Chapter 5 - The Turnpike to Cook County
The northbound lanes of Interstate 94 cut through the low, marshy scrub of Lake County like a gray concrete blade. At seventy miles per hour, my Honda’s driver-side window whistled—a high, persistent leak in the rubber gasket that I had stuffed with paper towels two winters ago to keep the freezing spray off my left shoulder.
Beside me on the passenger seat lay the green duffel bag.
On top of the canvas, the red wax seal from the original folder sat in an empty plastic specimen jar I had borrowed from the academy infirmary.
My cheek had stopped throbbing. It had settled into a dull, leaden ache that radiated down into my jaw and up toward the temple, the skin stiff where the bruising was beginning to turn the color of an overripe eggplant. Every time I checked the rearview mirror, the reflection of the silver lieutenant’s bar pinned to the left collar of my new service shirt caught the strobe of the afternoon sun through the windshield.
At two-fifteen PM, my phone vibrated against the plastic center console.
The number was an unlisted Chicago exchange: 312-558-0000.
The administrative switchboard for the Richard J. Daley Center.
I tapped the speaker toggle. "Lieutenant Vance."
"Audrey."
The voice was thin, dry, carrying that ancient, papery rasp that only comes from seventy years of breathing legal archives and Havana tobacco.
"Uncle Alistair," I said.
A pause on the other end. A sound like parchment sheets being shuffled over a walnut desktop, followed by the wet, rhythmic clicking of an antique pocket watch being wound.
"Your father’s attorney—young Mr. Pendelton’s senior partner—filed an emergency motion for a continuance forty minutes ago," my great-uncle said. "He cited emotional distress, family tragedy, and an acute medical emergency regarding your brother."
"Did you grant it?"
"I told him," Alistair said, his voice dropping into that terrifying, flat cadence that had broken the Chicago rail syndicates in 1974, "that if Richard Vance was not sitting in the well of Courtroom 2402 by four-fifteen this afternoon, I would issue a bench warrant with a five-hundred-thousand-dollar cash surety and send the Cook County sheriff’s fugitive squad to the airfield in Waukegan to pull him out of the pilot's seat."
"He has a charter booked," I said.
"He had a charter booked," Alistair corrected. "The Federal Aviation Administration placed a ground stop on the aircraft twenty minutes ago at the request of the Treasury Department. Richard is currently sitting in the departure lounge with three state troopers standing six feet from his chair."
Alistair paused. In the background, I could hear the deep, bronze chime of the City Hall clock tower striking two-thirty.
"Your grandfather was an idiot about many things, Audrey," the old judge muttered. "He spent sixty years pretending that money was a form of character. He thought that if he left eight million dollars in a blind trust with enough restrictive covenants, it would force Richard to become an honest man by sheer arithmetic."
"Arithmetic doesn't change blood, Uncle," I said.
"No," Alistair agreed. "It merely calculates the cost of the treason. How is your face?"
"My cheek is swollen. The bone is intact."
"Good," the judge said. "Because I don't want you covering it with makeup when you walk into this courtroom. I want the record to show precisely what four years of your father's 'parental discretion' looks like under sixty-cycle fluorescent lighting."
"I have the original transfer slips from 2022," I said.
"Keep them in the jar," Alistair said. "The bank’s regional vice president has already been subpoenaed. He arrived fifteen minutes ago with three boxes of microfiche from the central storage vault in Gary. He looks like a man who expects to spend the weekend in the federal holding facility at 71 West Van Buren."
"And Marcus Sterling?"
"Marcus is already here," Alistair said, a dry, faint chuckle rattling in his throat. "He has his linen jacket off. He has his ledger open. He has been sitting in my jury box since one o'clock, drinking black tea from a silver thermos and showing my law clerk the exact entries where your mother diverted fifty-four thousand dollars to a landscape architect in Highland Park."
The line went dead with a clean, sharp disconnect.
I stepped on the accelerator. The Honda’s speedometer needle crept toward eighty, the engine vibrating against the rusted motor mounts, the green cornfields of northern Illinois blurring into a long, pale smear of summer green.
At the toll plaza near Touhy Avenue, I pulled into the manual lane.
The toll collector was an older man with white hair, wearing an orange safety vest over a short-sleeved blue shirt. He took my five-dollar bill, glanced at the green duffel on the passenger seat, and then his eyes traveled up to the silver bars on my collar and the purple bruise across my left cheekbone.
He didn't give me my change immediately.
He reached into his small booth, pulled out a brown paper towel, and handed it to me alongside the three ones and two quarters.
"You're bleeding a little at the corner of the lip, Lieutenant," he said, his voice quiet, gravelly, the voice of a man who had seen service somewhere cold fifty years ago.
I touched the corner of my mouth. A tiny bead of dark, oxidized blood had dried against the scar.
"Thank you," I said, wiping it away with the rough paper.
The old man looked at my uniform, then at the highway running south toward the steel-and-glass towers of the Loop rising against the blue sky like a row of upright chisels.
May you like
"Give 'em hell, soldier," he said, stepping back from the window.
The gate arm rose with a mechanical groan, and I dropped the transmission into second, the tires barking once against the expansion joint as I hit the concrete ramp leading into the city.
