That night, she told Oswald the story of her father’s atonement.

  Matilda grew up on a farm. Her dad, Caleb, was a six-foot-six pillar of leather and muscle who could rip stubborn tree trunks from the ground with his bare hands. He was also a devout Christian who suffered no fools and insisted on a pious family. He was hardest on his wife, and Matilda always feared that he beat the woman, but Matilda never knew for sure. Then, the terrible indiscretion came. The man had a fling with the local librarian. It was an open secret among the wagging tongues of the little farm town, and it crushed Matilda and her family. Of all people, though, Caleb seemed like the last person one would suspect of adultery.

  The part of the story that fascinated Oswald the most was the aftermath of the affair. Caleb proceeded to beg his wife to forgive him, and she agreed. But Caleb was not finished with his atonement. He then hiked all alone, with no food and only a meager amount of water, fifteen miles downstate to a wilderness area. He came back home in a month, emaciated and near death, and yet cleansed of his sin.

  Later, Matilda’s mother explained to the little girl that her father had atoned “in the fashion of Isaiah” so that he could be with Matilda’s mother in heaven. Apparently, the man had sat meditating on the top of Whidmoore Hill, alone, for an entire lunar cycle. It was the only way to free himself of the burden of his wickedness.

  The lessons of that story had not only seared themselves into Matilda’s soul, but they had also imprinted Oswald’s subconscious.

  “I understand,” Oswald now says to Matilda, standing over her deathbed, summoning a weak voice.

  She coughs. Then she says in a broken murmur, her eyes welling up again, “It’s the only way, Ozzie. It’s the only way we’ll ever be together again in heaven.” Cough. “Whether it’s seven lives, or eight, or eighty... do this for me... save as many lives as you’ve destroyed by the next full moon.”

  Her head droops again. She reaches blindly for him. Oswald takes her slender, bony hand in his. Oswald feels the heat of her gaze. It paralyzes him. She lets out a fusillade of coughs. Oswald looks at her. “Sweetie, do you want me to call 9-1-1?”

  She manages to give him a forlorn, loving, melancholy smile. “Too late, Ozzie. It’s okay. Just make sure it’s by the next full moon, like it says in Isaiah.” She coughs feebly. Her eyes go blank, and her breathing slows.

  Nodding frantically, Oswald says, “I got it. Save as many lives as I’ve taken. Do it by the next full moon. Got it. Sweetie?”

  She has frozen like a doll. Eyes open. Staring. As still as marble.

  “Matilda?!”

  He squeezes her hand. Shakes her. Screams her name to no avail.

  Her eyes have no life left in them. They look like glass marbles.

  “MATILDA!!”

  8.

  The memorial service takes place a week later in the garden out behind the First Unitarian Church in Lombard. The Indian summer has turned prickly and humid, and that afternoon the sun beats down on the meager landscaped courtyard with a vengeance. The air smells of street tar, and the cicadas roar like waves washing up on a beach, at times so loudly the eulogies are drowned by the din. Oswald spends the bulk of the ceremony behind the draping at the front of the makeshift dais, hiding, embarrassed by his ceaseless sniffling. Dressed in his itchy houndstooth, the suit so shopworn it’s shiny in the seat and under the arms, he tries to hold in his sorrow, but it stubbornly keeps quaking through him as though his central nervous system is undergoing a seismic shift.

  The event is sparsely attended—Matilda Valkenburg had few friends and even fewer living relatives—to the point that Oswald keeps peeking around the corner of the curtain just to marvel at the paltry number of mourners. He can see Gerbil sitting in the front row, fanning herself with a program, clad in an anachronistic navy pinafore and Easter bonnet, surrounded by empty folding chairs, looking like she would prefer to join Matilda in the urn sitting next to the podium. If it weren’t for her high-top tennis shoes and prominent tattoos, Gerbil Goldstein could pass for Amish. The rest of the congregants—Creepy Uncle Al, the woman from Matilda’s hospice group, Cousin Mary—sit with dour expressions trying to listen to the monotonous, impersonal eulogy delivered by a baby-faced pastor whose name Oswald can’t even remember.

  Oswald keeps thinking that Matilda would find the whole event extremely tedious and unnecessary. Matilda was a practical sort, not prideful in any way, and despite her deep religious beliefs, she had not been fond of organized religion. Hence the meager trappings at her funeral.

  But that’s not what keeps running through Oswald’s mind that day. Even that night, during the somber, awkward, drunken wake that Cousin Mary hosts in her mobile home up in Kenosha, Oswald can’t stop thinking about the dying woman’s last wish. How does one go about saving lives? And where did all that business about Isaiah and the lunar cycle come from? Oswald feels like a garbage man being asked to find all the trash that he’s hauled away over the years and return it to its rightful owners.

  The next few days pass in a blur of weed-fueled paranoia, migraine headaches, flickering hallucinations, and intermittent crying jags. His head injury only seems to add to his grief and sense of massive loss. He loses track of what’s real, what’s a hallucination. He obsesses over Matilda’s last wish. At one point, Gerbil convinces him to go to the hospital and have his injuries checked out.

  Under the guise of being carjacked, Oswald uses a fake identity and insurance card to get past the paperwork Nazis at the front desk. He chooses carjacking because he figures it’s banal enough to allay suspicion and common enough to delay any kind of police involvement until he has a chance to get a prognosis. His photograph figures prominently in most mug-shot albums, and his criminal jacket encompasses almost three single-spaced spreadsheets. Plus, he can’t help wondering about the gun he lost at the scene. Fortunately, the Bulldog is filed and cold, but some enterprising evidence technician might be able to strike a print off it that just might hold up in court.

  He gets an MRI and a CT scan, and the attending physician gives him a bunch of double-talk about a microscopic bullet fragment lodged in his brain. Evidently, it’s not even big enough to worry about removing, but the discovery delays Oswald’s departure—he has to wait around in ICU for what feels like an eternity—long enough for an admitting nurse to get nosy. While Oswald is sitting on a gurney, picking his nose, ruminating about his wife’s dying wish, a call is placed to the cops.

  Fifteen minutes later, Oswald hears the crackle of a police radio coming down the corridor. He slips out of the hospital the back way, through the kitchen.

  “This gentleman was a big fella, you say?” the older cop is mumbling as he writes in his black spiral-bound. He stands next to the nurses’ station at the end of ICU, his younger partner across the floor, checking in with dispatch.

  “Well yes, as a matter of fact he was a rather stout individual.” The lady doctor with the iron-gray bouffant is leaning against the counter, her eyeglasses off. She thoughtfully chews on the end of a ballpoint. “He also seemed a little distracted.”

  “Distracted?”

  “Well yes, considering the extent of the injuries.”

  “Dark hair?” The older cop has already closed the notebook. “Long, greasy black hair?”

  “Well... as a matter of fact, yes.”

  “Looked like maybe an Indian?”

  The doctor frowns. “You mean from India?”

  “Excuse me?” The older cop glances up at her. “From where?”

  “India... the country.”

  “No, no... I mean like American Indian... like a big freakin’ cigar store Indian.”

  The doctor purses her lips distastefully. “I’m sure you can learn the man’s ethnicity by looking at his admittance forms.”

  The younger cop pipes up. “Lady, those admittance forms are about as useful as the toilet paper you got in that—”

  “Ted!” The older cop interrupts. “Let’s let the good doctor get back to her rounds. Will you excuse us, Doc?”

  The two patrolmen walk away.

  A moment later, they pause at the exit doors. “This is definitely Big Chief.”

  The younger cop nods furiously. “Yeah, exactly, Betty put a memo on the big board about the death of his wife. There’s gotta be a connection between—”

  “Forget about it.” The older cop buttons his pocket, snaps his safety shut on his gunstock. “We’re too late.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “We’re too late, Davey.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s a potato bug.” The older cop has already turned away and is heading back down the corridor toward the exit. “Forget it.”

  “He’s a what?” The younger cop just stands there, hands on his hips, watching his partner head for the door. “A potato bug—is that code for something?”

  “It’s code for forget about it,” the older cop mumbles over his shoulder.

  The younger cop is aghast. “What about the gun?! The .44 they found at the scene of that shooting last week?! That’s Big Chief’s MO.”

  The older cop exits. “It’s a throw-down piece, they’ll get bupkiss off it.”

  The younger cop hustles after the veteran. Out the door, into the night. “But what about stuff like... evidence? DNA? From the hospital room?”

  “Forget about it, Davey.”

  “But what about—?”

  The older cop pauses on the edge of the lot, a sodium light putting a halo around his cap. “We’ll give it to Rigby. She’ll babysit it for a few weeks.”

  Then the older cop walks away with the crestfallen gait of a lifer, all slumped and beaten down, a man just looking for the next clock-out and friendly shot of Bushmills.

  9.

  The next day, Lieutenant Inspector Anna Marie Rigby is sitting at her desk at Area Five headquarters on Grand Avenue, going through her in-box, when the twenty-four report on Oswald Means lands on her blotter. She stares at the manila file like it’s a bird dropping.

  “And this would be... what?” she inquires, glancing up at the freckled rookie girl with the temerity to drop such a load of shit on a cop’s desk.

  “Officer Dalton says you’ll recognize the sig, says it’s your jurisdiction.”

  “BIS?”

  “O-C actually,” the fresh-faced kid says, fidgeting in front of the desk. In her starched uniform and ponytail she reminds Rigby of unbaked cookie dough.

  “OC” is cop-speak for organized crime. Chicago’s Bureau of Investigative Services is broken into two divisions: the Detective Division and the Organized Crime Division. Lieutenant Rigby, three years away from her gold timepiece, is a veteran liaison between the two divisions, which means she mediates all the bickering and infighting between the two factions. Twenty-three years of this shit has taken its toll on the woman.

  “Okay, honey, I got it,” Rigby says, peeking inside the file and dismissing the rookie with a wave.

  The top of the report—scrawled in Patrolman Dalton’s handwritten hieroglyph—says something about a hit-and-run incident on Noble Street last night, an unknown perpetrator, and a victim alias. Under the alias line, the name Oswald Means is prominent in big block capitals.

  It might be her imagination, but the moment her gaze falls on Oswald’s name, a splinter of pain twinges in Rigby’s arthritic left hip. She had the joint replaced a year and a half ago, but the stiffness still plagues her, and nothing gets the pain going like a blast from the past. “Dad-blame-it-to-hell,” she mutters, reading the rest of the cover page, instantly extrapolating a hit gone bad.

  Rigby struggles out of her ancient orthopedic chair and waddles over to the window, where her raincoat hangs on a bentwood hat rack. She gazes out the meshed window-glass at the overcast Chicago morning, the wan daylight casting shadows down garbage-strewn alleys along Grand. Boarded storefronts stare back at her, pocked with black Rust-Oleum gang graffiti, bringing back memories of Operation Silver Shovel, and all the probes and stings and crusades Rigby has led against the Chicago Outfit.

  That was then, and this is definitely now, and the last thing Rigby needs right now is a family reunion with a nutcase like Big Chief.

  She lets out a weary sigh and plucks her raincoat from the rack, shrugging it over her shoulders. A plump, matronly woman with the jowls of a bulldog and hard little cinder eyes behind half-glasses, she wears her silver hair in a Margaret Thatcher scoop and favors off-the-rack ensembles from Lane Bryant. Today she wears a navy-blue polyester number that makes her rotund midsection look like a bag of inner tubes.

  She has tried dieting. Usually it lasts about a week, and she gains weight.

  “I’ll be back in five,” she tells the desk sergeant on her way out.

  The moment she steps outside, the leaden atmosphere of the west side engulfs her in piss-fragrant wind. She shoots her collar and trundles eastward toward the corner of Grand and Canal. Morning foot traffic swarms around her as she digs in her purse for her notebook.

  On the cardboard backing, faded with age, the ballpoint numerals water-blurred, is a phone number she loathes calling, but what choice does she have?

  She makes her way into the crowded Dunkin Donuts on Canal Street. Voices and sugar steam and grease stench waft by as she presses through the crowd toward the payphone in back—the only payphone within a five-mile radius of the squad house surviving the digital age.

  A bored, phlegmatic wheeze answers after the fifth ring.

  “Mr. Ferri, that lady cop’s on the phone.” The goombah with the Neanderthal brow stands in the doorway with the cordless.

  “Who?” Anthony Michelangelo Ferri, an old dandy in a smart Arrow shirt and dapper little pork-pie hat, looks up from his breakfast. His prominent, pock-marked, aquiline nose juts out over a meticulously trimmed pencil mustache the color of old pewter.

  “Lady cop with the OC task force?” the goombah says from the doorway in a kind of stage whisper, his big gnarled hand over the remote’s mouthpiece, as though he’s afraid of hurting feelings. “Didn’t say her name, but I think it’s like Rigby, something like that.”

  “Like the song.”

  The goombah gives him a blank stare. “Huh?”

  “The Beatles song, ya mook.” Ferri lets out an off-key croon: “Eleanor Rigby... stands by the sea and does something with her something all day.” He sighs and thinks for a second. “Rigby... Rigby.” His delicate, liver-colored lips purse with vexation. Collar buttoned high and tight against his shriveled neck, his soft-boiled egg sitting before him in its impeccable little sterling cup, Ferri has the quiet dignity of a Sicilian undertaker. He has run the Chicago chapter of the Riccardo crime family for nearly twenty years now without managing to get himself indicted or bumped off. He has a mind for details. He remembers people, if not song lyrics. And he does indeed abide—as stereotype would have it—that revenge for Sicilians is best served cold. Anthony “the Mink” Ferri believes in quiet, clean, top-down efficiency. “Is this person on retainer with the organization?” he inquires softly.

  The goombah in the doorway—a capo named Jimmy Dalessandro—nods his prominent unibrow thoughtfully. Dressed in a bowling shirt and Sansa-belt slacks, he is an enormous golem of a man with a tree-trunk neck and pomade-slick graying hair. He looks like a refugee from the 1960s, like a bodyguard for the Rat Pack. “Matter of fact she is on the payroll.”

  The old man cocks his head. He has tiny, wiry gray hairs inside his huge ears that catch the light. “Don’t seem to recall working with a lady cop by that name.”

  “It’s been a while, sir. The Yid used her back in the Silver Shovel days.”

  “No kidding,” Ferri marvels, gazing wistfully across his office at the placid scene outside his window, the swaying olive trees and twinkling cocktail lights of Bocci Ristorante’s Restaurante’s outdoor café. For the last decade, Ferri has managed his affairs out of the rear of this very popular Chicago eatery specializing in Mediterranean fusion cuisine. But right now, the restaurant’s ersatz owner is casting his thoughts back to those tumultuous days of Operation Silver Shovel, and all the legal contortions the mob lawyers had to deploy over the course of those carnival trials. It brings the twitch of a faint smile to Ferri’s wormy gray lips.

  “Lemme talk to her, Jimmy,” the old man says finally, making an impatient waving gesture with his crooked, age-spotted hand.

  The goombah hands over the cordless, then makes himself scarce.

  “Good morning, this is Anthony Ferri,” the old man says softly into the phone. “How may I be of assistance?”

  “It’s actually the other way around, Mr. Ferri,” the voice crackles in his ear.

  Ferri’s fuzzy gray eyebrows arch with interest. “Pardon?”

  “It’s actually me being of assistance to you,” the voice says.

  The old man takes a deep breath. “May I ask what this is in reference to... Officer Rigby, is it?”

  “Lieutenant.”

  “What’s this about, Lieutenant?”

  “This is about that knucklehead you got working for you out west.”

  “I got a lot of knuckleheads,” the old man says with a beleaguered sigh.

  “Goes by the moniker Big Chief?”

  “Big Chief?”

  The voice on the end of the line lowers a notch, as though imparting something very candid and confidential: “He’s making a spectacle of himself, Mr. Ferri, and that’s when I get my own ass in the soup for looking the other way.”

  “Big Chief?” Anthony Ferri is searching his memory banks for the context, the guy, the name.