Penance: A Chicago Thriller by Dan O'Shea Read Free Book Online

right thing, kid, calling me,” said Riley. “What’s your name again? Hasty?”
    Clarke could hear the ridicule in his voice, the alpha-male bullshit, Riley having to mark his territory, make sure the east-coast punk knew who was sucking hind tit.
    “Hastings.”
    “Right, Hastings. What is that, some kind of family thing?”
    “Something like that,” said Clarke.
    Riley was over by the far wall, turning off the thermostat. “You wanna open those windows for me, Hastings?”
    “Why? It must be ten degrees outside.” Almost 10.00pm, and the temperature had been dropping all night.
    “Time of death, kid. Stuff happens with stiffs. Don’t ask me the particulars, I don’t know. But whatever it is, it happens slower if they’re cold. Gives us more time to work out what happened here.”
    Clarke looked at the mostly naked corpses, sniffed the smell of sex in the air. “Don’t we know what happened here?”
    “Looks like Junior was a rump ranger. Stosh here, well, Stosh’d fuck a toasted cheese sandwich – especially if the sandwich was just working out which way its bread was buttered. Especially if the sandwich wasn’t really sure it wanted to get fucked yet. Stosh liked em hurt and confused, liked fucking them, liked fucking them up even better. That way, he’d have em on a string, and he could pull it whenever he wanted. Looks like maybe he pulled a little too hard. Looks like Junior got pissed. That’s the rough draft, anyway.”
    “Rough draft?”
    “First shit happens, then history gets written down. Got a guy on his way’s gonna look things over, decide what history is.”
    “He who controls the present,” Clarke said.
    “Yeah, well, you, me, and Orwell, we’re gonna go see the old man.” Riley looked over, saw Clarke looking at him. “What, you think I can’t read?”
    Clarke was thinking, if they put the fix in, I may still have a play here.
     
    Mayor Hurley stood looking out the window of his spacious, spartan office on the fifth floor of City Hall, facing the plaza to the east, where the new Picasso sculpture stood. The wind drove small, scattered flecks of snow through the spotlights that lit the sculpture.
    The mayor was so different from the son. Junior had been tall, lean, dark Irish. The mayor was short, stocky, ruddy, yet emanated power like a scent. Clarke had never understood the relationship between father and son. The son was devoted to ending the corrupt politics for which his father was practically the Platonic form. No real emotional connection between them that Clarke could see – no real emotional connection between the mayor and anyone. But the mayor put the full force of his machine behind the son, and the son had an intense personal loyalty to his father.
    “Fucking statue, still don’t get it,” said Hurley.
    “Pardon?”
    “The Picasso. Junior’s idea, you know. Public art, he says, so we can be a great city, like New York or Paris. Like we ain’t a great city already. Like I gotta put a fucking steel monkey in the middle of the Loop so we can be a great city.”
    “Picasso is genius. Subjective as individual works may be, to have his work on so prominent a stage.”
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Make all the art critics in the world gush about us. Course you could move all the art critics in the world into the same damn place and you wouldn’t have a city, you’d have a village, cause there’s maybe a couple hundred of em, and the village wouldn’t need an idiot. And then they’d all starve cause they don’t know how to do nothing. What I like about it? The Picasso? I look out on a nice day in the summer, and I see the kids climbing up that slanty part at the bottom and sliding down. Got the parents standing there, trying to figure out is it a baboon or what, and their kids play on it. I like that. Some guy from the Art Institute came to tell me I gotta keep them kids off it, that it was sacrilege or some shit. Scrawny atheist fuck in my office talking about