J. Konrath - Dirty Martini

“Where’s the siren?” he asked.

“No siren.”

McGlade seemed to consider it.

“Want me to stick my head out the window and go woo-woo-woo ?”

I hopped back onto the street, buzzed through the red light, and swung east onto Touhy, missing a pickup truck by a good two feet.

“Did you pull down the little lever on the suction cup?” I asked, swerving to avoid the SUV ahead of me.

“There was a lever?”

I tapped my brakes, and the cherry bounced off my hood and onto the sidewalk, where it hit a mailbox and splintered into a million little red and blue pieces.

“Hell.” I frowned. “That thing was vintage.”

“Don’t worry about it. You can hire a midget to sit on your roof and hold a lava lamp. You’d get the same effect.”

I passed a Jeep, hit the horn, and took a right onto Lincoln.

“How old is this car?” McGlade asked. “It’s a model made before airbags, isn’t it?”

“Just go limp at impact. It’s the same thing.”

I heard a whirring sound, and chanced a look. McGlade had locked his hand onto the door grip. I smiled, and pinned the speedometer.

“McGlade, what street is the festival on?”

“Pratt and Central Park Avenue. You could drop me off wherever, though. Up here is fine. Or here. Or at that nail salon. I was thinking about doing my nails.”

I zipped past the nail salon, breezed through a yellow light, and hung a left onto Pratt. Then I hit the brakes.

Yellow sawhorses blocked off the street, a thick wall of people milling around behind them. Thousands of people.

“Parking is going to be a bitch,” Harry said.

He was right. And because a lot of these folks were cops, all of the hydrants were already taken. I stopped in the middle of the street, dug my ankle holster-complete with AMT-out of my purse, and put my leg up onto the steering wheel to strap it on. Naturally, McGlade had to comment on this.

“You’re pretty flexible for an old chick. Can you put your foot behind your head? I dated this girl once. Well, not really dated .”

I grabbed my purse, hopped out of the car, and waded into the crowd. It was elbow to elbow, a carnival that seemed to go on forever, complete with music and rides and plenty of food. Besides the prerequisite amount of coptosterone, there were also plenty of women and children, and every third person was eating or drinking something. Beer. Lemonade. Corn on the cob. Hot dogs. Nachos. If the Chemist was going to unleash his toxins at this event, a lot of people would die.

I pushed my way up to a popcorn vendor and asked who was in charge. He had no idea, but offered me a program. I folded out the map and studied the gigantic layout. The information booth was dead center. I moved as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast at all. I literally had to force my way through people, enduring a slew of unhappy stares and a few off-color remarks.

“So what’s the rush anyway?” Harry had somehow caught up and was right behind me. “You think this poison guy is going to try something?”

“I don’t know. There’s a good chance he did something. This guy hates cops, and here’s a chance to kill a bunch at once.”

“Think he did something to the soft pretzels?”

“I don’t know.”

McGlade shoved a large pretzel under my nose.

“Take a bite, tell me if it’s safe.”

I knocked it aside, pushed over to the edge of the crowd, and walked along the perimeter, which was much quicker.

“Lots of people,” McGlade said. He’d risked it; his mouth was full of pretzel. “Whaddaya think? Thirty thousand? Forty? Be tough to poison this many people.”

Harry had a point. So many different vendors, it would be an impossible feat to hit all of them, or even half of them. If I wanted to kill a bunch of people here, how would I do it? Gas? I spied a helium tank being used to fill balloons. I also noted a cooling-off station, which sprayed a fine mist of cool water onto people who walked beneath it. The problem with either was speed. The poison would have to be slow-acting, so as many people as possible could become infected before panic made the rest flee, or instantaneous, getting as many people as possible at once.

“How about a crop duster?” McGlade said. “He could swoop down, trailing gas.”

Harry pretended his fake hand was an airplane and made zooming sounds as he flew it around. I double-checked the map, decided that this was the midpoint, and forced myself back into the masses. The information booth was appropriately crowded, and I marched to the front of the line and said, “Who’s in charge?”

The guy behind the counter folded his arms.

“This isn’t the end of the line, lady.”

“I’m a cop,” I told him.

“It’s PoliceFest. Everyone here is a cop.”

The people I’d cut in front of echoed the statement.

“Look,” I said, lowering my voice. “I’m on the Chemist case. Have you heard of it? I think he’s here, and he’s going to kill a bunch of people. Now, who is in charge?”

“Jim. Jim Czajkowski. I’ll call him.”

He used the walkie-talkie attached to his belt buckle. A minute later a short, slightly pudgy man with a waxed handlebar mustache stepped into the booth.

“I’m Jim, Skokie PD. What’s going on?”

I leaned in and spoke softly. “We have reason to believe that this festival might be the target of a terrorist attack. Have you noticed anything unusual?”

“Not really. I mean, setting up an event like this is a nightmare. There are always snags.”

“What kind of snags?”

“Well, the music tent has collapsed twice. The garbage cans are filling up faster than expected. Some moron drank too much and cracked open his skull.”

“Are you sure it was alcohol?”

“I’m sure. He got into a drinking contest with his buddies.”

“Anything else out of the ordinary? Problems? Complaints? Maybe from before the festival started?”

“There’s that damn portable toilet truck.”

Where had I recently heard about portable toilets? Herb. He was searching for a stolen truck.

“What about the truck?”

“Parked here real early this morning, right in the middle of everything, but didn’t unload. All of those Porta Potties are sitting up there, just taking up space. We can’t even take them down ourselves, because they’re wrapped up in chains.”

“Show me.”

Jim led the way. Harry once again fell into step behind me, this time eating a hot dog. We walked past a Tilt-A-Whirl, a ring toss booth, and the aforementioned music tent, which appeared to have collapsed again. Eventually, we wound up behind a row of carny game booths on a small patch of dirt, next to a semi with a flatbed trailer attached. Stacked on the trailer were thirty-six portable toilets.

“Yipes!” McGlade said. “Johns!”

Jim spit onto the grass. “Someone just drove them up and left them there. And look at the way they’re chained together.”

I moved closer and agreed it went above and beyond simply securing them to the trailer. The heavy gauge chains formed a net around the toilets, and there were thick padlocks wherever two chains intersected. It would take an hour just to unlock them all.

I pulled out my cell phone and called Herb.

“Hi, Jack. I heard about the Bains wedding. Nice work.”

“Thanks. That stolen Porta Potti truck, was it a flatbed, red Peterbilt cab?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you at the fest?”

“Bernice and I are in the music tent, watching the volunteers wrestle with the collapsing canvas. Why?”

“I think I found your truck. I’m to the west of you maybe fifty yards, behind the Tilt-A-Whirl.”

“I’ll be right there.”

McGlade had climbed up to the driver’s side of the cab and was peering in the window.