Chapter 15: The Second Month

I drove, because he was bleeding, and because I needed something to do with my hands.

The van took the old rail road north without headlights until we were a mile clear of the yard.

Luka sat with his head against the window and a wad of his own shirt jammed against his shoulder.

Neither of us said a word.

I turned off at the Calumet River, onto a gravel apron behind a shuttered boat yard.

I cut the engine.

Black water. A single sodium lamp on a pole.

"Talk," I said.

"Let me look at the shoulder first."

"Talk. Now. Or I will put you in the river."

"You wouldn't."

"Luka."

He let out a long, tired breath and opened his eyes.

"The second month," he said. "A Thursday. I was in my car outside my father's club, and your dot went west."

"My dot."

"On the phone. It went to a parking structure off Halsted, and it sat there on the fourth level for an hour."

"I thought you were meeting someone. Another man." He gave me a lopsided, ugly smile. "I went to find out which one."

"You followed me."

"I parked on the ramp above you, in the dark, with the lights off."

I didn't say anything.

I remembered that night. I remembered it exactly, and I remembered that I had checked the ramp.

"A man in a good coat got out of a black sedan," Luka said.

"He walked up to you to say something, and then he didn't walk anywhere."

"He never got to the end of the sentence."

"No."

"You were above me."

"A hundred feet. Behind a concrete post."

"I had my hand on my gun the whole time, and I never took it out."

"Why?"

"Because I wasn't afraid of you," Luka said. "I was afraid of the man who owned the building."

I stared at him.

"Afterward you went down the stairwell and washed your hands in a bucket by the fire hose," he said.

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