Good Old Harry Hanratty

In the City of Big Shoulders
  

by Terry John Malik

        Chicago staggers like a punch-drunk brawler, beaten senseless by six straight days of temperatures pushing one-hundred degrees. The heatwave has strained the City’s electrical grid and exhausted the patience of its residents. It’s pit neighbor against neighbor and friend against friend, for no reason at all. But Harry Hanratty has a reason to be out on an oppressively hot July night. Harry set out to settle a score, and he assured me that however the night might end, he’d accept the consequences. I pledged to do the same—Harry was more than a friend to me, much more, but he didn’t know it.

I.

        I first met Harry on the job more than seventeen years ago. I don’t recall exactly why I took an immediate liking to him—maybe because he looked like everybody’s kid brother who you’d want to put your arms around and tell him everything’s going to be okay. Even today, to look at him you’d have a hard time taking him seriously until he flashes his Detective Star in your face and slaps cuffs on you. He stands only 5’6” or so. I’m not sure about his weight. You see, the top of his pants can’t decide whether to ride atop the bulge in his waistline or to slide down just below it. In his forties, most of his hair has already abandoned him except for a laurel wreath of reddish-brownish fuzz. His eyes are blue-gray and sit astride a bulbous nose full of tiny dilated red blood vessels spindling about like tributaries of a silent, unseen river. But none of that matters.

        On most Friday nights I would meet Harry at O’Leary’s Lantern on Central Avenue near Irving where we joined other detectives of the 23^rd District for week-ending drinks. O’Leary’s was a safe haven, a place where cops could get cold beer on tap and blow off steam among their own, and a place that Harry and I could be together. It was no wider than a two-lane country road and twice again as deep. Harry joked that it resembled the dark caverns of his childhood nightmares where monsters lurked. To me, it looked like what it was—a dark, run-down old tavern, its floors worn and stinking of sour beer, and its ceiling paint peeling. During peak hours on Friday nights, you could hardly hear yourself talk over the din of drunken laughter and animated arguments that often got settled out back.

        Harry would arrive first, order up a Guinness, and nurse it while waiting for me to show up. He’d sit alone at the end of the bar and tell the bartender he was waiting for a friend. A friend? The best that I could tell, I was his only friend. He thought our Friday nights together in my bed were just sex between two cops relieving the tensions of the week and filling our mutual loneliness, nothing about love for Harry.

        As the others from the 23^rd filed in, we would mix with them and exchange polite small talk. After twenty minutes of feigning sympathy for their complaints about the job and exchanging clever banter, Harry and I would retreat to a secluded booth out of earshot of the most curious among them. It was there in the back of O’Leary’s where Harry, a diffident soul, shared with me all he was capable of sharing about himself. Never looking for love, preferring the solitude of a mind uncluttered by the turmoil of relationships. Never the influencer. Always the influenced. Owner of the forever-feeling of inadequacy. And the keeper of a religious zeal I admired but never completely understood.

        During one of those O’Leary’s nights, he sheepishly admitted he was in trouble. Speaking in the vaguest of terms, he said he was being blackmailed into covering up the crimes of another cop. I couldn’t tell if he was feeling embarrassed or guilty, but he refused to say more about what he was being forced to do.

        I reached across the table for his hand. With a look to the crowded bar, he withdrew his.

        “Look, Harry, I don’t get it. For all your faults—”

        “I have faults, Jeanie?”

        “You know what I mean. None of that matters to me. I never met anyone like you: an ardent, God-fearing, bible-reading, candle-lighting, daily-Mass-going, old-fashioned Roman Catholic churchgoer. And yet, from the sound of it, you seem to have allowed yourself to get dragged into a quagmire of criminal activity that is at odds with your faith and could land you in prison.”

        Nothing would be gained by mentioning our Friday night assignations. Harry must have confessed his sin the next day and started a week with a clear conscience—until the following Friday night.

        Harry stopped the middle-aged waitress as she walked by and ordered another beer. He wasn’t thirsty. He was delaying.

        “Harry, what’s really going on?”

        He pressed his four fingers and thumb hard against his forehead, shading his face. In a flatness of voice, he uttered a single word: “Acosta.”

        “Acosta? Oh for Chrissake, Harry!”

        “The night of the ghost gun raid. He uses it like it’s piano wire wrapped around my balls and jerks on it anytime I balk at his demands.”

        “Harry, listen to me. You gotta get free of him. Just refuse to do whatever it is he wants you to do.”

        “It’s not that easy,” Harry lamented.

        “Call his bluff. Whatever it is he requires of you, he can’t turn you in without implicating himself.”

        “C’mon, Jeanie. You know he’s just clever enough to manipulate evidence to shift the blame to me and make me the scapegoat.” Harry stared at the last of his beer as he swirled it around the bottom of his glass, determinatively reticent to tell me more.

        “There’s got to be a way.”

        Without looking up at me he replied, “I may have a way out, Jeanie, but the cost—well, the cost might be too high to pay.”

        As troubled as he was, Harry seemed to have it worked out for the time being. Each Saturday he sought forgiveness in his parish’s confessional, drawn there by a schoolboy’s conscience and a code of conduct written in pencil and taped to his bathroom mirror. He played a grim game of self-deceit, and he played it well.

        The game started the night of the infamous ghost gun raid. We were part of a special combined CPD-ATF task force investigating black market gun dealers who were supplying West Side street gangs with untraceable semi-automatic weapons. The raid was led by Sergeant Ramón Acosta, a tall and lean Cuban-American with a pock-marked face, a stylish slicked-back haircut, and deep-set brooding eyes. He was always well-groomed; too well groomed for a cop. The rumor was that he had won a couple hundred grand playing the little lotto game, with the result that allowed him to wear Armani suits, $400 shoes, and drive a Cadillac Escalade. No doubt, he started the rumor. No doubt, no one believed it.

        During the raid, Harry shot and killed a scared, unarmed black kid who had no connection to the gun dealers. He was simply a homeless kid in the proverbial wrong place, wrong time. Acosta witnessed the whole thing. He looked Harry in the eye, measuring the man. Whatever he saw in Harry’s eyes that night sealed their fate.

        That’s when Acosta reached for his ankle holster and pulled out an unregistered drop-down Ruger .38, complete with a smooth-taped grip. As he opened the gun’s cylinder and withdrew all but two bullets, Acosta asked in his gravelly voice, “You right-handed?”

        “What?”

        “Are you right-handed? Yes or no?”

        “What are you talking about?”

        “You want out of this mess or not?”

        “Left. I’m left-handed. So?”

        Acosta took careful aim and shot Harry in his right arm, tearing open a gash in the fleshy part just above the elbow. Incredulous, Harry instinctively grabbed his arm, blood seeping through his fingers and, in a rage, he cried out, “What the fuck, Acosta? You mother—”

        “Shut up!”

        Acosta tugged on Harry’s shirt sleeve, tore it length-wise, pushed it up his arm, and fashioned a makeshift tourniquet.

        “Here. Hold it tight.”

        Then he wiped the Ruger clean with a handkerchief taken from his pocket. He placed the gun in the kid’s hand, pressing the kid’s finger against the trigger and squeezing off another shot; the slug lodged itself in the wall behind Harry.

        “It was self-defense, Hanratty. I saw the whole thing. The kid shot first—he got off two shots. Hit you in the arm with the second. Just press hard against the wound and keep moving.”

        Acosta saved his ass that night. After that night, he owned it.

        Well anyway, as I was saying, heatwave or no heatwave, Harry Hanratty had a job to finish on that night in July, and he was not to be deterred by the night’s stifling heat nor the hollow feeling in his stomach.

II.

        Harry chose an empty Gold Coast brownstone undergoing a rehab as the place to leave the body of Acosta’s latest victim. He stood at the foot of the stairs that led to the second floor and contemplated what loomed before him—an arduous climb up a narrow, unlit, dilapidated staircase. Beads of sweat dotted his bald head and raced down his brow. A vagabond breeze added a chill to the perspiration-soaked shirt clinging to his back. His hands were uncomfortably damp and sticky. Undaunted, he slung the girl’s limp body over his shoulder, took a deep breath, and started the climb.

        Halfway up, his knees begged him to stop and rest. He answered with a grunt and another three steps. Nearing the top, a wobbly riser gave way and the girl’s body began to slide off his shoulder pulling him backward and to the left toward the stairwell wall which had been opened to its two-by-four framing by the rehab contractors. Harry thrust his hand toward the wall, clutched an exposed stud, leaned forward, and regained his balance. Harry set his mouth in a line of grim determination and tightened his hold, telling the girl’s corpse, “I won’t drop you. That much I can promise.”

        In the gutted bathroom at the top of the stairs, he eased her naked body onto the raw, piss-stained plywood floor. Losing his balance, he fell to his knees, and came face-to-face with her. Her face was streaked with long, thin strands of moonlight sneaking through cracks in the boarded-up window just behind him. He leaned back on his haunches, snatched his small Mag flashlight from his pocket, and focused its narrow beam on her face for a last look. He gently fingered her hair and slid a strand from her face to behind her ear. He traced her lips with his forefinger and ran the back of his hand across her cheek.

        Harry stood and looked down at her, intoning remorse, he whispered, “I’m sorry you’re the one who had to pay the price to stop him. But before the night is over, I may pay a high price too.”

        Drenched in sweat, Harry swept the flashlight in arcs around the room and down the stairs, following its dancing beam back to the first floor. He rushed down the worn and squeaking rear staircase to the alley where the air was thick with the odor of sulfur from spent Fourth of July fireworks and the stench of rotting food from nearby garbage bins. Bile and disgust rose in his throat. Bile from the odor. Disgust from the task.

        Out of breath, he took several timorous steps to his twelve-year old Honda Civic and reached for the driver-side door. He stopped—abruptly—and stood perfectly still with his hand pressed against the door handle. Squinting, he looked to the end of the alley where, under a flickering streetlight, a couple was in a deep embrace sharing a kiss and a grope. He ran a pensive hand across the top of his bald head and wrinkled his brow at the sight of them. Satisfied that they hadn’t shown any interest in him, Harry swung open the car door, reached under the front seat, and retrieved a pint of Irish. He took an angry swallow and came away grimacing and coughing from the burn of the cheap liquor. Harry looked to the end of the alley again, lines of concern deepening in his forehead. The couple was still there. She had her back to the wall and was shaking her head. Her companion shot a furtive glance over his shoulder at Harry, then looked away and took her in his arms again.

        Harry leaned back against the open car door, and this time he took a measured swig of the whiskey. He cocked his head and shifted his eyes to the boarded-up window on the second floor. In the finality of the moment, he declared, “It ends tonight.”

        “What did you say?” came a flat gravelly voice from the shadows.

        Harry wheeled around to see the profile of a man lurking in the hollow beneath the stairs. The gravelly voice was unmistakable. It belonged to Ramón Acosta. Harry was counting on him showing up. His plan turned on it.

        “It ends tonight?” Acosta spit out Harry’s words like he had just taken a bite of rancid meat. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

        “Why her, Ramón?” Harry quickly replied to blunt and divert Acosta’s suspicion. “Why any of them?”

        “It’s not your job to ask questions,” snarled Acosta, “your job is to get them as far away as possible from where they died—”

        “Murdered.”

        “What?”

        “From where they were murdered.”

        “Okay. Murdered,” he replied icily.

        “My God, Acosta, how much more do you want from me?”

        “The ghost gun raid. I saved your ass that night. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be looking at a twenty-years to-life for killing that kid.”

        “I should’ve owned up to it. Turned myself in. It was an accident. At least, I could sleep at night.”

        “Don’t kid yourself.”

        “Tell me something, Acosta. Why are you here tonight? You wanna make sure I did as you instructed? Is that it? Is that why you’re here? The girl is on the second floor in a gutted bathroom as you instructed. Go on! Go look for yourself!”

        As Acosta emerged from beneath the stairs, he declared, “You’re right, Hanratty. It ends tonight.” A deep shadow covered his face and, at his side, his nickel-plated .38 glinted in the light of the night’s crescent moon.

        The sounds of the Fourth of July seeped into the alley. The last faint explosions of fireworks at Navy Pier. The fading final crescendo of the 1812 Overture. And then, the thunderous roar of the Overture’s cannons muffled the crack of two gunshots. Acosta’s .38 muzzle flashed bright as if he wielded lightning in his grasp.

        Harry never had a chance to reach for his Smith & Wesson 9mm stuffed between his belt and his belly. He collapsed against the car’s back fender, careened to the left, and landed at the foot of the staircase, a corpse.

        Acosta fingered the safety on his .38 and holstered it, pulling the strap tight under his right arm. He squatted next to Harry, retrieved his 9mm and said, “Good old Harry Hanratty! You’re going to cover for me one last time,” looking up at the second floor window, he added, “after I’m done with you and the girl, no one will doubt that you were the Rehab Killer.”

III.

        My partner for the last five months in Internal Affairs, Rickie Lombardi, broke our staged embrace and moved out from beneath the flickering streetlight and into the darkness of the alley. I reached for his arm, but he jerked it away and pushed me back against the wall.

        “Rickie, what the hell are you doing? Harry told us to wait until—”

        “Jean, don’t be a fool! Harry’s dead.”

        “You don’t know that . . .” I fought back tears.

        Rickie bolted down the alley, shouting, “Acosta! Freeze!” He stopped momentarily, took his stand, and aimed his SIG at Harry’s car. “Acosta! It’s Lombardi! Show yourself and move away from the car.”

        My thoughts raced back to yesterday morning when Harry laid out his plan to Rickie and me. The plan turned on getting Acosta in the same room as the dead girl. Harry? I heard two muffled gunshots. I saw him go down. I heard Acosta talking to him. Harry knew the risk. He knew he might have to take a bullet—said he might’ve even welcome it. But Christ Almighty, Harry!

        Acosta stood from behind the rear fender, his hands held high and holding Harry’s 9mm above his head upside down, his thumb in the trigger guard. “It’s okay, Lombardi. Hanratty was the Rehab Killer! I caught him just now with the body of another one of his victims. He practically dared me to kill him. Who would’ve thought the little weasel was capable of murdering young girls?”

        Rickie slowed his pace to measured, deliberate strides, his weapon held at shoulder level with both hands, trained on Acosta. “Save me the bullshit! You’re through, Acosta. Hanratty gave himself up to Jean and me and told us the whole story.”

        “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lombardi.”

        “For the last time, move away from the car and place the gun on the ground and kick it toward me or I’ll drop you where you stand.”

        “Damn you, Hanratty,” Acosta muttered, “You fat little fuck!”

        Suddenly, the alley seemed narrower. The buildings, taller. Porch lights went on, then off, like the blinking eyes of an audience reluctant to watch the most frightening part of a horror movie. From above the back door of the restaurant across the alley, a wobbly fan blade scraped against its frame in lazy rhythmic intervals against the soundtrack hum of the City.

        Just then, the door of the restaurant swung open, flooding the alley with the clatter of pots and pans. An apron-clad worker, a trash bag in each hand, stepped into the alley and panicked at the sight of armed men. He dropped the bags and scurried for cover back to the restaurant’s kitchen, slamming the door hard behind him.

        Taking advantage of the distraction, Acosta took ahold of Harry’s gun, and squeezed off two quick shots. Rickie’s shoulder caught one; the second splashed slivers of brick on my shoulder and face. I darted to the other side of the alley and took a position behind a trash bin with a direct line of sight, my .45 in hand. Rickie swayed to his right and stumbled, going down on one knee. His hand trembled so badly that he jerked at the trigger getting off several wild answering shots. A sudden staccato of rapid gunfire filled the alley. And then, a shroud of silence and smoke.

        “Harry? Rickie? Rickie!”

        Keeping low, I ran to where Rickie lay. A crimson halo was forming behind his head. I didn’t need to check. He was dead.

        A gravelly voice came from behind the car, “Who’s there? I need help . . .”

        “Acosta?”

        “Yeah. I’m hit bad. I’m losing a lot of blood. Is that you, Conner?” his words, barely audible.

        I cautiously followed my .45 around the rear of the car and found Acosta sitting on the ground, slouched against the open driver-side door. His bloody left hand was pressed against a growing red stain on his lower left abdomen; and, from a wound in his right shoulder, blood was leaking down into his shoulder holster, onto his .38 and down his limp arm. Harry’s Smith & Wesson, lay on the ground a couple of feet in front of Acosta, its slide open and the chamber empty. I kicked it out of Acosta’s reach.

        “Your weapon, Acosta! Where’s your gun?”

        With a contemptuous look, he nodded to his right side. “I strapped it tight into my holster—as it turned out, too tight. I fumbled with the snap when Lombardi charged me. I couldn’t get it out in time, so I used Harry’s 9mm.” Looking down at his bloody shirt, he added, “After I took one in the gut, I couldn’t get to the holster.”

        I gave him a swift, hard kick in his side close to the wound. As he writhed and screamed in pain, I reached down, tugged his holster from his shoulder, retrieved his .38, and stuck it in my belt.

        “Where’s Harry?”

        “Fuck him! I need help. You made the bleeding—”

        I cut him off before he could say another word. I trained my Glock on him and squeezed off a single shot above his head, shattering the car’s window. Shards of glass rained down on him.

        “I said where’s Harry!”

        Wincing, he defiantly answered, “Foot of the stairs. Dead.”

        I craned my neck to look over at Harry. He was bloody and wasn’t breathing. He was gone. My heart sank. An angry tear rolled down my cheek. Dispirited, I leaned back against the rear fender of Harry’s car and rubbed my brow as if applying the right amount of pressure would force answers to surface. Hell, the night’s heat alone was enough to fry my brain and cloud my thinking. Dammit Harry, you’re supposed to be here to wrap your arms around me and tell me everything’s going to be okay.

        Harry died trying to end Acosta’s rape and murder of young girls. He had struggled all his life to do the right thing and to be faithful to his god. His reward? Dying alone without dignity or honor in a dark alley, discarded like the food scraps in the restaurant’s trash bin and the demolition debris piled at the foot of the stairs.

        As if a sheet of lightning flashed before me, an epiphany of revelations opened my eyes. Answers came to questions I had never before asked. Everything about the moment seemed so simple. I froze in place absorbing the possibilities. One thought repeated over and over again: I don’t intend to end up like good old Harry Hanratty—dead and alone with nothing more than an unfulfilled promise of a paltry pension for his seventeen years of loyal service.

        Likely shaken by the prospect that the next time I pull the trigger of my .45 I’d lower my aim, Acosta was already working an angle to stay alive. “Conner, tell me,” he said, “how long have you known what Harry was doing? Weeks? Months? Under the law, Harry would be considered to be an accomplice, and you—well, you were aiding and abetting or maybe an accomplice after the fact. Some smart Assistant State’s Attorney will have sorted it out by the time we’re arraigned. But it doesn’t have end that way.”

        He said it with the smooth, deceiving allure of the serpent in the garden, but there was truth in what he said. I could be in the clear easily enough though. I mean, Harry’s dead and the secret of what he had done for Acosta and my knowledge of it died with him. And Acosta? He can’t talk if I finish tonight’s firefight with one more bullet, but that would make me no better than him—a common murderer.

        “You could’ve had a better payday all these years if you had played the game like the rest of us, but you refused. Nobody except Harry wants to partner with ‘Clean Jean Conner,” afraid you’d turn them in if you witnessed them taking even the smallest bribe. But it’s not too late to change all that. It’s not too late to make the money you deserve for risking your life every day on the job.”

        So the serpent offers a bite of the forbidden fruit.

        He gestured toward Rickie. “Your partner, Lombardi, he was on the take—”

        “Yeah, at IA we knew that. I was transferred to Internal Affairs specifically to keep tabs on him. Pretty clever of little Rickie, huh? Got himself transferred to IA about a year ago and then started blackmailing guys in Narcotics to get a drift of their skim.”

        “I stumbled upon his game, Conner, and squeezed him for a share.” Acosta grimaced as he took deep breaths; the red stain had slowed.

        “Yeah, we knew about his payments to you. We were waiting for Rickie to pay off certain district commanders who we suspected would look the other way for a thick envelope tossed in the front seat of their cars. We allowed little fish like you to swim by so we could snag big fish in our net.”

        “That’s my point, Conner. I know who the big fish are. I was waiting for the right time to shake them down. I can supply you with a list of those names—names you won’t get if I’m dead.”

        Acosta’s voice seemed miles away. Everything suddenly looked clear to me. The son-of-a-bitch Lombardi had been living high on the hog after only seven years on the job. He and other cops on the take were leading comfortable lives, with six-figure savings accounts and driving new BMWs while I lived on a detective’s salary in a one-bedroom apartment above a coffee shop in the Pilsen neighborhood with ten more payments on my used SUV and student debt I’ll still be paying into the next decade.

        “Harry confided in me that he was being forced to be your cleaner but wouldn’t tell me what you were up to. So I kept a close eye on you.”

        “And what did you find?”

        “Last week, for the first time, I found what I feared—the girls.”

        “Why didn’t you turn me in?”

        “Harry. To protect Harry, at least until I was sure that he had a plan to stop you.”

        “Protecting your lover! That’s right everyone knew about your Friday night trysts. We never could figure why you were lovers. I mean what in the hell did you see in him.”

        I lowered my weapon and snapped off a shot at his feet. Chips of asphalt sprayed on him. He flinched and swore. This poor figure of man would never understand emotions of the heart.

        Regaining his composure, he asked, “So, what are you going to do, Conner?” The unholy confidence of the serpent was gone. Acosta stunk of fear.

        Harry was gone. And with that my sudden epiphany had introduced me to a world without rules. I straightened my spine. If the custom and practice was to be on the take, only a fool wouldn’t join in. Maybe it took seeing Harry’s lifeless body to lift the veil of naiveté I had chosen to hide behind all these years.

        The serpent slithered away, but the forbidden fruit was too good to resist. My turn, Goddammit!

        “Ramón, am I right? The slugs in your gut and shoulder—those had to have come from Rickie’s SIG?”

        He replied with vacuous indifference, “I suppose so.”

        No reason to let him know I froze when the shooting started and didn’t get off a single shot.

        “My gut, Jean. It’s starting to hurt real bad. Maybe you should call—”

        “The EMTs will be here soon enough. Listen to me, Ramón. Rickie took several wild shots. No one would be surprised if a couple of his wayward shots wound up in you instead of his intended target—Harry.”

        Acosta jerked his head up and apparently not realizing what I was telling him, growled, “Lombardi wasn’t going to arrest me tonight, dammit. He was out to kill me because I was squeezing him—”

        “The hell with that! You’re probably right about Lombardi, but that doesn’t matter now. Tell me this, Acosta: the only slugs that the medical examiner is going to dig out of Rickie will have come from Harry’s 9mm?”

        “I never got a chance to reach for my .38. I guess . . .” Acosta’s eyes lit up. “Wait, yeah, you’re right.”

        I stuffed my .45 in my belt holster and snagged Harry’s gun from where I had kicked it. I momentarily hovered over Harry’s body thinking that I couldn’t keep my pledge to him. I reached down and retrieved Harry’s extra magazine from his back pocket. While reloading his 9mm, I asked Acosta, “You right-handed?”

        “What?”

        “I said, are you right-handed.”

        “What are you talking about?”

        “Look, I can make you a hero or I can put a bullet in your head and claim the mantle of heroism for myself by having caught and killed the Rehab Killer.”

        “Kill me and you go back to your Detective’s pay and a pension in three years at half pay.”

        “For Chrissake, shut up! I’m way ahead of you. Listen, when the dicks from Homicide get here, we’ll have to convince them that Harry was the Rehab Killer. You tell ‘em just enough to shift suspicion toward Harry. I’ll tell them that Lombardi had a hunch that Harry was the one killing young girls—that he was the Rehab Killer—and we unexpectedly came across you. We witnessed your confrontation with Harry and during an exchange of gunfire, you shot and killed him. At first, the dullards in the 23^rd District Homicide Unit will shake their heads in disbelief, but as the evidence you provide them mounts, they will eventually believe the evidence.”

        “My God, Conner,” Acosta said in a hushed tone. “You’re willing to pin the murders on your friend?”

        “Harry’s dead. There’s nothing I can do to change that. He was a loner—no family, no friends—and he was more than a little odd. Until I saw Harry’s body just now, the thought of betraying him would never have entered my head. But now? If that’s what it takes for me to finally get the payday I deserve, then yeah, that’s what I’ll do. C’mon, Ramón, you must’ve suspected that Harry’s usefulness had run out when you decided to show up here tonight. You must’ve already prepared a cover story to explain why you had to kill him.”

        “Yeah. I was going to set him up to take the fall . . . but I don’t understand. Maybe it’s the pain. Maybe it’s the heat. Where the hell are you going with this?”

        “Try to keep up, Ramón, will ya’? We don’t have much time. Blue and whites are on the way. You take over shaking down the big fish on Lombardi’s list—I’ll want a third of your take and a third of what you’re already taking down in bribes and payoffs. I’ll move into Rickie’s play with the guys in Narcotics; that’s all mine for letting you live. You being the hero who shot and killed the rapist and murderer of three teenage girls, the brass will honor your request to transfer to the Narcotics Bureau, and we’ll take over their entire operation, splitting the spoils fifty-fifty.”

        “Sweet Jesus! I never pegged you as such a cold, calculating bitch!”

        “Ha! Until just now, neither did I. So what’s it going to be? Take it or leave it.” I raised Harry’s 9mm and aimed it at him, saying, “You’re not going to like the ‘leave it part’. And Ramón—”

        “Yeah?”

        “You ever touch another girl again, I’ll track you down and without a second thought I’ll kill you like I’d kill a rabid dog.”

        The wail of sirens grew closer. I could see flashing blue strobes bouncing off the windows at the end of the alley.

        “Too bad for you, but to make our story credible, you need to have a slug in you from Harry’s 9mm. So, like I said, are you right-handed?”

“And they tell me you are crooked, and I answer:
yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.”
Chicago – 1913
Carl Sandburg

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