Bad Break: A Novel

Chapter Seventy

Forsythe couldn't believe that he was about to lose only the second partner he'd had in his seventeen years as a cop.

That kind of longevity builds spousal-like familiarity and comfort. He and Gutffeld knew each other better than their spouse and girlfriend, respectively. Often, they completed each other's sentences, and neither ever had to ask what the other wanted during coffee or donut runs.

So, neither man spoke, but rather grunted and groaned, as they carefully navigated the sub-level stairs of the old auto repair shop at the corner of South Dearborn Street and West Twenty-Fourth Street, adjacent to City Park Number Five Hundred Forty.

"Who gives a park a number," Forsythe had asked, when they were circling the block an hour earlier, sizing up the neighborhood to gauge the odds of anyone paying attention when they pulled into the service station lot and raised the giant bay doors that once metered long lines of vehicles awaiting repairs from belt and spark plug replacements to tire rotations.

"I mean, there was no one in this entire city worth naming a park after?"

The questions were reasonable, but when posed again just as the pair had hoisted their load in the old oil changing bays —what would have been the basement, if the building upstairs was a house— Guttfeld asserted his authority and declared them a literal waste of breath.

"Do you see where we are," he scolded. "This place couldn't be slicker if they had let a greased pig run around! If we're careful we might be lucky to make it upstairs in ten minutes, without breaking anything. Focus!"

And focus they did – so intently that it wasn't until Forsythe had reached the fourth step from the ceiling...or first-floor, depending on your perspective, that he was high enough to see it.

"Gutty, was there a pair of shoes up here when we came down? I don't remember..."

Behind the two silent giants, who could have been clones of Devante – one of whose size sixteen Lebron 17s had given their presence away, stood a fatigued, slightly bent, and very, very angry Jefferson.

His head still throbbed a bit and made him wonder if he'd left the hospital too soon. It also made him wonder if the headache was cosmic payback for the extremes he had gone to, to catch a single, somewhat passive, unarmed journalist at a busy intersection.

It had taken just fifteen minutes for Backstrom to get Jefferson, his mother and Uncle Cletus, and Joanne Meir to a hotel Meir owned across the city line in Cicero, the old suburban Chicago home of gangster Al Capone, after which the big cop promptly took off again.

Forty-one minutes later, Backstrom, accompanied by two undercover vice officers —friends and allies who had an inkling about his whistleblower dustup— arrived with two sullen goons as prisoners.

While Backstrom and OGC, AKA Uncle Cletus, hustled their new guests into a side room, pausing only to point menacing fingers at Jefferson and tell him to stay put, Meir, Katrina Jefferson, and Baller Johnson sat on three sides of a square pub table and stared impatiently. After pounding on the door to the adjacent room got him nowhere, Jefferson joined them and listened as the older woman talked through a stack of papers that converted much of Jefferson's cash into new real estate developments.

It took her nearly an hour.

"Why," the young Moriarty asked.

"Because people believe in you, and —I did my homework— I'm convinced you're bored. And don't look at me like that, young man. I don't need your money. I'm doing you a favor. Which reminds me. Do you know what mixed-use means in the context of real estate?"