Bad Break: A Novel

Chapter Sixty-Nine

By the time a nurse wheeled him to the exit of John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital, Agamemnon Jefferson I had plotted his revenge.

First, he would have someone track down Devante, the traitor.

According to his sources, Devante had been in on the kidnapping that had ensnared Jefferson, Ward, Pogano, and me. He was the target. We were collateral damage.

The motivation was as old as crime itself. Devante may not have been a comic book villain like his boss, but he was pretty intelligent as well and had started to grow resentful about being a sidekick. He didn't feel appreciated or well compensated.

So, when a captain in the Graylords approached and offered Devante a position as a consigliere or senior "advisor," along with a two-and-a-half percent cut if he helped them take Jefferson's drug business, Devante accepted.

He felt enough loyalty and pangs of conscience though that he objected to an obvious murder. Instead, he recommended the kidnapping, after which Jefferson could be disposed of quietly and, ideally, far, far away from Chicago.

The plan fell apart, though, when the Graylords ignored their agents and sent an amateur crew to do the job – three teenage boys, who jumped the gun, after tailing Jefferson for three days, and grabbed him before they were supposed to. Had they waited till the appointed time, they probably would have caught him alone at the warehouse where he'd held me or at his mother's house.

By moving too soon, the boy bandits had to improvise and grab us all, rather than leave witnesses whom they hadn't, initially, been ordered to kill.

Devante pretended to be a kidnap victim as well until the shots started and he saw that the panicked gang members had opened fire on a policeman at ground level.

That's when he realized it was all going to hell and ran. He hadn't been seen since, but Jefferson would find him. He had to. Disloyalty could not be tolera---.

"Boy get yo' narrow ass out of that chair and get in this car!"

Startled, Jefferson realized that his temporary bodyguards had stepped back a respectful distance to make room for Cletus B. Williams, a man some of them had known nearly two decades earlier as OGC, or Original Gangster Cle'.

He may have been out of the game, but its rules dictated that unless he "sold out" he would always be afforded the respect and reverential fear his once ferocious reputation and questionable activities had earned him.

To Williams' right stood Jefferson's mother, arms crossed, one foot tapping impatiently as she chewed a piece of gum like the treat had offended her.

Backstrom, still wearing bib overalls, flanked Katrina Jefferson on one side, and on the other was a woman Jefferson didn't recognize. But he did recognize the look on her face. She was comfortable in the company of this bunch - cop, reformed-but-still-dangerous gangster, and long-suffering mother. And the look on her face suggested that she'd have felt as comfortable as his own mother putting a precocious young man in his place.

None of them appeared to be in the mood for backtalk. And for the first time since he was eight years old, Agamemnon Jefferson I, felt intimidated by adults.

He stood slowly, hung his head, and walked toward the open rear door of Backstrom's custom ride.

"You going away for a little while, son," Williams said. "It's for your own good. And smart as you are, I think you know it. Ya momma tells me you been planning an exit for a while now. Well, it's time you took it. But there's one thing you gotta do first."

Jefferson was exhausted. His uncle was right. He really didn't want to be a criminal mastermind. Beneath the layers, he wanted two things: to be left alone and to be rich.

And on the opposite side of the coin that Gonzalez had flipped, Jefferson could debate or defend later the morality of getting away scot-free.

If nothing else, Jefferson should be happy that after all that had happened, no one in the Chicago press corps —not even me— had been able to credibly tie him to criminal activity.

And now, in the heat of a completely unexpected intervention, he had decided to walk away from his enterprise with several suitcases stuffed with millions in cash, along with a stack of documents for more than two dozen bank and investment accounts where the rest of his money was stashed. He would have to give up his beloved Volvo and classic Mustang muscle car, but his uncle had made arrangements to sell the hair supply business in Indiana that Jefferson had purchased to launder money. And the cars were the property of that business.

For the first time since his thirteenth birthday, Jefferson was giving serious thought to the question of what it meant to be a teenager, to enjoy being a teenager. And it surprised him how much the idea of enjoying his youth appealed to him.

"Where are we going and what do you need from me before we leave?"

"That's where I come in," Backstrom and the stranger both said almost simultaneously, raising a hand in greeting as they drove away.