Chicago Assault (5 page)

It took him a moment to place them. Then he remembered: They were the two winos he had seen sleeping on the bench outside Beckerman's apartment.

Only they hadn't been sleeping. And they weren't winos. It was now clear that they had been waiting on the three killers.

Had they followed Hawker? Or was O'Neil on the hit list, and were they simply determined to carry out orders?

Whatever brought them there, Hawker was determined they would not leave until he pounded some information out of them.

One of the “winos” stood at the door. As he tapped lightly at the window, the other wino hugged the wall. In his right hand was a long-barreled revolver.

“Yeah, what do you want?” O'Neil yelled from inside.

“An old friend sent us,” answered the wino. “We need to talk to you.”

“Who's the old friend?” O'Neil demanded. He was buying time, Hawker knew—time for him to get into position.

“Can't say it out here,” countered the wino. “Open the door.”

Quietly, Hawker had positioned himself beside the steps. He figured he could jump onto the porch and crack the guy with the gun in the back of the head before he knew what hit him.

Unfortunately, O'Neil decided to move first. Without warning, he punched open the door and grabbed the first wino by the throat. He pulled him roughly into the living room and swung him down onto the floor.

Jamming the barrel of his Python against the guy's head, O'Neil yelled, “I got the bastard, Hawk! It's all clear—”

His words were cut short as the second wino plunged into the room, his revolver snapping off heavy-caliber fire. Before he had time to take firm aim, though, Hawker cracked the hoe handle over his right arm.

The man spun. The shock was plain on his face. Hawker drove his right fist deep into the man's belly. As he hinged forward, whoofing, Hawker used his right elbow to club him solidly behind the neck.

O'Neil lay on his back on the floor. He had been shot in the right hand, and the blood poured freely down his arm. “Watch it, Hawk! He's got my gun!”

Hawker didn't need to be warned. He had seen the first wino dive for O'Neil's Python. He tried to roll away as Hawker's foot hammered at his side. The wino fought his way to one knee and brought the revolver up to fire.

Hawker slapped the gun away with his left hand, and wrestled him to the floor. The “wino” was just over six feet tall and built like a bomb shelter. He muscled his arm under Hawker's shoulder, then clapped both hands behind Hawker's head in a painful half nelson.

Hawker drove backward against him, then used the man's resistance to throw him over his shoulder. The moment he hit the carpeted floor, Hawker was on him. He put all his weight behind an overhead right. The man jerked his head away at the last moment.

It was a fatal mistake.

Hawker had meant to hit the man on the jaw. Instead, his fist crushed the fibrous windpipe beneath his throat.

The man gagged and kicked at the floor, his eyes bulging, hands clawing feverishly at his ruined windpipe.

In less than a minute, the man quivered, still and silent, as the room was filled with the sudden fecal stink of death.

“Christ,” whispered Hawker. “I didn't mean to do that.”

“The bastards,” Jimmy O'Neil raged, holding his bleeding hand. “The stupid son of a bitch deserved to die, Hawk. You did the right thing.”

Hawker looked at him evenly. “You don't understand, friend. It's information I wanted. I don't care about him.”

“Well,” said O'Neil, picking up the Colt Python with his left hand and motioning toward the second wino, “he looks as if he can still carry on a proper conversation.”

“It also looks as if we need to get you to a doctor,” Hawker said. He took O'Neil's right hand and inspected it. The bullet had torn away the meaty section between O'Neil's thumb and forefinger.

“Will I live?”

“I'm afraid so.”

O'Neil chuckled. “It'll take more than these two peckerwoods to kill the likes of you and me. Just like old times, huh? Fighting shoulder to shoulder, kicking royal ass.”

“Right,” said Hawker.

“Except it was me who usually saved your bacon,” O'Neil added with dignity.

“I better get you to a doctor. I think you're going into shock—your memory is beginning to deteriorate.”

“Hah!” O'Neil sniffed. “And I'm sure you don't remember the time—”

The sound of the second assassin jumping to his feet drew the attention of both of them. Somehow he had found his revolver during Hawker's fight. He got off one wild shot as Hawker dove for him.

But Jimmy O'Neil's Colt exploded while Hawker was still in midair.

The man was smacked against the porch wall as if he had been hit by a sledgehammer. The impact cracked the front window and shook the floor.

The man collapsed into a heap, eyes wide. Dead.

Hawker lay on his belly on the floor at the feet of the dead man. “Why in hell didn't you just try to wound him?” Hawker demanded. “Neither one of them can talk now.”

“And what do you expect?” O'Neil said indignantly. “I had to shoot with my damn left hand. And if you will think back carefully, Mr. James Hawker, you will remember that I'm
right
-handed.”

Hawker climbed to his feet. “Well, no use arguing about it.” Hawker looked at O'Neil. “I suppose we'll have to call the police.”

“Yes, yes, it's our duty,” said O'Neil evasively.

“And I suppose your neighbors heard the gunshots. The cops are probably already on their way.”

“It's one of the sad things about living in this neighborhood,” mused O'Neil. “My neighbors are all so old and deaf, they stop by regularly so that I can listen to their hearts—just to make sure they're still alive.”

“I had to blow away those three guys earlier,” said Hawker. “The police commissioner is going to be after my ass for that. When he finds out I was involved in two more killings, he's going to lock me up and throw away the key.”

“Hmmmm …” O'Neil said thoughtfully. He touched his temple as if he had an idea. “Now, if the two of us were low-life, lawbreaking hoodlums, we'd probably find their car, stuff these two stiffs in, and drive them someplace equally far from our own two lovely homes.”

“If we were hoodlums,” echoed Hawker.

They exchanged looks and nodded at the same time. “I'll find their car,” said Hawker.

“And I'll clean up the mess these nasty buggers have made,” said O'Neil.

“I could use a beer afterward,” added Hawker. “There's a story you promised to tell me.”

“I know a fine little pub called the Ennisfree,” said Jimmy O'Neil. “I'll bring the keys.”

five

O'Neil drove his old Mercedes, and Hawker drove the death car: a canary yellow rental Chevy, matched to the keys in one of the dead men's pockets.

Who would drive what car was the subject of a short debate. O'Neil was at his gracious, flimflam best.

“You see, Hawk,” he reasoned, “if I drive the car with these two dead lads in it, the police stop me, they'll take one look at this mug of mine and figure me for a murderer. Lord knows that's what those nasty Ulster bobbies always thought. May even start shooting before I have a chance to explain—”

“Oh, God—”

“But if
you
drive the death car, Hawk, and the police stop you, they'll just figure you're an off-duty cop doing some moonlighting for our good coroner. You see, it's the kind and honest face you have—”

“Jimmy …”

“The face of a young saint, it is, James. Oh, if I could have a face like yours just for a month. Or a week even …”

“Jimmy?”

“… there'd be no end to the horrible crimes I'd perpetrate, for I'd be supremely confident that my fine good looks would convince any jury in the land of my childlike innocence. Whoring and drinking—yes, and I'd take a turn at teenage girls, too! And I'm a lawyer, you may remember—”

“Jimmy! I'll drive their goddamn car, if you'll just promise to shut up and let us get at it!”

O'Neil gave him a brotherly pat on the shoulder. “There, now, that's my James, always the first to volunteer for a dirty job.”

“I'm beginning to wish that the guy who shot you in the hand had had the foresight to take a gun course. And one more thing, Jimmy. I'm not leaving my car parked outside your house after all that shooting.”

“I'll follow you to your apartment then.”

“My place is too close, too. And I'll have no alibi if the cops come by or try to call.”

“Then where, in Mary's name, do you want to take it?”

“Downtown. Back to Beckerman's apartment, maybe. I can say I was so upset I went for a long walk. It won't take long.”

O'Neil shook his head. “You always were prissy about details, James.”

Hawker smiled. “I'm still alive, aren't I?”

Twenty minutes later, they had the two corpses propped in the backseat of the canary yellow Chevy. They looked like passengers. Hawker wore gloves, and he had covered the front seat of the car with plastic so he could remove all microscopic traces of his own spore: clothing material, hair, and skin scrapings.

He shifted the Chevy into gear and drove north on Damen, into the industrial stink beyond the south branch of the Chicago River. The cold September wind was ripe with the foundry and diesel smell of the canal area. Hawker kept his window rolled wide open, because the stink in the car was worse.

It was 3:42
A.M
.

The city that never sleeps was asleep.

The streets were deserted. Many of the factories had shut down during the recession. A golden corona of light glowed above the smokestacks of those still in production.

Hawker swung west on Twenty-third Street, sticking to the back streets.

O'Neil followed a safe distance behind.

On Sacramento, Hawker turned south past Harrison High School. A few blocks beyond that, he steered down a deserted alley he knew. He parked the car beyond a garbage bin. He bundled up the plastic and stuffed it far down into the trash.

Even if the police went through the garbage bin for clues, they wouldn't give the sheet of plastic a second thought.

Satisfied that no one was around to see, Hawker slid into the Mercedes beside O'Neil.

“Nice and easy, Jimmy. Get us out of here. Don't drive straight to your bar. Head in the opposite direction. I want to make absolutely sure that no one is following us.”

“As good as done, Hawk,” O'Neil said softly. And after a long silence, he asked, “Why here?”

“Why what here?”

“Why did you decide to leave the stiffs here?”

They were gliding down Sacramento, through empty streets. To their left was a hulking civic structure. “I know your sense of humor,” explained Hawker.

“What?”

Hawker tapped at the window. “You don't know what that building is?”

O'Neil smiled. The lighted sign out front read MUNICIPAL COMMUNICABLE DISEASE HOSPITAL. “Death is communicable?” he asked.

“Sooner or later, every single one of us catches it,” Hawker said soberly. “Some just sooner than others.”

When Hawker was satisfied they weren't being followed, he told O'Neil to head for the Ennisfree, the Irish pub he owned on Farrell Street near McGuane Park.

“Fine, fine,” said O'Neil. “But first I have to stop and make a telephone call.”

“Telephone call? Who do you have to call at this hour?”

“A dear friend of mine is staying at the bar.”

“You're turning the place into a hotel?”

“When the occasion calls for it.” O'Neil straightened himself behind the wheel. “James, old friend, you've never asked me anything about my dealings with the Irish Republican Army—one of the few Irish-Americans around here who hasn't, I might add. And I've always appreciated it.”

“You know how bored I get when you give speeches, O'Neil, I spared myself, not you.”

O'Neil ignored the sarcasm. “Even so, it'll probably come as no surprise to you that I've kept my hand in the fight. Right here in America.”

“I'm shocked,” said Hawker with even more sarcasm.

“Hah! Do you want me to explain things to you or not?”

“I'm listening.”

O'Neil nodded. “Chicago and Boston have the largest Irish population outside Ireland itself—you already know that. Most of the Irish in both cities arrived from the home country during or just after the potato famine of the 1840s. An entire nation of subsistence farmers depended on those potatoes to keep their families alive. But during those years, 1845 to 1849, the potatoes caught some cursed blight and rotted before the very eyes of our great grandfathers. Sure, the other crops in the fields were fine. Good grain, fine vegetables. But the English had already stolen our lands, and they demanded the good crops as rent, knowing full well they were sentencing their tenants to death by starvation.

“Yet they still demanded their crops. Starving Irishmen harvested crops grown through their own sweat and saw the food hauled away by English landlords while their own wives and children ate grass. More than a million men, women, and children starved to death during those horrible four years. And the English did nothing. It was genocide; pure and simple, Hawk. They wanted the tenants off the land—land the tenant families had owned and farmed for a thousand years. The knowledge that they stole the land from beneath the corpses of Irish children meant nothing to them, for we have always been less than animals in the eyes of the English.”

O'Neil's voice grew husky with emotion as he spoke, and his knuckles were white beneath the heavy bandage on his right hand. “A million simple farmfolk starved, and a million more immigrated to America. The world has forgotten the thievery of the English, and the suffering they caused, but some of those who came to America still remember. They remember that it was the English who banned our religion and made the use of our Gaelic language a crime punishable by death. They remember that the English
still
rule our God-given land, though they have neither the moral or legal right. Thank God they remember, Hawk, for the English have committed a sin against humanity that must never be forgotten.”