Crazy for You (14 page)

Nowhere to go. Cops behind, cops in front, stone wall to our left, river to our right.

“Down there!” I pointed, so out of breath I could barely speak.

We ran down a flight of damp steps that led to the river. A water taxi, bright yellow and shaped like a miniature ferryboat, was just pulling away from the dockside taxi stop.

Labeck picked me up and hurled me onto the deck as though I were a basket of feathers. I landed in an untidy sprawl just as Labeck made an Olympic-caliber long jump across the water gap and landed beside me.

“Impressive, huh?” he said, grinning as he hauled me to my feet.

The Milwaukee cop reached the taxi dock first and blew a shrill whistle.

The boat pilot, facing toward the river, didn’t see the cop or hear the whistle, because of the engine noise. Trumbull and Olafson, yelling and waving, ran down the steps. Trumbull snatched a gun out of his coat, and for a terrified moment, I thought he was going to shoot us, but he fired into the air, trying to attract the taxi guy’s attention. Olafson started speaking into a walkie-talkie.

The taxi moved out into the current and chugged beneath the Wisconsin Avenue Bridge. The other passengers in the taxi—two men and a woman—stared at us, mouths agape. Finally the pilot turned around, saw us, and grinned.

“Howdy, folks—didn’t see you get on board. Did ya drop from the sky?”

The taxi emerged on the far side of the bridge. The Milwaukee cop had run across the street and was above us, leaning over the railing, yelling down through cupped hands.

“Attention! This is the Milwaukee Police Department. Stop your vessel at once and pull over to the side.”

“What’s he saying?” asked the driver, who seemed to be hard of hearing, possibly because of the tufts of cottony hair sprouting from his ears. He had a weathered, freckly face beneath a hooded rubber slicker, and smelled like diesel oil.

“He said to watch out for pirates,” I said, the first thing that popped into my head. The driver gave me a confused look. Labeck gave me a what-the-fuck look.

“That guy’s a buddy of ours,” I said. “Always horsing around.”

“What’s your next stop?” Labeck asked the driver, whose jacket bore a name tag identifying him as Hennessey.

“Clybourn Street.”

“Could you go a little faster?”

Hennessey was starting to get suspicious. “You folks didn’t pay yet. And I don’t know why all of a sudden I got cops yelling at my boat.”

Labeck took out his wallet and extracted a hundred-dollar bill. He held it up in case Hennessey was blind as well as deaf. “Go faster,” Labeck said. “My wife is in labor.”

Hennessey looked at me. I thrust out my stomach, trying to look like I was about
to pop out a baby instead of like someone who hadn’t been doing her crunches lately.

“Okay,” Hennessey said, clearly not buying the labor story, but liking the looks of that hundred. “But I ain’t supposed to create a wake.”

He snatched the bill from Labeck, stuffed it in his shirt pocket, and goosed the throttle. Three minutes later, Labeck and I were stepping off at the Clybourn Street landing. I headed for the steps that led to the street, but Labeck yanked me backward, pointing to a narrow strip of ground beneath the bridge. We picked our way between rotted wooden pilings and the massive bridge mechanism, over ground strewn with slimy water weeds and used condoms and broken glass and sewage. Invisible in the shadows of the bridge, we watched as a sleek speedboat raced past only a few yards from us, creating a wake that rippled the river and sloshed water over our feet.

“Police boat,” Labeck muttered. “I think he’s chasing down the ferry.”

I hoped poor old Hennessey didn’t get in too much trouble.

Then I turned my mind to our own problems, because as we emerged from the smelly under-bridge depths, red lights strobed in our direction, and what appeared to be every police car in the city converged on the Clybourn water taxi stop. Unnoticed, we scrambled up a weed-choked slope on the opposite side of the bridge. Keeping low, we slipped through a gap in a steel-link fence and found ourselves in a dry dock filled with barges, boats, and dredgers laid up for the winter. We wove between the boats until we reached the fence on the opposite side of the yard. Its gate was closed and locked. Not a problem for someone Labeck’s height. He boosted me up until I reached the top of the fence and was able to climb over and jump to the ground. The jolt of landing reawakened the back demons, who dug in with flaming tridents. Seconds later, Labeck leaped lightly down beside me. We were in an alley that ran parallel to the dry dock.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Your car. Where are you parked?”

“I can’t remember.”

If Labeck had rolled his eyes any harder they would have popped out of his head and skittered across the alley.

“I know where my car is, I just can’t remember the street name.” I’d parked across from St. John’s Cathedral, the closest spot I could get to the Riverwalk in the
crowded downtown theater district.

We moved east beneath the pillars of the expressway, darting from shadow to shadow as traffic thundered overhead, the big semitrailers setting up thrumming vibrations that made it feel as though the whole viaduct was about to crash down around our ears. A few blocks later, where the expressway turned south to cross the harbor, we turned north, onto streets where pedestrians were thin on the ground.

“Take off your jacket,” I told Labeck, pulling my own off.

“Okay. That way if we don’t get shot, we’ll just freeze to death.”

“Who’s the expert on fugitive survival here?”

He took off his coat. “Not the world’s best disguise.”

My teeth were chattering so hard I could barely talk. “They’re looking for a male and a female in dark coats.”

Now we were a male in a gray hoodie and a female in a blue sweater. That might fool the cops for two seconds.

Still, even a slight edge is better than none.

That was the moment the police cruiser appeared out of nowhere and drove toward us, siren blaring, lights blazing.

Chapter Seventeen

Some days you’re the bug, some days you’re the windshield.

—Maguire’s Maxims

The cruiser drove right past us, in pursuit of a speeder. The driver didn’t even look at us.

“I think I need a change of underwear,” Labeck said.

Taking a circuitous route, we worked our way north, scuttling through the shadows, blending in with pedestrians as we got closer to downtown, and finally arriving at the spot near the cathedral where I’d parked. We halted in the gloom of the church overhang and stared across the street at my car.

“They might be watching it,” Labeck said. “We should wait.”

Light streamed through the windows of St. John’s, throwing brilliant lozenges of light onto the snowy ground. Labeck tried the church’s front door, which to our surprise, opened. We stepped inside into incense-scented warmth and the sound of a heavenly chorus. A choir group was rehearsing up front, but none of them seemed to notice us as we slipped into a back pew.

“How did Trumbull find us?” Labeck whispered.

I eased my screaming back against the hard pew. “That officer—the one who saw us kissing—must have tipped him off.”

He shook his head. “She never saw my face. Anyway, Trumbull couldn’t have gotten there that fast. He knew exactly where we were and he’d already called for backup from Milwaukee PD before he came after us.”

I picked up a church bulletin left over from the evening Mass and absently began dog-earing its corners. “Maybe they picked me up at the CRS office and followed me.”

“Who else knew we were meeting at the Fonz?”

“No one.”

We were quiet for a moment, soaking in the lovely warmth, then Labeck
scrutinized me, frowning. “Why are you sitting like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re bucking for the good-posture award.”

“Sprained my back.”

“Poor baby. You’ve been running around jumping off fences and boats with a bad back? You should be in bed, flat on your back. His eyes softened and he wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “I like thinking of you flat on your back in bed.”

“You’re not supposed to have thoughts like that in church.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“No.”

“Why did I even ask? Admitting you need help isn’t the Maguire way, is it?” He kissed the top of my head.

The choir launched into “The Holly and the Ivy.” The soprano carried the melody with such piercing sweetness it gave me goose bumps. I felt a sudden lump-in-the-throat nostalgia for the days when I’d taught freshman chorus, remembering how satisfying it had been to transform a screechy gaggle of adolescents into a first-rate choir. I wondered whether I’d ever again teach music, or if I’d have to spend the rest of my life serving lattes to customers who thought barista meant bar girl.

Labeck got up, went to the door, and peered out. “Let’s try it,” he whispered.

Braced for bullhorns and weapons, we hurried across the street to my car. I beeped open the doors.

“Where’d you get this thing?” Labeck asked, as he got in. “A yard sale?”

“Loopy Larry’s Gently Used Vehicles.”

“How do you move the seat back?” he asked. “My knees are up to my chin.”

“The seat doesn’t go back.”

Grunkk!
He’d moved the seat back. The vibration traveled along my vertebrae like the devil’s roller coaster, and I had to clamp my lips together to keep from screaming.

“Where’s
your
car?” I asked, pulling out into traffic.

“Hidden in the garage of a neighbor foolish enough to drive south for the winter.” Labeck fiddled with Pig’s heater controls. “It’s like a tomb in here.”

“The heater doesn’t work. The engine sounds sort of like a pig. And don’t open the glove compartment because it disturbs the mice.”

A police car came speeding down the street toward us, flashers and siren going full blast. Hastily I pulled over to the side while we waited for it to pass. I was just about to ease out into traffic again when another squad car careened past, heading in the same direction. Labeck craned around in his seat and peered back toward the police cars.

“Mazie,” he said in a carefully controlled voice. “Drive. Not fast, just get out of here
right now
.”

I did, pulling smoothly into traffic. Checking the rearview mirror, I could see the night lit up with flashing red lights in front of the cathedral. “They knew we were at the church!”

“Unless they’re late for choir practice,” Labeck said.

“Maybe someone in the choir recognized you.”

“I don’t think any of them saw us come in.”

I headed east on Kilbourn Avenue, keeping a wary eye on my rearview mirror, deciding to drive up to the university area, where there’d be heavy traffic and crowds of students we could blend into.

Labeck picked up my purse and started rummaging around in it. “Where’s your phone?”

“Why?”

“Because I want to order a pizza. God, this thing’s a mess—”

“Stop wrecking my junk. My phone’s in my pocket.”

He reached across the seat, dipped his hand into my coat pocket, and fished out my cell.

“What are you doing?”

“Shh,” he said.

“Shh, yourself!” I was cold, hungry, and in no mood to be told to shh.

Labeck took a gadget resembling a Swiss Army knife out of his jeans pocket and started taking my phone apart. “Pull over,” he said.

I was getting really tired of him telling me what to do, but I pulled in to the first parking space I could find, which happened to be in front of a fire hydrant. Labeck
opened the window and tossed my phone onto the lawn of an apartment building.

“Hey—”

“It’s bugged. They’ve been recording us.”

I stared at him. “That’s—how could they—”

Then I remembered. The apartment search this morning. Krumholz hadn’t been planting drugs,
she’d been planting a bug in my phone
! Hard to believe; the phone was skinnier than a Hershey bar. “Can they really fit a listening device in there?” I asked.

“This one was only about the size of a watch battery, but they’re amazingly powerful—they can pick up sounds twenty feet away. That’s why I threw your phone out.”

“Why didn’t you just take out the bug?”

“Because we don’t want them to know we know they’re listening.”

I was still trying to tease the sense out of that when Labeck said, “The recorder works even when the phone is off. A techie at my station showed me some of this stuff.”

“But it’s illegal to bug people.”

“It’s a gray area. Trumbull will worry about the legality after he’s got us locked up.”

I felt violated. The device had sat there in my phone all day, a small, malevolent viper in my bosom, recording every sound within twenty feet—every conversation, every yawn, every toilet flush.

“They would have heard you say you’d stayed at Bob’s,” I said.

“There are ten thousand Bobs in Milwaukee.”

“They must have heard me talking to Frederick Cromwell.”

“Good. Maybe they’ll arrest him instead.”

“What did we say on the boat?”

“Doesn’t matter. The engine was making too much noise for them to pick anything up. But when we went in the church they could hear the choir. It probably took them a while to narrow it down to St. John’s, or they’d have nabbed us right off the bat. Okay, ready to hear the worse news?”

“Worse?”

“Every time you turn on your phone, your position can be located by
triangulation. It doesn’t need a tracer; any cell can be triangulated as soon as you power on your phone.”

“I turned on my phone while I was waiting for you. But only for a few seconds.”

“That’s all it takes. Whoever is monitoring your phone gets signals from the three nearest phone towers, which pinpoints your location within two hundred feet. That’s how Trumbull knew we were at the Fonz.”

“So let’s toss the bug in the sewer.”

“I’ve got a better idea.”

He got out of the car, retrieved the phone, and got back in. “Drive to the nearest bus stop.”