“What you’re describing is too heinous to discuss, Curtis. We’ll talk tomorrow about our arrangements. We can’t go on living together after this.”
He deflated again, shrinking inside himself without speaking. He probably couldn’t think beyond tonight, with its threat of arrest and prison. Perhaps other horrors were adding to the gray pallor around his mouth, but I didn’t think so—I didn’t think he had enough imagination to picture what he’d really been doing as the Xerxes doctor. Maybe being booted into the cold by the sister who had always protected him was punishment enough—maybe it would hurt him worse than anything I could do.
Exhausted, I returned to the examining room to look at Louisa again. Her shallow breathing seemed unchanged. She muttered in her sleep—something about Caroline, I couldn’t make out what.
It was then that the shots started. I looked at my watch: thirty-eight minutes since I’d called Bobby. It had to be the police. Had to be. I forced my weary shoulders into action, moving the desk back from the door. Telling my charges to stay put, I turned out the room lights and crept back to the plant. Another five minutes passed, and then the place was filled with boys in blue. I moved out from the cover of one of the vats to talk to them.
It took awhile to get things sorted out—who I was, why an alderman was lying in his own blood next to Steve Dresberg on a factory floor, what Louisa Djiak and the Chigwells were doing there. You know—all the usual stuff.
When Bobby Mallory showed up at three we started moving faster. He listened to my worries about Louisa for about thirty seconds, then had one of the men send for a fire department ambulance to take her to Help of Christians. Another ambulance had already carted Dresberg and Jurshak to County Hospital. Both were still alive, their futures uncertain.
I snatched a minute in the confusion to call Lotty, let her know the bare bones of what had happened and that I was unhurt. I told her not to wait up, but in my secret heart I begged her to.
When the state police arrived they assigned a car to ferry the Chigwells home. They’d wanted to send Ms. Chigwell to a hospital for observation, but she was adamant about returning to her own home.
Before Mallory came I’d been telling everyone that Jurshak had lured Chigwell down to the plant with a tale about finding a half-dead employee on the premises. Ms. Chigwell hadn’t let him go alone this late at night and the two found themselves caught in the cross fire. Bobby looked narrowly at me, but finally agreed to my version when it was clear he wasn’t going to get anything else from the doctor or his sister.
Bobby left me squatting wearily against a pillar on the plant floor while he conferred with the Fifth District commander. The light winking from uniform jackets and hardware made me dizzy; I shut my eyes, but I couldn’t keep out the clamor, or the murky Xerxine smell. What would my creatine level be after tonight? I pictured my kidneys filled with lesions—blood-red with black holes in them, oozing Xerxine. Someone shook me roughly. I opened my eyes. Sergeant McGonnigal was standing over me, his square face displaying unusual concern.
“Let’s get you outside—you need some fresh air, Vic.”
I let him help me to my feet and stumbled after him to the loading bay, where the police had rolled back the steel doors leading to the river. The fog had lifted; stars showed little yellow pricks in the polluted heavens. The air was still pungent with the scent of many chemicals but the cold made it fresher than it was inside the plant. I looked down at the water glinting black in the moonlight and shivered.
“You’ve had a pretty rough night.”
McGonnigal’s voice held just the right level of concern. I tried not to imagine him learning how to talk to difficult witnesses like that at a seminar in Springfield—I tried to think he really cared about the horrors I’d been through. After all, we’d known each other six or seven years.
“A little exhausting,” I admitted.
“You want to tell me about it, or do you want to wait to talk to the lieutenant?”
So it was role-playing from a seminar. My shoulders sagged a bit farther. “If I tell you, will I have to repeat it to Mallory? It’s not a story I feel like going over more than once.”
“You know the cops, Warshawski—we never take any story just once. But if you’ll give me the outline tonight, I’ll make sure that does for now—get you home while there’s still a little left of the night to sleep in.”
Maybe there was a little personal concern mixed in. Not enough to make me tell the whole truth and nothing but—I mean, I wasn’t going to explain about the doctor’s medical texts. And certainly not Jurshak’s relations with Louisa. But after I’d pulled a crate over to the water’s edge and sat on it, I gave him more details than I’d originally planned to.