Start Shooting Read online

  Also by Charlie Newton

  Calumet City

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While there may be similarities, the words, deeds, beliefs, and/or opinions of all characters herein are fictional and have no connection whatsoever to the actual person whose name they may share or upon whom they may be based, nor does the actual person adopt, express, or acknowledge agreement with any words, deeds, beliefs, and/or opinions of said fictional characters herein.

  Copyright © 2012 by Charlie Newton

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Lyrics from “Mornin’ Ain’t Comin’ ” by Kenny Herbert

  (www.kennyherbertmusic.co.uk).

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corp. and Georges Borchardt, Inc. on behalf of the Estate of Tennessee Williams for permission to reprint excerpts from A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, copyright © 1947 by The University of the South. All rights reserved.

  Jacket design by Emily Mahon

  Jacket photograph © Grove Pashley / Photographer’s Choice / Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Newton, Charlie.

  Start shooting : a novel / Charlie Newton. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Police—Fiction. 2. Corruption—Fiction. 3. Crime—Fiction. 4. Race relations—Fiction. 5. Brothers—Fiction. 6. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3614.E73S73 2011

  813’.6—dc22

  2011002844

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53470-3

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Chicago

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Bobby and Arleen’s novel is about hopes and dreams, the bet-it-all contracts that either propel you through the fire or burn you to death. If not for the backstage, to-the-bone candor of several remarkable individuals, the pages that follow couldn’t go where they go.

  ON BEING AN ACTRESS

  Anne Johns and Kaaren Ochoa

  ON BEING THE POLICE

  Denny “Ten-Inch” Banahan, Bobby Vargas, Jason Cowin, Bob Anderson, and Patti Black

  THE THEATER

  Kevin Nance

  THE EDITORS (HARD, SOULLESS MEN WHO TORTURED INSECTS AS CHILDREN)

  Easy Ed Stackler and Don McQuinn

  THE READERS (COUSINS OF THE HARD, SOULLESS MEN WHO TORTURED INSECTS AS CHILDREN)

  F1 & F2: Sharon & Doug Bennett, Brian Rodgers, Big Jean Viallet, Catriona Kennedy, and Billy Thompson

  AND MY PAL

  Bill Owens

  CHICAGO

  The girl was thirteen and Irish, and fashioned out of sunlight so bright she made you believe in angels. The box was older, made from the same steel that armored battleships. It held momentous sins; the dark, grisly legacy of a terrified empire in ruin.

  Seven thousand miles and thirty-seven years separated their burials, the box in a reinforced granite cave on the east end of Hokkaido Island, Japan; the girl in a velveteen-lined coffin at 111th and Central.

  Give a Nobel laureate this year’s NASA budget and every witch in New England and there’s no way he could marry the two. Maybe the tarot readers in Chinatown saw Pandora coming—God knows they love that mystical shit more than money—but I didn’t. I didn’t see the murders of my friends. I didn’t see the stacks of life-out blood money. I didn’t see people I loved forcing me into a box so dark your soul melts.

  Nineteen years I’ve been a ghetto cop and thought I’d worked every heartbreaking, horror combination possible. But I hadn’t. I wasn’t marginally prepared for how bad six days could get. And neither was anyone else.

  SIX DAYS AGO

  OFFICER BOBBY VARGAS

  FRIDAY, 10:00 AM

  Black, white, brown, or yellow, on Chicago’s South Side, your neighborhood is your surname. Put on a gun belt, a suit, or a nun’s habit, and all you did was accessorize.

  For those of you exiting the ’L near Eighteenth and Laflin in the Four Corners, the etiquette is: grab a length of rebar, scratch a cross in the concrete, set both feet solid in the quadrant that best fits your skin tone, lean back, and start shooting. Welcome to Chicago, the “2016 Olympic City.” We’re glad you’re here.

  How Olympic? We have the best hot dogs, best pizza, worst baseball team, six months of weather that would give pause to a statue, and a river we dye green on St. Patrick’s Day because we can. If the IOC could possibly require more, page two is fourteen miles of sandy beaches, blues bars that actually play the blues, icebergs in the winter, four racetracks, and street gangs with twenty thousand members. Think of Chicago as Club Med, but with issues. Wear clean underwear and socks in case there’s an accident, and you’re good to go.

  On a good day.

  Which, unfortunately, today isn’t. Chicago isn’t California-broke/bankrupt, but we’re guaranteed citywide layoffs, school closings, and half-staff hospitals if we don’t win the 2016 Olympic rebid now that Rio folded. Because our civic karma is a bit spotty, we’re submitting our rebid during a Latino gang war on the West Side that won’t stop making headlines, telling the IOC they’d be lots happier in Tokyo.

  A Chicago defeat is worse than bad, but I/we have larger problems. Outsiders have come to the Four Corners. Outsiders who don’t understand that some history will kill you dead if you don’t leave it alone. These people weren’t here twenty-nine years ago. I was.

  Right over there, winter of 1982.

  Above the unpatched asphalt and broken glass, in those four-story brick tenements.

  It was cold and dead silent then; it’s a hundred and six now. Frayed curtains flutter through windows propped open with No. 10 cans. Sharp voices bark from inside, blending with radios singing songs and making promises in three languages. Beneath the windows, lowriders and highriders idle their Chevys and pickups at their respective curbs, eyeing each other for insults they work overtime trying to see. Their neighborhood runs on friction, blame, violence, and reprisal.

  America, the great melting pot? That’s where Mayor Daley said we were headed when I grew up here, before the ’68 and ’72 riots changed everything. The truth is, that version of America is dead. We’re the Balkans now, waving foreign flags from an idyllic old country that wasn’t there when we left.

  I lived two blocks from here when the riots went off, around the corner behind St. Dominick’s. Grew up singin
g in the kitchen with my mom; wore what no longer fit my brother, Ruben; snuck Pall Malls from my father’s pack before lung cancer and his two years in Korea finally killed him; and combed my hair as American as I knew how. We had a flag on our stoop every day it wasn’t raining and I put it out there. My dad and I would stand at the flag, shoulder to waist, and salute it. I miss him and the country he died for, every morning when his picture watches me buckle on the body armor and 9-millimeter.

  When I was a toddler, the Four Corners was home to “Ricans”—any shade of brown was considered Puerto Rican, like we’d all gotten off the same boat in Humboldt Park. Back then three other groups made up the neighborhood: shanty Irish, the I-talians who never made it to Taylor Street, and a sprinkling of Lithuanians from what they called Jewtown. The blacks were expanding toward us from the north and west but weren’t here yet. Residents of the Four Corners didn’t live on an island, more of a refugee camp with bad history and worse on the way. Not to say that blacks caused what happened. Everybody caused it.

  To the south, the Chicago River kept us away from the bungalows of Mayor Daley’s working-class, but way better-off, Bridgeport. If you were Irish and beholden to the Daley Machine but hadn’t achieved working class yet, then you lived farther south, beyond the parking lots and souvenir sellers of Comiskey Park, in violent, insular Canaryville. If you were Irish and aspired to be beholden to the Daley Machine but were too poor or not tough enough for Canaryville, you lived across the river with us “Ricans” in the Four Corners; you listened to the White Sox on a neighbor’s radio, drank Hamm’s Beer on your stoop, and nights someone in your family mopped blood in the stockyards until it closed for good in ’71.

  To our east, fourteen elevated lanes of Dan Ryan Expressway and a hundred years of urban legend separated us from the First Ward. Within its boundaries the patronage jobs were doled out, as were the graft and violence necessary to run a major American city. The river ran through the First Ward’s heart, ferrying goods to and from what was once the third-largest port in the world. Planes from the world’s busiest airport flew over the First Ward. All the money coming into or out of Chicago made a stop in the First Ward. Big-boss aldermen brokered the city’s future, beginning with Kenna and Bathhouse John, and ending with Toddy Pete Steffen who’s still a kingmaker. One block farther east of Toddy Pete’s dominion was Chinatown, but when I was a kid that trek meant braving the First Ward so Chinatown might as well have been fifty miles by camel.

  To the north we could breathe a little; the Burlington Northern Railroad merely separated us from Jewtown—“Maxwell Street” we called it—a crosshatch of sweaty jangling street market where drinking-age restrictions hadn’t caught on and goods-and-services warranties weren’t given or implied. Jewtown we “Puerto Ricans” could go to if we were careful, which being young we weren’t, until the riots changed the rules.

  On Sundays, Muddy and Junior and Howlin’ Wolf and anybody you could name played Maxwell and Halsted. Black men sportin’ canary-yellow fedoras and girls on each arm mixed with nervous teenagers shopping for Mexican switchblades and factory-reject cowboy boots. Men with the musicians had walking sticks with voodoo heads and their women had nickel-plated revolvers. On the corner, Jim’s Original grilled onions and Polish sausages all day. Nighttime white girls arched their backs under high-piled wigs, wore boots and tiny shorts and looked at you too long. The blues singers sang with half-a-man in each pocket, sipped those bottles between two fingers and each song till they were empty—song, bottle, and man.

  Maxwell looked sort of like Eighteenth and Laflin does now, but acted way different. Fred Hampton of the Panthers was dead; so was Martin Luther King and the tension was high, but Sunday was a black/white truce day and Maxwell Street was the DMZ. Just before my big brother Ruben became a cop, he found me my first music-industry job sweeping the sidewalk out front of 831 West Maxwell at Maxwell Radio and Records—a real nice Jewish guy owned it, Bern Abrams and his wife, Idell-Idy. Ruben was their friend, made it a point that all the bad guys knew.

  A week into my music career sweeping the sidewalk, Ruben walked out with three-hundred-pound Chicago legend Chester Arthur Burnett, the Howlin’ Wolf himself, harmonica in one world-class hand, guitar in the other. Howlin’ Wolf called me by name, took my broom, and slung his guitar over my shoulder. Un-freakin’-believable. Told me playin’ was better than sweepin’; that he’d done a truckload of both and knew whereof he spoke.

  Howlin’ Wolf’s why I bought my first guitar. Okay, it was the girls, but Howlin’ Wolf was second. Big brother Ruben rode with me to a pawnshop in his friend’s squad car the very next day and put up half the money; told the steel-eyed man behind the counter I was good for the other half. And ever since a guitar’s been my answer to the day’s questions.

  My guitar didn’t save Maxwell Street, long gone to “urban renewal,” and it hasn’t saved the blues from rap, although I’m trying. The Four Corners has hasn’t fared well, either. Out here I have to be Officer Vargas, but you can call me Bobby. Actually, if you’re a girl and like weekend guitar players, you can call me whatever you’d like. Toss in one of those pouty smiles or a three-star hair move, or just clap real loud while everyone else is talking, and I’m yours till you’re tired.

  I’m not quite your rock-star moment? Well, this guitarist has done a demo/session-player audition at Wolfe City Recording Studio, ground zero for the blues after Chess Records closed. Granted Wolfe City hasn’t called back yet, possibly because I stood in the outer office drooling on the framed, autographed eight-by-tens and album covers for an hour, trembling like it was first confession day at St. Dom’s. But Wolfe City will call, you’ll see. And then it’s “Stairway to Heaven” time. Get me the full pompadour, Ray-Ban 2140s, thin black tie—baby. Makes me shiver just thinking about it.

  Unfortunately my district’s taxpayers, all the bangers, and most of my coworkers don’t see my future as clearly as I do; they think I’m just another pretty face. What I am is almost forty-two, the divorced father of two German shepherds—one of whom I miss—a failed Catholic, and speaker of street Spanish with some difficulty. My parents were both born in Mexico and my mom spoke lyrical Spanish every day of her life, so some in the Hispanic section of the Four Corners call my language issue a mental block. Others aren’t as kind.

  Some in the neighborhood also say I have a problem with professionalism in certain situations. This might be true; I have received CR numbers (complaint registers) a hundred and sixteen times in nineteen years. Sounds like a lot, but it’s less than one a month and not bad if you beat them. If you don’t beat them, a hundred and sixteen would be a hundred and ten too many. Do I give a shit? Well, yeah, I enjoy beating the crap out of ghetto people.

  Just kidding; we talk sort of tough down here. However, I do find some pleasure in trading punches with assholes, Hispanic gangsters in particular. Any gangster would do, but other than the Four Corners, the 12th District is almost exclusively Hispanic gangs, my homeys, many of whom I’ve known since they were shorties. They consider me a traitor; I have suggested they tighten up the hairnets and drive their ’62 Chevys south a thousand miles, learn to eat sand and iguanas, then come back and see which country they like better. I also insult black, white, and Asian gangsters, but not as well. A cultural bias? Only if you consider street gangs with twenty thousand members a culture.

  SIREN. Then another. A blue-and-white wails past the alley’s mouth, a Crown Vic right behind him. A four-foot-tall tough guy backs away from the cars and into the alley’s mouth—flannel shirt, baggies, white sneakers. I pull my SIG Sauer, slide it under my leg, and pop my siren. The kid spins fast, almost falls, IDs the car, and digs in to run.

  “Little Paul. Get your ass over here.”

  Little Paul freezes, eyes cutting, trying to choose between whatever scared him into the alley or me, his seven-year-old brain not quite up to the task.

  “Now.”

  Little Paul unfreezes, pimp rolls to my front bumper, eyes
me through the windshield, then cups his balls. He walks dented fender to my window where he stops and stands one shoulder lower than the other. The smooth brown face says, “Me llamo Pachito.”

  “Your name’s Paul. You’re an American, in America. You speak English.”

  His head, even with the do-rag and flat-bill ball cap, barely makes the bottom of my window. But he be bad, baby. Squint-eyed, teeth bit together, don’t-fuck-with-me bad. “Me llamo Pachito … Ramera.” Ramera means bitch. As in, that’s what I am.

  “All ganged up, huh? Your brother still dead? Your father? How’s that working out for them?”

  Little Paul steps back and taps his chest with three fingers extended on both hands. KK—King Killers, street mythology that says his set kills Latin Kings on sight; doctrine that’s almost as stupid as the WTC-9/11-let’s-bomb-some-firemen ayatollahs.

  “Your ma still working four jobs so you can wear those rags? Hang with these losers?”

  “Mi madre—”

  “Speak English, you little fuck, or I’ll throw your ass in those trash cans.”

  He looks away—fuck you in street Spanish.

  I pop the door, knock him off-balance, and exit, SIG 9 in hand. “Hands on the tire.”

  He does. Seven years old, a second grader, and he knows how to be arrested. And social workers wonder why this gang shit pisses cops off.

  “Gimme the rock or I make you strip.”

  “TAC cops can’t do that. Gotta call Juvy.”

  “I’ll call the Sisters of Providence, too. But that’ll be right after I fuck you in the ass. The rock or strip. One or the other. Now.”

  He does neither. I rip the dope out of his pockets and the pocket liners with it. Fourteen bags that should’ve been in his mouth but his mouth is too small. Ten dollars apiece. My left hand twists his shirt to his neck and spins him around to face me. My right hand holsters the SIG, then rubs black from my front tire. With my index finger I make a black dot on his forehead. Ash Wednesday for bangers.

  “You tell Danny Vacco I catch you walking his dope again, I put a bullet in his head.” My index finger taps the dot. “Right. Fucking. There.”