Chapter 10 - Retribution in the Shadows
The federal indictments against Alderman Vane and Gordon Pike hit the evening news like a tidal wave across Chicago.
By five o'clock, the municipal building on LaSalle Street was surrounded by television broadcast vans.
Federal marshals had padlocked the executive offices of Calumet Freight and the Grand Venetian Ballroom.
Yet, the corruption that runs ninety feet deep into the limestone bedrock of Cook County does not die in a single afternoon.
Ray Howerin had not been in the council chamber when the handcuffs were snapped around Gordon Pike’s wrists.
Howerin had vanished from his Lake Geneva cottage three hours before the federal agents arrived with the search warrant.
He had two million dollars in untraceable bearer bonds in a private safe box and fifteen years of street leverage.
And he knew that August Sartori’s court testimony would put him in a federal penitentiary for the rest of his life.
At seven-fifteen that evening, Toby Doyle stepped off the south-bound bus near the corner of Thirty-First and Halsted.
He had refused to stay in the Lake Shore Drive penthouse, insisting on retrieving his technical portfolio from Bridgeport.
The boy carried his drafting tubes under his arm, his head ducked against the biting lake wind.
A nondescript gray van with rusted rocker panels had been trailing him since he cleared the Chinatown overpass.
As Toby turned into the narrow residential alley behind their apartment building, the van’s side door slid open with a screech.
Two men in heavy hooded sweatshirts jumped into the snow, their faces obscured by black neoprene masks.
One of them held a short length of galvanized water pipe wrapped in electrical tape.
“Grab the kid’s bag!” a voice hissed from inside the van.
“Pike says the sister has the backup hard drive with the original phone metadata!”
Toby turned to run, but his boot slipped on a patch of black ice beneath the slush.
He went down hard on his right hip, his drafting tubes scattering across the frozen ruts.
The man with the pipe lunged forward, raising the iron above his shoulder to bring it down across Toby’s ribs.
The strike never landed.
From the shadow of the brick garage opposite the alley, a heavy black sedan accelerated with a violent squeal of rubber.
The sedan’s front bumper caught the gray van’s open sliding door, tearing it backward off its tracks with a deafening screech of twisted metal.
Before the two masked men could recover their balance, three men in dark coats spilled from the sedan.
Marco hit the man with the pipe with a professional, brutal shoulder check that drove him into the brick wall.
The second attacker was tackled into the snow before he could draw the revolver tucked into his waistband.
Willa stepped out of the front passenger seat of the sedan, her eyes blazing with a feral, protective fury.
She ran across the frozen alley, dropped to her knees in the slush, and hauled Toby into her arms.
“Did they touch you?” she demanded, her hands frantically checking his collar, his ribs, and his face.
“Did they hurt your hands, Toby?”
“I’m fine, Willa! I’m fine!” Toby gasped, clinging to her jacket with trembling fingers.
“They were looking for the original drive from the phone!”
August Sartori stepped out of the driver’s side of the sedan, shutting the door with a calm, ominous click.
He walked across the blood-splattered snow of the alley, stopping directly over the man pinned against the brick wall.
August reached down, grabbed the man’s hood, and ripped it backward off his head.
It was not a hired street thug.
It was Ray Howerin himself, his face bleeding from a deep gash across his cheekbone.
Howerin looked up at August, his eyes wild with the trapped, cornered panic of a rabid dog.
“August, listen to me!” Howerin wheezed, his breath coming in ragged, bloody gasps.
“Pike was the one who ordered the hit on the kid!”
“Pike had a private retainer with the insurance investigators; he was going to pin the whole thing on me!”
“I was just trying to get the drive so I could trade it to the feds for immunity!”
August looked down at the man who had sat at his grandfather’s cedar table for fifteen years.
His expression was completely vacant of emotion, as cold and unyielding as the winter ice on the river.
“You sent men with iron bars after a seventeen-year-old boy, Ray,” August said, his voice dropping into a lethal whisper.
“You stood in my mother’s house and drank my grandfather’s wine while you planned to collapse a roof on her head.”
August reached into his coat pocket and drew out a heavy, snub-nosed revolver.
He did not cock the hammer.
He held the weapon by the barrel and extended the checkered walnut grip toward Willa Doyle.
Willa stood up from the snow, keeping Toby behind her back.
She looked at the heavy steel revolver in August’s outstretched hand.
“He tried to cripple your brother, Miss Doyle,” August said, his eyes locking onto hers with brutal candor.
“He tried to make you take the blame for thirty tons of rotting iron.”
“The law in this city is slow, and men like Ray Howerin have cousins who buy off the appeals judges.”
“If you want this finished tonight, you have the right to pull the trigger.”
“No one in northern Illinois will ever ask a question about what happened in this alley.”
The silence in the narrow Bridgeport passage was absolute, broken only by Howerin’s terrified whimpering.
Marco and the other men did not move; they stood like stone sentinels waiting for the verdict.
Toby stared at his sister, his breath catching in his throat.
Willa looked from the dark muzzle of the revolver down to Ray Howerin cowering in the dirty snow.
She saw the pathetic, broken vanity of a man who had traded human lives for municipal kickbacks and cheap concrete.
She slowly raised her right hand.
She did not take the gun.
She reached out and gently pushed August’s wrist downward, forcing the weapon back toward the frozen pavement.
“My father spent thirty years working the open hearth at South Works, Mister Sartori,” Willa said, her voice ringing clear in the cold night.
“His hands were covered in third-degree burns, and he died with seven dollars in his checking account.”
“He never took a dime that didn't belong to him, and he never let a dishonest man make him into an animal.”
“If I shoot this coward in an alley, I become Gordon Pike.”
“I become Ray Howerin.”
“I become every rich monster in this city who thinks a human life is something you can throw away to protect your pride.”
She looked straight into August Sartori’s dark eyes, refusing to flinch from the violence in his soul.
“Hand him over to the federal marshals,” Willa commanded.
“Let him sit in a concrete cell in Terre Haute where he has to spend the rest of his life thinking about how an honest waitress put him there.”
August stared at her for five long seconds.
The tension in his broad frame slowly uncoiled, like an iron spring releasing its stored energy.
He slid the revolver back into the interior pocket of his wool overcoat.
A faint, profound shadow of admiration crossed his features, softer than anything Willa had seen in him before.
He turned his head toward Marco.
“Call the federal prosecutor on Clark Street,” August said quietly.
May you like
“Tell them we have the missing witness in the Venetian conspiracy.”
“Deliver him to their front steps with the evidence tied around his neck.”
