Marcus Sakey - The Blade Itself

“Because he’s got a bullet hole in his chest.”

Nolan looked longingly at the rest of his cheeseburger. Most of the time he made himself eat well, and the occasional burger was a rare luxury. He sighed. “Let’s roll.”

A gust of wind tagged them as they stepped out, the kind Chicago was famous for, brutal, cold, and hard enough you could lean into it, let it hold your weight. They’d left the blue Ford in a no-parking zone, but cops knew cop cars, marked or not. Nolan fired up the engine, changing his radio frequency from the seventh to the ninth district in case any news came over while they were en route. “He tell you where they were?”

“Just said east side of the river.”

The drive up to Bridgeport took twenty minutes, but finding the scene turned out to be easy. A dozen squad cars sat beneath the overpass, their lights painting the underside of the freeway in garish sweeps of color. Traffic racing above made the dim space hammer and thrum. One of the beat cops from the district, a tall guy with wind-burned ears and the barrel-chested look of a tactical vest under his uniform – Peter Bradley, that was his name – spotted them and came over with a grin.

“Hey, Detective. You slumming?”

“Yeah. You can go home now, Bradley – the real cops have arrived.”

The beat cop laughed, started to lead them toward the water. “Detective Jackson is down here.”

“What’s the story?”

“Couple of kids saw the body, called it in.”

“You take their story?”

“Cutting class, said they came down here to hang out. They’re headed to the ninth now. Want me to have the sergeant save them?”

Nolan nodded. It wasn’t likely they were involved, but they might have seen something useful. That was crucial these days. The running joke was that in the war on crime, the Felony Review Board was France. Way they saw it, you didn’t have a witness, may as well surrender. Nothing like CSI , teams of researchers working round the clock to make the physical evidence. Unless you were dealing with a high-profile case, somebody white and North Side, it took upward of four months to get anything more complicated than a print back from the crime lab.

Amid the sea of blue-shirted beat cops, Detective Willie Jackson was easy to spot in green corduroy pants, a purple shirt, and a fedora with – no shit – a feather in the band. Before Nolan made detective, he used to wonder why they all wore hats. Once he got bumped up, he found that standing out made it clear to everybody who was in charge. It was a little thing that made a difference. Some of the guys, it tended to be the ones who wore big mustaches, they went so far as cowboy hats. He’d just gone with a brown leather golf cap. Made the point and kept his head warm.

Jackson stood with arms crossed, watching an evidence technician as she knelt beside the body. Nolan could smell it from here. Floaters were notorious. The scent lingered in your nostrils for hours, even after a shower.

“You guys bring me one of them burgers?” Jackson turned to them, nodded to Matthews, shook hands with Nolan.

“Shit, no,” Matthews said. “You mess with a man’s lunch, you’re on your own.”

Nolan ignored them, moving over to get a better look at the body. He didn’t know the evidence tech, a woman maybe thirty-five, neat brown hair, but she clearly took her work seriously. She had the dead man’s arm laid out on the cold concrete as she painted his fingertips with black ink. The victim had washerwoman wrinkles on his hands, and she held each finger firmly to soak it with ink. It felt intimate.

When it came to bodies, Nolan had a method. He didn’t like to start with the face. Better to begin with the impersonal parts, the limbs, the clothing. That way you could look without emotion. There was a trick to being able to screen your vision, see only a part of the whole.

The arms showed no tracks, no sign of junk abuse. A tattoo marked the inner forearm, the ace of spades. The skin had started to get the green-brown tinge of a body that had been in the water a couple of days, and was marked by typical postmortem trauma, the result of scraping against God knew what on the river bottom.

His gaze circled inward. Black jeans, boots. A T-shirt that might once have been white, now dingy with river water and blood. Gases had swollen the belly – that was what made it float. A ragged wound gaped in his chest. At least the rats hadn’t been at it yet. Sometimes with a body out of the river, the only way to find a wound was to look where they’d eaten.

Finally, the facts straight in his mind, cataloged and filed, he looked at the man’s face.

Matthews joined him, wrinkling his nose. “I hate floaters.”

“He’s pretty, huh?” Jackson said. “Any takers that it’s homicide?”

Matthews knelt down. “He was shot somewhere else.”

“The lividity, yeah.” Jackson directed his voice toward the evidence tech. “You able to pull clean prints?”

She laid the arm down gently before breaking her quiet communion with the dead. “I won’t know for sure until we try to find a match. It’s tricky when a body’s been in water.”

“How long you figure he floated?”

She shrugged. “The skin hasn’t started sloughing. A couple days? The medical examiner can say for sure.”

Jackson nodded, clapping his hands together and rubbing them for warmth. “Man, I hate this weather. Not even Halloween and it’s cold enough to snow.” His voice echoed and rebounded under the concrete of the overpass. “Nolan, you’re pretty quiet. What do you think?”

“Run the prints.” Nolan kept his voice low as he stared at the man’s face. “But that’s Patrick Connelly.”

Evan had played him.

Knuckles white on the steering wheel, Danny remembered the previous afternoon in the construction trailer, the scorched smell of old coffee, Evan’s feet propped up on the counter. Saying that he would make the call. Saying it too quickly. It had rung an alarm in Danny’s head, but he’d let it go.

Dammit.

The guy had known then what he was going to do. Been planning it. Things had never been under control.

You got it, kid. Welcome back to the dance.

After the disastrous phone call, he’d found himself at loose ends. He wanted a place to think, and had set out for a bar in his neighborhood, but when he got there the idea of being so close to home felt sleazy, like bringing a mistress to the marriage bed. He’d gotten back in the truck, planning to head for another neighborhood, but ending up just driving, restlessly circling the city. He’d been doing it an hour now. Driving and talking to himself, punctuating his sentences with slaps to the wheel, going faster as the anger simmered in his belly.

No matter how careful he was, how much thought he put into it, Evan was a tidal wave, an earthquake, a tornado. A force of nature. Danny pressed down harder on the accelerator, feeling the buzz of pavement beneath his tires. You could rage at a whirlwind. You could pull your hair and scream logic and good sense. But in the end, if you stood in its path, you took your chances. Cars blurred as he hurtled toward the skyline, weaving between lanes. There was no reasoning with a force of nature, no relying on its judgment. He swung left around a Mercedes. He’d hitched himself to the cyclone, and there was no way back.

A horn screamed beside him, the Mercedes squealing in panic as he merged into its lane, his quarter panel nearly against the rounded hood. He yanked the steering wheel back, too hard, the tires screeching, and for a moment he thought he might lose it, end up on two wheels and then in a slow, stuttering roll, this whole drama brought to a sudden close, but his nerves cut in, and he eased the wheel back, turning gently, cars all around him honking. Back in his lane, he took deep breaths, ignoring the angry look and middle finger from the driver of the Mercedes. Tapped the brakes to test them, and when they felt solid, started to slow.