Sara Paretsky - Burn Marks

Not until I had typed up the report and sent it across the Loop by messenger did I break for lunch. By then hunger had given me a nagging headache, although I felt better mentally for being able to cross a major task off my time chart.

I went to a vegetarian café around the corner for soup and a bowl of yogurt. That took care of the hunger, but my headache grew more intense. I tried ignoring it, tried to make myself think about Luis Schmidt and his anger at my visit to the Ryan construction site. My head hurt too much for logic. When I retrieved the Chevy from the underground garage, I wanted just to drive home and go back to bed, but all the time I’d wasted lately was still haunting me. I slogged north to Saul Seligman’s house.

He wasn’t happy to see me. Nor did he want to let me have pictures of his children. It took every ounce of energy I had to keep being gentle and persuasive through the blinding pain thudding in front of my eyes.

“In your place I’d be angry too. You have a right to expect service for the premiums you pay. Unfortunately, there are just too many dishonest people out there and the good guys get stuck as a result.”

We went on like that for forty-five minutes. Finally Seligman made an angry gesture. He moved to a massive secretary in one corner and opened its rollaway top. A pile of papers cascaded to the floor. He ignored those and pawed through a drawer behind the remaining papers until he found a couple of photos.

“I suppose you’d stay here until dawn if I didn’t give you these. I want a receipt. Then go, leave me alone. Don’t come back unless you’re telling me you’ve cleared my name.”

The pictures were both group shots, taken at some kind of family party. His daughters stood in the middle, on either side of his wife, while Rita Donnelly and two other young women flanked them. Those two were presumably her daughters, but I didn’t much care at this point-I was having too much trouble seeing.

I pulled a small memo pad from my bag to write out the date and a description of the pictures for Seligman. The letters danced around the page as I wrote; I wasn’t sure my note made sense. Seligman stuck it in the secretary, rolled the top back down, and hustled me out the door.

I drove home more by luck than skill. By the time I got there I was shivering and sweating. I managed somehow to make it upstairs to my bathroom before being sick. I felt a little better after that, but crept off to bed, putting on a heavy sweatshirt and socks before crawling under the blankets. As I got warm my tense neck and arm muscles relaxed and I drifted into a deep, drugged sleep.

The ringing phone brought me slowly back to life. I was buried so far down in sleep that it took some time to connect the noise with something outside me. After a long spell of weaving the ringing in with my dreams, my mind finally swam lazily back to consciousness. I felt newly born, the way you do when an intense pain has been washed out of your system, but the insistent bell wouldn’t let me enjoy it. Finally I stuck out an arm and picked up the receiver.

“H’lo?” My voice was thick and slurred.

“Vicki? Vicki, is that you?”

It was Elena, crying extravagantly. I looked at the clock readout in resignation: one-ten. Only Elena would rouse me at this godawful time.

“Yes, Auntie, it’s me. Calm down, stop crying, and tell me what the trouble is.”

“I-oh, Vicki, I need you, you’ve got to come and help me.”

She was well and truly panicked. I sat up and started pulling on the jeans I’d left on the foot of the bed. “Tell me where you are and what kind of trouble you’ve got.”

“I-oh…” She started sobbing heavily, then her voice disappeared.

For a moment I thought I’d lost the connection, but then I realized she was covering up the mouthpiece. Or someone else had covered it. She’d been running away and her pursuers had caught up with her? I waited in an agony of indecision, thinking I should hang up and summon Furey, not wanting to hang up until I was sure I’d lost her. Since I had no idea where to send police resources I waited, and after a couple of heart-wrenching minutes she came back.

“I ran away,” she sniffed dolefully. “Poor little Elena got scared and ran.”

So she hadn’t been in mortal terror, just rehearsing her act. I kept my voice light with an effort. “I know you ran away, Auntie. But where did you run to?”

“I’ve been living in one of the old buildings near the Indiana Arms, it’s been abandoned for months but some of the rooms are still in real good shape, you can sleep here and no one will see you. But now they’ve found me. Vicki, they’ll kill me, you’ve got to come help me.”

“Are you in the building now?”

“There’s a phone at the corner,” she hiccoughed. “They’ll kill me if they see me. I couldn’t go outside in the daylight. You’ve got to come , Vicki-they can’t find me here.”

“Who will kill you, Elena?” I wished I could see her face instead of just hearing her-it was impossible to sort out how much truth she was spouting along with the rest of it.

“The people who’ve been after me,” she screamed. “Just come , Vicki, stop asking so many goddamn questions, you’re like a goddamn tax collector.”

“Okay, okay,” I said in the soothing voice one uses with infants. “Tell me where the building is and I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

“Just kitty-corner to the Indiana Arms.” She calmed down to a quavering sob.

“On Indiana or Cermak?” I tied my running shoes.

“In-Indiana. Are you coming?”

“I’m on my way. Just stay where you are by the phone. Call 911 if you think someone really is coming.”

I turned on the bedside lamp. Dialing Furey’s home number, I carried the phone over to my closet. It rang fifteen times before I gave up and tried the station. The night man said Michael wasn’t in. Neither were Bobby, Finchley, or McGonnigal.

I hesitated, undoing the safe in the back of my closet where I keep my Smith & Wesson. Finally I explained that Bobby wanted Elena found and that Michael had been assigned to look for her.

“She just called me from an abandoned building on Indiana. She says she’s in trouble-I don’t know if she is or not, but I’m on my way down there to get her. I’d like Furey and the lieutenant to know.”

He promised to put out a call on the radio to Michael for me with the address. I set the phone on the closet floor while I checked the clip. It was full and the ninth bullet was chambered. I carefully made sure the safety was on, put a shoulder holster over my sweatshirt, and left.

When I got to the bottom Peppy started barking anxiously behind Mr. Contreras’s door. She hadn’t seen me all day, she’d missed her run, and she was determined I wasn’t going to leave without her. Her barking followed me down the walk to the street.

As I was getting into the Chevy, Vinnie stuck his head out his front window. He yelled something, but I was already rolling and didn’t hear him.

I headed for Lake Shore Drive. The Dan Ryan would decant me closer to the site, but I wasn’t up to dealing with the construction and detours in the dark. For the same reason I left the Drive at Congress and went down Michigan Avenue instead of negotiating the spaghetti behind McCormick Place.

The moon was nearly full. Once I’d slid past the street-lamps onto south Michigan its cold light created black-and-white stills: objects highlighted with unnatural clarity, their shadows pitch black. I was feeling a little weak still, from being sick and from having eaten only once in the last twenty-four hours, but my mind was wonderfully clear. I could make out every drunk on the benches in Grant Park, and when I turned onto Cermak and up onto Prairie, I could even see the rats slithering through the vacant lots.