Barking Dogs - A Mitch Helwig Book Read online

  “There’s a warehouse. There’s guys there. They know everything that’s going down. Somebody there might know.”

  Mitch’s Barking Dog accepted it.

  “Where?”

  “North of Thorncliffe. East of Laird.”

  “What’s the address?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “How will I know it?”

  The Loon was silent for a minute, trying to decide how much information was too much. Then his eyes strayed back to the Barking Dog gazing coolly at him. If the guy kills me, he thought suddenly with unusual clarity, then he kills me. What do I care what he does after that? But if he lets me go, then I’ll kill him. Eventually. Or one of the boys will, once I put out the word. And I don’t think he’ll kill me.

  “I was only there once. To a meeting of sorts. It’s kind of a stash place.”

  “What’s stashed there?”

  “Whatever needs stashing. Stuff that needs to be fenced. Stuff that needs to be stripped or doctored before sale.”

  “Quit fucking around. How will I know it?”

  “I told you. I was only there once. But I do remember the name of the place. It was Herrington Storage, or something like that.”

  It had all filtered through the Barking Dog without incident. Suddenly, Mitch felt tired—bone weary. The tension was draining out of him, leaving him completely rational and able to weigh all the alternatives, without the addling effect of anger or fear.

  He looked at the Loon, who was also relaxing visibly, feeling the trade had been accepted, that the man in front of him was too ordinary, too sane and well-balanced to be the threat to his life that he had been a few moments ago.

  “Let me go now. I’ve told you everything I know. I’m no good to you now.” The Loon waited.

  “You’re right. You’re no good to me now.”

  The Loon smiled weakly.

  “You’re no good to anybody, ever.”

  The smile faded.

  “The rules have changed.”

  A frown crossed the Loon’s face.

  Mitch squeezed the trigger evenly. The Loon’s mouth started to open. It was the last deliberate movement he made. The blue pencil beam bridged the gap between the men instantaneously, flaring to life, burning silently through the Loon’s heart. He fell to the pavement like a puppet whose strings have been unceremoniously dropped, his head bouncing hard on the tarmac.

  You got Door Number Three, Mitch thought. It happens to all of us, sooner or later.

  He stared down at the two bodies, feeling nothing. Then he strode over to the third victim, the one who had brandished the surprising laser from the darkness. It was Hollow-eyes. Bending, he retrieved the laser from the ground near his assailant’s outstretched hand, slipped it into his pocket, and walked with a steady gait out of the alley. He didn’t look back.

  14

  Elaine heard the front door lock turning and glanced at the bedside clock. 12:11 a.m. There followed the soft sounds of the lightweight steel door opening and closing, the whisper of the deadbolt sliding home, and then moments of silence before the bathroom door clicked shut.

  The digital clock blinked to 12:12.

  Water was running into the bathroom sink. The sound was familiar, comforting. It meant Mitch was home. It meant an end to her solitude. It meant the possibility of continuing. She had decided that much. They had too much together to open an unbridgeable chasm right now. If it was going to happen, well, it was going to happen. But she would not instigate a midnight confrontation. Mitch, she knew, needed many things right now, and she hoped that one of them was still her.

  The anger and fear and depression that she had felt earlier in the evening had dissipated. In their stead was a strange—strange to her, at any rate—acceptance of this turn of fortune. The idea of one’s life’s savings was in itself a curious one, she came to realize, if it was measured on a computer printout or on a monitor, as a plus or minus balance, no matter how many zeros were involved in the final figure. Elaine thought of Jan and how her collapsed marriage had riddled her with anxiety, guilt, depression, in spite of the fact that she was well-supported by the separation agreement. The numbers didn’t add up to the total involved. It was the emotional equation that needed balancing.

  The water in the bathroom stopped running.

  This man she lived with, whom she both knew and did not know, with whom she had shared everything worth sharing, was the man she wanted to live with. It was her choice. It involved no one else, except their daughter, and that too had helped fix her mind on its present course.

  Mitch came into the bedroom with his shirt and jacket in hand, bare to the waist, his hair mussed and wet. She saw the beginnings of his middle-age belly appearing, in spite of the fact he was in excellent shape and not even forty. Seeing it made her feel good, because she could remember how it had once been taut and a source of pride for him, and the fact that the memory was hers, that she had been privy to the graceful change, linked her to the past and anchored her sternly.

  “You awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t have to wait up for me.”

  She shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep.”

  He unbuckled his pants, slid them down and off, and draped them over the back of the chair—the same chair he always draped them over. Then he slid his briefs off and walked naked to the closet and took down his pajama bottoms from the hook inside the door.

  Elaine let her eyes linger pleasantly on his nakedness. “Hey, you,” she said, suddenly.

  He looked up, his pajama bottoms still in his hand. The expression on his face told her that his thoughts were still somewhere very far distant.

  “Can I interest you in a bit of salacious conduct?”

  Their eyes met and locked, the communication total, the result of ten years as man and wife.

  Elaine’s heart was pounding. This was the moment of a certain kind of truth. Her nervousness came from the fact that her words had sprung spontaneously from her lips, completely unplanned. But only after they had left her, after they had spilled out into the world, never to be recalled, did she realize where they could lead. They could lead to the truth, the truth she had sworn she would not seek, at least not tonight. For if there was another woman, and he had been with her, his body would be unable to withhold the truth from her. A physical resonance blossomed from their ten years together, and she felt she could read his responses like a coded cipher, and translate the signals unwittingly.

  The words were out. She could not get them back.

  Mitch gazed gratefully at the woman in his bed, the woman he needed more than he could ever know. His body responded and he felt his manhood swell slowly but surely.

  She watched him drop his nightwear to the floor, and her eyes, unbidden, were magnetized by his swelling erection. A sense of relief flowed almost orgasmically from her as she both relaxed and tightened simultaneously.

  Mitch walked across the room and sat down on the bed beside her. He stroked her hair gently, brushed her forehead, her eyebrows, her nose and lips with the feathery tips of his fingers. Then he slid his hand onto the fullness of her breast, feeling the nipple harden and tense beneath her nightgown. In turn, she reached out and took his hardened manhood in her hand and caressed it lovingly.

  Mitch gasped now at her knowledgeable ministrations, and the fire burned in his veins and in his brain. Bending, he kissed her full on the lips, and the kiss grew into a mutually ravishing exploration as the kindled spark was fanned, as it spread like a bushfire toward a devastating conflagration.

  When, eventually, he entered her, it was with ease, so great was the tension in both of them, and the lovemaking transpired at a pitch only a fraction below that of frenzy. When, as was their pattern, her orgasm had overwhelmed her, left her floating far beyond the confines of their insignificant apartment, and he felt he could no longer contain himself, the eruption that claimed him was without precedent.

  His body blew apart.

&
nbsp; The apartment blew apart.

  And he drained himself in great, wracking spasms, internal convulsions, and nerve-shattering siphoning, giving his mind and body the relief they needed beyond all others, in the arms and body of his wife.

  Elaine’s eyes welled with water as she listened to his gasps and felt his torment leave him. Whatever it was that had isolated him from her of late, that had prompted him to act alone in the matter of their savings, it was not, she now felt with certainty, a woman.

  And with that knowledge came a relief that drained her equally.

  15

  “Read me this morning’s goodies, Huziak. I’m sitting down.” Karoulis pried the plastic lid off the white Styrofoam cup and let the hot coffee steam out into the small office.

  “We’ve got some arrests, Captain.”

  Karoulis’s eyebrows perked slightly. “Good,” he said, simply. “Start off with the good news. Give me some hope first.” He tried to sip his coffee, found it too hot, placed it back on the paper napkin, and merely held it for warmth and comfort.

  “We picked up James last night. In a flophouse on Shuter.”

  “He come peacefully?” Karoulis couldn’t believe it.

  “We surprised him. He had no choice.”

  “Good.”

  “I think we’ll make this one stick, too.”

  “Christ. We’d better.”

  “We’ve got the witnesses. Can’t find the guns he used, though.”

  “We release him after three years on an attempted murder charge. His slimeball of a lawyer gets him off of the murder rap five years ago. We suspect he’s raped his mother as well as beaten his wife as well as killed the family of ten....We fucking well better have the bugger this time!”

  “And,” Huziak forged ahead, trying to ignore the captain’s outburst, “we’ve got a suspect in the homosexual-related mutilation slayings.”

  “Who?”

  “Guy named Berskis. Stanley Berskis. Age thirty. A house painter.”

  “Wasn’t Hitler a house painter? Standing on that ladder all day must drive you mad.”

  “The guy was wanted in Lake County, Illinois, and in Indiana. He was released on bond in February when his bond was reduced from one million to ten thousand dollars after a judge ruled that evidence uncovered in Indiana could not be used in court.”

  Karoulis held his head.

  “Berskis’s neighbors told us he attracted attention to himself by leaving his apartment drapes open and walking nude in front of the window.”

  “So he comes here and gets himself a nice apartment and carries on.”

  “Appears so.”

  Karoulis sighed. “And that’s the good news.”

  Huziak pursed his lips, nodded.

  “Well, now that I feel so much better, I guess I’m ready.”

  Huziak cleared his throat. “Yes, Captain.”

  “Don’t dally, Sergeant. Let me have it. I’m strong.” He smiled wryly and placed his hands behind his head and sat back, waiting.

  Rolling his eyes, Huziak continued. “We had four major break-ins overnight. A total of $256,875 estimated take. Thieves took $150,000 worth of bakery equipment from the Delphi Bakery on Pape. Jewelry, a camera, and a purse valued at $35,000 were taken from an O’Connor home. A side window was forced. $30,000 in jewelry and clothing was lifted from Danny’s Imports on Coxwell. And jewelry and household items valued at $28,000 were taken from a Gamble Avenue home.”

  “I didn’t know anyone on Gamble Avenue had that much of anything.”

  Huziak shrugged, still refusing to be drawn in by his captain’s pique.

  “We got a woman walking with a friend to ‘cool off’ after a quarrel with her boyfriend, who was subsequently abducted, held captive for twelve hours, and raped by as many as twenty men. The woman, Thelma Maher, forty-one, and a nineteen-year-old girlfriend were walking to breakfast after the woman had just finished arguing with her boyfriend when a car containing three men pulled over. One man tried to grab the younger woman’s purse. She ran away, but the victim was thrown into the back of the car and taken to a Dundas Street East apartment, where she was repeatedly raped. Apparently, a number of people passed through the place and it became known that she was there. She escaped twelve hours later by slipping out a door. She was naked when she flagged down a passing motorist—a woman—who told her to hide in the backseat of her car and drove around looking for a police cruiser or skimmer. McMahon brought her in.”

  “Can she find the place again? Can she I.D. anybody for us?”

  “That remains to be seen. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”

  Karoulis nodded. “O.K. What else?”

  “Nothing more on the missing kids.”

  Karoulis was silent. There seemed to be one missing every week. They never turned up.

  Huziak decided to use his lighter material. He had been saving it for a finish, but sensed that the captain might need it a lot right now. Come to think of it, he realized, I can use it, too. “You’ll like this one, Captain.”

  “Oh? I thought you’d given me my good news for today already.”

  Undaunted, Huziak continued. “Seems a couple of early-bird employees arrived at about seven a.m. this morning at Brownwood Medical Clinic, on Parliament near Gerrard. They could hear a voice shouting ‘Let me out!’ and a pounding from inside a wall, so they called the fire department. The fire fighters arrived, kept shouting to the trapped man, and he responded by pounding and shouting back so they could reach him. Eventually, they cut through the plaster and into a sheet-metal duct that measured about twenty-five by thirty-five centimeters to find this guy. He had evidently lowered himself into the air vent after climbing on the roof last night, and gotten himself stuck good.” Huziak smiled, and Karoulis found himself responding with a small kind of perverse pleasure. “We got him now. Larry Hughes, twenty-three, of Sumach Street. Breaking and entering.”

  “Good.”

  “Ain’t it though?”

  “What was he after?”

  “The usual. Drugs. Pills. Small-time dealer who was going to pull the perfect caper. Must’ve seen it on TV.”

  “So now they’re in the walls themselves.” Karoulis shook his head. “It used to be termites, you know. Not people.”

  “Or carpenter ants.”

  “Aren’t they the same thing?”

  Huziak looked perplexed. “Not sure, Captain.”

  “Hmmm.” He looked up. “That it?”

  “No, sir. Got another dandy.”

  “You’re in rare form this morning, Huziak.”

  “Not me, Captain. The world.”

  Karoulis sipped his coffee. It was finally consumable. Part of him preferred merely to hold it, to smell it, to take comfort from its regular appearance on his desk as a talisman of order and routine.

  “It started about five a.m. this morning and finished up about seven-thirty. Haven’t you listened to the radio?”

  “No. I like quiet in the morning.”

  It occurred to Huziak to say that he was in the wrong job for it, but prudence came through once again and he remained silent on his own thoughts. “It was up in the Thorncliffe apartments. Some sixty-two-year-old guy who was mad at everybody in the world tossed most of his possessions out of the sixteenth-floor window of his apartment. It began at five, when he threw out his mattress, TV set, and French-style antique telephone. Fire lighters were called again. They used loudspeakers to warn him, but he just wasn’t in a listenin’ mood.” Huziak read from a list now. “He threw away cameras, picture albums, food, full cans of beer, pots and pans, piles of newspapers, telephone books, pornographic magazines, a set of encyclopedias, mayonnaise jars, a box of batteries, two bicycles, a half-dozen new bicycle tires, and new and used clothing. He tossed pillowcases, pens, and sets of suspenders still in their packages.” He glanced up, curious to see Karoulis’s expression. He wasn’t disappointed. Even the perpetually grim captain was allowing a trace of a genuine smile to exhibit itself, howe
ver slightly.

  “He couldn’t very well do all this quietly, could he?”

  “No, sir, he couldn’t. In fact, he amassed quite a crowd of onlookers, all of whom appeared much more delighted than appalled. In fact, Citypulse News had cameras there for live coverage, and preempted regular programming. Some in the crowd gathered below shouted, “Refrigerator, refrigerator!” and he pushed the apartment’s refrigerator out the window to the sidewalk sixteen stories down. The flights of the refrigerator, the apartment stove, and other large pieces of furniture brought whoops of glee from the crowd.”

  Karoulis sat with his mouth open.

  “A few yahoos called out for the guy to jump, but cooler heads prevailed and hushed ’em up.”

  “How’d it all stop?”

  “Well, officers were called in, but were reluctant to break into his apartment for fear he might be armed. Eventually, he was talked out. Nobody was hurt.”

  “Poor bastard.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Poor old bastard.” He seemed lost in thought. “What’d we do with him?”

  “Took him to East General for observation. We got hold of a niece who said he’d been despondent since his wife left him twelve years ago.”

  “And we put the guy’s misery on TV, eh?”

  “Misery sells.”

  “Everything seems to sell.”

  There was a quick rap on the door and they both looked around to see DeMarco, Homicide, staring in at them through the glass-partitioned door. Karoulis waved him in.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Captain.”

  “That’s all right. What is it?”

  “Just in. One of our men has been shot.”

  “Oh, no. Christ. Who?”

  “You probably don’t know him too well, Captain. Transferred from Peel County in the spring. Name’s Fedwick. Mark Fedwick.”

  “What happened?”

  “He answered a break-in alarm at Adamo Computers Peripherals, Inc., and Stanton Telecom, Inc., on Wicksteed, about six this morning.”

  “Six in the morning?”