, he can’t just give us some patsy; we’ll get the actual shooters.

  If we get anything at all.

  “I need it by tomorrow,” I say. “Make a good business decision, Jericho.”

  Chapter 19

  DISCO LIGHTS a cigarette while he sits in his car. He had vowed to quit. He hasn’t lit up in three weeks. But all that changed after the call from Augustina at the restaurant, after reading about the death of the four-year-old girl with the pigtails. Now’s not the time.

  There’s never a bad time to quit. Sure, but whoever said that didn’t have the entire Chicago Police Department after him.

  He rubs an eye with his knuckle. He didn’t bother trying to sleep. No chance. Anyway, he needed to be up by three, pick up Nicolas and Trev by three fifteen, stop at the drop-off point, then make it to the location by four, while it’s still dark.

  Out of the apartment building comes Nicolas, long and rangy, a flat nose and dead eyes, his hair buzzed tight, dark circles under his eyes at this hour. Like Disco, Nicolas was recruited out of Berkut, the Ukrainian secret police, mostly covert missions to suppress political opposition, anything from surveillance and intelligence gathering to assassinations and torture. Nicolas came to the States years after Disco, each of them chosen by General Boholyubov, who ran Berkut before it disbanded. Nicolas was especially fond of the Berkut rape rooms, which is probably why Boho brought him here.

  Nobody scares the girls more than Nicolas.

  “How’s Trev?” Disco asks in their native tongue. Disco normally has a rule that they speak English, but that’s another exception he makes under the circumstances.

  “Scared to death,” Nicolas answers, also in Ukrainian. “He watches the news, reads the internet. He thinks we’re all going to prison.”

  Trev could be a problem. Unlike Disco and Nicolas, he’s not Berkut, not someone trained. He came fresh from the army in Ukraine. Physically capable and morally flexible. But lacking fearlessness. Or, more accurately, lacking the ability to harness fear.

  Five minutes later, they pick up Trev—smaller, darker, boyish, though looking worn out, aged well beyond his twenty-six years. “It’s all over TV,” says Trev. “It’s all over the internet.”

  “Then stop watching TV,” Disco replies. “Stop reading the internet.”

  Disco drives up to the northwest side, finds the alley, pulls over to the side of the road. Neither Nicolas nor Trev has ever seen the actual meeting place. Disco likes to keep some things to himself.

  Nor have they ever met Dennis Porter. Nobody will meet his contact in Internal Affairs besides Disco.

  Anyway, Porter won’t be there. This is only a pickup.

  Or at least that’s the plan. You can never be sure. The shooting in K-Town shook up everyone, Porter included. From a strategic standpoint, he can’t see the logic in Porter’s ambushing him here, trying to kill him. But if there’s one thing Disco has learned, it’s that you can never fully understand the motives of your “friends.”

  Disco draws his Ruger and holds it at his side as he approaches the alley. He stops, listens, hears nothing but faint sounds of trains, some birds chirping.

  Disco walks the alley, heads to the same garage, fifth one down. This time, the garage door is down, but it’s not locked, and the automatic opener has been disabled. He raises the door with an abrupt yank and jumps back, crouches, gun aimed inside.

  The space is empty. His adrenaline decelerates.

  In the middle of the garage, on the ceiling, a plastic enclosure covering the controls for the door opener. He uses a ladder, reaches up, lifts the enclosure carefully, and unhooks it from its moorings. With his other hand, he reaches in and pulls down the heavy paper bag.

  He closes the enclosure back up, puts away the ladder, and looks inside the paper bag.

  A SIG Sauer pistol. A suppressor. And a crushed cigarette butt in a plastic bag.

  He breathes a sigh of relief. Porter came through.

  Chapter 20

  THE HOUSE is in Englewood, on Union Avenue south of Marquette, as rough a neighborhood as they come. An A-frame with aluminum siding. On one side an alley, on the other an empty lot where a house once stood. Disco scouted it earlier tonight, after meeting with Porter.

  They decide on the back door. Disco is the expert on locks, having focused more on covert work with Berkut than Nicolas, whose talents for brutality made him better suited to interrogations and torture.

  Behind him, Nicolas and Trev are quiet, tense. Weapons out. Like Disco, each of them wears rubber gloves.

  Disco works the dead bolt open, turns the knob, opens it a crack while keeping hold of the knob, not letting the latch snap back. Listens for an alarm.

  No alarm.

  There’s a chain on the door, though. Disco could kick in the door, as he often would in Ukraine, boldly asserting himself, but this isn’t that kind of moment. You don’t do that in America unless you’re a cop.

  He uses bolt cutters to snap the chain. Stops. Listens. Hears no sounds from the darkness inside.

  Turns and nods to his men.

  He pushes the door open and quickly walks through a small kitchen, the sink filled with dishes. Hears the faint sounds of canned laughter, identifies it as a television, moves toward the sound.

  The bedroom. A man and woman, asleep, illuminated by the television’s light.

  The man is in his twenties, African American, with braids, dyed bright red, tight against his head. The woman is—well, who knows? Who cares?

  The man awakens with a start just as Disco sticks the SIG Sauer, suppressor attached, into his face, grabs a braid, and holds him down.

  “Hello, Junior,” he says, so this man, wide-eyed and terrified, will understand that Disco knows his name, or at least his nickname.

  Nicolas grabs the woman, covers her mouth with a gloved hand, holds her down, looks at Disco expectantly.

  “Where are your car keys, Junior?” Disco asks.

  Junior angles his head to the right, to Disco’s left.

  “Ah, look at this, right on the nightstand.”

  “Let me do it,” Nicolas says in Ukrainian to Disco, holding the woman down. “A few minutes, at least.”

  This is no time for getting your jollies, but as Disco thinks about it, it could help paint the picture. “Go ahead,” he tells Nicolas in Ukrainian. “But keep your pants on. Just use your hands. And keep the gloves on.”

  No DNA, in other words.

  Disco turns on the man, Junior. “If you stay quiet, I will let you live,” he says.

  Junior, sweaty and breathless, nods once.

  Disco stuffs a handkerchief in Junior’s mouth. Then he shoots him in the shoulder, the sound muted by the suppressor, the man’s cries by the cloth in his mouth as he bucks and squirms. Disco shoots him in the other shoulder, all but disabling his upper body.

  Nicolas, with his free hand, lands a solid punch to the woman’s face, the sound of bones crunching, then switches hands, holding down her head with his right hand while yanking down the bedsheet with his left. The woman thrashes about as Nicolas forces his hand between her legs.

  Christmas came early for Nicolas this year. An unexpected bonus.

  “My friend is going to have some fun with your girlfriend,” says Disco. “What do you think about that, Junior?”

  Junior is about to go into shock, his eyes turning glassy while he makes guttural sounds through the handkerchief.

  Disco shoots him in the upper right thigh. Then the other. Junior’s
mouth opens, letting out another scream but then gagging on the handkerchief as it moves toward his throat.

  Trev is standing back, keeping an eye on the scene.

  Nicolas is doing a serviceable job of muting the woman’s screams with his hand, but it’s getting to be too much. They’ve made their point.

  “Enough!” Disco stands up, holds the tip of the SIG’s suppressor against Junior’s head, and puts him out for good.

  “A few more minutes,” Nicolas says, enjoying himself.

  “No.” Disco aims the pistol at the woman. “No.”

  Nicolas steps off the bed, panting like an animal himself, his eyes wild. Disco puts a suppressed bullet through the woman’s temple.

  “Let’s go,” he says. “We have to hurry.”

  Back outside, Disco pulls the paper bag out of his pocket, which still contains the cigarette butt that was left for him. He drops the butt on the back porch. Then they find Junior’s car, an old beater Ford sedan parked in the rear. Disco uses the car keys to pop the trunk. He removes the floorboard and finds the spot where the spare tire would normally be.

  Nicolas, who went to their car, returns now, holding the AR-15 that Disco used in the K-Town shooting. Disco drops the assault rifle in the trunk, replaces the floorboard, closes the lid, returns the car keys to the bedroom.

  Then they get the hell out of there. They drive back to the northwest side of the city in silence. Disco returns to the same alley, to the same garage, places the SIG and the suppressor back in the paper bag, and puts the bag back up in the enclosure of the garage door opener, just where he found it.

  There, he thinks to himself. Porter can take it from here.

  This better be fucking over now.

  Chapter 21

  VALERIE?

  You call out her name, your voice shaky, your throat clogged with emotion. You just kissed your little angelic daughter, your beautiful Janey, for the last time, said your good-bye at the hospital.

  And her mother wasn’t there.

  She’s dealing with it, you tell yourself. Dealing with it in her own way.

  But she couldn’t have been there? She couldn’t have answered your phone calls?

  These thoughts while you climb the steps of your home, calling out her name again.

  Valerie. Valerie.

  Open the bedroom door. Empty. Light’s on in the bathroom.

  Valerie, you whisper.

  You know it, somehow, before you reach the bathroom, before you see her legs. Her body turned awkwardly to the side. Blood spatter on the walls.

  The gun, your service weapon, in her limp hand.

  I draw a gasp of air, my eyes popping open, stinging from sweat. I push myself from the drenched pillow, shivering as I sit up, checking my phone for the time. My alarm was just about to go off anyway, so at least my nightmares have good timing these days.

  I head into the bathroom and turn on the shower, my body reeking from slimy perspiration, my mouth dry as dirt. My heartbeat slowly decelerates, my breathing evens out, as I put my face under the pulsating water and let it wash everything away.

  They’ve been dead for four years. You’ve had four years to get past it.

  And so much has happened since then. I returned to the job; I even fell for another woman; I was almost killed; I stood trial for murder; I unearthed a scandal that took down all kinds of major players. Why am I back to having nightmares about Valerie? I never stopped thinking about her, of course; not one day has passed that I haven’t. But it’s like her death is front and center again for some reason. Why? I’ve got the whole freakin’ city breathing down my neck to solve this murder, and I’m dreaming about Valerie again.

  “Why now?” I whisper. “Why are you back?”

  Chapter 22

  TODAY’S THE day. We’re already well into the twenty-four-hour cease-fire that Andre Oliver promised us. And the protest rally, for which the city is already preparing, is tomorrow.

  Praying that my meeting with Jericho Hooper will bear fruit.

  The sky is a brilliant orange as I drive to the station just before six in the morning, sipping a large black coffee, no more than three hours of sleep under my belt.

  The front pages of the Trib and Sun-Times are all about LaTisha, all about the gang violence, all about the new Special Operations Section, all about how black people have to live in drug-infested, violent neighborhoods, with cops only paying lip service to their problems.

  I don’t know a single cop who doesn’t care about what’s happening on the West Side. We see the victims, and it hurts. We go after the perpetrators and okay, sometimes we go overboard, maybe because we can’t get out of our heads the images of dead children or drugged-up addicts choking on their own vomit. Sometimes we cross lines. We pay for that. Courts throw out evidence. People hold up their smartphones and record us. Then we can’t solve cases, so people stop helping us. They figure, Why should we, if it’s gonna be for nothing? Why stick our necks out, even risk our lives, to bear witness against criminals who aren’t going to be caught anyway?

  The station house is all but empty. SOS isn’t a typical district headquarters with a traditional overnight shift. But Carla is already at her desk. And—what the fuck?—popping something into her mouth.

  I’m just walking in as this happens, as she’s throwing her head back and swallowing. She spots me and clumsily screws the lid back on the bottle and throws the bottle in her work bag in a single fluid motion that is supposed to be casual, nonchalant, no big deal, nothing to see here.

  I say the prayer again: Please don’t give me a pill popper for a partner. Please let that be vitamins or ibuprofen.

  She nods to me. She looks strung out—thin, too thin; dark circles under bloodshot eyes. She looks more likely to vomit than solve a case. But what the hell—she got no more sleep than I did last night, so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed was never on tap for today.

  Whatever. I don’t have time for that right now.

  Sosh and Mat Rodriguez are in by six. We’re meeting with the whole squad in two hours, but I’m reporting to the superintendent and my lieutenant in one hour, and I wanna see what we have so far.

  “Tox screens came back on the victims,” says Rodriguez.

  The dead carrier, Stanley Wilson—Frisk—tested positive for cannabis. So did the presumptive target of the shooting, Dwayne Sears—Shiv. The unidentified dead girl on the porch had heroin in her blood.

  “Stolen 4Runner in Melrose Park’s a dead end so far,” Sosh tells me. “Family that owns it, it’s there when they go to bed, gone when they get up. Melrose Park has shit for POD cameras, at least on the residential streets. We’re still reviewing the ALPRs and the PODs on the Eisenhower.”

  “All right, so where’s Ronnie Lester?” I ask.

  Lester walks in as if on cue. Ronnie’s a UC in the Fifteenth—the Austin neighborhood—in the heart of Nation territory. He must be in his midtwenties at least, if not thirty, but I swear he could pass for a teenager. Short and wiry, his kinky hair sprouting like a fountain off his scalp to his shoulders, a black White Sox jersey and tattered jeans and high-tops. Without the lanyard around his neck holding his star atop a series of gold chains, you’d make him for the Imperial Gangster Nation drug dealer he’s pretending to be.

  “Griffin, shit, I know you.” Ronnie gives Carla a fist bump. The rest of us introduce ourselves.

  “I got five minutes,” he says, not taking a seat. “If you’re lookin’ for word on the shooter, I don’t got it.”

  “Nobody’s talking?” Sosh asks.

  “Shit, everyone’s talkin’. But nobody knows.”

  “Jericho wants K-Town, though,” Carla says. “Right?”

  Lester makes a face, as if she just said the most obvious thing in the world. “Jeri-Curl wants the whole damn city, girl. Probably get it, sooner or later.” He looks over the squad room, new and shiny, so different a workplace from the one he has on a daily basis, on the streets of Austin. “Whatever happened, man, w
e’re gearing up now.”

  We. He’s been undercover a long time. Hard to get out of the role. Better that he doesn’t, in fact. So not they but we.

  “Gearing up for the Hustlers,” I clarify.

  He lifts a shoulder, yes. “Everyone’s puttin’ it on us, so Jericho’s got us preppin’. Shit’s gonna get thick.” He spends two syllables on that last word.

  “Say we catch the shooters,” I say. “What are the odds we get them to talk about Jericho? We got any chance at all?”

  Ronnie smiles at me as if I’m an idiot.

  “So no chance,” I say.

  “You remember Stevie Lewis? Stevie Woo-Woo?” He can tell we don’t. “Kills a Disciple in Harvey. We pick him up, got him dead to rights on the shooting, he says he’s willing to give up Jericho for ordering it. His throat accidentally runs into a knife in county lockup. But Jericho, he don’t stop there. They shoot Stevie’s brother coming out of a liquor store. They tag his face so many times we need DNA to ID him. They find Stevie’s mama, they pull a train on her—okay, sixty-year-old woman—then strangle her and leave her naked corpse in the middle of Augusta Boulevard. And then, in case anyone didn’t get the point, they burn down the motherfucker’s house.”

  So nobody talks.

  Ronnie points to us. “Only way you’re getting those shooters is if Jericho gives them to you.”

  He doesn’t know we’re already working that angle, and I’m not gonna tell him. For his sake.

  “Think he’ll do that?” I ask.

  He shrugs again. “With this heat, could be. Didn’t expect to kill no cute little baby girl.” He looks at his phone. “Gotta move. Don’t think I’ll have anything for you, but if I do, I’ll get word to you.”

  He looks back at Griffin. “SOS, huh?” He makes a fist of congratulations.

  “I’ll walk him out,” she says when he’s halfway to the door. “Maybe he’ll tell me something else.”