Read Calumet City for Free Online Page B

hair rises on my neck. If I carried a cannon like my Magnificent Seven partners, I could shoot through all three booths. Hell, I could shoot through an engine block. The GD lounging starts to turn, his shoulders coming with his cap.
    Heartbeats. If this is it, this is it…
    The front door fills with Sonny Barrett and, "Yo, Anne, baby, how you doin’?" Sonny has both eyes on the GDs and one hand visible. The lounger eyes him back; the one facing me shifts just his eyes to Sonny’s voice, then back to me, and right at me this time.
    Sonny passes their booth too slow to be polite, nods less so, and says, "Gentlemen."
    The lounger raises his chin. Sonny steps to a stool, leans his back on the counter, and shows his gun hand full and a thick finger on the trigger. The grin doesn’t match his bloodshot eyes, but Sonny’s voice is happy. "Anne, how ’bout some coffee?"
    Anne steps between Sonny and one of the GDs to pour their coffee. Not the move I would’ve made. Anne is smart but has less fear than she should, and once chased a ticket walker three blocks. Got her ass kicked too.
    Sonny hard-eyes the GDs, but bitches about me, "You
gotta
sit by the window?"
    It’s where I always sit.
    The GDs don’t touch their coffee. We all sit and wonder what’s next. Sonny announces to no one in particular, "Funerals ain’t today, no reason to be all jacked till then. Me? Shit, I’d grab a forty and forget about it. Maybe some bitches too. Party, you know, till it’s time."
    The GDs don’t look at him. Both get up. Both glance at me. And leave. The last of their oversize jackets passes through the door and Sonny says to me, "
Get the fuck out of the window
. Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you?"
    I dip the cold toast instead of answering. Sonny cuts to the Seventy-fourth Street windows, waiting for the gunship. I figure to hit the floor beneath the sill if it happens. If not, still being in the window when they pass reinforces what I’ve been telling this neighborhood since they were schoolboys. "I live here too, homes. Me
and
you."
    Anne has remembered where she works and found a reason to be in the kitchen. A blue-black Impala slow-passes on Seventy-fourth and the driver stares—he isn’t one of the two who were inside—not a good sign. The Impala waits on traffic that isn’t there while the driver makes sure that I am, then makes a slow right onto Ashland. The cook behind Sonny acknowledges the tension; it’s tight across his face and chest, the stained apron deflating when he lets the breath go. I know why I’m working down here, but honestly have no idea why he is.
    Sonny asks for coffee again, slips into the booth, and says, "The mayor, huh? They think
these shitheads
tried to clip him? Put fucking Ayatollah Gibbons in office?"
    My toast stops mid-arc. I add two blinks and wait for Sonny to continue. He doesn’t. The bread is raisin and more aged than toasted. Sonny’s a lot of things, most of them A-male Irish and blunt to the point of painful, but he isn’t telepathic. I know better than to bite on anything but the toast, so that’s what I do.
    Sonny accepts coffee from Anne in a cracked cup, comments on her having lost weight since yesterday, and turns to me. "The mayor, right?"
    "The mayor…what?"
    "Somebody did try to kill him, remember?" Sonny’s eyes are ponds. "
Jaze,
I feel like shit. Drank half the night with Cisco. Boy’s got every nurse in that building working his room."
    "You called me, remember?"
    "Cisco called you?"
    "You."
    "Cisco called me?"
    I check my toast. "How’d you pass the sergeant’s exam? Your cousin take it?"
    Sonny winces at the coffee, then frowns an inch over his shoulder toward the kitchen, as far as his neck allows. "So, what’d he say?"
    "Who?"
    "Cochise. Who the fuck do you think?"
    I try a change of subject, one I’d prefer not to broach but can’t help needing to know more, if there is more. "The body in the wall, they ID her yet?"
    Sonny says, "Ask the