Джеймс Паттерсон - The Red Book

With my free hand, I pat our interlocked ones. “But you didn’t. Right? You didn’t.”

She blinks out of it, nods. “Right.”

I reach into my pocket for my phone. “Call your boy,” I say. “Hear his voice.”

“That’s okay.”

“No, c’mon.” I unlock my phone, hand it to her. She dials and holds the phone to her ear.

“ Niño, it’s me. How are you doing? How was your day?” She listens, her eyes filling with tears, her face doing all sorts of contortions to keep from a full-throttle cry.

It’s like I’ve never seen her before, like she’s a different person, not guarded and stiff but raw and emotional and vulnerable.

We go over a bump. We’re just about to Stroger, where Carla’s going to be examined and stitched up, and I’m going to be examined a very different way, by COPA and IAB, over the officer-involved shootings tonight.

“Thank you, partner.” Carla hands me the phone. She looks like she’s going to say more, or wants to. “Thank you, Billy,” she says.

Chapter 68

WE END up at Salem’s Inn. Nobody feels like hitting the Hole tonight. The patrols are over there, living up the victory, but the four detectives seemed to collectively agree that while booze was in order, a big crowd wasn’t.

Even Carla joins us, though she drinks soda water. The left side of her face is bandaged, bruised, and swollen. She got twenty stitches on her cheek at Stroger.

“Only one lookout on the rooftop,” I say wistfully, for about the tenth time, as I down my bourbon. The good stuff, best Salem’s has, Four Roses Single Barrel, because Soscia’s buying, whether he fucking knows it or not.

He knows it. He’s feeling good and bad at the same time. Good because the raid was a success. With the fireworks outside, and the noise generated by all the blenders and coffee grinders cutting and mixing the heroin, nobody heard us coming. The rooftop lookout with the Tec-9 and cell phone never completed his phone call before I shot him. The unarmed guy at the front porch didn’t know what the hell was going on, apparently, when the undercover flirting with him pulled a small-caliber pistol out of a bag that was supposed to be holding her dog’s poop.

The final count: 8.4 kilos of heroin and six hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in cash. That’s a big take. That’s a press conference for Sosh tomorrow.

But Sosh fucked us on the roof, and he knows it. That noise we heard on the fire escape, the backup unit coming to help—the first cop up was Sosh. He’d worked this thing for weeks; this heroin bust was his. But the moment he heard my distress call, he started running for the fire escape. The patrols told me they’d never seen a guy that big move so fast. That’s Sosh. He’ll try not to let on, but the bad intel he gave us, that’s gonna stay with him for a long time.

Rodriguez takes off before the rest of us, but we’re too exhausted to give him shit about his wife. Sosh heads to the bar. I look at Carla.

“Don’t ask me how I’m doing,” she warns. “You can’t keep doing that my-poor-sick-partner thing.”

“Yeah, but tonight’s different.”

“Whatever. I’m fine, Detective. Thanks to you.”

She tries to smile, but it hurts too much.

Sosh comes back with a couple of shots of Jäger, which is a horrible idea. “All right, Griffin, now that you’ve shared a near-death experience with us—”

“Not with you I didn’t. You put me in a near-death experience.”

“Ah, semantics,” he says. “It’s time you tell us whether you’re black, Hispanic, Asian, or what-the-fuck.”

She almost spits out the club soda in her mouth. She manages to swallow and busts out laughing, touching her bandaged face while doing so. “Ow.”

I shoot Soscia a look, and he looks back like he can’t understand why I’d be shooting him a look.

“So…where’s your money?” she asks Sosh.

“I had you as a PR through and through. Harney has you half black, half Hispanic.”

By now, my hand is covering my face. Soscia ain’t so PC on his best day, and he’s thrown a lot of whiskey down the hatch tonight.

“Why Puerto Rican?” she asks.

“Don’t answer that, Sosh. Do. Not. Answer.” I have no idea what Soscia will say. I just know it won’t be good.

“My father was from Jakarta,” Carla says. “My mother was Colombian. They met at the University of Chicago, where he was getting a PhD in aeronautical engineering and she was an undergrad. Okay?”

Sosh looks at me. “I don’t even know how to make fun of that. Where the hell is Jakarta?”

“Indonesia,” she says.

“Where the hell is Indonesia?”

She laughs again. “Southeast Asia, you half-wit.”

“Okay, so you’re half Asian, half Latina?”

“If that makes it easy for you, Soscia, go for it.” She looks over at me. “Everybody good now?”

“And you became a Chicago cop.”

“What did you expect me to do? Open a dry cleaner that has salsa dancing?”

Sosh likes that. He points at her. “You’re lightening up, Griffin. I knew we’d get there.”

“Nah.” She stirs her drink. “My mother’s father was a cop in Colombia. Bogotá. He was killed by the narcos, in fact. He was one of the first cops who actually tried to stop the Medellín cartel back in the seventies, before it was fashionable to do so. So I always kinda had the cop thing in my blood.”

“So your mom must be proud of you,” I say.

She thinks about that, and her expression changes, not so easy to read when half her face is swollen and bandaged, but something different, like she was holding something in, and my innocuous comment unlocked the door. Her eyes glisten again with tears, as they did in the ambulance.

She mumbles something about needing the bathroom and rushes away.

Chapter 69

PORTER LIKES to catch the Sox from the club-level seats when he can. Sometimes—most of the time—it’s good to keep a low profile, but other times, it’s good for his mushrooms to see him in a Boss suit or in two-hundred-dollar seats, to let ’em know he has a few bucks in his pocket, which means he must know what he’s doing.

This is one of those times.

Giolito’s getting shelled by the Astros, and Anderson seems to be the only guy capable of sustaining consistent offense in the entire starting lineup, but so what? It’s a mild, breezy night, the Jameson is giving him a warm buzz, and it’s a ball game, for chrissake.

“Any trouble getting in?” he asks when Carla Griffin sits down next to him. God, does she look awful. Like she lost a fifteen-round fight.

“No. Not sure why I have to come to the Cell to meet with you.”

“Not the Cell anymore, sweetheart. And you have to come here because it’s where I am. So talk to me. What’s he doing?”

Tilson pops one into short center, ending the fourth, stranding two runners. Chased a bad pitch is what he did.

“You heard about last night,” Carla says.

“I did,” he says without looking at her. “You’re lucky to be alive, sounds like. Harney put down the mutt, yeah? So now you got warm feelings toward him?”

A simple question, but not so simple an answer, apparently. Eventually, Carla says, “Harney seems like a good cop, yeah.”

“So tell me about this good cop. He’s still tracking the ID of the Jane Doe?”

“Yeah. Thinks he traced her to an orphanage in Romania.”

Fuck me, Porter thinks to himself. I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn’t have any at all. He sips on his whiskey, counts to ten. Disco won’t be happy.

“You got my burner, right?” he asks. “I want updates daily now. Probably no good meeting every day. I want to know everything he does with this girl.”