Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

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