Hush (10 page)

From above his head came a crash, followed by
a heavy thud that shook the house.

What now? he wondered. What now?

And then she began screaming and moaning.

"My leg! My leg! I broke my leg!"

In Japanese, Sachi meant "child of bliss."
LaDonna Anderson wasn't Japanese, but she'd traveled to Japan as a
high school exchange student. That had been years and years ago.
And even though she'd thought about her Japanese parents often,
hoping to someday go back there, she never had. She'd married a
kind, patient man who developed emphysema from working in a coal
mine. They had one child, and LaDonna named her Sachi, child of
bliss.

Sachi was a beautiful girl who became a
beautiful woman. When her father died and LaDonna was too overcome
to speak at the funeral, Sachi delivered a wonderful eulogy. She
was that kind of person. Someone who could do anything.

And when she accidentally became pregnant and
announced she would keep and raise the baby without the father's
help, LaDonna had thought, Yes, you will. And she thought, There
are no accidents. Only miracles.

During Sachi's pregnancy, she and her
daughter often talked about going to Japan together someday. It was
a dream they'd often shared through the years, and now that dream
included a child. They would take Sachi's baby with them. . . .

The baby ended up being a boy. Sachi named
him Taro, Japanese for "firstborn son."

It had been expensive to have the special
birth announcement put in the paper. Even though LaDonna couldn't
afford the forty-dollar fee, she'd done it anyway. She wanted all
of her friends to know that she was proud of her new grandson,
proud of her beautiful daughter.

LaDonna worked nights at a market only three
blocks from where she and Sachi lived. She could pick up a paper
that evening when she got to work, but she couldn't wait so long.
And sometimes there were no papers left by evening.

She got up early and walked to the market,
buying a paper and a cup of flavored decaffeinated coffee for
Sachi, caffeinated for herself. Sachi had temporarily given up
caffeine and chocolate because she was nursing. Some people said it
didn't matter what a mother ate, that it didn't have any effect on
her milk, but LaDonna knew better. Food like beans and brussels
sprouts made a baby colicky, and caffeine kept an infant awake, and
Lord knew a mother needed that baby to sleep as much as
possible.

LaDonna hurried home with the paper.

They'd lived in the apartment on Mulberry for
more than three years. Enough time so that she no longer saw the
carved names on the walls, or noticed that the handrail to the
second floor was loose. What was outside their apartment didn't
matter. Because inside was their world, their safe, cozy world.

In the kitchen, LaDonna cut out the birth
announcement and stuck it to the front of the refrigerator with a
magnet. Later, she would take Taro's hospital photo and the birth
announcement and have them framed. It would be a surprise for
Sachi. Something she could save along with all of her other
treasures.

The apartment was still quiet, so she left
the white plastic lid on Sachi's coffee, opened her own, and sat
down at the small round table in front of the bay window to read
the paper. A short time later she heard the sound of a fretful
baby, heard Sachi's sleepy voice. Then all was quiet, and LaDonna
imagined Sachi nursing her tiny, red-faced baby, smoothing his
straight black hair.

Later, Sachi came out in her bathrobe and put
the bundled baby in LaDonna's outstretched arms.

"I brought you coffee," LaDonna said, not
taking her eyes from the infant who was staring in her direction
with crossed eyes. "Raspberry decaffeinated."

"You've been out?" Sachi lifted the lid and
inhaled. "Ah, that smells almost as good as caffeinated."

"I wanted to pick up a paper."

Steam swirled up from her cup as Sachi lifted
it to her mouth. She took a cautious sip. "Why not wait until
tonight?"

"There. Look on the refrigerator."

Sachi took four steps and leaned forward. "A
birth announcement?" she asked in a puzzled voice. "Mom, nobody
puts birth announcements in the paper anymore. Not unless you live
in some small town where everybody knows everybody and they have a
weekly paper that tells about things like Cousin Myrtle visiting
from a town five miles away. Or a photo of somebody in a goofy hat
and glasses with a caption reading 'Lordy, Lordy, Look Who's
Forty.' "

LaDonna felt deflated. She'd thought Sachi
would be happy about the announcement. "I wanted to put it in the
paper," she said stubbornly, frustrated that she would have to
explain her actions. She certainly hadn't thought Sachi would
question them.

"Why?"

"Because I'm so proud of you both. My Sachi.
My Taro."

Sachi sat down at the table across from her
mother and smiled in that sweet and wise Madonna-like smile that
made her seem so much older than her twenty- two years. She smelled
like baby powder and raspberry coffee, and the muted sunlight that
fell through the window painted her in a soft, golden patina. "I
know that, Mom."

LaDonna wanted to hold that moment, stop that
moment, embrace, absorb, understand that moment. The perfect circle
of love. Mother and child, mother and child.

That evening, LaDonna headed for work,
leaving Sachi curled in the corner of the couch, filling out birth
announcements, while Taro slept peacefully beside her. Later, Sachi
changed his diaper, nursed him, then put him down for what she
hoped would be at least a few hours, giving her a chance to catch
up on her sleep.

She was dreaming about driving around and
around in a car, desperately looking for her missing baby, when she
heard a knock. Thinking it was early morning and her mother had
forgotten her key, she shuffled sleepily to the door and opened
it.

A dark-hooded man stood in the opening.
Adrenaline surged.

She tried to slam the door. He pushed it
open, his hand immediately going for her throat, cutting off her
scream before it began.

City of Big Shoulders. That's what somebody
named Carl Sandburg had called it, or so Ronny Ramirez had been
told.

It was 2:00 A.M. and Ronny Ramirez was on
patrol as one of the rapid response teams implemented by Daley in
the late nineties. Ramirez loved Chicago. He loved his job—most of
the time.

The son of migrant workers, he'd lived in the
United States his whole life. Before he was born, his parents used
to come up from Mexico to Missouri every fall to pick tomatoes,
then pears. When the season was over, they returned to a little
scrap of land that belonged to his grandfather where they grew
produce and sold it in Mexico City. But when Ramirez's mother
became pregnant with him, they decided to stay where they could
take advantage of free hospital care in exchange for agreeing to be
poked and prodded by students for two weeks before, during, and
after the delivery. Twelve students had been chosen to participate
in the birth. One had performed the episiotomy. Another had caught
the afterbirth.

I've never had so many strangers looking at
my crotch, baby, his mother had told him. But the whole humiliating
experience had been worth it, because her son, Ronny Ramirez, was
born a citizen of the United States.

Now that one of them was a legal American,
the family remained in a small farming community where most people
chewed tobacco, drove trucks with huge tires, and talked like they
were underwater. There, both of Ronny's parents graduated from
fieldwork to factory jobs, and they were soon able to buy all of
the things that they'd done without in Mexico, from electronic
equipment like 35-millimeter cameras and VCRs, to big appliances
like washers and dryers. Even more important, Ronny was able to get
an American education.

In school he was considered a curiosity. He
excelled in sports, so he was accepted into the exalted inner
circle made up of the children of rural families.

Ramirez hated it.

He kept thinking there had to be someplace
better out there somewhere. There had to be a place that was more
than cornfields as far as the eye could see.

His Mexican roots were as foreign to him as
they were to the kids he went to school with, yet he never felt he
belonged in the farming community where he'd grown up. He was a man
without a country.

And then he discovered Chicago.

It embraced him, welcomed him. And for the
first time in his life he felt a part of something. He wasn't sure
what yet—he'd only been there four years, but the familiarity was
comfortable. It felt like home.

The police scanner flashed, the dispatcher
announcing a ten-one—a matter of utmost urgency. That was followed
by the code for a possible homicide and an address. "Available area
units please respond."

Ramirez's reluctant partner for the evening,
Regina Hastings, flipped on the lights, then announced to the
dispatcher that they were only five minutes away.

Ramirez gunned the patrol car until they were
flying down almost deserted streets, Hastings gripping the handle
above the door as he took a corner too fast.

"Slow down, will you? Chrissake, Ramirez.
What's your fucking hurry?"

But she knew what his hurry was. Ramirez
always liked to be the first officer on the scene. It was like a
contest with him. A call could be way the hell on the opposite side
of Area Five, and he'd haul ass over there like the show couldn't
start until his face appeared on the scene.

He shot her a glance over his shoulder, white
teeth flashing in his dark, handsome face. He didn't take the next
corner any slower.

Tires squealed across dry pavement, and for a
brief moment, it seemed that the patrol car might tip up on two
wheels.

Prick, she thought. He was one of those
pricks who became a cop because he wanted to drive fast and carry a
gun, not to mention intimidate people. He had a reputation as a
love-'em-and-leave-'em kind of guy. But in all fairness, hers
wasn't an unbiased opinion. She'd gone out with Ramirez once—an
occurrence she kept trying to scribble out of her mental journal.
But no matter how many times she tried to scratch it out, it kept
appearing again like the invisible ink she'd played with as a kid,
the kind you ran under water to make show up.

She'd been a cop long enough to know she
preferred to date cops. They were the only ones who understood the
daily stress in an officer's life. Ramirez, on the other hand,
wanted to be looked up to. The only time they had what could be
called a conversation, he'd confided that he actually liked foot
patrol because people could get a good look at him in uniform.
She'd laughed, and that had been that.

Nobody laughed at Ronny Ramirez.

The patrol car squealed to a stop in front of
a five- story brick apartment building. There were lights on in
several of the windows; a cluster of people stood on the cement
steps that led to the front door.

"This must be the place," Ramirez said,
shoving the gearshift into park and cutting the engine.

"I hope somebody has a sticker to give you
for being the first one here," she said sarcastically as she opened
her door.

Hastings guessed there were approximately ten
people gathered under the porch light. Clinging to wrought-iron
railings, rubbing away fingerprints that may or may not have told
them something. A compromised crime scene was Homicide's biggest
complaint. But cops had no control over what happened before they
arrived on the scene, and unfortunately not much control over what
happened after they arrived if there wasn't enough manpower to keep
the crowd back.

People started talking at once. Words jumped
out at Hastings, enough for her to piece together that a young
woman was upstairs, and that she was dead.

"Are you sure she's dead?" Hastings
asked.

"Dead? No damn foolin' she's dead," a black
man told her. "There's blood everywhere."

Ramirez and Hastings waded through the
people, telling them to please stay back. Behind them, sirens
wailed as an ambulance pulled to a stop in the middle of the
street. That was immediately followed by two more police cars.

Hastings relaxed a little, relieved that they
had backup to control the crowd.

"The baby," a woman in a pink nylon nightgown
said. "Did you tell 'em about the baby?"

Hastings hesitated. In front of her, Ramirez
stopped and turned around, their eyes meeting in silent concern.
From deep inside the dark heart of the apartment, someone was
wailing, a high, keening, anguished sound.

The woman finished her contribution to the
story. "Baby's dead too."

Baby's dead too.

That single statement set off a network of
phone calls.

Protocol dictated that in the event of an
unusual murder—mass shootings, serial killings, execution
killings—certain measures were to be implemented. On the night
Ronny Ramirez and Regina Hastings got the call that sent them
racing to Mulberry Street, several more units were dispatched in
hopes that the killer was still in the area. Like a well-oiled
machine, everybody did his or her part, with everything falling
into place. Within ten minutes, there were six officers
strategically stationed around the apartment building, another
twenty setting up checkpoints at intersections. When all protocol
was initiated, a call was put in to the head of the homicide
squad.

"Get a containment perimeter set up," Max
Irving said, the portable phone gripped between his ear and neck as
he pulled on a pair of jeans. "The perpetrator could still be in
the area. And cordon off the crime scene." He buttoned and zipped
his pants, then reached for his shoulder holster, slipping it on
over a white T-shirt.