Exhausted, I returned to the examining room to look at Louisa again. Her shallow breathing seemed unchanged. She muttered in her sleep-something about Caroline, I couldn’t make out what.

It was then that the shots started. I looked at my watch: thirty-eight minutes since I’d called Bobby. It had to be the police. Had to be. I forced my weary shoulders into action, moving the desk back from the door. Telling my charges to stay put, I turned out the room lights and crept back to the plant. Another five minutes passed, and then the place was filled with boys in blue. I moved out from the cover of one of the vats to talk to them.

It took awhile to get things sorted out-who I was, why an alderman was lying in his own blood next to Steve Dresberg on a factory floor, what Louisa Djiak and the Chigwells were doing there. You know-all the usual stuff.

When Bobby Mallory showed up at three we started moving faster. He listened to my worries about Louisa for about thirty seconds, then had one of the men send for a fire department ambulance to take her to Help of Christians. Another ambulance had already carted Dresberg and Jurshak to County Hospital. Both were still alive, their futures uncertain.

I snatched a minute in the confusion to call Lotty, let her know the bare bones of what had happened and that I was unhurt. I told her not to wait up, but in my secret heart I begged her to.

When the state police arrived they assigned a car to ferry the Chigwells home. They’d wanted to send Ms. Chigwell to a hospital for observation, but she was adamant about returning to her own home.

Before Mallory came I’d been telling everyone that Jurshak had lured Chigwell down to the plant with a tale about finding a half-dead employee on the premises. Ms. Chigwell hadn’t let him go alone this late at night and the two found themselves caught in the cross fire. Bobby looked narrowly at me, but finally agreed to my version when it was clear he wasn’t going to get anything else from the doctor or his sister.

Bobby left me squatting wearily against a pillar on the plant floor while he conferred with the Fifth District commander. The light winking from uniform jackets and hardware made me dizzy; I shut my eyes, but I couldn’t keep out the clamor, or the murky Xerxine smell. What would my creatine level be after tonight? I pictured my kidneys filled with lesions-blood-red with black holes in them, oozing Xerxine. Someone shook me roughly. I opened my eyes. Sergeant McGonnigal was standing over me, his square face displaying unusual concern.

“Let’s get you outside-you need some fresh air, Vic.”

I let him help me to my feet and stumbled after him to the loading bay, where the police had rolled back the steel doors leading to the river. The fog had lifted; stars showed little yellow pricks in the polluted heavens. The air was still pungent with the scent of many chemicals but the cold made it fresher than it was inside the plant. I looked down at the water glinting black in the moonlight and shivered.

“You’ve had a pretty rough night.”

McGonnigal’s voice held just the right level of concern. I tried not to imagine him learning how to talk to difficult witnesses like that at a seminar in Springfield-I tried to think he really cared about the horrors I’d been through. After all, we’d known each other six or seven years.

“A little exhausting,” I admitted.

“You want to tell me about it, or do you want to wait to talk to the lieutenant?”

So it was role-playing from a seminar. My shoulders sagged a bit farther. “If I tell you, will I have to repeat it to Mallory? It’s not a story I feel like going over more than once.”

“You know the cops, Warshawski-we never take any story just once. But if you’ll give me the outline tonight, I’ll make sure that does for now-get you home while there’s still a little left of the night to sleep in.”

Maybe there was a little personal concern mixed in. Not enough to make me tell the whole truth and nothing but-I mean, I wasn’t going to explain about the doctor’s medical texts. And certainly not Jurshak’s relations with Louisa. But after I’d pulled a crate over to the water’s edge and sat on it, I gave him more details than I’d originally planned to.

I started with the call from Dresberg. “He knew Louisa was important to me-my mother had looked after her when she was pregnant and they’d been pretty good friends. So they must have realized she was one person I’d come out here to help.”

“Why didn’t you call us then?” McGonnigal asked impatiently.

“I didn’t know how you’d manage a quiet assault. They had her in the back of the plant here-they’d simply have murdered her if they figured they were under attack. I wanted to sneak in here myself.”

“And just how did you manage that? They had a lookout where the road turns off to here and another guy at the gates. Don’t tell me you sprayed some amnesiac in the air and slid by them.”

I shook my head and pointed at the dinghy floating below us. The floodlights overhead picked up the incredulity in McGonnigal’s face.

“You rowed up the river in that? Come on, Warshawski. Get real.”

“It’s the truth,” I said stubbornly. “Believe it or not. Ms. Chigwell was with me-it’s her boat.”

“I thought you said they’d come here together.”

I nodded. “I knew if I told you the truth, you’d keep her and her brother here all night and they’re too old for that. Besides, she got shot in the arm, even if it did just graze her -she should have been in bed hours ago.”

McGonnigal pounded the crate with the flat of his hand. “You don’t have an armlock on empathy, Warshawski. Even the police are capable of showing concern for a couple as old as the Chigwells. Can’t you drop your sixties ‘Off the Pigs’ mentality for five minutes and let us do our job? You could have been killed and gotten the Djiak woman and your elderly friends knocked off in the bargain.”

“For your information,” I said coldly, “my father was a beat cop and I never in my life referred to the police as pigs. Anyway, no one got killed, not even those two pieces of shit who deserved it. Do you want to hear the rest of my story or would you rather get up in your pulpit and preach at me some more?”

He sat stiffly for a moment. “I guess I can see why Bobby Mallory shows up at his worst around you. I was bragging to myself that I was going to show the lieutenant what a younger officer with sensitivity training could do with a witness like you, and I blew it in five minutes. Finish your story -I won’t criticize your methods.”

I finished my story. I told him I didn’t know how Chigwell had gotten hooked up with Jurshak and Dresberg, but that they’d forced him to come along tonight to look after Louisa. And that Ms. Chigwell was worried about him, so when I showed up with my crazy suggestion that we row up the Calumet and sneak up on the plant from the rear, she jumped at the chance.

“I know she’s seventy-nine, but sailing’s been her hobby since she was a kid and she sure handled her oar splendidly. So then we got here, and we had a lucky break-Jurshak went into the plant and Dresberg walked off to check on the people in the ambulance. Who was in it? Is that who shot at you guys when you showed up?”

“No, that was the sentry,” McGonnigal explained. “He tried making a run for it. Someone got him in the abdomen.”

I suddenly realized that Caroline Djiak didn’t know where her own mother was. I explained the problem to McGonnigal. “She’s probably roused the mayor by now. I should call her if I can get back into one of the offices.”

He shook his head. “I think you’ve done enough running around for one evening. I’ll send a uniformed man over to her house-then she can get an escort down to the hospital if she wants. I’ll run you home.”

I thought it over. Maybe I’d just as soon not include a close encounter with Caroline in the night’s strains.