Dan O'Shea: Penance

“OK. Strictly as background. I talked with Eddie. I think he needs a couple of bushels of Prozac and maybe a decade or two of therapy. But if he ties into the shooting, it’s going to be sideways — somebody coming back at him out of some deal he screwed them on or something. All I got.”

“OK. Thanks. This will not come back to bite you, honest.”

They talked for another hour. Lynch filling her in on Chicago politics, the kind of stuff you couldn’t know coming in from Minneapolis. The feudal nature of it, the ethnic blocs, the primacy of neighborhood, the mayor’s office passed down from Hurley to Hurley like a family title. And the fixers — the city lifers, on and off the payroll — guys who had lines into everything, who could pick up the phone at their summer places over on the Michigan shore and conjure up votes from thin air or graveyards.

Got to the point where it had been time to go for a while, both of them still hanging in.

“Hey, Dickey Regan at the Sun-Times says to say hello,” said Johnson.

“You talked to Dickey?”

“I heard you were friends. He gave me the Great White stuff.”

Lynch shook his head and chuckled. “Asshole.”

“He also told me you were a good person for a cop. Said you had better things to do on St Paddy’s Day than get shit-faced with the Emerald Society and plot to undermine our constitutional protections. That’s pretty much a direct quote, by the way.”

“Yeah, well, Dickey and I go back. You can tell him he’s OK, too. For a press weenie.”

Johnson finished her wine. Played with her hair a little, like she wasn’t used to it being short. Leaned back in the booth, stretched. “God, four glasses of wine. I knew I shouldn’t have driven. Now I’ve got to drive home.”

“As a police officer, I would advise against it. I can get a unit to run you home.”

Johnson laughed. “Just what I need, covering the cop beat. Some uniform spreading the word he got strong-armed into playing taxi for me.”

“We can go to my place for a while, get you some coffee.”

“Inviting me up for coffee Lynch? What’s the matter, don’t have any etchings to show me?” That sly smile again.

“Just an offer in the interest of public safety, ma’am. Although I do have this extensive collection of Seventies album covers.”

“Except I don’t think you should be driving either.”

“Don’t have to. I live upstairs.”

“Really?” There was a little tone in her voice; not sarcasm. That smile again.

“Still like my schmoozing?” Johnson murmured into his neck as they clinched inside Lynch’s door, both of their coats and four shoes on the floor by their feet. Lynch had untucked her turtleneck and slid his hands up her back.

“I knew you had ways of making me talk, Johnson.”

“If you’re going to keep undressing me, you’re going to have to call me Liz.”

“OK, Liz.” The turtleneck came over her head. Black bra. “Isn’t this the time when we’re supposed to disclose our sexual histories in the interest of public health?”

“Why?” she asked. “Is yours long and varied?”

“Wife died in ’86. Did some tomcatting around for a few years,” he said. “Only been back in the pool a handful of times since, though.”

“You better have been wearing your trunks,” she said.

“Always wear my trunks.”

“I was divorced fourteen months ago,” Johnson said. “Dipped my toe in here and there, but haven’t been doing laps for a while.”

Lynch’s hands ran back down her back to the waistband of her slacks, and then to the front to the buckle of her belt.

“You like to swim?” he asked.

She pulled Lynch’s sweater over his head. “I finished second in the state in the 400 IM in high school.”

“I can only dog paddle, but I’m vigorous,” said Lynch. “You gonna pull me out if I get in too deep?”

Johnson’s slacks dropped to the floor. Her hands ran down Lynch’s chest and began to work the front of his jeans. “I can do better than that,” she said. “I can give lessons.” His jeans dropped. She ran a finger up the long, white welt on the right side of Lynch’s ribs, and then kissed the round, puckered scar under his left collarbone.

He unhooked her bra, and she pulled back for a second to let it fall down her arms.

“Last one in’s a rotten egg,” said Lynch. She smiled again, even better than last time.

There was a moment later, Johnson on top, rocking, neither of them rushing it, the dim light through the blinds falling in gentle curves across her breasts, when Lynch felt something break and shift inside of him, like a bone that had been set wrong being made straight. All those frantic couplings all those years ago, with Katie in the car before they married, and even after, there had always been a savagery to their mating. The cop groupies he’d pick up on Rush Street and the cruel gravity of their need. Now this gentility, this fluidity. He was swimming, and not struggling toward the surface and choking for air. Just swimming. For the first time in his life, he could breathe here.

“Yes, sir, we will keep you apprised.” Tecumseh Weaver (Colonel, USMC, retired) hung up on Clarke, sat back in his chair at InterGov Research Services and sighed. Fucking Clarke. How a guy got to be where he was with balls as small as he had was still a mystery to Weaver. But he sure had his panties in a bunch now. This little problem of his, it wasn’t the sort of thing Clarke could sic an official dog on, though. So he was tugging on Weaver’s leash instead.

Weaver’d never liked being on a leash.

The suite housing the offices of InterGov Research Services was not quite in Langley and not quite in DC, which was as it should be. And if the company’s internet connections and telecommunications were a little more secure, their staff a little better armed, and their raison d’etre a little harder to discern than those of the neighbors in the generic office park just off of I-66, that was as it should be, too.

InterGov Research Services was a limited liability corporation whose owners were even more mysterious than the company itself, being the figments of some very creative imaginations. InterGov was one of the thousands of small consultancies surrounding Washington that cleared away some of the fiscal bloat of the federal budget every year. InterGov’s masters viewed this not as wasteful, but rather as a way of creating financial breathing room outside the prissy auspices of the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees. Just another form of off-balance-sheet accounting.

And InterGov did provide real and valuable services to its legitimate clients. It had access to the NSA’s supercomputers and to some of the CIA’s best research talent, so clients like the Department of Agriculture received quick, accurate, and affordable analyses of pressing issues like Uzbekistan’s projected wheat yield, trends in Kenyan coffee production, and the statistical likelihood that, somewhere in the United States, the curious little bug that caused mad cow disease was already turning some citizen’s brain into so much insentient Jell-O.

But InterGov’s most valuable talent pool knew very little about computers, except for those attached to weapons systems. And if most of them were a little larger, a little stronger, and a little more familiar with places like Yemen, Mogadishu, Medellin, or Montenegro than your average Joe, well, that was as it should be, too.

It was the highest and best use of the latter pool of talent that Weaver considered as he waited for Chen to get back in from Reagan National.

Fucking Fisher, thought Weaver. This Chicago thing had his stink all over it. No details yet — Weaver had the techies hacking into the Chicago Police systems and would have those shortly — but there was speculation regarding a rifle.