For a reason all his own, James Drinker is intent on killing women in this city, and the only person who can stop him is me.

36.

Jason

Saturday, June 29

The problem with summer in the Midwest is that it stays light outside for so long. Just my luck, we’re only slightly over a week removed from the solstice, so today is the ninth-longest day of sunlight in the entire damn year.

Ideally, the best way to ambush somebody is to catch them outside their house—either inside their garage or on their walk up to their door—when it’s dark. You have the element of surprise, you have the cover of darkness, and you don’t have to hassle with details like house alarms, locked doors, or bolted windows.

But conditions have to be ideal, and for me, they are not. James Drinker doesn’t live in a house with a garage; he lives in a high-rise. And he leaves Higgins Auto Body at half past five, six at the latest, according to the surveillance team that has followed him over the last week. So that’s nowhere close to dusk, not this time of year.

All of which leaves me with only one option: walking up to his fourth-floor apartment, forcing my way in, and taking care of business.

When I was a kid, the intersection of Townsend and Kensington was a decent place to live, part of a middle-class Eastern European neighborhood called Power’s Park, named after a steel company owner who built a plant here in the 1930s and hired Polish immigrants. There was a place not two blocks away from this intersection where my dad sometimes took us after Mass on Sunday called Magyar that served Hungarian food, my father’s ancestry. We always knew it was coming after Mass when we piled into the beater station wagon and Dad would look at us in the rearview mirror and ask us if we were “Hungary.” Laughed like hell at that joke, he did.

Dad would speak what little of the native tongue he knew with the owners and would order food like money was no object—which meant he probably had just scammed somebody out of something and he actually had some dough. He went nuts over the paprika stew and dumplings. Mom always ordered the same thing, veal crepes. Pete and I kept it safe with debreceni sausage with mustard and cabbage.

My dad was always happy there, probably because he only took us there after he’d scored in some way or another—the track or a card game or some grift he’d pulled. My dad’s moods went up and down that way, depending on that week’s income. He was a pretty good con artist, I assumed, but he was even better at conning himself into believing he was a winner on those rare occasions when his takings outgained his expenses. Would have been nice if he’d left a little of that money for Mom. But in the Kolarich household, it was all about Jack’s mood. Would it be dinner at Irish Green and brunch at Magyar and flowers for Mom? Or would it be cold cuts and leftovers and Jack staggering home at two in the morning, half in the bag, looking for a boy to swat?

This neighborhood is no longer called Power’s Park; now it’s Old Power’s Park. The steel plant moved out in the seventies, and Magyar is now a pawnshop, next to a payday loan center, next to a secondhand clothing store. The whites mostly fled this neighborhood when the mayor decided, twenty years ago, that this area would be an excellent location for subsidized housing projects—far, far better than, say, the available acreage on the near-north side close to all the affluent white neighborhoods.

So now it’s a forgotten neighborhood, the streets littered with potholes and busted-up curbs, drug deals taking place in open view in dingy alleys or drive-ups at street corners. I can blend into this neighborhood if I wish—my hair’s pretty long now, I have two days’ growth on my face, and with an untucked T-shirt over blue jeans, I can basically play the part of the down-on-his-luck white guy.

I’m being overly cautious, but I don’t have a surreptitious route into James Drinker’s apartment, so the least I can do is make sure I’m in disguise while I case the neighborhood. I pass by his apartment building at 3611 West Townsend long enough to realize that there’s a door controlled by a buzzer, but it seems to be broken and people are freely entering and exiting. I see an elevator, a necessity for an eleven-story building, but I don’t plan on using it. I see mailboxes and a beat-up tile floor in the entryway.

The sun has fallen now, but I need to wait a little longer, because there’s nothing to the west of this neighborhood that will offer any cover, so the beautiful sunset, with its fluorescent colors lighting up the sky, still provides illumination.

I walk around the place a couple of times and then head back toward my car, parked three blocks away in a lot secured by a high fence. I pay the fee to the guy at the gate and get my key. I leave the lot and park on a side street a half mile away.

I use my electric razor to shave. I squeeze out some hair gel that I bought at the store to grease back my hair. In the SUV’s backseat, I use the extra legroom to change into a shirt and tie and suit.

When I was a prosecutor, I once lost my badge, which was a big no-no. Authentic law enforcement badges are a real treasure for the gangbangers; they trade them like currency. So I got docked some pay, but eventually they had to give me a replacement. Lo and behold, I found my original badge several weeks later, but I’d already paid the price for it, and I figured the odds of my getting through the paperwork to recoup my fine were about as good as my setting foot on Mars, so I kept the stupid thing. I wasn’t supposed to do that. Sometimes I do things I’m not supposed to do. Tonight might be one of those times.

I make the decision to leave my SUV where it is on the side street. It’s a small gamble. It’s a pretty nice ride, but I shouldn’t be too long, and I’d rather have my car at the ready without having to pay somebody cash to get my key. I don’t know if I’m going to be walking or running when I leave James Drinker’s apartment building tonight.

I’m wearing my trench coat, the shirt and tie showing through the nape, and the county attorney’s office badge clipped to my coat. I walk with confidence. You don’t do that, you’re a sitting duck. But you keep your chin up, make eye contact with passersby, and look serious but disinterested, and with the trench coat and badge, nobody messes with you.

Unless they do.

I approach the building. There is really no turning back now. I’ve made the decision and I have to abide by it with full force. If I back down now, I could be in a world of shit. I don’t know what James Drinker is capable of, but several people have underestimated him so far, me included, and I’m not going to do it tonight.

I take the stairs slowly, deliberately, not trying to conceal my steps but not going out of my way to be loud, either. I pass two people on their way down, both of them young men—late teens, early twenties—who show me some respect by keeping on their side of the staircase and then some. They could be badasses, for all I know, but why mess with law enforcement unnecessarily? They pick their spots like anyone else.

I get to the fourth floor and walk down to number 406, on the left side of the dimly lit hallway—dimly lit is good. The door is old, cheap wood, but probably on the thick side. There is no peephole, which is significant. I could work around it either way, but it’s easier this way.

I rap my fist three times on the door and call out, in a voice not my own, “James Drinker. County Attorney Special Investigators.”