“We can’t drive in,” I said.
“You gonna hijack a chopper?” my neighbor said. “We don’t have time to joke around.”
He was right. The clock kept ticking. I drove fast and dangerously, running red lights, weaving around traffic on two-lane streets, earning fingers, honks, even a brandished weapon at Eighty-third.
At 103rd, the top of the marshes along the Calumet River, I crossed over to Stony Island. We were at the start of a stretch of swamp, park, golf course, waste dumping and heavy industry, dotted with ponds made by the overflow from the big lake and Lake Calumet. If the thugs were in place, they were three miles to the south.
Move, move! I ordered myself savagely. Mr. Contreras was almost weeping with anxiety. My own state: sick, terrified, head a balloon bouncing ten feet from the ground, body in motion, body in motion will stay in motion, at rest—will rest forever.
I spied a canoe in the underbrush, jumped out of the car, saw the canoe was chained to a log. The old man still had enough strength to shatter the lock with a rock. I took the paddle stuck in the mud underneath it.
Stealing, no, borrowing, stuffing it any old way into the Taurus’s trunk, bouncing it down the road to the top of Dead Stick Pond, smashing through the fence around the pond, launching the boat. Mr. Contreras watching while I climbed into waist-high filthy water, fanny pack around the neck to keep my gun dry. He scrambled back through the brush to the car while I began to paddle, paddling for life, not a beautiful stroke, not knowing how to do it except by gut feel. Herons watched me with malevolent eyes: I was frightening away their lunch. Geese squawked indignantly, took to the air.
At the south end, I climbed out again into water brown with waste, purple-green with industrial oil, boots soaked, squelching through mud, up the bank to the wall separating the road from Lake Calumet. I could see the smokestacks of ships on the far side of the wall. The dredges and cranes at work on the hidden docks covered the noise I was making.
I used to walk that wall with Boom-Boom, while we dared each other to jump off under the noses of the freighters in Lake Calumet. We used to boost each other up. Back then, we wore dry clothes and shoes, but I could do it alone today in sodden jeans and mud-caked boots.
I found a place where the concrete had crumbled, exposing rebar. Put a toe in, hoisted myself into place. This was so easy, my third wall in twenty-four hours, I could join Cirque du Soleil. I straddled the wall, crabbed across, lay flat when I got in squinting distance of the road. The goons’ car was on the shoulder, tilting downward into the ditch, hidden from street view by the shrubs and tall marsh grasses.
Fifteen minutes from launch, five over our limit. I pulled out the Smith & Wesson, took off the safety, placed the spare clips on the wall in front of me. Right on time, the Taurus engine roared as Mr. Contreras floored it and drove headlong toward the wall. He swerved a second before he hit it and fishtailed, knocking the rear end against the wall.
The doors facing the wall opened and the dogs jumped out.
Gunfire rattled from the underbrush. The Taurus’s windshield shattered. I aimed at the flash of light in the weeds, emptied half a clip, saw movement in the brush, fired again, reloaded, slid from the wall, jumped across the ditch to the enemy car, shot out the tires. A savage growl behind me: I turned to see Mitch fling himself against a thug sneaking up behind me. Mitch knocked him to the ground. I stomped on the man’s arm, forced him to drop his gun, kicked the gun away, kicked the thug’s head hard enough to knock him out, hit the road as more gunfire erupted.
“Down,” I ordered Mitch, panting, “down!” He loped off instead, heading across the road to Dead Stick Pond.
I didn’t know where Peppy was, didn’t know where Mr. Contreras was, had to concentrate on the gunfire still coming from the thick grasses.
Furious shouts from behind the retaining wall. Heads appeared—men in hard hats, men with walkie-talkies, cell phones. The gun roar filled my head; I didn’t know what they were saying, kept my eyes on the car, on the underbrush. Saw movement in two places, ducked low, shot at the feet as they appeared. And then the hard hats were over the wall, moving into the brush, surrounding the punks.