I hesitated, undoing the safe in the back of my closet where I keep my Smith & Wesson. Finally I explained that Bobby wanted Elena found and that Michael had been assigned to look for her.
“She just called me from an abandoned building on Indiana. She says she’s in trouble—I don’t know if she is or not, but I’m on my way down there to get her. I’d like Furey and the lieutenant to know.”
He promised to put out a call on the radio to Michael for me with the address. I set the phone on the closet floor while I checked the clip. It was full and the ninth bullet was chambered. I carefully made sure the safety was on, put a shoulder holster over my sweatshirt, and left.
When I got to the bottom Peppy started barking anxiously behind Mr. Contreras’s door. She hadn’t seen me all day, she’d missed her run, and she was determined I wasn’t going to leave without her. Her barking followed me down the walk to the street.
As I was getting into the Chevy, Vinnie stuck his head out his front window. He yelled something, but I was already rolling and didn’t hear him.
I headed for Lake Shore Drive. The Dan Ryan would decant me closer to the site, but I wasn’t up to dealing with the construction and detours in the dark. For the same reason I left the Drive at Congress and went down Michigan Avenue instead of negotiating the spaghetti behind McCormick Place.
The moon was nearly full. Once I’d slid past the street-lamps onto south Michigan its cold light created black-and-white stills: objects highlighted with unnatural clarity, their shadows pitch black. I was feeling a little weak still, from being sick and from having eaten only once in the last twenty-four hours, but my mind was wonderfully clear. I could make out every drunk on the benches in Grant Park, and when I turned onto Cermak and up onto Prairie, I could even see the rats slithering through the vacant lots.
In the moonlight the Near South Side looked like postwar Berlin. The lifeless shells of warehouses and factories were surrounded by mountains of brick-filled rubble. When I got out at Twenty-first and Prairie, I was shivering from the desolation of the scene. I took a flashlight from the trunk and stuck it in my jacket pocket.
I took the Smith & Wesson from my shoulder holster and crept along the shadows on Twenty-first, holding it in my right hand. The cold metal brought me little comfort. I was wound up enough to take aim at a passing alley cat. It snarled at me, its eyes glinting in the moonlight as it passed.
Even as my heart pounded I wondered how much of Elena’s panic to believe in. I remembered all the times she’d gotten Tony out of bed with urgent alarms, only to have them dissolve—revealed as the phantasms of her drinking. This might easily turn into another such evening—maybe I shouldn’t even have roused Furey.
My lingering doubts didn’t make me careless. When I got to Indiana I stayed awhile in the shadow of an abandoned auto parts dealer, straining my eyes and ears for any kind of movement. I’d worried about finding Elena’s hideout from her vague directions, but there was only one hotel on the street besides the Indiana Arms. The moonlight picked out the dead neon lights of the Prairie Shores Hotel, halfway down the block on my side of the road.
I heard a rustling across the street and knelt, the gun cocked again, but it was large plastic bag dragged loose from the rest of the garbage by the ubiquitous rats. Against my will I saw their yellow teeth tearing my exposed hands; they felt tingly and uncontrolled and I hugged them under my armpits, the gun digging into my left breast. I gritted my teeth and headed down Indiana.
Across from me loomed the burned-out hull of the Indiana Arms. The sharp night air carried the acrid scent of its charred beams to me and I fought back a sneeze. When I got to the corner I could see the pay phone but not my aunt. I prowled around the street for a few minutes, tempted to return to my bed. Finally I squared my shoulders and went over to the Prairie Shores Hotel.
Its front was boarded shut; I cautiously circled around to the back. The door there was heavily chained, but on the north side a broken window provided an easy entrance.
I shone my flashlight through the missing panes. I was looking at part of the pantry for the old kitchen. I trained the light around as much as I could see of the interior. No one was there, but a rustling and the sudden darkening of shadows along the top of the broken cabinets told me my yellow-toothed pals were.
I wished I’d worn a cap. I tried not to think of the red eyes watching me as I climbed carefully over the bent metal frame. A glass shard caught in the crotch of my jeans. I stopped to loosen the fabric and listened some more before moving again. Still no human sounds.