Butcher's Road (49 page)

As for Lennon, his back and feet hurt from standing at attention for so long. He’d already listened to the same horseshit falling from Wenders’ fat, wet lips, and had endured poorly worded accolades from two other detectives on the subject. The steam heat clutched his uniform and soaked into the fibers, pushing through his shirt and skin like burrowing insects. Perspiration saturated his collar and cuffs, and he experienced moments of light headedness so profound he felt certain he would topple over.

But he stood there. He heard the lies, though they hit his eardrums in a hum as if the organs refused to translate any further deceit. The voices he heard in his head belonged to the man he’d killed and to himself.

On Christmas Eve, he’d stood outside the gate to Marco Impelliteri’s home, watching the blaze from a distance and hearing the occasional pop of gunfire. He’d spent a long time debating the situation, wondering if there was anything left to be done. And then Butch Cardinal emerged from the shadows, holding a tommy gun on him. Two minutes later, Butch explained the situation.

Then he told Lennon he had a plan:

“You may have to shoot me,” Butch said. “I don’t want Impelliteri to have the satisfaction. Things go bad and you do the shooting yourself. It may be the only thing that saves your skin.”

“I’ve got more than enough rounds for Impelliteri and his men,” said Lennon.

“You can’t count on that,” Butch said. “I made a mistake letting Hayes get involved in all of this. He’s trapped in the house, and he’s got himself a bum peg. We need to give him some time to get clear.”

“We can all get clear.”

“No, we can’t.” Resolution hardened the frown on Butch’s lips, tightened the line of his jaw. “Too many men. Too many questions to answer. If Hayes gets away he can fix this. He’ll bring men. They can retrieve what was lost. You have to take me in there and give me a chance at Impelliteri, but if it goes bad, you do the shooting.”

Then Butch managed to take out Luke Chalice, but he wasn’t going to be fast enough to get a drop on Impelliteri. More men were racing through the snow. Jake would see, and he’d get his gun up plenty quick, and though Lennon might have been able to thin out the crowd, he’d put his neck on the block in the process. If even one of Impelliteri’s men escaped to tell the tale, Lennon and his family might as well cut their own throats because no amount of talk or scratch would save their asses. So Lennon had taken his shot. He’d wanted to get a clean shot to the heart, but his hands were shaking and his aim went foul. Realizing he’d only wounded the big man, Lennon took a second shot, and this one had hit the mark, just above the lower arc of the pectoral, but Butch had reacted as if he hadn’t noticed, so Lennon had shot again and again, wanting nothing more than to put the wrestler down, put him out of his misery, and bring the whole mess of a night to an end.

Eventually Butch had toppled in the snow, but not after what struck Lennon as interminable minutes. Sadness and perplexity cast shadows over the man’s eyes, even as the light from Impelliteri’s burning house reflected on the glassy lenses.

Regret seized Lennon’s chest and head before Butch crashed into the snow. How could he have done it? Why had it been so easy to shoot the wrestler? Lennon would have taken longer to bring down a rabid dog. Had he wanted to murder the man who’d brought so much turmoil to his life? Was he that kind of man? He didn’t want to believe it, but killing Butch Cardinal had been the easy thing, the smart thing. Now, normality could return to Lennon’s life. The balance was restored.

Standing on the stage in front of his equally corrupt brothers, Lennon felt as if wishing for normality in this city was like praying for the clap, begging for a tumor. He knelt before the throne of a diseased king and ate grapes from his shit-smeared fingers and he considered himself blessed.

Another wave of dizziness overwhelmed him, and Lennon adjusted his stance. He breathed deeply, enduring one spike of shame after another. Even telling himself that he’d only done as the wrestler had asked achieved nothing but greater levels of grief and self loathing, and there was no way to make this crime right, no way to cleanse his soul of this shame.

When the commissioner said Roger Lennon’s name and then pulled away to lead the applause, Lennon stepped forward to accept his commendation.

On the sixth day of the new year John Hayes organized his men outside of a squat office building in Chicago’s Southside. The sun shone, but an icy wind cut down the streets, blowing past pedestrians whose brows were chafed red by the cruel air. Men and women spotted the group of well-dressed men congregated before the building and crossed the street to avoid involvement in what was likely violent business.

They weren’t wrong.

After his house had been reduced to condemned cinders on Christmas Eve, Marco Impelliteri had moved his family into the Drake Hotel, where they were pampered to assuage their grief and frustration, but he spent little time in their company. Hayes’ men had reported that with the exception of New Year’s Eve Impelliteri had slept elsewhere. His men had tracked Impelliteri constantly in the days following the gangster’s acquisition of the Galenus Rose and several other items of interest to the Alchemi.
Butch Cardinal’s
ill-conceived attack on Impelliteri’s home had resulted in the loss of not only the Rose, but also a Petrification Thorn, a bullet-resistant tunic, Brand’s copper arm band, and the Promethean Blade. It had been a dreadful night for everyone involved, if not a complete failure. Mr. Cardinal had managed to send Impelliteri’s gang into disarray. With so many men dead and injured, the gangster had been forced to begin rebuilding his mob, starting mostly from scratch, which had slowed his plans to mount an attack on 213 House. For that, Cardinal had Hayes’ gratitude. But while his family enjoyed the comforts and the services at the Drake Hotel, Impelliteri spent most of his time, day and night, in an office on the second floor of the Southside building.

As with their capture of Musante (Butch Cardinal’s capture of Musante, Hayes noted to himself), they had to tread lightly. If injured while wearing the Galenus Rose, Impelliteri would have to be taken into custody and observed until the Rose emerged. Hayes didn’t want that. He wanted a clean operation that put the Rose in his hand and put Impelliteri in the ground. Once he had regained possession of the Alchemi’s property, Hayes intended to leave Chicago and never return, and that could not happen fast enough for him. He associated the city with misery, like the wind, all but constant with only subtle lulls to make the next gust all the more dreadful.

He reiterated caution to his men. Impelliteri’s guards would be armed and ready to kill. They were not the sort to question or bargain. “Immobilize on sight,” Hayes said. “Do not hesitate.”

Limping to the door, Hayes held it open and ushered his men over the threshold into the shadowed foyer of the building. A click at the end of the hall announced a door being latched shut. Another door, this one on Hayes’ right, opened a crack to reveal a curious eye before slamming closed.

With his injured leg, Hayes could lead his men only in strategy. As they raced up the stairs to the office where Marco Impelliteri had spent the last several nights, Hayes hobbled up the stairs, clutching the rail tightly and occasionally wincing when his weight came down wrong and sent a flare of pain from ankle to groin.

At the landing he paused to give his leg a moment to recover. From the end of the hall, came a great racket of voices and shuffling feet. He was surprised to hear nothing in the way of gunshots or cries of pain. Soon enough all sounds hushed. He limped down the hall and entered an office lobby that held a small cherry-wood secretary’s desk and chair. Sun streamed through the wooden blinds in harsh planes that stung his eyes. He observed the small space, and was again surprised. There should have been bodies here: Impelliteri’s guards.

Hayes continued into the main office and found his men lining the perimeter of the room, all of their eyes focused on the same spot. The office décor consisted of half a dozen filing cabinets along the back wall, a small radio, a steel fan, a large black safe with its door open, and Impelliteri’s desk and chair. Impelliteri sat in the chair, holding a gun in one hand and the Galenus Rose in the other. His eyes were moist from tears and his cheeks burned crimson. He raised his gun and pointed it at Hayes’ chest.

“Tell me how it works,” the gangster said, his voice cracking with misery. “You have to tell me.”

Hayes recalled his conversation with Mr. Musante, who had been more than generous with his information about Marco Impelliteri’s personal deviations. He had wanted the Rose for a number of reasons, but the primary of those was the hope that it would cure him of a sickness that was not the result of virus or bacterium. He lusted after his own child and Hayes knew of no ameliorative agent for such a thing.

“It only mends the body’s tissues,” Hayes said. “Flesh and blood and bone. It can’t heal a diseased soul.”

“Liar!” Impelliteri cried, shaking his gun in Hayes’ direction. “Lonnie told me it would cure me. Now tell me how it works or I’ll start putting holes in your friends.”

Though disgusted with the man and wholly impatient with his irrational sense of entitlement, Hayes still found the expediency with which he killed Marco Impelliteri shocking. He hadn’t thought to cock his arm back, nor had he thought to launch the iron bar in the gangster’s direction. It happened so quickly, Hayes hadn’t given himself time to consider these things, but they happened nonetheless.

Impelliteri had his head turned, his gun pointed at Mr. Ross, who stood before the window. “How about fat boy?” Impelliteri said. “If I open him up, you think you might change your mind?”

Then the bar was rocketing through the air. Hayes had never put such force behind a throw in his life. The rod broke apart into dozens of needle-sharp spears, and they hit the gangster in the head. Impelliteri’s face and skull vaporized, broken and shredded and dragged away on the surfaces of the projectiles. Like the aftermath of a shotgun blast at close range, nothing but tattered flesh remained above Marco Impelliteri’s neck.

Hayes wondered how long it would take the Galenus Rose to repair that level of damage, or if it even could. He stepped forward, eyeing the pendant still grasped in Impelliteri’s motionless palm. Any second it would become liquid and then vapor, vanishing into the man’s pores to begin its reconstruction of him.

But that didn’t happen.

With his men still in position around the edges of the room, waiting for his instruction, Hayes approached the desk. He tossed a glance toward Ross, who showed his understanding of Hayes’ concern with a cocking of his head.

Hayes reached over the desk and lifted the Galenus Rose from Impelliteri’s hand.

He felt nothing.

At contact, he should have been accosted by a thousand memories of healing. Further, with his leg so damaged, the Rose should have begun its curative work on him, but there was nothing. The Galenus Rose rested in his palm, a hunk of red-tinged metal, with no more power than a wad of chewing gum.

Hayes turned to observe his men as he thought this development through. When his eyes fell on Mr. Ross, he noticed the man was fighting against a grin. His eyes sparkled with amusement.

And Hayes knew why. Ross had already figured what was just now occurring to Hayes: he was holding the copy of the Galenus Rose. For a time, Butch Cardinal had possessed both. He had gone to Impelliteri’s with a clear plan of dying, of being murdered, so that no one, not the syndicate men nor the police, would ever look for him again. Around his neck, the most obvious place a man like Impelliteri would look, he’d worn the fake Rose. As for the real icon, the one with power, Mr. Cardinal had likely hidden it lower on his body, in a region that a man like Impelliteri would only search as a last resort.

It was so simple. So obvious. But only obvious to those who had been part of the chase.

Hayes returned Mr. Ross’s smile and nodded his head. Then he ordered his colleagues to search the safe and the desk and the closet and Impelliteri’s person. He left them to their work and returned to the landing and the stairs.

Outside he limped to the car and opened the door.

It was there. Returned.

On the passenger side of the front seat laid the real Galenus Rose.

Hayes’ breath caught in his throat. Even without touching the pendant he could feel its authenticity. He pulled away and straightened up and looked over the top of the car at the sunlit streets, searching hopefully for a familiar face amid the harried pedestrians.

They moved as if in unison, a single herd. Wrapped in hats, scarves, and heavy coats, some so threadbare they seemed more like the garments of the long dead. Men and women made their ways to their homes, or their offices, or to shops where every purchase was the result of agonizing debate—every penny paid a sacrifice. Irretrievable. For some their destinations would prove dull, familiar, and colorless. Others would find joy. Others would find misery. But they carried on, moving forward, bundled and hunched, walking swiftly with their heads down to survive the cold.