Urban Renewal Read online

  “How would I know that?”

  “Come on, Clara. You recognized my voice on the phone. You knew I’d be somewhere around here tonight. And you caught my voice again after you got off that bus.”

  The woman’s hand slid into the pocket of her coat. Stayed there.

  “Lots of people can do voices,” she said.

  “Big Luke always said you were a hard woman.”

  The woman blinked rapidly, tears very near the surface. But her hand stayed deep in her pocket.

  “Even when you were a little girl, he told me. One night, we were talking. Just before we went in. Talking to kill the fear, you know what I mean? He told me about your pink party dress—about how you wore it to church one day and people were whispering behind their hands about it. How you just stared them down, backed them away, all their fake-Christian nastiness. He said he knew he wanted to marry you right then.”

  The woman took her hand from her pocket, walked over, and sat down next to the bum. Her nose told her the truth—whatever the man was, he was no wino.

  “I still miss that man,” she whispered.

  “He knows. He knows what you’re doing, how good a mother you are to the girls. What sacrifices you make for them.”

  “You believe that? You truly do?”

  “I do. He’s watching,” Cross said, thinking, Somebody sure as hell is, as he felt the burning sensation high on his right cheekbone.

  “I feel that, too, sometimes. That’s why I never even thought about …”

  “I know.”

  “I know things, too, Cross. I know about you. Things I hear. Who’s watching you, then?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “You might be close to the truth with that, Cross.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I have all his letters. From over there. I read them, all the time. Read some of them to the girls. He wrote to them, too, you know. Separate letters he wrote, even though they’re twins. Like he knew they would be different. I was pregnant when he went over. He never saw them.”

  “He sees them now, Clara. Sees you, too. Days at the Motor Vehicle Bureau, nights at the hospital. No vacations. No fancy clothes. Every penny for the girls.”

  “I keep them safe, Cross. It’s hard lines here. Even the gang-bangers have walked away from the projects now—what’s left of them, anyway—but I can’t pass up the rent. I been tempted. Many, many times. But there’ll never be a man for me—I’m waiting on Big Luke, and we’ll be together again soon enough. But having a man for … protection, you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I go it alone.”

  “You want to move out, yes, Clara? Out of here. To a safe place.”

  “That’s what I’ve been saving for. But the girls go to school, that comes first. That’s our way. Me and Luke’s, I always tell them. You finish college, make something of yourselves, then you go out and earn some money, buy your Mama a little house someplace.”

  “It’s time now, Clara. As you sow, so shall you reap.”

  “The Word of the Lord? Cross, that’s blasphemy in your mouth. I told you, I know what you do. Some of it, anyway.”

  “Same thing I did over there. With Big Luke.”

  “My man died serving his country,” she said, head back, eyes flashing. “I knew he wasn’t gonna get no medals for it. He wasn’t still in the army, but …”

  “It was just another war,” Cross said, lighting a cigarette. “And I never had a country to serve.”

  The woman made a face. “I don’t allow cigarettes in my house. Not liquor, either.”

  The man snapped the cigarette away without taking a drag.

  “It’s time for that house, Clara.” He reached into his voluminous coat, took out an envelope, handed it to her. “There’s a piece of paper in there along with the money,” he said. “It’s got names, photos, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, copies of signatures. They’re all going to have to renew their licenses within the next few weeks. All you have to do is make sure each one gets registered as an organ donor.”

  “Why do you …?”

  “You don’t want to know, Clara. You worked your whole life, now harvest time is coming. The crops are ready to come in. Take the money, buy your house. There’s enough there. More than enough. I’m just planting my own seeds, that’s all.”

  “Couple of Luke’s letters, he talked about you, too. He said you didn’t care if you lived or you died.”

  “He told you the truth.”

  “And he cared so much. He had so much to come back to. You didn’t care. But you came back and he didn’t. Why is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She reached over, took the envelope, put it in her pocketbook.

  “Goodbye, Clara.”

  “Goodbye, Cross.”

  “HE’S ON the top of the list,” the white-coated intern said into the pay phone in the basement of the hospital.

  “You’re sure.”

  “No doubt about it. He gets the next one.”

  “Kiss your student loan goodbye,” a voice told him.

  A PHONE rang in the living room of a modest home in Merrillville, Indiana. It was snatched on the first ring by a pretty woman whose face showed the etched lines of living with death hovering just below the ceiling of her home.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s time,” a voice said. “You remember where to meet?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman put down the phone. “Lois, come in here,” she called.

  A teenage girl walked into the living room, a paint-daubed artist’s smock covering her to her knees.

  “What is it, Mom? Did they find …?”

  “Not yet, darling. I have to go out for a while. You watch your little brother. And say a prayer, okay?”

  The girl nodded. Stood patiently for her mother’s kiss.

  The woman drove quickly to the parking lot of a local diner. She pulled into an empty slot in the back and started to roll down her window. Before it was all the way down, she saw a man detach himself from a motorcycle and start toward her.

  He approached, leaned against the car, his face hidden from her eyes.

  “He’s on the top of the list,” the man said.

  “We waited so long.”

  “You sure you want to go through with this? It’s expensive. And they might find a donor on their own. Maybe in a real short time.”

  “He doesn’t have time,” the woman said. “What good’s a house if one room will always be empty?”

  THE MAN was so old that even his expensive cologne couldn’t mask the stench of the impatient grave. A silk suit hung limply on his wasted frame. A two-carat blue-white perfect solitaire flickered in the neon light, sliding down his bony finger toward the knuckle as his palsied hand trembled.

  The black stretch limo was parked in an alley behind the bar, the old man seated in the cavernous back seat. Bodyguards flanked the limo, standing outside.

  The chauffeur’s partition was closed.

  The door opened, and a man climbed inside and seated himself across from the living skeleton. One of the bodyguards closed the door behind him; it made a noise like a bank vault.

  The two inhabitants of the back seat sat in silence, both waiting.

  “You are very good,” the old man finally said, his voice a reedy imitation of a human’s. “You have patience. Respect. The old ways. Too bad you were never one of us.”

  “There aren’t enough of you left,” the other man said.

  “Yeah, that’s true. Less of us all the time. This … thing you got to do, it ain’t for me. Rocco, he couldn’t take me down. Too many buffers. But I got people I got to protect.

  “ ‘The Accountant,’ he calls himself. Like he knows it all. But he don’t know. The big thing he don’t know is that we do. The indictment is sealed, but we got a little peek inside. He turned. Rolled over like the cowardly dog he is. Figures he’ll take a couple a years in a Level One, play so
me tennis, come out, and start over.”

  The other man stayed silent.

  “You got everything you need?”

  “Rocco Bernardi.”

  “Then it’s done, Cross?”

  “We got two things left, then it’s done.”

  “Here’s one,” said the old man, handing over a thick envelope.

  “Watch the news,” Cross said, stepping out of the limo into the night.

  A PHONE buzzed in the guard booth at the gates to a mini-mansion in the lush suburb of Winnetka.

  “Front gate, Anthony speaking,” a smartly uniformed man answered.

  “Have Bert bring the coupe around to the front.”

  “Yes, sir,” Anthony answered, nodding over to another uniformed man, next to him in the booth. “Right away.”

  The other man took a holster and cartridge belt from a hook, strapped it on, and walked across the manicured, floodlit lawn to a four-car garage. He pressed a transmitter on his belt and the garage door rose. The interior was as brightly lit as an operating room.

  The man opened the door of an anthracite-black Bentley Continental GT, its flanks gleaming under endless coats of carnauba. He started the car and sat patiently, listening to the muted purr of power. Then he slowly backed out to the circular driveway in front of a white brick two-story house and vacated the driver’s seat, leaving the door open.

  A man came down the steps to the car, moving with an air of moderate caution. He was dressed in a conservative midnight-blue suit. His brilliant white shirt set off a red-and-blue tie in a tiny diamond pattern that rippled in the glare of the floodlights.

  “Everything okay?” the man asked.

  “All quiet, Mr. Bernardi,” the guard said, touching his cap with two fingers. He maintained his position even as the Bentley shot away, firing a barrage of marble chips from the driveway at his ankles.

  The big coupe turned at the next corner, heading for Chicago’s downtown, the Loop. Its driver punched a single button on the cellular phone in the console between the bucket seats, and lit a cigarette while the phone rang through the speaker system.

  “Hello …?”

  “It’s me. I’m on my way.”

  “Oh, good, honey. I was wondering when—”

  “Don’t wonder, bitch. That’s not your job. I’ll be there in an hour, tops.”

  “I’ll be waiting, honey. I—”

  The man who called himself “The Accountant” broke the connection.

  As the Bentley rolled onto a winding stretch of road, a young woman in a wheelchair watched from a darkened room lit only by the sickly amber glow of a computer screen. She lifted a pair of infrared night glasses to her eyes, touched the zoom, zeroed in on the license plate: “ACCT 1.”

  The young woman dropped the night glasses to her lap, wheeled herself over to the computer. A few lightning-fast keystrokes opened a small window in the upper left corner of the screen.

  “?” appeared in the window.

  Her fingers tapped keys; “Rolling” appeared on her screen. She hit another key and the screen went blank. One more keystroke and her hard drive began reformatting. She immediately turned to a new computer and booted it into life.

  In an office on a high floor of the Sears Tower, a man turned from another computer screen and picked up a telephone.

  In an after-hours joint on the West Side, Ace felt a vibration in his shirt pocket. He took out a small box and glanced at its liquid-crystal display. The blade-thin killer walked through the club, into a back room where a man was watching television. He turned from the screen at Ace’s approach, waiting. When Ace nodded, the man got up and walked out the back door.

  A city ambulance was cruising the Dan Ryan Expressway. A round-faced Hispanic woman was driving, her hair spilling out from under her cap. A lanky white man with a prominent Adam’s apple was in the passenger seat. Their radio was quiet. A b-r-r-r-ing sound filled the cab. The lanky man took a mobile phone from his shirt pocket and flipped it open. He didn’t speak.

  “Alert,” the phone said into his ear.

  The lanky man nodded at his partner.

  “TELL CACASO he has a deal,” the man in the Bentley was saying into his cellular phone just as the door to the truck bay of an abandoned warehouse at the edge of the Badlands slid up.

  A car flowed out into the night—an anonymous citycamoed sedan that no one was ever sure they had actually just seen. A pudgy man was at the wheel, guiding the massive vehicle delicately with his fingertips.

  “I got him on the scanner,” Cross said from the passenger seat. “Probably the federales do, too—they like to keep track of their assets.”

  Buddha said nothing, piloting the Shark Car through the Warehouse District on the Near South Side, heading toward the Loop.

  Cross pulled a burner cell from a shoulder holster, hit a number.

  “How close?” he asked.

  “He’s on the Drive,” a voice came back. “Maybe ten minutes. Fifteen tops.”

  Cross pushed another button on the cell phone, waited for the telltale hiss of acid being released, and tossed it out the window.

  “He’s going to his girlfriend’s, Buddha. So they’ll have a couple of his boys out front, to cover him. It has to be on the turn-in, okay?”

  “Sure, boss.”

  The Bentley kept well within the speed limit. The driver talked on his phone, making deals with his mouth. And making plans in his head. The sleek custom-painted car turned off Lake Shore Drive, heading to the Gold Coast apartment where his mistress waited.

  “He’s about two kliks away now, Buddha. Stay sharp.”

  The pudgy man made no acknowledgment.

  Cross hit a number on another phone. In the cab of the ambulance, the lanky man didn’t speak, just listened:

  “Going down” was all he heard.

  “Hit it!” the lanky man told his partner. As she stepped on the gas, he picked up his radio.

  “We’re going out of service for a personal. Fifteen minutes; acknowledge.”

  “You’re clear,” came back the dispatcher’s voice.

  “Let’s hit the Gold Coast, Zee,” he said. “There’s a little Afghan joint not far from there I want to try.”

  “Remind you of old times?” The woman smiled.

  The Bentley motored along, its smug driver never noticing the anonymous Shark Car moving in from a side street.

  “Got him?” Cross asked.

  “Locked,” Buddha said, focusing.

  “Harvest time,” Cross said, adjusting his shoulder belt.

  As the Bentley slowed down for the corner, the Shark Car took it broadside, knocking the heavy coupe into a line of parked vehicles at the curb. Cross slid from the car, looking dazed, his hands empty.

  Bernardi bounced from his coupe, unhurt. And angry. As Cross approached, the informer’s fists were balled, and his face was a mottled pattern of red and white.

  “You stupid hillbilly sonofabitch! Look at my car.”

  “I’m … sorry, man,” Cross muttered. “Look, I got insurance. Really. See.…”

  Cross reached into the pocket of his coat. The sneer vanished from Bernardi’s face as the silenced semi-auto came up. The first shot took away the bridge of his nose. Cross walked over, cranked off two more rounds into the man’s head, one in each eye. The Shark Car was off the block before the doorman at the fancy building a block away had finished dialing 911.

  “DAMN! You hear that, Zee?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go!”

  Less than a minute later, the lanky man was back on the phone.

  “We’re coming in, got one down.”

  “Trauma team?”

  “You can try, but there’s no way he’s gonna make it, looks real bad. But his license says he’s an organ donor. May not be too late to … you know, with all head wounds. We’ve got him iced down—maybe they can save something.”

  “You’re clear to fly, come on.”

  “ETA under two minutes.”

 
The ambulance piled into the hospital lot. The body was wheeled out on a stretcher, rushed straight into the OR. Then the surgeons went to work.

  THE PHONE rang in the woman’s home in Merrillville.

  “Mrs. Layne?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please come right away. A casualty just arrived, too late to save him. But he was an organ donor, and his heart’s in perfect condition. We’ve done the blood-typing, and it appears to be an ideal match. We’ve already started surgery on your husband.”

  “It’s the miracle!” the woman cried out, as if she had known it would come.

  “CLARA TOOK the money?” Ace asked, just the barest whiff of suspicion in his tone.

  “Sure. I told her it was Big Luke’s. Money he gave me to hold, a long time ago.”

  “Well, he did that, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We spent that money. And a lot more. All on those punks we paid to keep Clara’s place safe.”

  “That’s right.”

  “No way you were holding that much, bro. I don’t know what else Big Luke was into, but—”

  “Pretty close,” Cross admitted. “But, yeah, it was running low.”

  “So where’d the money for Clara to buy that house come from?”

  “I invested what was left.”

  “Sounds like you bet on a long shot.”

  “Yeah. Just like when Buddha goes drag racing.”

  “THAT IS your calling card, is it not?” The speaker was sitting in partial shadow. His shape was slender, his voice transcontinental.

  “Calling card?”

  “Your—I am not sure how to say this—perhaps, your ‘motto’?”

  “I still don’t see—”

  “One shot, one kill.”

  “You mean, is that what people said about me?”

  “If you will.”

  “It’s what I was known for, but my name was never put out there.”

  “There?”

  “In the World.”

  “We are not … ah, pardon me. Let me summarize, then. If you will, you had a certain reputation of … military service, but that reputation was only among your comrades. Certainly not … publicized, am I correct?”

  “Pretty much,” a medium-sized man with heavily muscled forearms answered. The iris of his left eye was a very slim circle of a blue so pale it was almost white, making its light-gathering black pupil appear greatly enlarged. “Only, how do you know anything like that? You’re not—”