Derek Haas - Dark men

His eyes flash. “Missing?”

“No one’s stolen one of your skulls?”

“I…”

“You made a deal with a contract killer named Flagler.” It’s not a question.

He looks back and forth from Risina to me. “I…”

“He came to kill you, and you bought him off with a skull from your collection.”

Now he doesn’t protest or stammer, just lets me continue my train of thought.

“He doesn’t put a bullet in you, and you promise to give him one of your most expensive, rarest items. That’s how it went down, right?”

Bacino folds his arms across his chest and pouts. “I knew it wouldn’t end there.”

I reach into my pack and pull out the skull, the one I thought was swiped by Flagler but was actually traded to him by Bacino. A skull for a life. Bacino looks at it with the eye of a practiced collector.

“Do you know how much that’s worth?”

I shake my head.

“More than the contract on my life, I can assure you. You got it, you keep it. I know I’m not in a position to bargain, but I’ll make the same deal with you I made with the other guy. Don’t kill me and that skull’s yours. You can make a fortune off of it. It’s the head of-”

And right then, his brother opens the door holding a leather collar and wearing only a bathrobe. “What talent you got up in here, bro?”

He’s wearing a dopey grin and it takes a moment for his eyes to move from Risina to me. I can see the slow calculations take place in his head. He moves from lustfulness to confusion to understanding in the span of five seconds.

Good fences can get into a lot of places, discover a wealth of personal information, chronicle a life to a surprising degree. A pay-off to a talkative employee, a search through police records, a disguised visit to relatives or friends can prove indispensable in fleshing out a mark’s file. And in areas that are off-limits, behind closed doors, an experienced fence will make educated assumptions.

Nothing in Bacino’s file suggested he shared his late-night trysts with his sad-sack older brother. I thought we’d have another ten minutes before the bodyguards finished their smoke break, but now I understand why the guards take that break in the first place: to give these bastards some breathing room while they screw whores together. Who would want to listen to a pair of assholes slipping it to some one-night stand each night?

“Get help!” Bacino screams. It takes Ben a few seconds of blinking for the words to process. Then his lids pop open and his eyes widen as the pieces come together.

In a fistfight, the guy you’re trading blows with will often try to land a haymaker to the jaw. The punch starts from somewhere near his belt and is as easy to spot coming as the headlight on the front of a train. An experienced dirty fighter will duck his chin and crouch so that the punch connects with the top of his head, almost always shattering the bones of the punching hand. It is the hardest part of the human body, the top of the skull.

Before Ben can flee, I hurl the stolen skull at his face with everything I have. The top of the cranium connects with his forehead, making a sound like a baseball bat thumping into a wooden support beam. Immediately, he drops to the floor as his legs turn to jelly.

Spying an opening, Bacino launches out of the bed and heads for Risina, roaring like a lion. I’m not going to be able to close the distance before he gets to her, but I’m going to make him sorry if he harms her in any way. He leaps for her throat, but she swings the gun around like she’s unleashing a pair of brass knuckles, not taking the time to aim and pull the trigger, but nailing him in the side of the face with everything she has, the steel and polymer of the gun’s barrel leading the way.

The blow connects with an audible crunch, a pistol-whip, and though it doesn’t knock him out, it stuns him and shatters a few teeth in the process. Enraged, he blinks away tears and tries again, but I finish what Risina started, swinging for the back of his head with the butt of my gun, once, twice, until he falls face-down on the wooden floor.

The older brother Ben starts to groan.

“Time to go…”

“But?”

“He doesn’t have Archie.”

“You believe him?”

I nod and that’s all she needs from me. We’re out the door, down the stairs, through the opening and over the wall before the bodyguards tamp out their cigarettes. We’ll get a few more minutes as they mistake the moans of pain upstairs for something else. It’ll be all we need.

Accidents don’t exist in this business. A hit man dies, a fence goes missing, a mark wanders off the side of a building on his way to plummeting ten stories: none of this is surreptitious. This trade places a premium on precise planning, on exacting detail, and if a player has his ticket punched, more likely than not, a malevolent hand, not an act of God, is behind it.

The wind has grown belligerent throughout the day, racing around corners and smacking pedestrians in the face like a schoolyard bully. The sun is nothing more than a condemned man held in chains by a wall of dark gray clouds. The sky might rain, or it might just threaten the act, as though it gets some sort of twisted pleasure out of withholding the information. Every now and then, Chicago, as a city, likes to rise up and remind its citizens she won’t be pushed to the background, she won’t blend in behind them, she’s a leading character in their life story and they’d be wise not to forget it.

The three of us, Smoke, Risina, and I, hurry under the scaffolding of some Gold Coast remodeling project and head toward a simple eatery named the Third Coast Cafe. “Pardon our progress” signs have spread across the city like kudzu. Everywhere I look, another building constructed in the late-19th century aftermath of the Great Fire is in the middle of a facelift. After the housing crash, all those construction workers had to find something to do with their time, so the city funneled stimulus dollars into the hands of no-bid general contractors. Of course, it wouldn’t be Chicago if evidence of kickbacks and greased palms hadn’t already been hinted at by the Times.

The workers swarm the scaffolding like wasps, the wind only a nuisance. They raise equipment, bang away at walls, scrape, sand, and plaster, ignoring the weather. I guess anything becomes routine if you do it long enough.

The restaurant is half-full this time of day and customers hunch over coffee and pieces of pie, reluctant to give up their table and head back out into the wind. We slide into a booth in the back corner and order some food. Smoke’s nervousness has reached a new apex; his leg shakes up and down like a piston.

“We’re in a jam now,” he says. “We’re up against it.”

“Yeah, we’re at square zero. We haven’t even reached square one. The skull collector was an anomaly in Archie’s files, but not the one who nabbed him or wanted me.”

“We chased the wrong dog up the wrong tree.”

“I suppose we could take a look at the file again, see if we can figure out who the client was, see if he’s upset the mark is still alive.”

“Seems like it wouldn’t have nothing to do with you, though?” He’s asking more than he’s telling. He has a point, but his fidgeting grows even more exaggerated.

“What aren’t you telling me, Smoke?”

When Smoke looks up, I can’t tell if he’s surprised by my question or if I caught him by being direct. He swallows and wipes his mouth with his napkin. He looks to Risina for help, but she gives him a hard stare I didn’t know she had in her. I’ll admit it’s disconcerting, coming from her. I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that look.