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The Concrete Inquisition

Michael “Doc” Kildare’s new glass eye was really plastic. Acrylic, to be precise. The same stuff they used for airplane windshields and storm doors. That didn’t matter. He would have hated the fucking thing if it were a diamond.
   He pushed it into his vacant left eye socket.
   Doc’s real left eye so deep-dark blue, so wonderfully sharp it practically had X-ray vision, had gotten shot out when he was still Sergeant-of-Detectives Kildare of the Chicago Police Department. Now, he was just an ex-cop and he sat alone in the office of Gunther Dietz, ocularist, practicing how to put his prosthesis in and take it back out again.
   He felt no better with the thing in than if the surgeons had just closed the wound and sewn a button on like goddamn Little Orphan Annie.
   He popped the prosthesis from the enucleated socket. Doc looked at his disfigured reflection in Gunther’s mirror and he wanted to kill somebody. Maybe himself.
   The thought brought a bitter smile. What was the point of suicide when there was nobody left to care? Moving his scarred eyelids apart, he worked the prosthesis back into place again.
   His shrink had told him not to dwell on it, but staring at the reflection of the plastic marble in his head he thought for the millionth time about the raid that had cost him his eye and his job.


   The whole thing had started when one of his snitches, Bobby Ro, came to him with a new idea in law enforcement.
   “Confidential informant credit,” Bobby said. “What do you think?”
   “What’s that? A lay-away plan for snitches?”
   “Hey, Doc. Have a little respect. Lookit where I brought you.”
   The two men were having drinks at Fullwell’s. It was thepriciest new bar on Rush Street. They clipped you six bucks for a beer, but they threw in all the atmosphere you could stand. Then after you walked out the door, depending on how your expensive buzz left you feeling, you could stroll a few short Gold Coast blocks to either the city’s most elegant brothel or Holy Name Cathedral.
   Wherever Bobby Ro planned to go next, he didn’t intend to get there on foot. His new black Jaguar XJS gleamed in the crisp autumn night outside the window where they sat. Bobby saw Doc looking at the car.
   “Nice, huh?”
   “You hit the Lotto, Bobby? I’m surprised I didn’t see your name in the paper.”
   “Bought me a house out in Barrington Hills, too.”
   “Yeah? You pay for it with some of that Confidential Informant Credit?”
   “Paid cash.”
   Doc drank his six-dollar beer straight out of its imported bottle. He looked at Bobby, all five-foot-five, hundred and twenty-three pounds of him. He was a Chicago-born Puerto Rican, 22 years old, and he ran small errands for a Colombian named German Aldena. The only reason he’d gotten the job was because the Colombian had married Bobby’s knockout teenage sister, Maria Rosario.
   Doc had caught Bobby delivering half-a-key of coke to a party thrown by a trader from the Mercantile Exchange. He’d been Doc’s snitch ever since.
   Now, he was buying British luxury cars and suburban mansions.
   Doc said, “Okay, let’s hear about this idea of yours.”
   “I got it reading the Wall Street Journal.”
   “Come on, Bobby.”
   “Yeah, really. It was this story on the sale of intractables.”
   “What?”
   “You know, things you can’t put your hands on. Like ideas – or information.”
   “The word is intangible.”
   “Like I said. Anyway, they was talking about one company runs a clean business can sell another company a credit to run its business twice as dirty. I mean, for pollution and shit like that. Or two guys’re are putting up skyscrapers, see, and one doesn’t build as high as the law allows, so he sells his air credit to the other guy so he can go above the law. You get all this?”
   Doc rolled his eyes and ordered another beer on Bobby’s tab.
   “Just explain what it has to do with you.”
   “Well. I got some information you really oughta know.”
   “So tell me.”
   “I mean, this is big time.”
   “How much?’’
   “Not money, man. Credit.”
   “For what?”
   “For something I ain’t been caught for yet, but still might be.”
   Doc glanced at the car again.
   “See.” Bobby said, “my problem is, what I got to tell is only good for a little while and then it’s too late. So if I wait to see if I get caught to tell you, I might have nothin’ left to trade. So, what I thought was, I tell you now and if I need it get credit later.”
   “Confidential informant credit.”
   “Yeah, why not? The Journal says we’re livin’ in the Information Age.”
   “And if you don’t get caught, I get a freebie. “
   “That plus knowin’ you helped me retire honest “
   “You’re gonna retire? At your age? Must be some ripoff you pulled. You sure you got something big enough to trade for that?”
   Bobby smiled “Put you on the front page of the Trib, man. Politicians be linin’ up to shake your hand “
   “Maybe put a bad guy away just to ice the cake?”
   “The baddest, man “
   Doc stared at him and Bobby’s smile only got wider.
   “Okay, Bobby. Your credit application’s on the table. Let’s see how you fill it in.


   The planning session had to be fast. Doc had wanted to limit the information to the fewest people possible: him, the eight guys on his team and his boss, Lieutenant Vince DiGiuseppe. Vince overruled him and said the Captain had to know. The Captain included a token fed from DEA for reasons that actually made sense. Even with all that, they still got the whole thing laid out in 24 hours.
   Armando Guzman himself was coming to town, and nobody wanted to miss him.
   Guzman was a Medellin big boy, one of the famous "extraditables." According to Bobby, though, he’d fallen into deep shit with his fellow coqueros and had to make some fast vacation plans. He was on his way to Spain, but he had to stop in the States first to pack a few bags.
   With money. As Bobby had put it, he wasn’t coming to Chicago to shop for socks at Sears. Guzman was cleaning out his pipeline so no one could rip off his cash.
   Bobby’d given Doc the location of a caleta, a stash house, and the time Guzman would be there. Bobby had reminded Doc that Guzman wasn’t the type you took alive. He’d also added that his brother-in-law, German, would be on hand, and don’t spare any bullets on his account, either.
   The treachery among in-laws had been what convinced Doc that Bobby Ro wasn’t just jerking him around. And if everything worked out right, Doc was determined that Bobby would receive a get-out-of-jail pass for anything short of murder. Even then, it’d depend on who he’d killed.
   The caleta was a rundown cinderblock house sitting alone on an open, weed-filled lot between two factories on Ogden Avenue. Behind the house was an alley. Along the far side of the alley ran a block-long fence that enclosed a giant scrapyard that held a mountain range of discarded car and truck tires.
   Doc and Detectives Junior Little, Steve Petrovsky and Frank Wallis waited in a ‘65 Chevy with heavily tinted windows parked around the corner at one end of the block. They were the guys who’d be going inside.
   Vince, DEA Special Agent Starling, and three other detectives from Doc’s team were parked in two cars around the far corner of the block. They’d take the perimeter of the house.
   The junior members of the team, Detectives Janet Foxx and Burt Levitt, were hiding in the scrapyard opposite the rear door of the caleta in case anyone climbed over the fence.
   Eight squad cars of uniforms would pull up to block off the street and the alley; all they’d been told was to be ready for anything.
   Everybody’s radio was set to channel 5, the car-to-car frequency. They weren’t going to communicate through an operator and let the whole world in on the raid. When everyone was in place, they sat and waited for Guzman.
   “You know,” Wallis said, “just once I wish we’d go charging into one of these things and have the assholes outgunned.”
   He held a pump-action shotgun between his legs. Junior Little smiled and shook his head.
   “Frank, I wanna be outta town the day they turn your ass lose with an Uzi.”
   The argument revolved around a standard cop gripe. Everyone from dopers to drag queens was arming for World War III, and the department limited them to handguns and shotguns.
   “Least they give us raid hats,” Junior said twirling a baseball cap with CPD on the front, “so we won’t shoot each other.”
   They talked to keep from getting too cranked up and to pass the time. The next topic was how much money Guzman was coming to get. Everybody figured it’d be enough that he’d have to bring a step-van to hold it.
   When the Colombian rolled past at 3 a.m. he was in a two-ton truck. If Guzman planned to fill that thing with money, Doc thought, this was going to be a motherfucker. The truck turned into the alley that would take it behind the house.
   The plan was to hit fast and hard, but the timing had to be just right. Doc started his engine and wheeled around the corner onto Ogden. He did 20 miles per hour. He wove back and forth over the double yellow line. If any lookout was going to spot them, he’d see a drunk who forgot to turn his lights on.
   Doc had Junior radio the contact to Vince. Then he had him talk to Foxx in the scrapyard. She whispered back that the truck had stopped in back of the house and three men got out of it. Two other men opened the steel-covered back door of the house and were looking around, checking things out. Four of the men had automatic weapons. At the back of the truck, two of the ones who’d just arrived were having trouble getting its doors open; the third was cursing them. No one was going into the house yet.
   Doc wanted them all in one place. He didn’t want to rush the ones outside and get caught in a crossfire if anybody else was still in the house.
   He pulled the Chevy over to the curb. Wallis got out and, maintaining their cover as drunks, peed noisily in the doorway of the building across the street from the caleta. He zipped up fast when Foxx reported that the men had opened the truck doors and were walking toward the house.
   Doc took the radio and whispered, “We’re going in.”
   Wearing Kevlar body armor and carrying their weapons openly, the four detectives raced silently across the front yard of the house. Doc whipped around the rear corner of the structure just in time to throw his shoulder into the back door before it closed.
   His momentum carried both him and the man on the other side of the door to the floor. A split second later a hail of bullets scorched the air over his head. A return shotgun blast roared from behind him. Despite all the explosive racket, Doc heard someone groan – practically right in his ear. The man he’d knocked down was regaining his senses, and he had a machine pistol in his hand.
   The guy never got a chance to use it. A fusillade of automatic weapons fire cleaved his head open, and a round grazed Doc’s left shoulder. Doc rolled to his right and took cover behind a packing crate.
   Somebody wanted him bad because they fired right through the crate. He backed up as fast as he could, until he bumped into a wall. Bullets, jagged pieces of wood and bits of green confetti exploded all around him.
   He got a moment’s reprieve when the sonofabitch who was shooting at him had to change his clip. Doc bounced to his feet, firing as fast as he could to give himself cover. There were only two Colombians left alive, Guzman and German Aldena. They crouched on opposite sides of another crate kitty-corner from him, out of the line-of-fire from the doorway.
   Doc cut Aldena down as the Colombian was trying to seat a magazine in his AK-47.
   Then, before Doc could swing the barrel of his Walther, he saw Guzman’s gun – a pistol – pointed at him, and Doc knew he’d shot the wrong guy first. He tried to turn and duck.
   Guzman’s first round missed but the bullet fragmented against the cinder-block wall next to Doc’s head and he felt red-hot lances of pain as the ricochets shredded his left eye into a leaking bag of jelly. Guzman fired again and the round hit Doc in the middle of his Kevlar vest.
   As he fell, losing consciousness, he noticed that the top of the crate he’d sheltered behind had been blown off. It was filled with money.


   “Look over here.”
   Doc jumped at the sound of the voice. Gunther Dietz had entered the room with an eyeglasses case in his hand. He saw that Doc had the prosthesis in. Doc turned his face. It didn’t help a bit that Dietz’s own eyes – brown – were bright and clear and looked like they could see through a bank vault.
   “Look up,” Dietz said.
   Doc looked up.
   “Look down...and follow my finger.”
   Doc tracked the finger. Dietz was experienced enough to know when his finger would go out of Doc’s limited field of vision and it skated just along the boundary.
   Dietz and all the doctors had told Doc that only a small rim of the visual field on his left side was lost to him, but it sure as hell seemed that his “blind spot” was everything to the left of his nose.
   “Good motility,” Dietz said. “The prosthesis is tracking well. I think we’ve got the right one this time."    How does it feel?”
   “Like a cue ball.”
   Dietz laughed.
   “A distinct improvement. Last time it was a pine cone, I believe.”
   “Can I see the glasses, Gunther?”
   The ocularist handed the case to Doc. He took out a pair of tinted sunglasses and put them on. In the fluorescent light of the office the tint on the lenses was a light gray. The color didn’t stop Doc from seeing clearly but the reflection in the mirror showed it was enough to disguise the goddamn marble.
   The only way you could tell was to get nose-to-nose, and Doc wasn’t going to let anyone get that close.
   “The lenses’ll get darker outside, right?”
   Dietz nodded. “Yes, they’ll polarize. Are the frames comfortable?”
   “Yeah, they’re fine.”
   “Okay, that’s it then. I’ll see you next Monday for your checkup.
   Doc got up to 1eave, still looking at himself in the mirror. The sunglasses had a nice style. He might know he was a cyclops but no one else had to be the wiser.
   “Mr. Kildare.”
   Doc looked at Dietz.
   “The best way to adjust is to just let it happen, let the body make its accommodations. You can help that along if you find something else to focus your time on.”
   “Easy for you to say, Gunther.”
   There was one thing for Doc to think about. Getting his hands on 15 million of the 45 million bucks they’d taken away from Armando Guzman.


   “My boy’s missing,” Glenna Handee said.
   The cop looked up from the report he was writing and saw a thin woman with a lined face. She sat down at his desk.
   “Scuse me,” he said
   “You’ve got to help me find Jerry.”
   The cop heard a touch of country in her voice, and despite her hard-looking eyes, he could see she was scared. Scared but keeping it under control.
   “I’m not the guy you want, lady.”
   “You’re Detective Bourne?”
   “Yeah.”
   “The sergeant up front told me to see you.”
   Bourne was a vice cop. It wasn’t his business to take a report on a missing person much less find one. But he didn’t even have to look around to know he was the only schmoe in plainclothes still hanging around the station house.
   “You got a picture of your boy?”
   Glenna had a photo ready and handed it over to Bourne, thinking he looked more like a crook than a cop. He was fat, too. He looked like he couldn’t even button his coat over his belly.
   The cop glanced at Jerry’s picture and frowned.
   “How old is he?”
   “Jerry’s 17.”
   “How long’s he been gone?”
   “He never come home from work tonight.”
   “He’s got a job?”
   “He makes deliveries for Szell’s drugstore, but he’s home by six-thirty, regular as a clock.”
   Bourne looked at the station clock. Eight-forty. The kid, husky from the looks of him, hadn’t been gone three hours yet.
   Glenna saw the expression on the fat face change and now he was handing her picture back.
   “Jerry’s retarded,” she said.
   “What?”
   “It happened when he was a baby. His air got shut off too long when I was birthin’ him. Anoxia, they called it.”
   Bourne looked at the picture again. The kid’s face looked back at him and it did seem too innocent for a teenager. There wasn’t any smirk or smartass to it.
   “Jerry’s got the mind of an 8-year-old. That’s all he’ll ever have.”
   “But he’s smart enough to hold a job?”
   “He only delivers right in the neighborhood.”
   “Can he read?”
   Glenna nodded. “Some. If the words aren’t too big. He knows his street signs.”
   Bourne scratched the stubble on his jaw. He thought this made him look pensive. His ex-wife had said he scratched when he was itchy to be somewhere else.
   He asked, “Does the kid deliver any drugs somebody might want to take from him?”
   “No. Mr. Szell makes people come in for those.”
   “What about money?”
   Glenna was puzzled. “What about it?”
   “Does he collect it when he makes a delivery? If someone knew he was retarded and carrying money…” Bourne let Glenna fill in the thought. Then he went on to another. “Or Jerry might’ve had a few bucks in his pocket and decided to have a good time.”
   Glenna had looked worried, but now her eyes narrowed.
   “I raised my boy honest. And everybody that knows Jerry likes him.”
   Bourne sighed. “I raised my kid honest, too, and if I wasn’t a cop, he’d be doing time by now.”
   He studied Jerry’s picture again. Seventeen on the outside, eight on the inside. He lifted his face to Glenna.
   “He works to help you make ends meet?”
   Glenna flinched at the personal question, but only momentarily.
   “That, and to give him his self-confidence.”
   “Does the boy have a father?”
   “No.”
   “You have a boyfriend?”
   Glenna’s mouth tightened. She hadn’t wanted to come to the police. Admitting that she needed help only twisted the knot of fear in her chest.
   “You got a boyfriend, maybe he’s got the kid.”
   “I ain’t got no boyfriend.”
   Bourne scratched his jaw again. “Lady, I’ll make some calls. See what I can do.”
   “Calls to where?”
   “To the hospitals. If I can’t find him there … then I call the morgue.”
   Glenna’s face hardened so much she could get only a whisper out of it
   “That’s how the police find a poor boy in this city?”
   Bourne saw the contempt in her face. He couldn’t miss it. Her attitude pissed him off. He didn’t have to do squat for her. He was going out of his way as it was.
   “Listen, lady. You know howmany missing-person reports are filed in this town every year? Twenty thousand!”
   Bourne knew he had the number right. He’d read it in his newspaper just last week.
   “Another thing,” he said, “a kid gets to be 17 in this state, he’s no longer a juvenile, he’s a minor. He’s legally entitled to take off if he wants. Now, you say Jerry thinks like a little boy, but I see he looks like a big boy. And if he’s got a job and can read street signs, he’s two notches up on most of the creeps we arrest around here every day.”
   The cop tossed Jerry’s picture down on the desk in front of him.
   “You want me to make the calls or not?”
   Glenna Handee picked up her son’s photo and left without a word.


   The first thing Doc did when he stepped outside of Dietz’s office building was to look in a store window. The reflection showed that his glasses had turned darker, even though it was almost evening and the early spring sky was overcast. He couldn’t see either his real eye or the marble — and if he couldn’t, no one else could, either.
   He started off down the street for the long walk home. He was in the Loop and his neighborhood, The Wedge, was on the North Side, miles away. He had to walk because he couldn’t drive, he refused to take the CTA and cabs were for yuppies. That left the old shank’s mare. Maybe losing his eye’d be good for his heart
   He stopped for a red light and took another peek at himself in another window. It was stupid, he thought, to worry about his looks before he considered other things.
   A horn honked and he jumped back as a Sun-Times truck raced around the corner in front of him, its rear wheel climbing the curb.
   Doc never saw it coming. To hell with looks, he thought. He’d damn well better pay attention to what was going on around him. Whatever anyone else said, he was sure he saw only half as much as he had before. Which meant the chances were twice as good the next reckless fucking driver would nail him.
   The light turned green and he carefully stepped out into the intersection. With a bitter grin he told himself he really should keep an eye out.
   His newly warped sense of humor made him shiver. It was as if he had to needle himself, put himself down for being less than he used to be. Part of it, he knew, was self-pity. That was something he’d never let himself feel before.
   His shrink had told him it was a form of mourning. He was grieving for his loss. Doc didn’t joke about that.
   The thing that worried him the most — and he couldn’t help it — was that the goddamn marble would fall right out of his head.
   He thought of all the ways it could happen. He might be jogging up the front stairs of his house, land a little hard on the top step, and bang. Out it’d come. He could see it. The marble would go bouncing down the steps, always looking back at him. It would roll along the sidewalk and just before it disappeared into the gutter it would give him a big wink.
   But it didn’t have to be that involved. He might just be sitting in his kitchen one night blowing on a cup of tea to cool it down. Next thing he knew, plop. Eyeball soup.
   He’d told the shrink about both of these ideas. She didn’t laugh. She offered him the comfort of her warmest smile and said that while it wasn’t impossible to displace a prosthesis, it wasn’t all that easy, either.
   Gunther had told him the same thing with a lot of technical reasons-why.
   Doc had told neither of them his worst-case scenario: having it fall out while he was making love. He’d kill himself if that ever happened. But since he didn’t know any woman he’d trust going to bed with, maybe he’d never get laid again.
   Of course, for a 36-year-old guy, that wasn’t a bad reason for killing yourself, either.
   When he thought about suicide, he thought about Harry. Maybe she’d come back and save him. From himself, if nothing else. Maybe he was a jerk-off kidding himself, too. Harry hadn’t called once since the divorce. Not even after he’d been shot. Not in all the time he’d been recovering.
   If recovering was what the hell he was doing.
   “Michael.”
   Doc stopped and looked up. He saw the familiar frame houses and brick two-flats of his neighborhood. He was almost home and he had no idea of how he’d gotten there or how long it had taken him. Glenna Handee was standing in front of him. She was the only person he could think of who still called him by his given name.
   He didn’t need more than one eye to see the worry written into Glenna’s face.
   “Michael, can I talk to you?”
   He knew he should have said yes, but he was surprised that she was speaking to him. All of his neighbors had been tiptoeing around him for months, ever since he got out of the hospital, not saying more than a hurried hello or a nervous good to have you back.
   “I need your help.”
   That was even more surprising. Glenna was fiercely self-reliant. He wouldn’t have expected her to ask for help unless she was bleeding freely.
   “With what?” The question came out flat and hard. He hadn’t intended it that way, but he didn’t know how to tell Glenna that without sounding stupid.
   “I was by your house just now, Michael. I’m sorry for your troubles, but ...”
   He tried again, taking a little of the edge off.
   “Glenna, what’s wrong?”
   “Jerry’s missing.”
   “How could he be missing? He never goes anywhere.”
   “He didn’t come home from work tonight.”
   Glenna had kept her voice steady and her back straight, but that was when it hit him. She was bleeding freely. Inside.
   “Glenna, are you and Jerry having any trouble?”
   “What do you mean?”
   “I mean, every kid has days when he gets mad at his mother and feels like taking off.”
   Glenna shook her head.
   “Michael, Jerry didn’t run away.”
   Doc had known Jerry literally from the moment he was born. Glenna had been his friend, and one of the truest, from that same day. Suddenly, the cold fear that Glenna was feeling wrapped itself around his heart.
   He said, “Come on. I’ll walk you over to the station house.”
   “I been to the police already.”
   “So they’re looking for Jerry.”
   She shook her head and told him what had happened. Doc knew Detective Eddie Bourne.
   “Glenna, a guy like that ...”
   He saw her face harden. It was easy to imagine her giving Bourne the same look. Hell, he could see any frightened parent reacting the same way. A cop would have to go charging out of the station with his gun in hand and blood in his eye to get any other response.
   He tried to explain.
   “Detective Bourne is a pretty decent cop.”
   “Decent enough to make phone calls,” Glenna said harshly.
   “Glenna, he’s been on the job for years. He deals with pimps, pedophiles and pornographers day in and day out. He can’t afford to have a lot of empathy. To Bourne, making a few phone calls would be like donating a kidney.”
   He saw that she didn’t have a lot of empathy right now, either.
   “I know some other cops over there,” he said.
   “He was the only one to talk to. I asked the desk sergeant after I got done with him.”
   Goddamn cutbacks, Doc thought.
   “Michael, I’ve been huntin’ around and callin’ out Jerry’s name ever since I left the police. I can’t find him anywhere. Please help me. Help me find my boy.”
   He watched flashes of horror flicker across her eyes like a nervous tic. He could practically see her imagination suggest and then repress explanations of what had kept her son from returning home.
   But fear wasn’t the only emotion he saw in her eyes. A raw red flame of rage burned there, too. Glenna suspected someone was responsible for Jerry’s disappearance and she wanted to strike out. She wanted to make someone pay.
   That desire for vengeance quickly seized Doc’s wounded soul. He, too, might have a chance to hit back at someone here. Not for what had been done to him, but what might have been done to Glenna.
   At the moment, that was good enough.
   “Let’s start looking,” Doc said.


   The Wedge was nothing special, just a lower middle-class slice of the city. As a neighborhood, it fell somewhere between gentrified Wrigleyville and desolated Uptown. Its houses, two-flats, and courtyard buildings had grown tired. Aging facades and drooping gutters waited for the day when money could be spared to meet their needs.
   Doc and Glenna walked along looking for any crack in the concrete that might hide a boy.
   “I’m scared, Michael.”
   “I know.”
   “I’m angry, too. Nothin’ bad should happen to a boy like Jerry.”
   “We don’t know that anything has. He’s been gone only a few hours.”
   “Something’s happened. He wouldn’t be out this late of his own mind.”
   Doc had no answer for that.
   A smile formed unexpectedly on Glenna’s lips. It came so clearly from the heart that it grafted a surprising loveliness onto her tired face, and reminded Doc that she was a year younger than him.
   “Jerry buys me presents. Did you know that, Michael?”
   Doc did, but he didn’t say anything.
   “Usually, it’s a candy bar from Mr. Szell’s store. But once,” she marveled, “once it was roses.”
   “He’s a good kid.”
   Doc had helped Jerry buy the flowers as a favor. Jerry had promised to keep Doc’s help a secret. Crossed his heart and hoped to die.
   “People think I have it hard with him.”
   “Don’t you?”
   “Jerry’s the easiest, happiest part of my life.”
   Doc nodded. “Let’s look in there.”
   They stepped down into a pitch black gangway between two apartment buildings. Doc went first, brushing his fingers along a brick wall and poking around with a foot before taking each step.
   “Jerry?” Glenna called out. Her voice filled the confined space. There was no answer.
   They continued to the end of the passage, looked into the empty yard behind the building, and retraced their steps to the street.
   Doc and Glenna pushed on in silence.
   A lot of families who lived in The Wedge had been in the same places for generations. They were people who were getting by, but not ahead. So, they stayed put. Favored sons and daughters assumed low interest mortgages on tiny principals and took care of Mom and Pop. Grandma, too, as often as not.
   As a rule, they kept their property clean, but their gardens were never going to make the Sunday paper and their buildings weren’t going to attract the rehabbers any time soon. There was a working-class stasis to the place.
   Urban amber.
   Doc thought he, himself, was typical. He lived in his parents’ house and every day he saw faces he’d known all his life.
   It made him wonder. If he had to, could he stop seeing these people as neighbors, and start looking at them as suspects?
   Because every instinct he had told him that Glenna was right. This wasn’t just a kid goofing off. Something had happened to Jerry. More to the point, someone had made it happen. Maybe someone who lived in The Wedge.
   “What are you thinking, Michael?”
   Doc realized that Glenna had stopped walking and he turned to face her.
   “Just trying to recall the places I hid out when I was a kid,” Doc lied.
   “Did you think of any?”
   Now that she mentioned it ...
   “Yeah.”
   “Well, let’s go then.”
   They turned a corner and headed for a lumberyard he’d remembered. But Doc didn’t expect to find Jerry there. Or drinking beer in the cemetery with the guys. Or making out in a dark corner of the neighborhood park.
   He expected he’d wind up doing what Detective Eddie Bourne had offered to do.
   Calling hospitals and the morgue.


   Harriet Wilkerson was booking a second-honeymoon trip to Seattle for a periodontist and his wife when that bitch Shirley passed by with a smirk on her puss and dropped the morning'sTrib on the corner of Harry’s desk.
   Harry ignored what she was sure had to be a taunt until she got her work done. Dr. and Mrs. Kirpak were flying first class to the Great Northwest and spending exactly one night in the Honeymoon Suite of the Seattle Hyatt. Then it was load the little lady and the rented camping gear into the rented Bronco for a week of fishing in the Cascade Mountains. This would recreate their first honeymoon.
   A month earlier, Harry had booked this rustic romantic and his mistress into a “convention” at the Mauna Kea Hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii.
   Harry had to smile at her disapproval — her hypocrisy. She’d had more than one episode of flyaway nookie herself when she’d been married. And her flights and hotel suites had been on the house.
   “Harriet,” Shirley cooed.
   The bitch never called her Harry, even though she’d been asked a million times.
   “I believe there’s something in this morning’s paper that might interest you. Right on the front page, too.”
   Harry looked at her tormentor who sat at a desk three feet away. Shirley was smiling at her. Shirley’s smile was as phony as her sing-song voice, her red hair and her tits. But she was the daughter of the travel agency’s owner.
   Harry knew if she didn’t look at the paper Shirley would pick it up and read it to her. Harry decided to save herself from that. Then again, maybe Shirley’s idiotic voice might have taken away some of the impact of the headline.
   Ex-Cop Files Claim on Drug Millions.
   Doc’s picture ran right under the headline. It was the photo that had earned him his nickname and she felt a lump in her throat when she saw it.
   Years ago, the department had wanted Officer Michael Kildare to do a recruitment poster. They’d even brought in some hotshot photographer to take his picture. But the department’s ad consultant took one look and said no way. He’d said this guy looks more like Doctor Kildare than Officer Kildare. No one would believe he wasn’t a model they had hired.
   Another career shot to hell, but the story got out and Michael became Doc Kildare forevermore.
   Harry reluctantly shifted her gaze from the picture to the story. Doc’s lawyer had filed a claim on his behalf for one-third of the money that had been recovered in the drug raid where he’d lost his eye. One-third came to $15 million.
   For a moment, Harry felt dizzy.
   The story added that forfeited drug money was usually divided among the law enforcement agencies involved in its confiscation. But Attorney Rudd Wetherby had claimed to have found citations in the U.S. Code that entitled Michael “Doc” Kildare to file for compensation for the loss of his eye and his livelihood.
   Harry couldn’t get over it. Doc was going to be a millionaire less than a year after she’d divorced him.    She was too stunned even to object when Shirley sat down on the corner of her desk. She just kept reading
   A spokesman for the CPD noted that Kildare was receiving a 75 percent disability pension of $33,000 per year, and that was all to which he was legally entitled.
   The DEA which was said to have assisted in the raid and therefore was the only other agency entitled to a share of the forfeited money declined to comment.
   “You ask me,” Shirley said, “I wouldn’t mind jumping a guy who looked like that even if he was broke.”
   Shirley’s smile lasted only until Harry shoved her off her desk.
   “Nobody asked you,” she said.


   The man hummed “Whistle While You Work” as he dug the grave. Every so often, he’d stop and spare a glance at the body on the basement floor next to the excavation. Its eyes bulged out like ping-pong balls and the nose was smashed flat. The digging man had caught the stiff a good one with his lug wrench.
   You forgot to duck, buddy, the man thought.
   He stopped digging at a depth of four feet and climbed out of the hole. He went over to a metal trough to mix cement. He’d use some of it to line the bottom and the sides of the grave. That way he’d have a neat box and the body wouldn’t pollute the soil as it turned to pus.
   Then he’d cover the body with cement, and no one would ever smell anything, either,
   After he completed his preparations, the man stepped over to the body and took a wallet from its back pocket. If you killed someone, he thought, you ought to know who he was for your records. He noted the name carefully and then rolled the body into the hole. He tossed the wallet in, too.
   Without taking the money out of it.
   He knew that if any shrinks ever got hold of him they’d say he was definitely crazy. No. Mentally ill, that’s what they’d say. Or they’d lay some jawbreaker technical name on him. No one was just plain crazy anymore. They’d ask him if he heard voices, and if he wanted to be truthful he’d say there was one. Only one.
   Cops, on the other hand, would say he was just a cold-blooded killer who got his rocks off watching people die at his hands. They wouldn’t be right, though. While he had to admit that he felt good afterward, pleasure wasn’t the force that drove him.
   He didn’t like to think about the real reason.
   What he liked to think about was never getting caught. And with the way he looked there was no reason why he should. Medium height, medium weight, medium brown hair, medium blue eyes. At a glance, he disappeared in a crowd; in a moment, he faded from memory. He was always around, but never noticed. The only possible thing that could give him away was when he heard the voice: he thought he might look like he was tuned into some kind of invisible Walkman.
   The man poured the remainder of the cement over the body. Next, he graded the surface of the grave until it was smooth and then waited for it to dry. He checked the new surface with his level and the air bubble was perfectly centered. Anyone who wanted to find the body now would need a jackhammer.
Of course, he didn’t expect anyone to find the body. This one or any of the rest. He knew that there had been other guys who’d felt the same way he did, and a lot of those clucks were on Death Row right now.
   But they’d been really crazy.
   They’d buried the bodies in their own basements.

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