Squinting in the near darkness, he scanned the construction vehicles, the cliffs, the empty road that ran along the top. Then the ring of the tunnel, casting the only light in this whole place. The door to the trailer was still open behind him, but they had left the lights off. There was nobody else here.
He looked back down at the dead man’s face. Fowler had been part of SIS for five years. He came out of the Narcotics unit, just like Bloome had. He was young, he was ambitious, he wanted to be a rock star cop. And that meant SIS. He’d found Bloome in Homan Square, had walked right up to him in the hallway, told him he’d be part of the team someday. Bloome had remembered him. When they had an opening, Fowler was the first man he called.
He was married now. His wife’s name was Joanne. Everybody called her Jo. Jay and Jo. She was seven months pregnant.
I did this, Bloome said to himself. I brought this man here. He will never see his own child.
Bloome stood up and tried moving his neck, felt the muscles tightening, the skin stretching over something hard, embedded just under the surface. He stopped testing it.
“Reagan,” he said out loud. “Koniczek.”
The two men inside the tunnel. Bloome knew they were dead. He knew by the simple math of a dozen gunshots and Mason and the woman somehow walking away.
They were dead.
Walter Reagan. John Koniczek. He knew their wives, too, just as well as he knew Fowler’s. He knew their kids.
None of these men should have been here.
Bloome spotted his gun lying on the ground, went back over and picked it up. He brushed it off before holstering it and, as he did, he remembered the day he bought it. Chicago cops have to buy their own weapons and he had picked out a Sig P250, chambered with .45 ACP shells. It was the only weapon he’d ever carried, even today when it was no longer on the approved list. If you already had one, they let you keep it.
He remembered the first time he had fired it on the streets. Just a few years in, on a West Side buy-and-bust, some low-level runner taking a crack at them as he fled down an alley. Back when they had no idea what they were doing. When their best idea for finding the traffic was looking for white buyers in the wrong neighborhoods or picking up junkies and turning them into informants. Trying to work their way from the bottom up. And never getting anywhere.
Things didn’t get much better when Bloome joined the Narcotics unit as a detective. It still felt like a losing battle every day. But then he got partnered with a detective named Ray Jameson. A former college wrestler with permanently mauled ears and a personality as big as his body, he was a human wrecking ball when it came to police work, a perfect counterpart to the cold, machinelike precision of Vincent Bloome. These were two men who never should have gotten along, not for five minutes, but it was Bloome’s couch that Jameson chose to sleep on whenever his wife threw him out of the house. And from the moment Bloome and Jameson started working cases together, it was obvious their individual strengths formed a perfect combination to get things done on the streets.
Bloome and Jameson were putting up good numbers, but the overall picture in Chicago was getting worse every year. More drugs, more violence. More pressure on the mayor to do something about it. Anything.
That’s how SIS was born. Bloome and Jameson were two of the first men to walk into that empty space on the top floor of Homan, already talking about how they’d lay out the office. Desks here, where the sun could come through these big windows. Interview rooms along that wall. It was time to get to work.
From the beginning, everything was different if you were a member of the new team. You dressed better than other cops. Tailored suits, leather shoes, long topcoats in the colder months. You worked harder. You worked longer. It was part of the team ethos that you didn’t even bother keeping track of your hours. You didn’t put in for overtime. You didn’t complain if you worked all weekend and didn’t see your family. The job itself was your reward.
As SIS detectives, Bloome and Jameson could go after anybody they wanted, at any level. They didn’t care about the little shit anymore. Low-level dealers were just stepping-stones to the suppliers above them. By the end of their first year together, they were putting together major cases, working them for weeks at a time. Making the arrests that got you photos with the mayor and profiles on the six o’clock news.
That was the payoff, right there. That’s why the young guys like Fowler and Reagan and Koniczek wanted to be a part of it.