Butcher's Road Read Online Free Page A

crew. The Italians and the Bug had split the entire city, and that included the city’s employees. Lennon himself collected an envelope once a week, but his bonus came from the Italians on the Southside, once ruled, and some said still ruled, from a prison cell by Al Capone. Between that and his salary, Lennon could still barely stay in the black. The house his wife wanted, the clothes she wanted for their daughters and herself—damned if he could rub a couple of dimes together by the time payday came around again. He certainly couldn’t afford a suit the quality of Smith’s.
    He ordered another drink from a waitress who wasn’t nearly as fresh as the girl in green. Then his partner, Curt Conrad, appeared beside him, shuffling into view like a diseased rhino. The fat man pinched a cigar between two sausage-plump fingers and carried his hat in his fist. Conrad sat down, and they started gabbing.
    But Lennon couldn’t remember what they had talked about. It hurt to try like his thoughts were weighty bastards, and they tromped on the broken glass in his skull as he attempted to line them up.
    He’d been in a bar.
    Now he lay in a bed.
    With as much care as he could muster, he rolled his head on the pillow so he no longer faced the scalding light, and Lennon opened his eyes again. In the chair by the door, his wife Edie sat slumped. She was sleeping. Her hands rested in her lap: one clutched a wadded kerchief, and the other draped over her handbag, which in the gloom resembled a napping black cat. Briefly he wondered where his daughters were. Normally, Edie never let Gwendolyn and Bette out of her sight—not that a night in the hospital had anything in common with normal.
    Lennon sensed movement in the hallway, hisses and mutters and displacements of light that might have been shadows or just defects in his vision. Across the corridor, the silhouette of a woman appeared in a doorway a moment before it closed.
    Lennon wondered if he was dreaming because nothing he saw was in focus. Nothing felt solid, except for the pain. The pain felt hard and hot, but aches could slip into dreaming minds, couldn’t they? A tickle of panic went through him. He vaguely remembered a determined face bearing down, remembered the collision of muscle and bone and the sensation of swimming backwards, and then nothing. What if Lennon wasn’t in the hospital at all, but only dreaming of it? What if he were still lying in that yard with his head split open and his brains leaking into the snow? His panic swelled. He struggled against it, called out for Edie, and at first she didn’t move, and Lennon felt certain he was trapped in a terminal dream. He bolted up in the hospital bed and the pain coalesced unbearably; so much so that he answered it with a harsh, gravelly shout, which seemed to do the trick.
    “Roger!” Edie cried. Fright broke her voice as she bolted from the chair.
    A squad of men appeared in the doorway behind her, and they all rushed in, and suddenly he was surrounded by familiar faces, many of whom smiled to see him awake. And then there was talking—ridiculous questions about how he felt—and finally Curt Conrad, his partner, a man he’d never considered particularly compassionate or bright, told the crowd he was getting a doctor, and Lennon thought that was a fine idea.
    Edie sobbed into his neck, and he wished he could get his mind off of the pain long enough to appreciate her concern, but her hair smelled pungently of floral perfume and the scent all but made him gag. He coughed and each spasm was like getting slugged by a heavyweight. A wave of gratitude ran through him when the doctor entered the room and cleared it of well-wishers before setting into his examination, which consisted of simple questions ( How many fingers am I holding up? ) and a bright beam of light drilling through Lennon’s retina and into whatever part of his brain telegraphed anguish.
    “Detective Lennon,” the doctor said, “Do you remember