Hope Rides Again Read online

  “Could it be Michelle?”

  “Chez Quis is a few blocks from here, not in Englewood.” He clicked the mouse a few times. “There. I’ve wiped it remotely. Whoever took it has got themselves a very expensive paperweight. Now we can head back downstairs—”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.” Barack stood. “Easy-peasy, Joe.”

  Easy-peasy? First he stole my Lent; now he was stealing my lines. If my privacy had been violated like his was, I would have been hoppin’ mad. We had different philosophies. Different temperaments. Sometimes, I couldn’t believe we’d ever become friends at all.

  “But—but your phone,” I stammered. “Don’t you think—”

  “I’ll get a replacement. It’s useless now. If they try to sell it, who would ever believe that it was the president’s BlackBerry?”

  We left for the elevators. The silent alarm that had been ringing in the back of my mind wouldn’t stop, and it had nothing to do with the eighty-three-dollar bet Barack had lost to me (of which I would never see a red cent). I had a good idea who the thief was. Barack was seemingly ready to forget the whole episode, but that was only because he didn’t know what I knew.

  “I need to get going,” I told him. “I remembered I have a thing.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “What about Caruso? That was kind of why I asked you to town. You’ll like him. He’s got some great ideas.”

  “Another time, I’m afraid. My flight leaves at nine, but I always like to get to the airport early. You never know what those security lines are going to be like.”

  “You have PreCheck.”

  I shook my head. “A hundred bucks for five years? I’ll stand in the cattle call line with everyone else, thank you very much.”

  “Still, getting to the airport”—and here he checked his watch—“almost eleven hours early seems excessive.”

  “I’m putting myself on standby. If I can surprise Jill by getting home early, hey, that’s better than a souvenir.”

  “I’d still buy her a souvenir.”

  He gave me another bear hug. I still wasn’t used to this new, emotional Barack Obama. Ever since I’d leaped in front of a bullet meant for him during our little adventure in 2017, he was the first one to initiate hugs between us.

  “See you at the beach this summer?” he said.

  “Sounds like a plan, Stan.”

  What Barack didn’t know was that I really did have a plan, and it had nothing to do with stuffing our faces with saltwater taffy on the boardwalk. I was no detective, but you didn’t need to be a detective to do detective work. I once replaced the flange inside the toilet in our guest bathroom. That didn’t make me a plumber, but I did it. By God, I did it.

  To do detective work, all you needed was a clue. Not only did I have that, I also had a suspect: Shaun Denton. And to think I’d trusted him.

  6

  When I boarded the L, there were only a handful of other passengers. The doors closed and the train rattled and hissed. The bucket seats weren’t padded like on Amtrak. Without judgment, I noted that several of my fellow travelers had brought their own padding. The Bidens were not blessed with such ample backsides, however. I settled in for a bumpy ride.

  I was headed for the South Side. I anticipated the elevated train would get me there faster than trying to cut back through the parade traffic. Any other time, I wouldn’t have gone after the phone—Barack could buy an entire Verizon store’s worth of phones if he wanted to. What bugged me was that Shaun had said he was headed to work at a freight yard. Not necessarily the one where Barack’s phone had been pinpointed, but it was just too much of a coincidence. A half hour after Shaun leaves for work and the phone just magically appears at a freight yard? There’d been a warning on the computer as Barack wiped the BlackBerry, advising him to contact local law enforcement to track down the device if he suspected it was stolen. “Don’t try to retrieve your device on your own,” the site warned.

  The last thing I wanted was for the police to get involved.

  It didn’t take a genius-level intellect like Barack Obama’s to connect the dots. Shaun seemed like a good kid. He was one of the Obamas’ “Rising Stars.” If he was indeed the thief, I wanted to give him a chance to do the right thing. Maybe Shaun was pulling my old leg when he said he wished he’d had a dad like me, maybe he wasn’t. But if he’d been my son, this is what I’d do—I’d find him and talk some sense into him before he got himself into real trouble.

  Slowly, the skyscrapers gave way to single-story brick homes. We stopped every half mile or so to pick up a new crew of working-class Joes and Suzies. I was getting a look at the real Chicago. Most were dressed in service-industry uniforms: checkered chef’s pants, polo shirts embroidered with names of fast-food establishments. Comfortable shoes.

  Nobody was wearing green except for the baristas.

  I debarked at the Sixty-third Street station. My phone’s map told me the main entrance to the freight yard was one block south, five blocks east. So this was the South Side. A dangerous area, if you went by the headlines.

  I drew in a deep breath and started walking.

  I could already feel blisters forming on the bottoms of my feet. That’s what you get for tramping around town in dress shoes. If there’d been a CVS along my route, I would have stopped in and picked up some Dr. Scholl’s inserts. However, there were only empty lots overtaken by grass on one side of the street, the fenced-in shipping yard on the other. From the elevated station, I’d seen an emerald-green Whole Foods sign a few blocks to the west, looking mighty out of place. Wasn’t that the grocer they called “Whole Paycheck”? No way was I buying some organic shoe inserts for double the price. I’d rather walk over broken glass.

  And I was walking over broken glass. Every five or ten footsteps, something crunched underfoot. A busted bottle. A smashed car window. A picture frame of a happy family with the husband’s face cut out. Bad breakup. Maybe Oprah could help.

  After a couple of blocks with the sidewalk to myself, I heard the tight patter of footsteps gaining on me. I hugged the concrete wall as I passed under a railroad viaduct, giving whoever was behind me room to pass. When I emerged on the other side, I threw a glance over my shoulder. Nobody there.

  Paranoia? Or something else? Had Barack sent the Secret Service to follow me? Perhaps, once upon a time, I’d have worried about that. But Barack and I didn’t keep stuff from each other anymore. It was an unspoken agreement, one that I was breaking right now. I’d tell him about Shaun. Eventually. When the time was right.

  A cop car with its lights and sirens blaring rounded the corner of a side street, skidding along the road and nearly careening into a crosswalk light. In the distance, another siren whined—this one longer, deeper—and another cop buzzed past.

  There was nothing around here to speak of but the yards. We were all on our way to the same place.

  Up ahead, trouble was brewing: three police cruisers were blocking the entrance to the freight yard. A fire truck was parked at an angle across one side of the street.

  A crowd of gawkers had gathered on the sidewalk. All African American. Meanwhile, I was white as a gravestone in the moonlight. With the scarf, I probably looked to them like I’d just come from a rugby match. At a pub.

  Had Barack or the Secret Service tipped off the police about the location of the stolen phone? It seemed unlikely because, in practical terms, Barack was right: it was a paperweight now that it had been wiped and locked. Barack didn’t want any publicity, understandably. His mind was on the forum. I seemed to be the only one even mildly worked up about the theft, and that was only because I had a suspect in mind.

  On the other hand, I knew that it was too much to believe the police presence here was unrelated to my current quest. They didn’t send out this many first responders for some kid who’d imbibed too much green beer and face-planted into the grass.

  I shoved my scarf into an overstuffed trash can and entered the huddle.


  7

  The police officer standing guard at the entrance had a frown on her face too well-worn to be anything but permanent. There weren’t any sawhorses or crime scene tape restricting the area, however, so I slipped through the crowd.

  She looked me up and down as I approached her. “You a Fed?”

  “What makes you say that?” I asked, my voice full of more gravel than a rock pit.

  “You all dress the same. Except you…you look familiar.”

  “Some people say I look like Cary Grant.”

  The officer—Rudin, according to the name patch sewn onto her shirt—looked at me sideways. She turned on her radio. “I got a Mr. Cary Grant out here. Should I send him in?” While she was waiting for a response, she whispered to me, “Which agency?”

  “Well—”

  Her radio squawked back. It was undecipherable to me, but Rudin seemed to understand whoever was on the other end.

  “What’d they say?” I asked.

  “They told me they don’t care if you’re the president of the United States, you’re not contaminating their crime scene.”

  “What if I was the vice president?”

  “Not even if you were Cary Grant. You can read all about what happened here in the paper tomorrow. Or maybe not. This is gonna be one of those days. They might simply tally the number of shootings and leave it at that.”

  “There was a shooting here.”

  The officer narrowed her eyes. Perhaps she’d realized she’d said too much, or finally recognized that I was putting her on. The look on her face said she was about to toss me like a can of corn.

  Right inside the gates, an ambulance was parked with its back doors open. Two EMTs were wheeling a gurney across the pavement from between two shipping containers. The victim’s face was partially obscured by an oxygen mask. He had dark skin and black slacks. He was shirtless, but if I had to guess, he’d been wearing a starched white shirt. I had a feeling in my stomach like I’d swallowed a dumbbell.

  Rudin traced my eyes to the gurney. “Shot twice in the gut. Clean shots, though. He’s lucky.”

  “Think you’ll catch who did it?” I said, assuming they hadn’t already.

  It was a good assumption.

  “We’ve got some shoe prints, which we’ll match to the perp when we catch him. You can always pray for video, but there aren’t a lot of CCTV cameras around here—the yard’s too massive to surveil every inch. A hundred and sixty acres. Something goes missing, insurance deals with it. It is what it is. If we’re really, really lucky, we can lift the shooter’s fingerprints off the bullet casings, but how often do you get lucky in this business?”

  “Not often enough,” I said, taking a wild guess. “Any witnesses?”

  She gave me a knowing look. “Nobody wants to insert themselves into the middle of a potential gang war, which is what most of these cases shake out to be. That’s a one-way ticket to Slab City.”

  The victim had just arrived at work, she explained. No coworkers saw anything. Unless there was a major break in the case, it didn’t sound like there was any hope. The department had their hands full this weekend. Bad things happen, she said.

  My nausea returned in a sudden rush—not because of her jaded attitude, but because I had to know. I had to know if it was Shaun.

  “Say,” Rudin said, adjusting her cap, “which agency did you say you were with?”

  “I didn’t,” I said, breaking through the invisible perimeter. I went straight for the gurney, which the EMTs were loading into the ambulance. I didn’t need to pull the oxygen mask from his face to know it was Shaun. It was his shoes—his polished shoes that gave him away.

  “Shaun,” I said, not that he could hear me.

  I didn’t care if he’d stolen Barack’s BlackBerry or every one of Tom Brady’s six Super Bowl rings—the kid didn’t deserve this. Nobody did.

  “We need some room here,” said one of the medics, a young woman with tattooed forearms.

  I stepped out of the way. “Hey, you didn’t find a BlackBerry on him, did you?”

  “Check with your friends,” she said, jerking her thumb toward a trio of uniformed cops surrounding the crime scene a couple of car lengths away. The shipping containers on either side of them were decorated with eagles carrying American flags. The cement at the cops’ feet was black with dried blood.

  The other medic was fiddling with a lever on the gurney. I was in their way, but they were used to guys like me getting in their way. I could tell they were tired of it. Tired of guys like me, tired of treating gunshot victims. Tired of the whole damn thing.

  “Found an iPhone,” the male medic said without looking up at me.

  “That’s it?”

  His partner hopped into the back of the ambulance with Shaun. I couldn’t remember who the patron saint of shooting victims was, so I sent up a prayer to all the saints. Maybe one of them would get the message.

  The medic slammed the door shut. “That’s all he had in his pockets, besides his wallet. An iPhone.”

  “Somebody shot him but didn’t take his wallet or his phone. What happened to no honor among thieves?”

  The medic fired up a cigarette. “Wasn’t a robbery. They fired six shots, from far enough away that they missed most of ‘em. Somebody wanted him dead.” He paused. “You aren’t from Chicago.”

  “Wilmington.”

  “People don’t get shot in Wilmington?”

  “They do,” I admitted. “All the time.”

  “Same shit, different zip code. Am I right?”

  He climbed into the cab of the ambulance, cigarette dangling from his lips. The ambulance pulled out, siren blaring like an air raid horn. It barely registered over the other sounds of the freight yard: the train whistles, the constant squealing of brakes like nails on a chalkboard. The shooting hadn’t slowed down the shipping business at all.

  My eyes wandered and found a pair of mirrored shades on the ground, the frames split in half, the plastic lenses crushed to bits by one of the ambulance’s tires. I crouched down. Without even reading the Ray-Ban logo on the frames, I knew they were mine. Or they had been mine. Interesting detail about the phone and wallet not being stolen. If the shooter never got close enough to empty Shaun’s pockets, then where was the BlackBerry? It had been nearby, around the time of the shooting. That much I could piece together. If Shaun hadn’t had it on him, however, that meant that somebody else had swiped the phone from the green room…and there was only one “somebody else” in the picture at the moment: the shooter. What sort of mess had I stepped into the middle of?

  “Long way from Delaware, Joe.”

  My body went rigid. Without turning to see who’d crept up on me, I said, “Hello, Rahm.”

  8

  Before I’d even shaken newly elected Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s hand, I’d known what he was all about. He was from Chicago, where Democrats had built one of the most corrupt political machines in the country. There’s an old joke that goes something like, “Uncle Frank was a conservative until the day he died in Chicago. Since then, he’s voted Democrat.”

  Ipso fatso, Barack was dirtier than the Delaware River.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t so sure about his friends. Rahm Emanuel—a firecracker with the mouth of a sailor—was the cleanest of the bunch, if that tells you anything. To say that we rubbed each other the wrong way would be a gross understatement. We got along like two sticks being used to start a campfire.

  “Take us around the block,” Rahm told his driver. “The long way.”

  Rahm was riding up front with his SUV limo driver. I was sitting in back beside a thick slice of roast beef named Benny Polaski, who’d worked muscle for Barack in 2008. Polaski was a common surname in Chicago, a city with the largest Polish community in the States. At one point, the Irish and Polish hadn’t been too friendly. After an influx of African Americans during the Great Migration, suddenly the differences between the Irish an
d Polish minorities seemed, well, minor.

  After a few blocks riding in awkward silence, Rahm finally spoke. “You’re going to miss the parade, Joe. It starts in less than an hour.”

  “Never been much of a parade guy. I like the ones where they throw candy, but I’m too old to fight for it with the kids these days.”

  “If I’d known you were in town, I could have gotten you a good spot. Cleared all the kiddies out. All the candy you could pick up.” He sighed. “I’m supposed to be on the first float, you know. Being the mayor and all.”

  “Something else come up?”

  Rahm glared at me in the rearview. “I got a text from the chief of police saying Joe Biden was snooping around a crime scene. Joe Biden! On the South Side, for Chrissakes. As if I don’t have enough to worry about this weekend as it is.” He shook his head. “Listen, you and I have never been friends, but we don’t have to be enemies.”

  He was right. We were never friends. “President Obama invited me to his little economic pow-wow,” I said. “I was there this morning. A tad dry. Thought I’d kill a few hours before leaving town by riding the L. I didn’t expect to stumble into a crime scene.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to, either,” Rahm said. “Did you read that book? Murder on the Amtrak Express?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “It’s not bad. Better than that Clinton and Patterson train wreck, if you’ll forgive the pun.” He paused. “If that crack gets back to Bill, you’re toast.”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  Rahm chuckled. “I hope you’ll forgive me for kidnapping you, by the way.”

  “Is that what this is?”

  Rahm twisted in his seat to look at me. “Does President Obama know you decided to tour one of our economically diverse, industrial-opportunity corridors?”

  I shook my head. Polaski unwrapped a Werther’s Original. For himself; he wasn’t sharing.

  Rahm lowered his voice: “I know what you’re doing down here.”

  “You do?”