Free Trigger City by Sean Chercover Page A

have fifteen seconds for me. Some half-assed gumshoe taking $800 a day from a grieving father? Grant should’ve had his secretary pass me off to a public relations lackey with instructions to shine me on.
    But Grant had time for me, so obviously he saw things differently. Perhaps he saw a gumshoe asking questions about Hawk River’s former head of payroll who was murdered just in time to stop her from testifying before that congressional committee. The murdered former head of payroll whose every connection to Hawk River was quietly scrubbed from the CPD’s case file by the concerted effort of several Chicago cops, a police department lawyer, an assistant state’s attorney, and a lawyer from the governor’s office.
    I unplugged the percolator and put on my jacket, thinking Don’t wander too far down Speculation Alley, Dudgeon. Even if Hawk River is a beneficiary of some cover-up, you don’t know that Grant even knows of it. Stay within sight of the established facts.
    I left the office. And locked the door behind me.
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    Back at my apartment, I changed into my sweats and did an hour on the recumbent bike with the stereo blasting Stiff Little Fingers. You don’t get much better than SLF, and the music kept me motivated on the bike. I toweled the sweat off my face and got down on the floor. I lay on my left side, with a three-pound dumbbell in my right hand, and struggled through the exercises prescribed by my physical therapist, isolating muscles and feeling them tremble under the strain of such incredible weight.
    Nothing so humbling as a contest lost to three pounds.
    Having just barely survived the workout, I shaved and showered and put on jeans and a Columbia College sweatshirt. Padded barefoot into the kitchen and swallowed two Percocet and a pint of water, opened a can of Beefaroni and ate it right out of the can, cowboy style . Poured three fingers of Mount Gay Extra Old over ice. Added a splash of water. Took my drink to the living room and faced the stereo.
    Over half my music collection was jazz but for the last nine months I hadn’t been able to listen to it. Jazz had been my musical anchor since I was sixteen. But now, every time I tried, it just made me angry. I hoped that I’d be able to return to it someday.
    But not yet.
    I put on Lurrie Bell’s Blues Had a Baby . To my ears Bell had the most soulful voice and inventive guitar on the Chicago blues scene. And that’s saying a lot.
    I drank the rum slowly and let the music wash over me and waited for the Percs to kick in. My shoulder hurt like a bastard, and it took some effort to stay in the present tense. The pain was a houseguest you never invited, who doesn’t know when to leave and insists on retelling the story of how you met, over and over. A trip down a specific memory lane that I’d just as soon never take again.
    The thing about being tortured is, there comes a point where you just want to die. You don’t care anymore. You just don’t give a fuck. All that exists is pain and self-hatred and the only way to make it stop is to tell them what they want to know. Or die.
    So you want to die. You want it more than you want to tell them what they want to know, or you’d have told them by now. You want it more than you’ve ever wanted anything in your life. The desire for death actually strengthens you, buys you a few more minutes of resistance. You know you’re going to break soon, and you beg death to come sooner.
    It’s sick, I know, but that’s how it is.
    Talk about ultimate tough guy credentials. That’s what you’d think, right? You made it through that and you never told them a goddamnthing. But here you are almost ten months later, still waking up crying in the middle of the night like a small child with night terrors. Or freaking out because you catch a whiff of cheap aftershave.
    Some tough guy.
    I finished the rum in my glass and poured another and returned