J. Konrath - Dirty Martini

“Why can’t I drive?”

“Because I’m driving.”

I got behind the wheel, and Harry sat next to me.

“Your car sucks.”

“I know.”

“Can I park the Vette in your garage?”

“Garage door is broken.”

“Your house sucks.”

“I know.”

I pulled out of the driveway, and Harry began to mess with my radio. Better the radio than listening to him talk. Unfortunately, he switched it off after only listening to three bars of “Freebird” by Skynard.

“Your radio sucks.”

“Let’s try being quiet for a while, okay?”

He lasted a whole two minutes.

“I’ve started to write poetry,” Harry said.

Lord help me.

“That’s nice.”

“It helps me deal, you know, with the pain.”

“VD?” I asked.

“Of losing my hand. There isn’t much physical pain anymore. It’s on permanently. They did a bone graft. Carbon fibers. Want to see where it’s attached?”

“No.”

He showed me anyway, peeling up the latex covering, pointing to his wrist where the scar tissue met the prosthesis. It wasn’t as ugly as I imagined.

“Gotta keep rubbing antiperspirant around the edges, because the latex gets hot and I sweat like crazy. Inside the hand, along with the mechanical parts, are myoelectric sensors, attached to my nerves and muscles. If I concentrate on open ”-I heard a mechanical whir, and Harry’s thumb and fingers separated-“and close , the fingers move. Only three of the fingers are actually robotic. The ring finger and the pinky just go along for the ride. It’s pretty strong, though. See?”

McGlade gripped my dashboard with the prosthesis, and his fingers punched right through.

“Harry!”

“Don’t worry. I’m okay. It doesn’t hurt at all.”

I looked at the damage, realized it was no big loss, and turned onto I-190, passing O’Hare and heading for Skokie. Harry was mercifully quiet for a few seconds.

“So, do you want to hear some of my poetry?”

“No.”

“A short one.”

“No.”

“It’s really short.”

“I don’t care how short it is, I don’t want to hear it.”

A few seconds ticked by.

“Want to see my new phone?”

“No.”

He tugged it out of his wrinkly blazer just the same.

“It’s a phone, a camera, a PDA, and it can even surf the Internet.”

“Have you been tested for ADD?” I asked.

He pressed a few buttons, and a loud feminine moan came from the device.

“This is a good Web site. BubbleBooty.com. It costs twenty bucks a month, but you get free fifteen-second previews of all their movies. So who needs to join?”

More moaning, and then the sound of a donkey braying.

“Or check this out.”

He stuck the camera in my face, and there was a blinding flash.

“Jesus, McGlade!”

“High rez, 1500 dpi. Look at that clarity. I can count the pores on your nose. Well, I could, if I had all day.”

“It’s quiet time again,” I said. “Let’s see if we can be quiet for the whole rest of the ride, okay?”

Quiet time lasted less than a minute.

“Just like the old days, isn’t it, Jackie? Cruising down the highway. Me and you. Young cops with bad attitudes. We had some fun times, didn’t we?”

“Not really.”

I watched peripherally as Harry tried to adjust the air-conditioning vent using his prosthesis, and snapped it right off. He pondered it for a moment, checked to see if I noticed, and then hid it under his seat.

“I don’t regret quitting the force.”

“You didn’t quit. You were kicked off.”

“I don’t miss it. It’s not like PI work. Someone hires me to do a job, I get paid, they’re grateful. Not like being a cop. Too many people hate you. Like all the traps in that house the other night. Someone had to really hate the department to set all that up. I heard it was a cop’s house too.”

Something itched at the back of my head, but I couldn’t quite scratch it.

“This guy has killed a lot of cops,” I admitted. I thought about Sardina, and Roxy, and the two Cicero officers. Plus all of the incidental police officer poisonings; three died at the Sammy’s, and twelve more became sick eating at various locations around the city. Hell, the Chemist even spread his toxins at the German deli only a block away from…

“The one-five.”

“You say something?” Harry asked. He was using his prosthesis to touch himself in a private place.

“Can you not fondle yourself in my front seat?”

“Just making a minor adjustment. It’s kind of strange, because it feels like someone else’s hand.”

“Shut up for a minute.”

“Why?”

“I’m thinking. Just be quiet.”

“I was being quiet. You’re the one who started talking.”

“Harry, shut the hell up.”

“Boy, you’re bitchy. Don’t they have hormones for after menopause?”

I tuned him out, concentrating on all of the restaurants and grocery stores the Chemist had poisoned. As I ticked them off, one by one, I realized that there had been a pattern all along.

“Each store was within a block of a police station.”

“Huh?” McGlade had gone back to adjusting himself.

“The police. The Chemist was targeting the police all along. Even the wedding-Captain Bains’s son. Why the hell didn’t I see it before?”

“Because you’re functionally retarded?” Harry offered. “Going senile? Have Alzheimer’s disease? Personally, I wouldn’t mind Alzheimer’s. You buy one magazine, and you’re entertained for the rest of your life.”

I drew in a sharp breath, having one of those rare moments where everything suddenly came together. If the Chemist truly wanted to hurt some cops, he needed to strike where there was a large concentration of us in a small area.

“PoliceFest,” I whispered.

More than twenty thousand cops, plus another twenty thousand family members and visitors, all in the same place at the same time.

“I think I broke your radio,” Harry said, handing me a knob with his rubber hand.

I jammed down the accelerator. While it wasn’t enough to pin us to our seats, I was pushing eighty soon enough.

“What the hell are you doing, Jackie?”

“I’m praying,” I told him. “Praying that I’m wrong.”

THE VILLAGE OF SKOKIE covered roughly ten square miles. It was one of Chicago’s larger suburbs, with a population of over sixty thousand, bordering the city on the north side.

I was burning some serious rubber, edging the car up into the nineties, and then I had to stop very quickly. Traffic had gone from open to insane. The Touhy ramp off of I-94 was backed up for at least a mile, bumper to bumper. All because of PoliceFest.

“McGlade, grab my cherry-”

I regretted saying it as soon as it breached my lips, but before I could qualify it he’d already answered, “I think I’m about thirty-five years too late for that, Jackie.”

“The red and blue light, smart-ass. In the backseat, on the floor.”

He fished around for it and set it on his lap.

“They still use these things?”

“The classics are still the best. Plug it in and stick it to the roof.”

McGlade put the cord into my cigarette lighter, and it turned on and began to spin, flashing colors.

“My key chain light is brighter than this stupid thing.”

“Just put it on the roof.”

“What is that? Is that a suction cup?”

“The roof, McGlade!”

I hit the gas and pulled onto the shoulder, spraying gravel. McGlade leaned out the window and attached the cherry to the top of my car. When he finished, he sat back down and buckled his seat belt.