Hope Rides Again by Andrew Shaffer

Author:Andrew Shaffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quirk Books
Published: 2019-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

28

Barack joined me in the front of the store and handed me a stocking cap. He put one on—gifts from our new friend.

There were, Barack had once told me, two truly spectacular months in Chicago: June and October. Today wasn’t bad, though. You couldn’t ask for better weather to do a little amateur detective work in.

I knew it wasn’t going to last. When the front passed, another long, deep freeze would set in that wouldn’t lift until April or May, and only then to make way for freezing rain. God bless Chicago, they still played baseball outdoors. The way America’s pastime was meant to be played. Playing indoors was blasphemy, like low-fat ice cream.

While we waited on a cab, I asked Barack what he’d told Morrison.

“About Roswell?” Barack said. “You know I can’t tell you that, Joe. That’s classified information, on a need-to-know basis. You’re better off not knowing.”

“You’re saying that you told him? The truth?”

The taxi interrupted us, and Barack didn’t say another word about it. I didn’t want to bring it up, even with the closed partition between us and the driver. By the time we reached our destination, I had other mysteries on my mind.

The address we’d found online turned out to be a laundromat in the middle of a block of low-rise brick buildings. I looked from my phone to the address and back again. “GPS says this is it. Maybe it closed down?”

Barack rubbed his chin. “Could be in an alley behind the building. Or…”

He went inside without completing his thought.

Three commercial dryers were running. A college-age girl was sitting at a table, head down in a Gillian Flynn paperback. Barack marched right on through the laundromat. He stopped at a navy-blue police phone-call kiosk, the freestanding kind they used to have in Great Britain. It was tucked into a corner. Was there a phone inside that connected to the Chicago PD? Had the longhair sent us here on some sort of wild moose chase?

Barack opened the kiosk and turned to me. “Ever been to a speakeasy?”

“Just how old do you think I am?”

“I’ll let you go first,” he said, ushering me into the box. It was bigger on the inside than it looked, and opened to a wide staircase leading up to the second floor. A single light—an “Edison” bulb—hung from the ceiling on the landing, giving off a warm orange glow.

I pounded on the metal door at the top of the steps, eager to get this over with. We shouldn’t have shrugged off Barack’s Service detail. Who knew what was lurking behind this door? We could have been walking into a trap. Now that we weren’t tethered to security, we were exposed. Naked. Not as naked as I’d been in the sauna, but close to it.

“What happens when there’s a fire, and the fire department doesn’t think to go through a phone booth looking for an address?” I asked Barack. “How do all these businesses in Chicago make money without signs? Who are they trying to fool?”

“I’d imagine that if there’s a fire, they’d follow the smoke.

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