Free High Chicago by Howard Shrier Page B

lamely. “By accident. He needed help with a personal matter, and I helped him.”
    “Aren’t you neighbourly.”
    “Kate, I know it looks bad—”
    “Looks bad? It fucking stinks, Jonah. He kills people for money. Where are your boundaries?”
    “He has nothing to do with the way I live.”
    “Judgment, then.”
    “Who am I to judge anyone?”
    “Well, I have to judge you,” she said. “I have to be dead careful about who I let into my personal life, because the second I do let someone in, he shows up on my work screen. And you’re already up there.” She reached into her purse and withdrew a twenty from a zippered pocket. “That should cover the drinks.”
    “So that’s it? Guilt by association?”
    “Not just
any
association. Don’t you get it? Dante Ryan is the kind of man I live to put away. Day in, day out, I work thisjob of mine. I see kids being shot by other kids because they gave them the wrong look. Husbands who kill their wives because the pork chops burned. And men found in the trunks of their cars because they got involved in organized crime. Dante Ryan kills people—not in passion or anger or on the spur of the moment—but for money, plain and simple, and if I had anything to say about it, he’d be doing life in Millhaven, not running a restaurant that I almost took you to.”
    “If you knew the truth …” And then I had to cut myself off, because there was no way I could tell her the truth about Ryan and me without including the nasty ending in the Don River Valley.
    I’m not sure what would have happened next—would she have walked out on me?—because her cellphone rang. She un-clipped it from her belt, drawing a dirty look from people at the table next to us, and answered with a terse “Yes?” Pause. “Hey, Gregg.”
    McDonough, her throwback partner. I was glad he couldn’t see us. He would have had a hoot if he knew who was sharing her table.
    “Where?” she said. “How far away are you? No, I’m closer. I can be there in fifteen minutes. All right. See you there.”
    She snapped the phone closed. “I have to go.”
    “You were leaving anyway.”
    “I’m sorry, Jonah. Can you at least understand why I have to be careful?”
    “We all have to be careful when we meet someone we like,” I said. “You were the first door I opened in a long time. I didn’t expect everything to be easy between us. But I was willing to try.”
    “I still have to go.”
    “Where?”
    “Church and Wellesley,” she said. “A man was beaten to death.”
    The heart of the gay village. “A bashing?” It wouldn’t be the city’s first but doing it in the heart of the village was beyond audacious.
    “I’ll see what the scene has to say when I get there.”
    “Let me drive you.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Please. It’s ten more minutes out of your life. What if there was something I could tell you that would help us get over this hump?”
    “I can’t imagine what that would be.”
    I took Adelaide across the lower part of the city, through the deserted financial district, tension filling the car like secondhand smoke.
    “There’s a lot I can’t tell you about Ryan,” I finally said, “for your sake as well as his, but I can say this: we came together because he was trying to make good on something and he needed my help to do it. He was trying, believe it or not, to save a life. Not to take one, Kate. To save one. He was trying to prevent something truly horrible from happening. Whatever you might think about him, he was trying to do something good, and he did. And I helped him. I paid a price for that. A high one. And I’ve been paying for it ever since. But I’m not sorry he came to me, and I’m not sorry about what we had to do. The only thing I am goddamn sorry about is that it came between us tonight.”
    We were heading north on Jarvis, which had more lanes and less traffic than Church. When we got to the corner of Maitland, Hollinger said, “Drop me here,