Even so, I pushed the car to seventy, as if I could outrun my irritability. Mary Louise, cop instincts still strong, raised a protest when we floated off the crest of the hill at Montrose. I braked obediently and slowed for our exit. The Trans Am was ten, with the dents and glitches to prove it, but it still hugged corners like a python. It was only at the traffic lights on Foster that you could hear a wheeze in the engine.
As we headed west into Uptown, the loneliness of the night lifted: beer cans and drunks emerged from the shadows. The city changes character every few blocks around here, from the enclave of quiet family streets where Mary Louise lives, to an immigrant landing stage where Russian Jews and Hindus improbably mix, to a refuse heap for some of Chicago’s most forlorn; closest to the lake is where Uptown is rawest. At Broadway we passed a man urinating behind the same Dumpsters where a couple was having sex.
Mary Louise glanced over her shoulder to make sure Emily was still asleep. “Go up to Balmoral and over; it’s quieter.”
At the intersection a shadow of a man was holding a grimy sign begging for food. He wove an uncertain thread through the oncoming headlights. I slowed to a crawl until I was safely past him.
Away from Broadway most of the streetlights were gone, shot out or just not replaced. I didn’t see the body in the road until I was almost on top of it. As I stood on the brakes, steering hard to the left, Mary Louise screamed and grabbed my arm. The Trans Am spun across the street and landed against a fire hydrant.
“Vic, I’m sorry. Are—are you okay? It’s a person, I thought you were going to run over him. And Emily, my God—” She unbuckled her seat belt with shaking fingers.
“I saw him,” I said in a strangled voice. “I was stopping. What could yanking my arm do to help with that?”
“Mary Lou, what’s wrong?” Emily was awake in the backseat, her voice squeaky with fear.
Mary Louise had leapt out of the car into the back with Emily while I still was fumbling with my own seat belt. Emily was more frightened than injured. She kept assuring Mary Louise she was fine and finally climbed out of the car to prove it. Mary Louise probed her neck and shoulders while I fished a flashlight out of my glove compartment.
Assured of Emily’s safety, Mary Louise hurried to the figure in the road. Professional training pushed the four beers she’d drunk during the evening to the back of her brain. Her stumbling gait on her way to the figure was due to the same shock that made my own legs wobble when I finally found the flashlight and joined her—we hadn’t been going fast enough to get hurt.
“Vic, it’s a woman, and she’s barely breathing.”
In the light of my flash I could see that the woman was very young. She was dark, with thick black hair tumbled about a drawn face. Her breath came in bubbling, rasping sobs, as if her lungs were filled with fluid. I’d heard that kind of breathing when my father was dying of emphysema, but this woman looked much too young for such an illness.
I pointed the light at her chest, as if I might be able to detect her lungs, and recoiled in horror. The front of her dress was black with blood. It had oozed through the thin fabric, sticking it to her body like a large bandage. Dirt and blood streaked her arms; her left humerus poked through the skin like a knitting needle out of a skein of wool. Perhaps she had wandered in front of a car, too dazed by heroin or Wild Rose to know where she was.
“Vic, what’s wrong?” Emily had crept close and was shivering next to me.
“Sugar, she’s hurt and we need to get her help. There are towels in the trunk, bring those while I call an ambulance.”
The best antidote for fear is activity. Emily’s feet crunched across broken glass back to the car while I pulled out my mobile phone and called for help.
“You take the towels; I’ll deal with the emergency crew.” Mary Louise knew what to say to get paramedics to the scene as fast as possible. “It looks like a hit–and–run victim, bad. We’re at Balmoral and—and—”
I finished covering the woman’s feet and ran to the corner for the street name. Glenwood, just east of Ashland. A car was about to turn into the street; I waved it on. The driver yelled that he lived there, but I took on the aura of my traffic–cop father and barked out that the street was closed. The driver swore at me but moved on. A few minutes later an ambulance careened around the corner. A squad car followed, blue strobes blinding us.
The paramedics leapt into efficient action. As they attached the woman to oxygen and slid her smoothly into the ambulance, a crowd began to gather, the mixed faces of Uptown: black, Middle Eastern, Appalachian. I scanned them, trying to pinpoint someone who seemed more avid than the rest, but it was hard to make out expressions when the only light came from the reds and blues of the emergency strobes. A couple of girls in head scarves were pointing and chattering; an adult erupted from a nearby walk–up, slapped one of them, and yanked them both inside.