Free A Bad Night's Sleep by Michael Wiley

friends of mine, Mom.”
    “No?” She sounded more disappointed than concerned.
    “If they come back, don’t answer the door. Don’t talk to them. Call me.”
    “Will you be picking up your phone?”
    “This is serious, Mom. These guys don’t want to help.”
    “That’s a shame,” she said.
    I agreed that it was.
    “Joe?” she said.
    “Yeah?”
    “Maybe you should leave town for awhile.”
    “Yeah,” I said and I almost smiled. “That sounds like a great idea. Maybe I’ll do that.”
    Mom gave me Jason’s room number at Children’s Memorial and we hung up.
    I got out of bed, went to the kitchen, and started a pot of coffee. While it dripped into the pot, I looked out the back door into the yard. The sky was heavy and gray with the kind of cold rainless clouds that sometimes covered Chicago for a week at a time in November. The elm branches hung in the windless air just like they did last night. The tree was the last of its kind in the neighborhood. All the other elms had died from a disease in the 1970s.
    After awhile I made my way into the living room. The red display on the answering machine said I had fourteen messages. Someone loved me. That was something.
    But I figured I should take care of business first. I picked up the phone and dialed Bill Gubman.
    “Did you change your mind about helping out and rent a fishing boat?” he said when I told him who was calling.
    “I was about to,” I said, “but then I started partying with my friends Earl Johnson and Bob Monroe and I forgot about fishing.”
    “You’ve met with them? Good work.”
    “I didn’t find them. They found me. ”
    “Good work anyway,” he said. “I’ve got some things for you—bank receipts, police reports, photographs. All that you need to set up Johnson.”
    “They’re watching me pretty close. I can’t pick them up at the department.”
    He considered that for a moment. “There’ll be a ceremony this morning at Daley Plaza for the officers who died at Southshore Village. I’ll be there with a package for you.”
    “Not exactly a private meeting,” I said. “Half the city will be there.”
    “So no one will be surprised that you and I are both there. Look for me near the stage. We’ll find someplace to talk.”
    Last thing I wanted to do. “I’ll see you there,” I said.
    I hung up and stared at the phone. Then I punched the button on the answering machine and the machine spoke to me. “Listen, you asshole…” the first message started. It was a crank call from someone who’d heard early that I was involved in the shootings at Southshore Village, someone who knew how to reach me, someone who told me that he’d take me apart, joint by joint. That meant the caller probably was a cop, maybe a friend of one of the cops who were wounded or killed. So much for love.
    Corrine had called four times. She was worried. She’d tried to find out where the police had jailed me but no one was telling. She’d figured my lawyer should know what was happening, so she’d called Larry Weiss, but he’d hit the same walls. The first three calls sounded more and more worried. What were they doing to me? In the fourth message, which she’d left last night, she said, “Call me,” and hung up. Like Mom, she must’ve heard that I was out of jail and gotten angry because I didn’t run to her first.
    Three calls were from Mom, worried too, the first when she was taking Jason to the hospital, the next telling me that he was all right, the last wondering where I was now that the police had turned me loose.
    The crank caller called twice more to let me know new ways he’d worked out to cause me pain.
    Lucinda Juarez had left the rest of the messages. She’d been my informal partner for the last month and a half. She’d also fallen into my arms, or I’d fallen into hers—only for a night, but that night kept rippling like a stone in water. It had almost drowned me and Corrine and it still might. Her voice had no worry in