CHAPTER 1
October 20th
“Chill, dude,” Spike says with a sneer. “This guy’s an easy mark.”
Fifteen-year-old Denzel Payton shoots Spike a sidelong look and offers up a nonchalant shrug. “I’m down with this, man.”
But he isn’t. He’s frightened of what they’re here to do; certain he’s going to regret coming. He buries his hands deeper into his hoodie as they round a corner and run smack into an unseasonably chilly late-October wind. The homeless camp known as Tent Town is several blocks ahead, huddling in the shadows of a railroad viaduct on the fringes of the Southwest Chicago suburb of Cedar Heights. A gathering mist mixes with campfire smoke, picking up rays of moonlight filtering through the trees that tower above the little park. Denzel eyes the ramshackle collection of lean-tos thrown together with whatever flotsam and jetsam the impoverished residents of Tent Town were able to cobble together. A handful of tents dot the encampment.
“What’s this guy’s story?” Denzel asks Spike.
“Some dumbass whose granny died and left him a little bread. Dope’s been flashing cash around. In a place like Tent Town, that’s like an invitation to share, y’know?” Spike tucks his face deeper within the folds of his oversize hoodie. Condensation puffs out of the darkness with each word. “So we comin’ for our little bit of the treasure, Denz,” he adds with an easy laugh. “Hell, ever see the little girl in the Charlie Brown cartoons what says, ‘I just want my fair share’? That be me.”
Denzel feels a barb of regret as his thoughts turn to his own recently deceased grandmother. It doesn’t seem right to steal what someone’s gram left them, but he can’t dwell on that kind of stuff. When Grams died of COVID, Denzel was left out in the streets on his own. Spike is all he has now—Denzel has to do whatever it takes to remain in the man’s orbit.
“How do you know about this guy?” Denzel asks as they cover the final block to Tent Town.
“I get around, man. Hell, I told you a smart operator don’t shit in his own sandbox, right? Only fools mess with the cutthroat motherfuckers in the city. The crowd out here is pretty mellow. Better eats in their food kitchen, too,” he adds with a grin.
Spike seems to know all the angles. He hasn’t answered Denzel’s question, though.
“How do you know about this guy’s deal?” Denzel asks again.
Spike doesn’t answer. He shoots Denzel a side-eyed scowl instead. The stare sends a chill through Denzel. The man is supposedly called Spike because he once nailed someone to one of Chicago’s elevated L tracks with a train coming. Probably bullshit, but it’s the only name Denzel is allowed to use when referring to him. Their relationship is complicated.
Spike pokes Denzel’s shoulder. “If you hafta know, I score some weed from this guy now and again. He supposedly gets a little military pension or something. Everyone out here gets a little piece of the action.”
“He just gives stuff away?”
“I know, right?” Spike says with a dark chuckle. “So we just coming for our fair share. Harry might need a little persuading today if he really got himself a nice stash.”
“A stash of what?”
“Just told you he come into a little bread, Denz. Listen up when I tell you shit!”
Denzel ducks his head. “Sorry, man.”
“Anyway, the dumb shit bought hisself a nice tent, some new tech—Apple stuff, they say.”
“Cool.”
Spike gives an eye roll. “And then he waves it around. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Musta got more than just his ass blowed up in the army.”
“He’s a vet?”
“Sure. Got hisself all fucked up in one of them Arab sandpits.”
“Guy’s a disabled vet? Don’t know how I feel about taking shit from one of them.”
Spike clamps a hand on Denzel’s shoulder, slows to a stop, and fixes his hard eyes on Denzel’s. “Don’t forget your place, Denz. You my yeah guy. I tell you what to think, boy!”
“Okay.”
“This cracker’s got money. Man, don’t they all got money, no matter how fucked up they get? No reason we shouldn’t get our cut, so stop with the bleeding-heart bullshit. You gonna come away with some nice new threads, maybe a pair of shoes, plus a little weed and some cash for a decent meal. Y’all got a problem with that?”
Denzel wants to say that he does if the stuff comes from what a disabled vet’s gram left him, but it won’t do to challenge Spike. “Nah, I’m down with it.”
Spike smiles and claps Denzel on the shoulder. “That’s right, my man. Let’s do this.”
Denzel falls in beside Spike as he marches into Tent Town and heads straight to a two-person tent. Light glows inside.
Spike stops outside the tent flap. “Hey, Harry. Y’all got company, my man.”
A head pops out of the opening. Long, stringy blond hair frames an emaciated face of indeterminate age. Harry grins unconvincingly, revealing a mouthful of crooked teeth with a pronounced gap between the top incisors. He pulls a pair of AirPods out of his ears. “Hey, Spike.”
“How’s my man? I hear you come into some cash. Good for you.”
Harry frowns. “Yeah, my granny passed and left me a few bucks. Picked up a couple things to remember her by. Losing her was a real bitch, man.”
Denzel recognizes the pain in the tight skin around Harry’s eyes when he mentions his gram. Knocking over this guy feels all wrong.
“Got some weed for us?” Spike asks.
“Got a little.”
“Me and my man Denz here could sure use some.” The edge in Spike’s voice signals that this isn’t really a request.
“Yeah, sure. Why not? I can give you guys a couple of joints.”
“Coupla joints? That’s it?”
“Other folks around here enjoy a smoke now and then.”
Spike’s smile vanishes. “I hear you scored yourself a bunch of C-notes, my man. Maybe more.”
“It isn’t much,” Harry says warily. “I like to spread some joy around here.”
Spike kneels to get in Harry’s face. “Starting with me, right? We ain’t gonna hang around here all night, so we’ll have our share now. We’ll take some cash too.” Spike nods his head back at Denzel. “My boy could use a Hamilton or two to get hisself a nice meal.”
Harry’s eyes rise to Denzel’s. “You hungry, man? Don’t got a home?”
“Nah. Lost my gram too, y’know?”
Harry nods sympathetically. “Sure, kid. I got a few bucks you can have. Hold on a sec.” He ducks back into the tent.
Spike leans in after him. “Shee-it, man. Y’all got some sweet shit in here, brother.”
Harry’s voice is muffled. “Picked up a thing or two.”
“New phone, huh? Sweet.”
“Yeah.”
Spike lets out a low whistle. “Whoo-ee. That’s a righteous roll of Benjamins, dude.”
“A bit, yeah,” Harry says nervously. “Been ordering a little pizza and Chinese for my friends.”
Spike snorts derisively and eases deeper into the tent until only his feet are outside. Denzel takes a step backward and glances around at a handful of faces staring back at him.
“Your cash ain’t gonna go far if you be doing shit like that,” Spike says from inside the tent. “Hell, folks do okay at the soup kitchen out here. They don’t need no pizza or Chinese.”
“Hey, man!” Harry exclaims. “What the hell are you doing? Give that back!”
“Gave you a chance to share nice. Looks like you ain’t fixing to do so.”
Fear creeps into Harry’s voice. “Relax, man. I’ll give you—”
A sharp crack cuts off Harry’s response. The weight of something sagging against the side of the tent causes it to billow outward, threatening to take the whole thing down.
“Teach you to fuck with old Spike,” Denzel’s partner mutters as sounds of rummaging spill out of the tent. Then Spike’s head and torso pop out. He holds a baseball bat out handle first. “Got my hands full in here, Denz. Hold this for a minute.”
Denzel takes the bat and stares mutely as Spike ducks back inside.
“Give me the bat and take this,” Spike says when he reappears a moment later and thrusts a Chicago Bears jacket at Denzel. A pair of Converse sneakers follow. Denzel takes the offerings uncertainly; Harry was wearing the jacket—maybe the sneakers, as well.
Denzel edges closer, squats, and peers inside the tent beyond Spike. Harry is lying on his side, silent and still. The baseball bat lies across his legs. Spike is rifling through his pockets, from which he produces a white cell phone, which he immediately stuffs into his hoodie. He picks up the AirPods and pockets them too.
“What the hell?” Denzel whispers as he realizes what just happened.
“Shut the fuck up,” Spike hisses as he pilfers more of Harry’s belongings, including a roll of cash. Then he upends a backpack and shakes its contents onto the floor. He plucks up a couple of baggies that appear to be weed and stuffs them into his pants pocket.
Denzel’s eyes settle on the inert form of Harry, who doesn’t appear to be breathing. A rivulet of blood snakes down the side of his face beneath a patch of hair that glistens red. Denzel’s stomach lurches as he continues to gawk. Is he dead? Denzel backs away from the tent, settles on his haunches, and meets the gaze of a destitute woman who edges closer with fury in her eyes. Her anger and courage seem to put a little backbone into a couple of men who follow in her wake.
Spike emerges and grins up at Denzel. “Time to go, my man,” he says as he stands, claps a hand on Denzel’s shoulder, and spins him away from the tent. He works his hoodie around his face with the other. “Put the coat on, dude. Look sharp!”
Denzel shrugs into the jacket, then ties the laces of the Converse sneakers together and slings the shoes over his shoulder.
Spike’s head turns toward the woman and men who are inching closer. He freezes them in place with a menacing “Stop right fucking there.” Once they do, Spike turns back to Denzel and tugs on his sleeve. “C’mon, man. Time to get the fuck outa here.”
Denzel takes a final look at Harry’s neighbors. He wants to apologize. He wants to dial the clock back ten minutes and change history. He wants to cry.
Spike wraps a hand around his arm. “This ain’t no time to freeze, boy. Move!”
Denzel is too frightened to do anything other than allow himself to be dragged away. With Spike’s hand locked on his arm, Denzel follows in a trance as Spike begins to jog back the way they came.
Denzel’s stomach continues to lurch as he stumbles along, overwhelmed by the unexpected enormity and ugliness of what he’s just been party to. Grams would have had his ass for getting mixed up in this. He makes it a block away from Tent Town before he yanks his arm free of Spike and veers into the entrance to an alley. He drops to his knees and begins to puke his guts out.
“Aw, shit, dude!” Spike exclaims in disgust. “Hurry the fuck up, man—and don’t mess up that new jacket I scored for you.”
Denzel barely hears him as his gut reaches down to his toes to dredge up everything he’s eaten in the last week. Spike’s heavy hand grabs the back of Denzel’s jacket collar and yanks him upright.
“Shit!” Spike mutters while Denzel spits out bits of food. “What the fuck now?”
Denzel’s gaze tracks Spike’s wide eyes to where a cop car has turned onto the street a couple of blocks away. He’s startled when Spike spins him so they’re face-to-face, then reaches into the Bears jacket to stuff the bags of weed into the inside pockets. He peels a few bills off the roll of cash and tucks them into Denzel’s front pants pocket. “Just making sure you get your fair share in case we hafta split up, dude.”
“Yeah, sure,” Denzel mutters.
Spike leans in close, his hard eyes locked on Denzel’s, his voice a threatening growl. “Don’t you dare give me up. You might do a little time in juvie if you get busted and keep your mouth shut. They’ll throw away the fucking key if I get locked up. You give me up and you’re a dead man. Understand?”
The police car stops, the doors open, and a pair of cops emerge. They take a few steps forward with their hands resting on their guns. Denzel is watching them when Spike slams his open palms into the boy’s chest, sending him reeling backward.
“What the fuck, man?” Spike shouts. He backs away from Denzel, with his hands thrust out as if to protect himself. “Stay away from me! You didn’t need to beat that poor bastard. I think you mighta killed him!”
Denzel stands in mute shock, trying to suck air back into his lungs. Spike’s blow has winded him.
The cops pause, their hands nervously fingering their weapons. Spike takes another step away from Denzel and points at him. “Crazy nigger mighta just killed a dude to score a little weed,” he shouts at the cops. “Watch yourself!” he adds as he sprints into the alley, leaving Denzel standing between Spike’s escape route and the cops, who, guns now in hand, draw down on Denzel.
“Don’t move! Hands up where I can see them. Now!”
CHAPTER 2
It’s a cold early January morning when my intercom comes to life at the legal juggernaut known as Brooks and Valenti—a colossus with all of two lawyers. Joan Brooks is calling from reception.
“Mr. Valenti, sir?”
That’s me. Tony Valenti, law firm partner. “Yes, ma’am. What can I do for you?”
“Miss Brooks would like to see you in her office,” comes the reply, sounding for all the world as if I’m being summoned to the boss’s office—or the school principal’s office—for remedial discipline.
“Please inform Miss Brooks that I’ll be along presently.”
“Make it snappy!” my partner, Penelope Brooks, calls out through the open door of her office. It’s all of ten feet from my own.
“You two!” Joan says in supposed exasperation. We have a running gag that Joan, who happens to be Penelope’s mother, is waging a long-suffering campaign to bring some measure of proper law firm decorum to our little operation—lawyers to little people and lost causes. It’s one of the many things that makes working here a lot more fun than I ever had as a high-flying corporate attorney before that career crashed and burned in a spectacular flameout a few years ago.
I happily close the file of the dreary wrongful dismissal suit I’ve been staring at with glazed eyes for the past few minutes, then get to my feet and stretch my arms high until the knot in my lower back pops. Even with me standing six feet five, my arms don’t come close to reaching the twelve-foot ceiling. Brooks and Valenti is housed in a recently renovated office suite on the second floor of a heritage building in downtown Cedar Heights. I run my hands through my wavy black hair. How wavy? One of the wits on my high school volleyball team christened me Brillo top. Enough said. I glance at a dark-blue pinstripe suit jacket hanging on the back of my door. Nah. My shirtsleeves are rolled up, my necktie is pulled down. We’re reasonably casual around here. Well, I am, anyway. If Joan had her way, I’d choke on the knot from my neckties all day, my suit jacket would never come off, and my shirt cuffs would be stapled to my wrists.
“What’s up?” I ask my partner as I darken her door. She’s dressed in a gray business suit, blue blouse, and black pumps.
Penelope, like her mother, is a wholesome daughter of rural Kansas, both of them five-foot dynamos with hearts the size of the vast prairies. She looks up from under the bangs of her shoulder-length light-brown hair and smiles as she lifts the edge of some paperwork resting in the middle of the hunter-green blotter on her desk. “This just came in, Tony. Kind of urgent.”
I step into her office and drop into one of the two chrome-and-fabric visitor chairs that sit in front of her hickory desk. “What is it?”
“We caught another case from the county.” Penelope registered us to participate in a pilot program in which the chronically underfunded, understaffed public defender’s office is permitted to farm out a small percentage of its workload to qualified private attorneys who agree to do the work on a cost-plus basis. The “plus” part of the equation seems to be measured in decimal points. Not surprisingly, private firms haven’t been beating a path to the public defender’s door looking for cases they can lose money on, but a number of publicly minded firms and individual lawyers have stepped up to the plate. We’re publicly minded. We also eat a lot of mac and cheese.
I cock an eyebrow at Penelope. “Another charity case already?”
“They must like our work, partner.”
“They must,” I grumble. We just wrapped up a losing effort in a domestic violence case the county sent our way. Given the evidence, our client deserved to lose, so I wasn’t unhappy with the verdict. I have some history being on the wrong end of domestic violence. We’re all better off with these miscreants off the streets. “What’s this one about?”
“All I have is a summary. The full file will follow if we accept the case.”
I roll my eyes. “If we accept the case, and we’re expected to decide without knowing the details. They’ll stuff it down our throats if we don’t play ball anyway.”
She smiles. “Such a cynical partner I have.”
I return her smile. “And I’ve got Susy Sunshine for a partner. Or maybe I should just call you Pollyanna.”
She laughs lightly. “That’s us. Brooks and Valenti, just like milk and cookies.”
“Milk and cookies?”
“They go together well,” she says affectionately. “Just like us.”
She’s right about that. Penelope is a brilliant strategist—a master of all things lawyerly, with the exception of standing in front of a judge or jury to argue a case. I, on the other hand, operate on instinct in a courtroom—the actor delivering the lines Penelope feeds me.
“So tell me what little we know about this case before things get downright sappy in here,” I suggest.
She frowns. “Murder case.”
“What the hell?” The county rarely farms out murder files. The cases are time-consuming and expensive to defend. The public defender’s office generally keeps them in-house for just that reason.
“It’s a juvie case,” Penelope continues. “The murder took place on the evening of October twentieth. Sounds pretty cut-and-dried, so maybe they figured it wouldn’t eat up too much of our time.”
“Just feed the kid to the wolves,” I say sourly.
“It comes with another twist. The PD office was handling it, but the attorney working the case died unexpectedly. They don’t have enough extra bodies to pick up all her files, and this one is on a tight schedule.”
“How hard can it be to get a continuance for a change of counsel under those circumstances?” I grumble. It’s a routine procedure when a lawyer steps aside in a case and new counsel has to get up to speed.
Penelope’s brow furrows. “I know, right? For reasons unexplained, the judge is eager to get the case into court. There’s a hearing in two weeks.”
“That’s quick.”
She nods.
“So the public defender is in a pickle and punted.”
“I’d say that about sums it up. What do you say?”
One of my best friends is a public defender in Cook County, so I know exactly how crushing their workloads are, what an outstanding group of people they are, and how thankless their important work is. How can I say no?
“I guess we pitch in,” I reply with a decided lack of enthusiasm.
“You could at least pretend to be excited.”
“I’m willing to help. Don’t expect me to break into a Snoopy dance about it.”
She winks. “So noted. No dancing in the courtroom required. Mind you, I’d like to see this Valenti Snoopy dance I keep hearing about.”
“Yeah, well, it’s cute when Snoopy does it. Three-left-feet Valenti? Not so much.”
That gets a chuckle. “I still want to see it.”
“Don’t hold your breath. We have a hearing in two weeks about who knows what in a murder case we know squat about. Nothing about this sounds good.”
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