Truck Stop Read online

  “Yeah, sure, I’m Sam Preston, who are you?”

  Preston was tall and narrow, and he might’ve been an athlete, but I got the sense he didn’t come from that kind of family. Long, thin black hair draped his pale face.

  “My name is Alex Chapa, I’m a reporter, and I’m looking for Emil Constentino.”

  He reached out to shake my hand, revealing a roughly inked tattoo of a lightning bolt on the inside of his forearm. I filled him in on the details, and he confirmed that Emil had been there two days before.

  “Emil’s a hell of a guy, comes in every once in a while. He buys shit I’d never be able to sell. I give it to him below cost a lot of the time on account of I like the guy, and he’s a good customer.”

  “What kind of things does he buy?”

  “Junk. But then, it’s all junk, isn’t it? One person’s trash, another man’s treasure. Buy a box of cereal, keep it unopened for thirty years, someone will pay five hundred bucks for the toy inside. Crazy world, right?”

  He leaned back against a door behind the counter on the common wall between the two businesses. It was covered with Garbage Pail Kids stickers, most of which were faded and pealing.

  “Is that the kind of junk he normally buys from you?” I said, pointing to the awful stickers that I vaguely remembered from my youth.

  “No, not this shit, exactly, but sort of. Emil never liked the antiquey stuff. He’s into collectibles. You know, baseball cards, records, movie posters. Most of those things hold their value, but Emil sometimes buys up stuff no one seems to want any more. You know, like Pokemon cards. Some of those used to go for a few hundred bucks a piece. Now you’d be lucky to get ten bucks for a trunk full. Just couldn’t hold their value.”

  “Emil bought Pokemon cards?”

  Preston shook his head. I waited, unwilling to ask again. He stayed quiet, folding his arms, his lips pressed firmly together. I got the hint and fished out my wallet. All I had was a twenty and a five, and I didn’t think he’d make change. I handed him the larger bill.

  “Emil accumulated stuff like collections of National Geographic magazine, Michael Jackson memorabilia, and pogs,” he said, his face splitting into a wide grin. “He thought they would become valuable again someday.”

  “Pogs?”

  “He bought pogs. A whole shitload of them.”

  The guy who was hunched over the comic books looked up for a moment. A big pog collector, no doubt.

  “And what, exactly, is a pog?”

  Preston spent the longest three minutes of my life explaining everything I ever wanted to know about pogs, including the details of their quick rise in popularity, and their even quicker fall. He told me about the many variations, and the important difference between a regular pog and a slammer, even pulled a few out from behind the counter and spread them across the glass top.

  When he was finished, I took him down a different track, asking questions about Emil, fleshing out his personality. Old man, forgotten by society, trying to eek out a living by selling items from the past. It was heavy on the schmaltz, and wouldn’t get me a Pulitzer, but some readers love that sort of thing.

  I gave him my business card and as I turned to leave I saw a large doll in a glass case. Preston noted my interest and launched into his spiel.

  “It’s a limited edition American Girl piece. It’s in mint condition in its original, unopened box.”

  He made it sound expensive and more valuable than it probably was, but the doll reminded me of my daughter Nikki, and I knew she’d love it.

  “How much?”

  “It books at seventy-five, but since you’re a friend of Emil’s it’s yours for forty.”

  “Do you take credit cards?”

  He pulled out one of those old credit card gadgets, the kind that makes an imprint of the card on a carbon copy, and I handed him my Visa.

  After he’d bagged the doll, I thanked him and headed to the next place on the list, a warehouse and factory just west of Old Town. A name had once been painted on the building’s brick façade, Jorgensen’s, maybe, but that was decades ago. The street that ran along the front of the building was narrow and empty, except for one truly eye-catching set of wheels.

  I parked next to a mint new Corvette, spent three seconds admiring the lines, then walked to a door that had one of those cheap tin entrance signs stuck in the middle. The old knob was scuffed, and badly dented, and it complained loudly when I gave it a quick twist. The room on the other side of the metal door was a cramped office that smelled of dried sweat and recycled grease. The paint on the walls may have been beige once, but years of cigarette smoke and stale air had left a mud brown patina.

  A small man with spiked hair sat behind a metal desk that was built long before computer monitors were common. He looked up at me as though he’d been waiting for someone, and I wasn’t that guy.

  “What do you want?” he asked as though that was his default greeting.

  I looked beyond him to a partially open door and noticed the shadow of someone on the other side.

  “Is that how you greet all your customers?”

  “We’re closed.”

  He tucked something into his hip pocket as he stood. This wasn’t a guy you showed your back to. He was short but solid, even his eyebrows had muscles, and his legs could’ve passed for fire hydrants in blue jeans.

  “Are you Marty Cleven?” I asked in my most authoritative voice.

  “What do you know about Marty?”

  “Nothing, except he was supposed to meet a man named Emil Constentino here two days ago.”

  “Don’t know either of them. Time for you to go.”

  “Is Mr. Cleven here? I just need a minute.”

  “Time for you to go,” he repeated, raising his voice several decibels.

  I glanced beyond him again, and saw what looked like a man moving around in the next room.

  “Is he in the room behind you?”

  “I warned you, buddy.”

  He came out from behind the desk, reaching around his back as he closed the twenty feet of cracked grey tile between us. When his thick right hand re-emerged it was holding a tazer.

  I never had military training, never formally studied the martial arts. But you pick up stuff over the years. After more than a decade of interviewing all sorts of people, experts in a wide variety of areas, not all of them legal, I’ve learned enough to defend myself in most circumstances. As all four feet, eleven inches of him came toward me I was certain this was one of those circumstances.

  Mighty mite was just five feet away when I lunged forward and slammed my left fist down on his right wrist, sending the tazer tumbling across the floor until it came to a stop somewhere under the desk. Before he could snap out of his what-the-fuck-just-happened trance, I swung my right forearm into his chin and across the side of his neck. He dropped to the floor like someone had cut his strings, one hand rubbing his face, the other seeking the tazer.

  The shadows in the other room weren’t moving around anymore, they were huddled by the door. It was time to go.

  I reached back for the entrance door and noticed there were dents and a lot of scuffed metal around the lock. Maybe the damage to the outside knob was recent, because maybe these guys didn’t have a key to the place. I heard shorty growl something R-rated as I walked out.

  Driving through busy Lincoln Park streets, I checked the rearview a dozen times on my way to the third stop, an apartment above a small business in Rogers Park. Calling the police crossed my mind more than once, but I didn’t exactly have what you would call a friendly relationship with a majority of the Chicago PD. Besides, what would I say? I saw a guy who might have broken into an old warehouse with his friends, and I assaulted him because he might have tried to attack me because I wouldn’t leave when he told me to? I’d been hassled by cops enough over the years, and I didn’t want to add another unpleasant experience to the collection. So it was on to the third address on my short list.

  The sign on
the door of North Side Plastics read Closed. Between broken slats in the lowered blinds I could see someone moving around inside. I found the entrance to the apartments around the side of the building, and the name on the mail box confirmed that Angel Batara lived on the second floor. But the amount of mail filling the box also suggested what I soon confirmed, Angel wasn’t home.

  An hour later I was sitting at Johnny’s Beef, eating a sandwich and looking over the notes I’d made, which added up to a whole lot of nothing. I finished lunch, got back in my car, and pointed it toward home.

  And that’s when I got the call from Zach.

  Four floaters in eight weeks. An attention-getting number. One death is a human interest story. Two can sometimes be the result of some sort of a grudge, or gang activity. A third can be dismissed as fallout from the first two deaths. But when the body count reaches four, regular folks start worrying that they could be next. And that sells papers.

  The scene along the North branch of the Chicago River was about what I had expected. I parked the car several blocks away so as to not draw attention to myself, and walked to the scene. The mid-summer sun that had recently baked the town to a crisp was still clinging to the late afternoon sky. Scanning the area for an anxious witness, a familiar face, or another reporter, I roamed the perimeter that the cops had staked out until I spotted Jimmy Gordon.

  “Hey, Officer Gordon,” I said just above a whisper. He turned and eyed me right away.

  “Chapa, I should’ve known you’d end up here along with the gawkers, bugs, and river rats.”

  Jimmy had been my pal since back in the nineties when I wrote a series of stories that helped him and a few of his brothers in blue get off on bum corruption charges.

  “What have we got here?”

  “The guy hasn’t been in the water for long, and it doesn’t look like he drowned.”

  “You got a name?”

  “Don’t think so, but all of this will be released to the press in due time.”

  “C’mon, Jim,” I said with a smile.

  He smiled back, though not as much, and appeared to consider his options.

  After a moment, he said, “Have I told you about my brother?”

  “Didn’t know you had one.”

  “I do, he’s an orthodontist, very successful, knows all the latest technology and shit. And he just opened his own office in Glen Ellyn.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “It’s a tough business, Alex, very competitive and publicity can be hard to come by.”

  “Sounds like he’s providing a fine and necessary service to the good people of DuPage County.” I nodded. “I could probably milk a decent feature out of that.”

  He returned my nod. We had an agreement.

  I watched Jimmy walk down to the river and over near a woman I recognized as Homicide Lieutenant Jacqueline Daniels. As Jimmy hovered around the scene I slipped behind an oak tree to avoid being spotted by the other cops. Daniels was a tough customer and a decent enough cop, but she didn’t take kindly to members of the news media. If she spotted me, Jimmy would immediately forget our deal, my name, or that he’d ever even heard of newspapers.

  She was surrounded by the usual array of police officials who were poking around the scene and carefully examining the corpse. I was so locked in to the goings on that I didn’t notice Jimmy had returned and was casually leaning against the tree I was standing behind.

  “The stiff is a white male, about six-three, under two hundred pounds, probably in his early to mid thirties. A group of folks on a river cruise spotted him floating by.”

  “That’ll ruin a nice day in the big city.”

  “No shit. He was found fully dressed, but without any ID on him.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “No word yet. I didn’t get that close.”

  “And he was floating, huh?”

  “That’s what I was told.”

  “Anything distinct about him?”

  Jimmy thought for a moment.

  “Oh yeah, he has a tattoo on his arm.”

  “What kind of tattoo?”

  “It’s a lightning bolt, could be prison ink.”

  “That’s Sam Preston.”

  “You knew him, Alex?”

  “Not for long.”

  2

  Daniels

  Homicide Lieutenant Jack Daniels pushed her bangs behind her ear—seeing the streaks of gray annoyed her—and frowned at the body being lifted onto the stretcher. The man’s clothes and hair had begun to dry, and aside from the dull open eyes he appeared to be sleeping.

  “Tour captain said he was floating,” she said.

  Her partner, Sergeant Herb Benedict, had liberated his emergency beef jerky stash and was munching on some sort of pepperoni stick.

  “I don’t get it either. Guy looks like he just went for a swim. Couldn’t have been in the drink for more than a few hours.”

  “But he was floating,” she repeated. The words didn’t taste right leaving her tongue.

  “Maybe he just had a buoyant meal,” Herb said. “Something light and airy. You want to grab a bite after this?”

  Daniels walked over to Phil Blasky, the county Medical Examiner, who was using a probe to take the liver temperature. Unlike Herb, who was portly and sported a mustache, Blasky was thin to the point of gaunt and didn’t have enough hair on his entire head to keep a mouse warm in the summer.

  “Eighty degrees,” he said, noticing Jack’s approach. “The water is fifty-five.”

  “Rigor?”

  “No. No lividity yet, no livor mortis. This man was alive a few hours ago.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “Can’t tell from a cursory examination. No visible marks on the body. Blue pallor, slightly cyanotic, but that could be from the water temperature. A drowning?”

  “When they fished him out he was floating.”

  “That’s odd.”

  Jack’s frown deepened.

  “Are his lungs full of water?” she asked.

  Blasky pulled a syringe out of his med kit, unwrapped it, then looked around for a place to put the wrapper. Herb took it, adding the garbage to the dozen or so jerky wrappers in his breast pocket; you always knew when Herb was around because he sounded like cellophane.

  “Let’s see.” Blasky pushed up the corpse’s shirt and angled the needle between the damp, pale ribs. He pulled back the plunger, getting a small quantity of blood and a larger quantity of air.

  “Suffocation causes cyanosis too.” Jack folded her arms. “Give his diaphragm a squeeze.”

  Blasky performed a partial Heimlich, there was a wet popping sound and something shot out of the deceased’s mouth and arced through the air. Jack tracked it down, squatting and peering at the asphalt between her black Ferragamo pumps.

  “What is it?” Herb stood next to her. He wasn’t built to squat.

  “I have no idea. Some sort of disk. A poker chip?”

  She looked closer. It was white, maybe three centimeters in diameter. If it hadn’t been stuck in a floater’s throat, Jack would have guessed it was a Communion wafer.

  Without prompting, Herb handed her a plastic evidence baggie and a wrapped pepperoni stick. She used the jerky to poke it. Metal. And thick, about a centimeter.

  She flipped the circular object over.

  Herb said, “Holy Guacamole, Batman.”

  Her partner’s comment was appropriate. On the other side of the disk was a picture of Batman. A close-up of his face, the caped crusader in three-quarter profile, looking suitably heroic. Jack maneuvered Batman into the baggie.

  Herb nudged her. “Should I call Gotham City, tell Commissioner Gordon that the Dark Knight has gone bad?”

  Jack stood up, smoothed out her skirt with one hand while holding up the baggie with the other.

  “You, my friend,” she said to Herb, “are too old to be such a big geek.”

  “Batman is cool. Can I have my jerky back?”

  Jack complied,
then caught movement out of the corner of her eye. Two men were approaching. One, a uniform she recognized as a beat cop named Gordon. The other, a man about forty, medium build, with strong Cuban features punctuating a slightly sad face. Jack knew him as well. She shoved the baggie into the coat pocket of her blazer and put her hands on her hips.

  “This scene is off limits to members of the press.” She had some steel in her voice, and though her words were to Gordon her eyes were on the reporter.

  “Lieutenant, Alex, uh, Mr. Chapa here, he says he knew the floater, uh, the deceased.”

  “He can pay his respects after we release the body. In the meantime, if he’d like to go for a swim himself, the Chicago Police Department would be happy to assist him.”

  Alex Chapa took a step forward, something Daniels viewed as brave but not wise.

  “Officer Gordon, tell the Lieutenant I just saw this man alive a few hours ago.”

  Jack narrowed her eyes. “Did anyone see you two together?”

  “I’ll save you the trouble. He owns a collectible shop on Clark, has a closed circuit camera. You can view the tape, which will show you he was still alive when I left.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” Herb said, stepping up to meet Chapa. “You could have killed him after he left.”

  “I didn’t kill him, Sergeant. I want to help.”

  “Do you like Batman?”

  “Batman? Why?”

  Jack stepped forward, standing shoulder to shoulder with her partner.

  “Officer Gordon, take Mr. Chapa down to the station and get a statement. If you make him wait for more than six hours, I’ll buy you lunch.”

  “Sorry, Alex,” Gordon said. “Let’s go.”

  Gordon placed a hand on the reporter’s shoulder, pulling him backward. Chapa shrugged away.

  “Lieutenant Daniels, I know in the past the Suburban Herald hasn’t treated you with the respect you deserve…”

  “Here’s the direct quote. ‘If Daniels paid as much attention to her job as she does to her wardrobe, maybe Chicago wouldn’t have so many unsolved homicides.’”