Close Call by John McEvoy Read Free Book Online Page A

phone calls regarding your fee. My word is good. I’ll be tracking your progress.
    “Go on with it then, man,” Hanratty said, and hung up.
    Thousands of mile away, Riley smiled as he put his phone down. Born and raised in the working class Chicago neighborhood called Canaryville, he still had strong ties there even though he’d married a woman from Winnetka and had lived in that northern suburb for years. He and his wife had seven children, four of them already in college. Riley was straining to finance their educations, and this with another three to go. He’d always kept his eye out for the main chance, and in the Monee Park situation he believed he’d found it.
    Although he’d moved fifteen miles and a world away from Canaryville, Riley was remembered there, both envied and respected for his departure from the insular old neighborhood where families had known each other and intermarried for generations. He knew who to call if he wanted to tap into the small talent pool of toughs always ready to create mayhem, whether they were paid for it or not.
    Had Hanratty pressed him for details, Riley would have described the two young men he was now planning to contact: “Brutal bastards who don’t like people, or working, but love money, especially if they’ve stolen it. They’re tougher than your granddad’s toenails,” he’d have said, with a satisfied smile.

Chapter 7
    Aiden Lucarelli walked out of Ogden’s Funeral Home first, a step or two in advance of Denny Shannon. From a distance the two of them, each a blocky five-foot six, wearing jackets with tavern softball team names on the back, looked almost identical. Up close, not so. Lucarelli’s dark eyes were widely spaced, his complexion carrying a Mediterranean tinge. He wore his black hair slicked back and sported one of the trimmed goatee/mustache combinations favored by many Major League baseball pitchers.
    Shannon’s skin was the color of printer paper, his closely set light blue eyes almost slits above cheek bones that stuck out like little shelves. The two of them walked with the thigh-bulging strides of the steroid-using amateur weight lifters they were, their black half boots clicking on the pavement. They were twenty-six years old, first cousins, and best friends since first grade at Holy Rosary parochial school in Canaryville. It was at Holy Rosary that they’d early on became known as “vicious little shits,” a reputation they’d done nothing to diminish in the two decades since.
    Unlike many of their fellow Canaryville residents, Lucarelli and Shannon had not been granted prized employment in the City of Chicago’s Department of Streets and Sanitation, notorious for its paternalism and phantom payrollers, while at the same time home to thousands of hard working citizens. “Streets and San” was replete with patronage sponsored Canaryville men, but Shannon and Lucarelli had been blackballed by the local political powers who deemed them to be too dangerous.
    The cousins worked during Chicago’s warm months on road construction crews. Laid off the rest of the year, they collected unemployment and indulged in pastimes that suited their personalities: house breaking and burglary in some of the ritzy Chicago suburbs, some strong arm work for a local bookie, visits to Rush Street bars where they frequently amused themselves harassing other patrons. They had been permanently barred from three such saloons thus far. The girls they’d occasionally managed to pick up in the bars and take to a nearby motel were usually naive tourists visiting the city.
    Of the two, Shannon had the most severe case of class envy directed toward the well-dressed, college educated young people populating these bars and restaurants. He loved walking down the sidewalk behind women who were talking on their cell phones, brushing them with his shoulder, saying, “Let me talk to him when you’re done.” He had Lucarelli laughing so hard he had to hang on to a parking