Sleep Tight (4 page)

 

Ed followed the Kennedy into the city and got off at Addison, heading east.

“Jesus. I’d forgotten how much I hate cruisers,” Sam said, struggling to find a comfortable position for his long legs among all the electronic crap and extra gear in the front seat. He unscrewed his flask, offered it to Ed. Ed shook his head. Sam took a deep pull. He mostly hated the police cars because they didn’t have a radio. Oh sure, every car had plenty of law communication equipment, but not an honest-to-goodness AM/FM radio. Not that the radio stations played much that they liked anyway.

Ed and Sam couldn’t stand most current popular music. R and B? Please. That used to mean something more than grunting and cooing “baby” a thousand times. Once in a while, they’d get lucky, and hear an old Sam and Dave song, maybe even some Muddy Waters, and they’d sing along, Ed in an unnaturally deep baritone, and Sam in a strangled, off-key cry. Outside the car, it probably sounded like shit, but inside, he figured they harmonized just fine.

Hearing a good song was rare. They stayed away from the popular stations. Sometimes the local college kids got tired of playing songs in which the musicians had apparently fallen asleep on their keyboards staring into the unfathomable depths of their belly buttons, and went retro and played some good stuff. You’d be surprised how hard it was to hear legendary local blues folks like Junior Wells, Magic Sam, Koko Taylor, or even Howlin’ Wolf on the radio.

Jazz? Sure, there was enough jazz to make your ears bleed. Problem was, Sam thought most of it sounded like somebody recorded a toddler with ADHD attacking a piano with a hammer while somebody else threw a drum set down the stairs.

They pulled up in front of one of the grand old dames that lined Lake Shore Drive, colossal, ornate buildings decades beyond their glory years. Ed hit the siren, jolting the night doorman out of a nap. Ed left the spinning lights on, splashing the front of the building with a blinking blue light show.

The night doorman watched them with bleary eyes and unlocked the door. Sam flashed his star but didn’t explain as they strode through the marble foyer and stepped inside the elevator.

Sam rolled his head around, easing the kinks in his neck. He eyed the numbers clicking past. “Soft or hard?” he asked.

Ed considered it for a moment. “How long’s it been?”

“Seven months. At least.”

“Last time, we kick in the door, go in hard?”

“Think so. We’ve broken the chain at least twice.”

“Soft then. I’ve already shot somebody tonight. Got it out of my system.”

The elevator doors opened on the top floor. They stepped out onto plush red carpet and followed the hall to the end. Sam checked his watch. Three in the morning. If their past visits were any indication, David Thatcher should be just about partied out by now, and they would be catching him either unconscious or just about to pass out.

Ed rapped briskly on the door and held his star up to the peephole, blocking them from sight. No answer. Ed knocked again. “Mr. Thatcher? Chicago PD. Open up, sir.”

From behind the door, a groggy voice said, “What, what do you want?”

“Please open the door, Mr. Thatcher.”

The door opened, but only a crack. David’s eye appeared. “What the hell is going on?” Acting tough.

Sam threw his shoulder into the door, forcing it to open the length of the chain. “Hey, David. How ya doing?”

“Oh, fuck. Not you two.” He tried to shut the door, but Sam’s foot was in the way.

Sam laughed. “Miss us? I hate to break it to ya, pal, but did you know there’s a warrant out for your arrest? Got two boys in a squad car downstairs, waiting for your ass. Go look, see if you don’t believe me.” Sam withdrew his foot.

David slammed the door.

They gave him a minute. Sam knocked on the door, said loudly, “You can either talk to us, or we’ll just kick the door down again and those boys downstairs will be happy to slap some cuffs on you. Your call.” Sam gave it a second to sink in, then said, “My patience is getting a little thin.”

They heard the click and tinkle as the chain was unlatched. The door swung open, and David stood in the doorway, arms crossed, scowling. He was young, maybe mid-twenties, dressed in a blue satin robe and not much else. His blond dreadlocks were smashed flat on the left side of his head, giving him a lopsided appearance. “I didn’t do nothin’.”

Sam pushed past him and stood in the middle of the apartment. It was a hell of a lot nicer than Sam’s place. Hardwood floors. Leather couches. Marble coffee table. Recessed lighting. A giant poster of Pacino’s
Scarface
. An artistic black and white poster of two blondes making out. Pizza boxes and greasy fast food bags spoiled the cultured effect, though.

“Your mommy still paying the rent?”

“Fuck you. Fuck you both.”

“David, David, David.” Ed shook his head, shut the door behind him, and leaned against it. “You really should be glad to see us. If we hadn’t heard about you, and intercepted those officers downstairs, you’d be in a real pickle right now.”

Sam checked his watch. “We told ’em five minutes. You got two minutes left.”

“So what?” David put his hands on his hips. “I ain’t done nothin’.”

Ed shrugged. “You pissed somebody off, that’s all I can say. Word is, they got you dealing on tape. Digital video, five-point-one stereo surround, all the bells and whistles. It’s truly astonishing where they can put a camera these days.”

“Let’s cut to the chase, for your sake,” Sam said. “We’re offering to take care of any evidence. That way, the boys downstairs can’t take you in. Make us happy, and who knows, that tape might just get lost. Happens all the time.”

“I got nothing. I don’t deal anymore. I’m clean.”

“Sure you are. You got . . . thirty seconds to convince yourself that it’s true.”

David lasted twenty seconds before muttering, “You guys are such motherfuckers.” He turned over the giant subwoofer and pulled out three baggies of pot, at least five pounds each.

Sam tossed two bags to Ed, who stashed them in his overcoat. “You sure that’s it?”

David shook his head, finally said, “Fuck. Fuck!” He went to the empty aquarium and pulled out a baggie of fine white powder.

Sam took that as well. “Now, tell me the truth. Don’t you feel better?”

 

 

Back in the car, Ed took the passenger seat and chuckled. “That kid.” He split open a Swisher Sweet with his pocket knife, scooped out the sweet smelling tobacco, and sprinkled some of the weed in its place as Sam pulled out onto the Drive. “He gets any dumber, we’re gonna have to call Social Services.”

“Well, I suppose there’s a good reason they call it dope,” Sam said, weaving the cruiser through traffic. He rolled down the driver’s window as Ed lit the blunt. Ed passed it to him, but Sam shook his head and laughed. “You fucking hippies. I’m driving, dammit.”

Ed took another hit.

Sam pulled a flask out of his jacket and took a long sip. He hit the lights and the gas and sped south through the blowing snow on Lake Shore Drive.

 

“Rule number one. Get yourself some decent boots. Those, they go to what, the top of your ankle?” Don asked as the truck rolled down West Ogden, passing three buildings, liquor stores, and vacant lots filled with nothing but snow. The avenue was nearly deserted at three-thirty in the morning. Parts of the West Side looked abandoned at the best of times; tonight it looked damn near apocalyptic.

They’d been at the bar close to five hours, shooting the shit, watching basketball and hockey. Don introduced Tommy around to most of the regulars. When Don mentioned Lee’s name, guys would invariably wince and offer their condolences. Then they changed the subject. Quickly.

Tommy lifted his foot to his knee and peered at it skeptically. He’d had the boots for nearly five years. Heavy-duty leather with thick soles, he couldn’t see what was wrong with them.

“Nah. They’re no good,” Don said. “You want something that’ll go up to your knees. Like some snake hunting boots, you know? Might have to hit some of the motorcycle stores, or the farm and hunting stores down in Indiana. I’ll see if I can dig up an extra pair of pads for now. When you get ’em, make sure they’re big enough that they’ll fit over your jeans. Had a rat run up inside my work pants once. Whoo boy, lemme tell ya, that was fun.”

The crossed Cermak, then South Pulaski.

“Rule number two. Don’t waste your time chasin’ rats with bait. Mr. Rat, he’s too goddamn smart. And there’s just too many of ’em. So you find a colony, and you poison the living shit out of it.”

“We’re heading for a colony?”

“We’re heading for the biggest, baddest colony you ever seen. Just you wait. We could kill rats until Christ comes back, and we wouldn’t make a goddamn dent in their population.”

Tommy considered this for a moment. “You ever been to Palmisano Park in Bridgeport?”

Don shook his head.

“It’s a nature park, got a lake, some paths and shit. Used to be the Stearns Limestone Quarry.”

“Oh sure, sure.”

“My dad told me, back in the day, when they were done hauling limestone out, somebody had the bright idea to fill half of it up with garbage, then make a park out of it.”

Don laughed. “Bet they got more than they bargained for.”

“Dad told me that the rats got so bad, they had to burn the garbage. Guess they had to stand around the place, killing rats as it all burned. Heard they switched to construction junk to fill it in.”

“Where we’re headed, it’s a little off the beaten path,” Don said with a sly grin. “Like everything else our esteemed commissioner has got his fingers in, it’s in that gray area in between of not exactly legal and a fuckin’ war crime.”

Don turned off into an industrial wasteland. “Take a deep breath. Just south of here, there’s the biggest raw sewage treatment plant you’ve ever seen. You ever hear of the Deep Tunnel?”

“Storm runoff?”

“Yeah. It’s so all the water has somewhere to go, so all our shit, and I mean that literally, understand, doesn’t wash out into the lake.” He turned into an industrial section, followed a few of the smaller streets that wove through the warehouses and deserted factories until they came to a shipping yard. Don nodded to the gate’s watchmen and followed a gravel road that wound around the trucks and down into a surprisingly deep quarry.

Down at the far end was a tunnel.

A set of narrow gauge train tracks that hadn’t felt steel wheels in decades, nearly obliterated in dirt and gravel, stretched into the darkness. Don didn’t even slow down and before Tommy could say anything, they were hurtling into the tunnel. Rough-hewn rock whipped past his window.

“Huh.” Tommy swallowed. “Didn’t realize we were actually headed underground.”

“Well, you wanna catch rats, you ain’t gonna catch ’em sipping cocktails at the Drake.” Don considered this for a moment. “Well, that’s a different kinda rat now, isn’t it?” He caught sight of Tommy’s wide eyes. “Relax. We got a ways to go. You’ll get used to it.”

The Streets and Sans truck shuddered as it rumbled down the tunnel. The headlights trembled, throwing crazy, flickering shadows across the uneven surfaces. The tunnel was big enough that two medium trucks could drive along side by side. Don kept the needle at a steady thirty-five miles an hour. “Believe it or not, we make better time down here than up top. No goddamn stoplights.” He laughed.

“How far are we going?”

“All the way back to downtown. ’Course, we’ll be a half-mile under the streets, at least. Some of the old-timers claim there’s tunnels that go down damn near a mile or more. See, the whole thing’s like goddamn Swiss cheese. You wouldn’t believe how many abandoned rail lines, storm drains, and God knows what else crisscross under the city. The Deep Tunnel engineers, they knew this, and they connected a bunch, so when it rains the lake doesn’t turn into a goddamn Porta-Potty.”

They passed a few intersections, and Tommy caught a quick glimpse of smaller tunnels before they were swallowed in the gloom. “You sure we shouldn’t be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs or something?”

“I wouldn’t want to be down here without a flashlight, that’s for goddamn sure. But I been coming down here, once a week or more, for, let’s see now, over two years now. Something like that.”

After about fifteen minutes, the tunnel opened up. There were no lights save the headlights, so Tommy couldn’t tell how large it was. But he couldn’t see the ceiling, and the place was full of rusting El cars. The truck bounced over a dozen sets of tracks, then followed the road as it ran down between the long lines of derelict hulks. The spill of the headlights briefly illuminated the dusty, opaque windows, reflecting distorted, ghostly images of the truck. It gave Tommy a skittish feeling.

He found he was having a hard time taking a deep breath. The thought of all that rock above, the weight of the entire city pressing down, down . . . He dried the palms of his hands on his jeans. The motion led him to his boots and he remembered that he wasn’t wearing the right kind of boots and that made things worse.

The El train corpses passed out of sight and the walls swallowed them up again. This one was shorter though, before long they came to a circular area, with a number of smaller tunnels branching off. It was clear which tunnel to use; the tire tracks had crushed the gravel into two easy-to-follow paths. Don pulled off to the side of the tire tracks and shifted into park. He pointed to an empty ring on the wall next to the tunnel. “Flag’s gone. That means somebody’s down in there. Tunnel isn’t wide enough for two vehicles. ’Specially garbage trucks.”

“Garbage trucks?”

“Sure. Why do you think we’re here? You want to find rats, you go looking for garbage.”

“Wait, there’s a dump down here?’

“Oh, yeah. An awful damn big one.”

“Why go to the trouble of driving all the way down here?”

Don spread his hands. “Landfills are big business. Nobody wants a garbage dump in their backyard, so these places, they can get away with charging an arm and a leg. ’Specially if it’s Uncle Sam picking up the bill. Your pal and mine, friend of the people Mr. Cornelius Shea, when he found out about this place, he had about a third of his drivers start dumping their loads down here. See, then he charges the city for the regular landfill costs, and pockets the surplus.”

Tommy was quiet for a while. “Jesus Christ. All I can think about are the assholes in my neighborhood, these wannabe crooks and gangbangers. They’ll bust open the back window of somebody’s piece-of-shit car, crawl in, see what they can steal. If they get a stereo, they’ll take off down the block, hoopin’ and hollerin’, thinkin’ they hit the jackpot. What a score.” He shook his head. “Those douche bags got nothing on these goddamn politicians.”

“What, you saying our elected officials aren’t going into politics to serve their fellow man?” Don laughed. “It’s the Machine, kid. Don’t look so shocked. And it ain’t just regular garbage down there. Shit, you think a landfill costs money? Try finding somewhere legal to dump toxic waste. If I were you, I wouldn’t linger when we’re getting the rats. I try to breathe through my shirt, you know?”

 

 

A bobbing light appeared in the darkness, growing in intensity by the second. Don flashed his brights. The approaching lights flashed back. A pale blue garbage truck filled the entrance, with only a foot or two between metal and rock. It rumbled out of the tunnel and pulled abreast of their van.

The driver’s window rolled down and a hairy arm held out a red flag on a three-foot PVC pipe to Don. Don said, “Working late.”

The garbage truck driver spit. “Boss got spooked. Heard a rumor that somebody was watchin’. Wanted the times we came dumping staggered even more. Wants at least an hour between each truck, you believe that shit?”

Don shrugged. “Be seein’ ya.”

The driver saluted, and headed back toward the surface. Don put the van in drive and they entered the tunnel. Their van was smaller than the garbage truck, but the walls were still uncomfortably close. Tommy never thought he would ever worry about claustrophobia, but this shit was getting old.

“What’s above us?” Tommy asked. “I mean, where in the Loop?”

“Dunno exactly. All I know is that we’re far enough down, you can’t even hear the subway.”

The right wall fell away into nothingness.

“And here we are,” Don said, turning the van off the road. The headlights illuminated a vast chasm. Fifteen yards out, the ground dropped steeply and disappeared, leaving hulking mountains of rotting garbage. Metal and plastic gleamed dully through the blackened ooze like bone as flesh decayed around it. The smell slithered through the air vents and cracks around the doorframes and sizzled in their nostrils. Tommy had expected it to smell like a bad Dumpster in the summer, but this didn’t have that revolting element that made your gorge rise. It had a burnt, chemical smell, like pepper spray steeped in bleach.

Don wrapped a bandanna around his nose and mouth and tied it in the back. He hefted a Maglite, saying, “Time to earn our keep,” and climbed out. Tommy followed, still stunned at the amount of garbage. The cavern stretched as far as the headlights shined; the place must have been as large as a football field. Probably bigger.

Don whipped the flashlight around. “Shut your door. Don’t need to come back and find any surprises.” He didn’t have to say it twice. Tommy slammed the door and the sound echoed across the immense cave. He flinched at the noise, feeling as if he’d just woken something dark and massive. Something that could seal off the tunnel before they got out.

He hurried to catch up to Don. Don said, “Watch your head,” and shined the light at the cave roof, revealing a slab of rock that sloped down at nearly a forty-five-degree angle. Don squatted under this and turned the flashlight at clusters of rat corpses. “Anywhere else, you try and lay out some poisoned bait, the rats laugh at you. They’re too damn smart. And there’s plenty of food. But down here, I dunno. Maybe the toxic fumes scramble their brains. There’s always plenty of dead ones. Anyway, this is where you find ’em.”

He led Tommy back to the van and they put on heavy leather gloves first, then disposable rubber gloves to cover the leather. Don took a box of blue plastic bags back to the rats. Tommy would hold each bag open while Don reached under the ledge and grabbed a rat by its tail. When the rat was in the bag, Tommy twisted the top and sealed it with yellow tape stamped with the three incomplete rings over a full circle, the sphincter-tightening symbol of biological hazardous material.

When they had collected fifty rats, they put them in a metal bin in the back of the van and laid out more poisoned bait. The entire process didn’t take longer than half an hour. They stripped off their rubber gloves and left them in the bin with the rats. Back in the cab, they sat for a moment, pulling off the leather gloves.

Tommy surveyed the rolling mounds of refuse. “Fifty rats. This doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, does it?”

“Not one damn bit.” Don turned off the headlights.

Darkness settled over the van with a totality that made Tommy feel as if someone had just pulled a thick rubber bag over his head.

“Check this out,” Don said. “Give your eyes a sec.”

Tommy’s other senses exploded into awareness. He clutched the door handle, just to triple-check the door was closed. Far off, he could hear a quiet skittering. The sound got closer.

Don turned on the parking lights. Countless red pinpricks out in the distant darkness froze and watched the van silently. “Holy shit,” Tommy breathed.

Don started the van, turned on the headlights. The rats vanished. “No. Not one damn bit,” he repeated. “Still, this is what we get paid for. Rats will always breed faster’n we can kill ’em. But it keeps Lee happy. And that, my friend, is the secret to a successful career in Streets and Sans.”