Max Collins: Neon Mirage

I eased myself in front of Peg, gently pushing her behind me, shooing her back toward and into the Berghoff, and as I did, the guy frowned at me, as if trying to place me.

Both his big hands were at his side, so there was little risk when I pulled the nine millimeter out from under my shoulder and shoved it in his fat gut and said, “Let’s you and me go in the alley, right now, bozo.”

He swallowed and we did. I smacked him once with the automatic, along one side of his head, and he went down and sat amongst the garbage cans and was out, or pretended to be. His ear was bleeding. He had a gun, too, which I took from under his arm and tossed down the alley, skittering on the bricks into the darkness. I took out one of my business cards and, before sticking it in the guy’s breast pocket, jotted a note on the back of it: ASK GUZIK TO CALL ME.

The next morning Guzik did.

“You slapped the Greek around,” Guzik pointed out in his detached monotone.

“If you’d seen how he was dressed, you’d have helped.”

Guzik grunted; it seemed to be a laugh.

I said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d lay off the girl.”

I didn’t ask him to lay off Ragen. That would be going too far; that wouldn’t be my business.

“She’s your girl?” Guzik asked.

“She’s mine. I’ll kill anybody who touches her.”

Long pause.

Then: “I’ll see to it she’s left alone.”

“Thanks, Mr. Guzik.”

Guzik grunted and hung up.

So did I, trembling.

Peg’s lawyer boss didn’t make it to court: he had a nervous breakdown first. But Ragen found somebody else to take the case (which was still in litigation at the time of the shooting at State and Pershing) and gave Peg a job in his own office in the meantime. We’d been seeing each other, off and on, since then; but with Peg living at home, being the dutiful daughter, and under her uncle’s watchful eye at work and all, we were taking it slow.

And that’s why I went along, when Jim Ragen leaned on me to provide him protection in his ill-advised struggle with the Outfit: I was in love with his goddamned niece.

Ragen wasn’t dead; just unconscious. But the way he was bleeding, he’d be dead soon enough if Walt Pelitier and me didn’t move our couple of asses.

First things first: I crossed State to a corner barber shop, where (now that the shooting was over) coloreds were milling, murmuring amongst themselves, pointing over at the shot-up cars. None of them spoke to me, possibly because I still had a gun in my hand. It was a bus stop, and there was a bench; several colored youths were standing on it, to get a better look. No cops had shown yet. This neighborhood wasn’t patrolled much-that no doubt was one of the reasons why it had been chosen to host the hit. I walked quickly to the modest newsstand along the Pershing side of the barber shop and handed the boy a buck and grabbed a bunch of papers. Then I went out into the street and got in on the pellet-puckered rider’s side of the Lincoln, having to yank at the mangled door some to do it, and began wrapping the bloody, unconscious Ragen’s wounded right arm in newspapers, like the limb was a big dead fish. The papers soaked up the blood. Black and white and red all over.

I used a few pages to clean the blood off my hands. Then I left Ragen with Walt and danced back through the moderate State Street traffic, most of which was slowing for a look (but not stopping-whites didn’t stop in this neighborhood unless, like me, they were shot at or something), and ducked into the drug store, where a thin, white-haired, colored gentleman in a white smock and wire-frame glasses stood behind the prescription counter. He seemed damn near serene, as if his window got shot out every day.

“Has anybody in here called the cops yet?”

The druggist nodded, slowly. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I did.”

“When they get here,” I said, handing him one of my business cards, “give ’em this, and tell ’em I’m driving the victim to the nearest hospital.”

“All right,” he said, still nodding, not glancing at the card.

“That’d be Michael Reese, right?”

He just kept nodding, and I went out, the glass of his window crunching under my shoes.

Michael Reese Hospital was at 29th, a little over ten-block drive, and we’d have to head back north to get there. We took Ragen’s Lincoln-the bodyguard car’s windshield was shattered, and a tire had been flattened, though I was able to pull it over to the curb and park it-and this time I drove while Walt rode figurative shotgun, Ragen between us, leaned against Walt. I turned left on Pershing and floored it and ignored traffic lights, just slowing a tad as I crossed the intersections while oncoming cars climbed curbs and screeched to stops to allow my passage, and I was going fifty, six blocks later, when I took a hard, careening left on South Park Avenue, a wide boulevard with a parkway down the middle where colored kids paused in their play to look with wide eyes upon the shot-up car full of white people that went streaking by.

The gray-brick complex of Michael Reese Hospital stretched along Ellis Avenue like a fortress in a foreign land; to the rear, separated from the hospital only by Lake Park Avenue, the wide W of the central building and its two major wings faced the downward slope of the Illinois Central tracks, beyond which was the lake. Nothing fancy to look at, the six stories of Michael Reese nonetheless towered over the rundown colored neighborhood at its feet, crumbling three-story buildings that huddled together as if only their close proximity kept them from falling down.

The big privately owned hospital had enough specialists on its staff to attract patients the likes of Ragen, even if he weren’t being dragged into the emergency room shot-up, even if it wasn’t just the closest, handiest hospital. But that emergency room was populated by street people, almost exclusively colored, victims of the casual violence their neighborhood bred. The South Side Irish seeking their health in this hospital were upstairs in the small private rooms; the emergency room’s darker clientele would wind up in a charity ward in Reese’s Mandel Clinic or, more likely, be treated as out patients.

As we dragged Ragen in, Walt on one side of him, me on the other, bloody newspaper sheets dropping to the floor like petals from a grotesque flower, a couple orderlies took over and ushered him into the emergency examination room at left, where they eased him onto an examination table and shut a curtain around him. I left Walt to fill in the attending physician, and went back out to the 29th Street ambulance ramp, where we’d left the shot-up Lincoln, doors open, motor running, and parked it in one of the nearby Staff Only stalls. I locked the sawed-off in the trunk; this was no neighborhood to be leaving weapons in the back seat of cars. Of course, what neighborhood in Chicago was?

In the phone booth in the corridor outside the emergency room, I called Ragen’s home first. His wife Ellen answered.

“He’s been shot,” I told her, “but he’s alive.”

There was a long pause.

“Where is he?” she asked; her voice was husky. It tried to be strong, but didn’t make it.

“Michael Reese,” I said, and she said thank you and hung up.

She didn’t ask for any details. There would be time enough for that. I didn’t know Ellen very well-we’d only met a few times-but she wasn’t naive. That much I knew. Jim winding up on the end of a shooting was inevitable. That much she knew.

Then I called my office. It was late-almost seven, now. I knew Gladys Fortunato, my secretary, would be long gone-she was a dedicated girl, Gladys, until five o’clock rolled around, at which point she couldn’t care less about A-1 Detective Agency, and who could blame her?