When Jake dropped me at Lotty’s, he fretted about leaving me on my own, but he had students waiting for him at Northeastern. I assured him I could get around with public transportation and taxis and that I wouldn’t be going far—I don’t bounce back from street fights the way I used to.
I dozed in the waiting room until Lotty had time to see me. She studied the reports from the Beth Israel ER on her computer screen, studied my face, agreeing the swelling had gone down, that there was no damage to the cornea or retina, took the cocaine-laced padding out of my nose, assured me that I would live to be scarred another day.
She advised me not to drive for a day or two, or at least to stay off the expressways. “And—I know caution is foreign to your nature, but Victoria—please!”
She didn’t say anything else, not the words of anger or fear she sometimes gives after an injury. Somehow that made the encounter more painful.
I walked to Western Avenue from her clinic to pick up a southbound bus. All my muscles felt stiff and sore; the half-mile walk helped pinpoint every blow I’d absorbed last night. When the bus finally lumbered to the stop nearest my office, all I wanted was to lie down and sleep, but I went into the coffee bar across the street for an espresso. Maybe caffeine could compensate for painkillers and pain.
I took a second coffee to my office, did half an hour of gentle stretches, then spent what was left of the morning at work, cleaning up jobs I could manage online. In the middle of a complicated search for funds that a partner had embezzled from his small business, my phone rang. The caller ID was blocked.
“This Warshawski?”
The voice was hoarse, hard to hear.
“Think about your old man, Warshawski, think how he got treated when they sent him to West Englewood. He made the wrong people angry, and so have you. Stop before they do something worse.”
He hung up before I could say anything. My computer records incoming calls. Not legal, I know that, don’t lecture me. I played the call back four times but it didn’t tell me any more than I’d known when I heard it live.
I fingered my swollen eye. My dad had been transferred abruptly, to one of the city’s most dangerous districts, without any explanation I’d ever heard. He was a good and experienced beat cop, able to develop relationships in even the most difficult neighborhood. It wasn’t the gangbangers who almost did him in, but his coworkers. During his time in Englewood, he was shot at five times. Each time, the dispatcher claimed Tony had never radioed for backup. He found a dead rat in his locker seven times, piss in his coffee cup many times. Most terrifying, he’d found his photo on the cutouts at the shooting range.
The first shooting occurred the summer after Boom-Boom made his home ice debut. I’d finished my third year at the University of Chicago. That summer, I was working as a secretary in the political science department, commuting from home to save rent money. My dad was on the graveyard shift, and in those pre–cell phone days I spent my nights on the foldout bed in the living room, too worried to go up the stairs to my own bed, never fully asleep, half-waiting for the phone to ring with news of disaster.
Tony never told me what had gone wrong, which power broker he’d pissed off. Someone in South Chicago remembered after all this time. And knew that I’d been attacked last night. So someone had persuaded the Insane Dragons to slash my tires and jump Bernie and me. Or they were taking advantage of the attack to threaten me.
My left eye began to throb. I lay on the cot in my back room with ice on my face, trying to imagine which of my cast of characters could have known my dad, which one of them would have known why he’d been flung to the hyenas.
My cell phone woke me an hour later. I was disoriented, my hair and neck wet from the melted ice. I struggled upright in my dark back room and dug my phone out of my jeans.
It was Bobby Mallory, my dad’s old friend. He’d been one of Tony’s protégés when he joined the force, but he was a savvy player and he was finishing his career at a command post in the shiny new headquarters building on Michigan Avenue.
“Vicki, what happened last night? My secretary saw your name on an incident report and passed it on to me. Why were you tangling with the Insane Dragons?”
Bobby is the only person on the planet who is allowed to call me Vicki. I gave him a thumbnail sketch of the old Stadium events, with a detour to talk about Bernie—Bobby had been a regular at the old Stadium when Boom-Boom and Pierre Fouchard skated together.
“Bobby, I just had a threatening phone call, telling me to remember what happened to Tony when he made the wrong people angry, warning me that the same thing could happen to me. Tony never would tell me what had happened. Do you know?”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line, then Bobby said heavily, “I can’t tell you.”
“Can’t or won’t?” I demanded.
“Don’t ride me, Vicki. I was in my first command and your father was protecting me, not wanting me to know things that might make me think I had to act.”