Sara Paretsky - Hardball

“You’re going out to the prison tomorrow?” she repeated, looking at me anxiously.

“Why not?”

She bit her lips. “Just… uh… I don’t know… you’re still hurting, I mean.”

“I’m a renewable resource.” I took a hamburger from Mr. Contreras and sat up to keep it out of Peppy’s mouth. “I’m like Hercules, except I regenerate my spleen, my skin, and my brain every morning.”

She laughed in a distracted, forced way and changed the subject, also in a distracted, forced way. She fed most of her hamburger to Mitch, then got up to leave.

I followed her to the side gate. “Petra! What is wrong here?”

Her large eyes filled with tears, and she stared at me for a long pause, then said, “Leave me alone, can’t you? Do you have to pry into everybody’s business?”

“No,” I said slowly. “No, of course not. But you’re acting-”

“I know what I’m doing. Leave me alone!” She slammed the gate.

“You haven’t been riding her over your place being torn apart, have you?” Mr. Contreras and the dogs had bustled over to join us.

I shook my head. “I wish now I had gone to her office today. Maybe I will after I get done with Johnny tomorrow.”

But the next day was when I came back from Stateville to find that intruders had been in my office and wrecked it with the force of an F5 tornado. That was when I found Petra’s white rubber ONE bracelet on the cement apron outside my back door. That was the night I spent with Bobby Mallory and the FBI trying to find any trace of my cousin.

After that sleepless night, my uncle Peter and aunt Rachel arrived. My uncle unleashed his own F5 on me, blaming me, at high volume, for anything that might have gone wrong with Petra. I tried to ride out the storm without fighting back because I knew raw rage was the only way he was able to express his fear. I was afraid, too, and so was my aunt. Finally, after several hours of his useless screaming, Rachel took Peter downtown to meet with the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge.

AFTER PETER AND RACHEL LEFT, I HAD A LONG TALK WITH Mr. Contreras, which included a promise to involve him in any action necessary to rescue Petra. I even shared with him the list I’d made of all the odd questions I had about my cousin during the past few weeks: the Nellie Fox baseball, her relentless interest in the contents of my trunk, her wish to see any storage places in the old family home in Back of the Yards, her effort to tour my own childhood home in South Chicago, her arrival at Sister Frankie’s gutted apartment last week, the smoke bomb that forced the Andarra family to vacate the house the night before Sister Frankie’s murder.

At first he put up a spirited defense of her youth and impulsiveness, but by the time I got to her late-night trip to the Freedom Center even Mr. Contreras was uneasy. “But, doll, if she was doing something she shouldn’ta been, it was because she was pushed into it. You listen to me. She’s as good as gold, little Peewee, and don’t you go thinking otherwise. When you get to the end of this story, you’re going to find Johnny Merton was behind it. Mark my words.”

“Let’s find her first and argue over who got her in over her head later, right?”

He agreed gruffly, and watched while I printed out a couple of shots I’d taken of Petra on my cellphone. I also printed random pictures off the Web of young blond women: some celebrities, some pictures that people had posted on their blogs, finishing with a few shots of myself.

I uploaded the photo I’d snapped of Alito and Strangwell at the Prudential Plaza the other day. It wasn’t a very clear shot, but it was the only one I could find of Alito. Strangwell was highly visible. His website showed him with various Illinois politicos, with U.S. presidents and a Supreme Court justice, and with entertainers like Michael Jordan. I guess if you were coming to Strangwell for help, the portraits showed you what kind of access a thousand dollars an hour bought you. I printed a couple of those images, and pulled one of Dornick from the Mountain Hawk Security website as well.

The old man finally left when I went into the bathroom to get ready for my day outside. As I covered my face and arms with protective creams, it seemed somehow wrong to be tending to my body when my cousin’s life might be in danger. I put on my hat, my gloves, checked the clip in my gun and put it in its tuck holster, and went out the back door.

Jake Thibaut was on his little porch with a cup of coffee. “That’s a fetching costume. You going undercover on a Civil War plantation?”

I tried to smile but found my voice cracking instead. “It’s because of the fire. Because of… Sorry, my cousin has vanished in a way that has me pretty freaked. I’ve got to go, see what I can find out.”

He walked down the five steps to our common landing. “You need any kind of help from me? You know, anything that doesn’t involve a handgun or some kind of physical heroism?”

I started to say no, then remembered that Thibaut had seen the people who broke into my apartment as they left early Tuesday morning. I pulled my folder of photographs from my briefcase and showed them to him.

“I know it was dark, and these aren’t great shots, but could any of these guys be the ones you saw?”

“It’s impossible to say.” He tapped the picture of Alito and Strangwell. “They’re sitting, so I can’t tell how tall they are. This one”-he was touching Alito-“he’s broad enough, but… I’d have to see them walking. I measure people’s height against Bessie. My bass,” he added when he saw my puzzled look.

I put the pictures back in the folder. As I started down the stairs, Thibaut said, “They looked menacing. Remember that.”

I nodded soberly. Menacing didn’t even begin to cover the way these people had acted.

I went out the back gate and picked up my car in the alley. In the frenzy we’d all been in since last night, no one had talked about seeing if Petra were at home, doped or… or not dead. I was going to make her apartment my first port of call, then head to South Chicago.

I hadn’t had time to replace the lump of melted plastic in my wallet with a new driver’s license, and I didn’t want to waste an hour explaining that to a traffic cop, so for the few miles that lay between me and Petra’s loft I stayed within the thirty-mile-per-hour limit, stopped at all stop signs, and even braked when the light turned yellow.

My picklocks were still in my glove compartment. I rang Petra’s bell, but there was no answer, even though I leaned on it for a good thirty seconds. I didn’t want to be seen using my picks in broad daylight, so I got inside on the tried-and-true method of ringing every bell in the building. There is usually someone careless enough to buzz you in, and I was lucky with the third bell I pushed.

I took the stairs up to the fourth floor two at a time. By the time I reached Petra’s door, I had a stitch in my side where my gun was poking me. The woman who’d buzzed me in was shouting up the stairwell. I tried to steady my voice when I called down an apology, I’d rung the wrong door. The voice of an educated white woman was reassuring to her, and she called back an acknowledgment. I heard her door close, and I knelt to work Petra’s lock.

My hands were shaking. I was slow, exhaustingly slow, and my cotton gloves kept slipping on the picks. I took off the stupid gloves but still felt like I was stirring molasses with my fingers.

When I finally got inside, the apartment had a churchlike quiet. A tap was dripping somewhere. That ping of water on enamel was all I could hear. I found myself tiptoeing through the big room that made up the bulk of the loft, looking for any signs of my cousin or anything that would give me a hint about where she’d gone.