Oswald goes cold. “You’re not part of—”

  “Allow me to introduce myself.” Fu-Manchu makes his announcement with exaggerated elocution, his ghostly wheeze dripping with sarcasm and derision. He takes a step forward, his leathery skin shimmering in the gloomy motel room. “I’m the poor son of a bitch he popped his cherry on.”

  “I didn’t—” Oswald feels himself shrinking in the dark room, shivering in the sudden chill.

  “I was numero uno.” The ghost shakes his head with contempt, letting out a flinty chuckle. “The kid always was a flake, even when he was a little squirt on the reservation.”

  Oswald remembers now in one great paroxysm of unresolved guilt. He remembers sneaking up on his stepfather out behind the Tilt-A-Whirl, after hours, with the 8-gauge shotgun loaded for pigeon. He remembers the sharp, flat slap, and remembers dragging the body across a half a mile of scrub brush to a sewage treatment facility, then weighing the corpse down with paint cans. Now, his knees going weak and watery, his heart racing, he gropes for the right words. “You deserved it.”

  Fu-Manchu shrugs. “Maybe I did.”

  “You were supposed to be my... what? My guardian. You were supposed to—” Oswald stops, feeling the eyes of the other dead people on him.

  The man in the shiny sport coat glowers at him. “Supposed to what? Supposed to what? Put up with yer shit just ’cause I was bangin’ yer ma—that stupid-ass squaw didn’t know her cunt from a corncob.”

  “YOU LEAVE MY MOM OUTTA THIS OR I SWEAR I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU AGAIN!”

  Oswald’s booming voice seizes the room like a jolt of electricity, and makes the ghost of Quentin Lawrence Warburton flinch, and all the other dead people snap their gazes up at Oswald, who is now facing down the memory of his stepfather in a fog of rage. Oswald’s eyes burn with tears of fury. He feels tiny, as though he is shriveling back into himself, regressing back to that bitter, confused kid sitting on a riverbank.

  Nobody moves. Nobody says a word for several seconds, as the muffled, moaning grunts of a sleeping Gerbil Goldstein stirring in the adjoining room seem to come from light-years away.

  The voice of the Accountant pierces the silence: “You killed your own stepfather?”

  Oswald finally lets out a sigh, turns to the Accountant, and speaks calmly, almost softly. “He used to burn my arms with his cigarettes.”

  “All right, I will grant you he’s not exactly Ward Cleaver, but—”

  “And when he was really feeling industrious he would torture me on the Tilt-A-Whirl.”

  “Pardon?”

  Oswald looks at the ghost of his stepfather. “Why don’t you tell them.”

  Fu-Manchu is gazing at the floor. “Yer doin’ fine.”

  “He was a carny,” Oswald explains to the group. “Worked at a little two-bit fairground on the edge of the Sleeping Waters Casino. Used to drag me up there late at night, after closing time—”

  “With all due respect,” the Accountant murmurs, “I really would prefer not to hear this.”

  “Sshhh—let him finish,” the Head-Wound Guy whispers. “I want to hear about it.”

  “He used to tie me down in one of the cars, and he’d play a little game, called it the Tilt-A-Roulette. He’d remove the bolts from the connecting arm, one at a time, and he’d send me spinning.”

  The man in the slimy fish-skin jacket grunts. “You never fell off, did ya? Huh? You never—”

  “Dude.” Across the room, the Drug Dealer is now looking askance at the ghost of Quentin Warburton. “That’s pretty harsh.”

  The Accountant chimes in. “If I may be so bold, I’m going to have to concur.” A disparaging tone has crept into his voice as he stares at the man with the stringy mustache. “And not to be judgmental or impertinent, but I’m starting to think we’re seeing the results of bad parenting here.”

  “All right, all right!” Quentin throws up his hands and skulks back around behind the lampshade. “Why don’t y’all just have every little spoiled brat in the world go get a shotgun and blow their daddies’ brains out!”

  Oswald is about to say something else when a meek little voice from the shadows weighs in.

  “Some of us never got a chance to be a good parent.”

  Oswald turns and sees the faint outline of a woman perched on a worn vinyl armchair pushed against the far corner of the room.

  Alberta Goldstein rises off the chair with a flourish, her long scarlet robe hugging her voluptuous curves. Like an actress making a grand entrance in a play, the former prostitute takes a few steps across the room and stands before Oswald with her hands on her hips, her sculpted face with its dark features and Cleopatra eyes trained on Oswald with baleful authority. The only flaw—the single blemish in her pristine appearance—is the wig of charred auburn hair, some of the burned tendrils hanging down, obscuring the .38-caliber exit wound in her stunning forehead. “Did you forget me, big fella?” she purrs with the sardonic tang of a born wiseacre.

  “Of course I didn’t forget you.” Oswald takes a deep breath. “You’re number eight.”

  “Whoopty-do,” she says with a facetious little twirl of her finger. “Lucky number eight.” Her gaze is unwavering. “You shot me in the back of the head.”

  Oswald looks down, the shame and regret smoldering in his guts. He licks his lips. “I’m really sorry about that, Alberta.”

  “You promised me I’d get to see her again.” Ghostly tears shimmer on the woman’s face. “I thought you were helping me.”

  Oswald keeps looking at the floor. He can’t bring himself to look at the statuesque phantom. “I took care of her as best I could. I kept my promise. I told you I would take care of her.”

  “Take care of her?” The ghost lets out a bitter, scalding laugh. “The Illinois State Children’s Orphanage?! Really? That’s how you cared for my daughter? That place was a dung heap!”

  Oswald swallows the hard lump of guilt wedged in the back of his throat.

  It had all happened so fast: the rumors starting to float around the underworld that the Mink had knocked up his high-class hooker girlfriend. A few months later, the woman vanishes, pregnant and terrified for her life and the life of her baby. Oswald had gotten the call then to hunt the woman down, and “make the problem go away.”

  Finding her had been easy. A pregnant prostitute on the lam is not exactly a needle in a haystack. But something about the job bothered Oswald from the get-go. This wasn’t a corrupt politician with his fingers too deep into the cookie jar. This wasn’t a scumbag pornographer skimming funds from the mob. This was an innocent bystander, and an even more innocent unborn child. Oswald decided to go off script and intercede.

  He snatched the woman and kept her on ice for the remainder of the pregnancy, reporting back to Ferri that she was still at large. When the baby was born—a scrawny premature little girl—Oswald personally escorted mother and child downstate to the Catholic orphanage. The nuns had initially balked at admitting the child of a prostitute, let alone a Jew, but Oswald could be very convincing—especially when pressing the barrel of a .45 snub-nosed Bulldog up the left nostril of the monsignor who ran the place.

  The sad fact was, Oswald had never planned on killing the mother. He knew the Ferri family would require proof of death, and whacking her would certainly be a way to ensure the child’s safety. But Oswald still harbored feelings for the woman. He wasn’t sure if it was love. He never truly loved anybody until Matilda. But the woman didn’t deserve to die. And Oswald would have gladly whisked her off to a safe place at that point if she had simply kept her shit together.

  But that’s not what happened. Oswald had just begun to make arrangements for a safe house in Louisville, Kentucky, for the woman, when she up and had a nervous breakdown. She bailed on Oswald. Caught a train back to Chicago, and went straight to the police. The organized crime unit must have thought they had a star witness on their hands—they kept the woman sequestered for a few days at the local Hyatt—but Oswald knew it was game over.

  Disguised as a limo driver, he picked her up at the hotel, drove her out to Melrose Park, and shot her in the head. Blew her wig clean off. Put a starburst in the middle of the rear window. It was the coldest night of the year—February—and thinking back on it, Oswald could have sworn his tears froze on his cheeks as he dug her shallow grave.

  He ditched the car but took the wig with him. The Ferri family would have their proof of death. But what they didn’t know—what they would never know—was that Alberta’s assassination was postpartum.

  At only eight weeks old, the skinny little baby girl had her mother’s eyes and robust constitution. On the birth certificate, Alberta had named the child Laura, but Oswald had always thought the little waif-like kid looked like a rodent, and his nickname for her—Gerbil—caught on by the time she had reached the emancipation age of eighteen.

  Now the ghost of Alberta Goldstein burns her gaze into Oswald. “You never told her, did ya?”

  Oswald keeps looking at that shitty carpet. “She knows plenty.”

  “You never told her.”

  Oswald wipes his mouth. “She knows enough... she knows her mom got whacked.”

  “Yes, but does she know who did the whacking?”

  “I’ll tell her when the time is right.”

  “Sure you will.”

  “Gerbil is doing fine, she’s doing fine. Don’t you worry about your little girl. She’s a trouper.”

  This is followed by a moment of terse, dry silence. Oswald turns away from the ghosts, and he lets out a long, pained, exasperated sigh.

  He gazes through the partially shuttered blinds, out beyond the flickering neon MOTEL sign, out beyond the vast darkness of the night. He can almost feel the phase of the moon turning like the hands of a cosmic doomsday clock: less than ten nights left, and seven lives to go.

  Behind him, the voice of the Accountant sounds philosophical: “I guess it just goes to show…”

  Oswald keeps staring through the window. “I can’t wait to hear this.”

  The Accountant continues, his voice heavy with regret. “... just how easy it is to make somebody disappear nowadays, for very little money down, I might add.”

  Oswald closes his eyes and speaks softly, more to himself than to anybody else. “Yeah, well... keeping people from disappearing ain’t so easy.”

  Another comment from the Head-Wound Guy: “That’s one thing about the mob—you can always depend on ’em —like death and taxes.”

  Oswald gets very still. An idea—like a bolt of lightning—crackles across the back of his mind. He spins around and sees the ghosts fading, the channel losing its signal. He holds up his hands. “Wait a minute, wait, hold on a second.”

  The Accountant stares at him. “What now?”

  Oswald points at the head-wound victim. “What did you just say?”

  Head-Wound Guy shrugs. “What do you mean? Just now? About the mob?”

  “That’s right, that’s right. Something about depending on them?”

  A brief pause here as the gallery of dead people stare at Oswald.

  Head-Wound Guy shrugs. “I said you can depend on them like death and taxes.”

  “That’s it!” Oswald snaps his fingers repeatedly. “That’s it! That’s it! That’s it! That’s it—!!”

  Oswald jerks forward in his nest of blankets, making another ramshackle set of bedsprings squeak. He comes awake with a hacking cough, his eyes geeked open, the words caught in his throat, as he gazes around the empty dance floor of a room. The ghosts are gone. The lucid dream has dissolved with the abruptness of a soap bubble popping.

  “That’s it,” he utters in a strangled voice. His head is buzzing, his stitches itching, his ears ringing like a lunch bell.

  “That’s what?” The voice comes from over his shoulder to his left, from the shadows of the adjoining doorway.

  Gerbil Goldstein is standing there in her underwear, looking at him with a wary expression, rubbing the sleep from her bloodshot eyes.

  He looks at her. “Huh?”

  “You were grunting like a pig in your sleep. Saying ‘that’s it, that’s it’—over and over again.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “So what’s ‘it’?

  He takes a deep breath and gives her a thousand-kilowatt smile. “The way we’re gonna find seven more people to save by next Thursday.”

  PART II:

  The Big Wipe

  “The little black train is coming,

  Get all your business right.

  Better set your house in order,

  Because that train may be here tonight.”

  - Jay Farrar, “Gob Iron”

  15.

  Around 10 o’clock the next morning, Arthur “the Candy Man” Morrison, small-time purveyor of downscale sex workers and discount drugs, paces nervously across the deserted picnic area of the Albany Park Forest Preserve. The modest little pavilion sits on the threshold of a dense, weedy grove of elms, the sickly flora withered by city pollution. A pale, washed-out sun beats down on the litter-strewn clearing, which is crowded with worm-eaten picnic tables chained to aging concrete pedestals (as if anybody would be desperate enough for furniture to steal such things).

  As he paces, weaving compulsively between the picnic tables, the Candy Man keeps his hands in the pockets of his purple-silk crew jacket, his eyes shifting across the periphery of the deserted parking lot. Inside his pockets, each sweaty hand grips a matching snub-nosed .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, each cylinder full of slugs. He is taking no chances. He will not go down to some alcoholic half-breed.

  The call that came in earlier this morning had spooked the pimp more than anything has ever spooked him. Sure, he had expected the Big Chief to come after him—in the wake of the fucked-up double-cross last week with Harkness—but not like this. The Candy Man had expected the Indian to sneak up on him with that Apache mojo-vengeance in the wee hours of the night, when the Candy Man least expected it, turning out his lights like the end of The Sopranos.

  But not like this. Not with some weird-ass phone call, with the Indian saying how he just needed information and how he won’t try anything funny and how he just needs to know who’s on the Naughty List for the month.

  The Candy Man stops pacing. The distant croon of an ambulance wavers in and out of the droning hiss of a nearby highway. The sound makes the Candy Man’s skin crawl. The air has that trademark West Side stench, a mixture of tar, carbon monoxide, and sewer run-off, and it tweaks some distant memory buried in the Candy Man’s gray matter—a childhood spent in the projects. He is too young to die. He is too smart to get dropped by a big, fat, drunk Injun.

  He looks at his watch. 10:04. The motherfucker is late. Or maybe the Indian’s watching, waiting for a clean head-shot. The flesh on the back of the Candy Man’s neck goes cold and prickles.

  “You there?” he says into his wireless headset.

  A click, and then a voice: “Got ya covered, homes.”

  “Shut the fuck up and listen. He’s gonna be showin’ up any second now.”

  The voice from the tree: “Gotcha in the cross-hairs—as we speak.”

  “Gonna leave the line open so y’all can hear what’s goin’ down. You dig me?”

  The voice: “I dig you the most.”

  “Soon as you get a clean shot you take this motherfucker down.”

  “Got it, homes.”

  “And stop callin’ me homes.”

  “Sorry. Sorry, homes.”

  “You call me homes one more time I will fuck you in the ass with a canned ham.”

  “Sorry. Sorry, man.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “One question?”

  The Candy Man sighs. “What is it now?”

  “Is there something else I should, like, call you?”

  The Candy Man rolls his eyes. “Call me Mr. Tibbs, motherfucker, now shut your fucking mouth and put a cap in this guy’s head so we can go home.”

  Alejandro Rodrigues, a gangly street-kid in a hoodie and backwards Cubs cap, now straddling the knotted neck of an ancient elm tree fifty yards due east of the picnic area, cradling a Galil 7.62-millimeter sniper rifle in his tattoo-embroidered hands, is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He barely made it out of Blue Island High School and had a hard time understanding the intricacies of paper versus plastic at the local Safeway.

  But he can shoot. That he can do. Trained in the Army Reserve, he can hit things at great distances with all manner of weaponry. And word gets around. That’s why he is currently the go-to guy among the street gangs that rule the territory east of Cicero Road and west of the Kennedy Expressway.

  And that’s also why, at this moment, he is perched so precariously on the dew-slick tree trunk (unaware that the slightest kick of the Galil, once discharged, will likely nudge him off the protrusion).

  He hitches in a breath and raises the scope to his eye. In the cross hairs he can see the Candy Man pacing, alone, across the deserted picnic area. It looks like a little round movie, faded and flattened in the aperture by the long lens, like a miniature video game, and it makes Alejandro smile a little as he wraps his finger around the trigger pad and holds his breath and watches.

  Movement blurs in the upper edge of the scope, a pickup truck pulling into the lot.

  Alejandro tilts the scope up slightly, framing the vehicle in the center of the crosshairs. A figure slowly emerges behind the trees—a big dude with long hair in a fatigue coat—who moseys cautiously around the edge of the lot toward the picnic area.

  Alejandro holds his breath.

  In the scope, the big dude is approaching the Candy Man with hands raised—a reassuring gesture, a momentary truce—and Alejandro frames the guy’s head in the tiny hairline bullseye. The angle of the light, the distance, the time of day are not perfect, but good enough. Alejandro lets out a calming breath.

  Then he inhales a deep, steadying lung full of air and braces his elbow against the trunk behind him for leverage and purchase. He holds his breath and gives it one more millisecond—just enough time for the big guy to move into the perfect position.