Chapter 3
Allison
Sunday, four days later, I enter the bar in Ukrainian Village by the expressway. Old-school, with dark wood and sticky floors and dim lighting.
Jennifer Harper already has a booth in the rear, next to the pool table. She didn’t have to fight a lot of customers for it. She didn’t wait for me to order a drink, either. But that’s Harp. It’s not drinking alone as long as someone else is in the bar.
That was one of the things that burned her at the FBI. But the Bureau’s loss is my gain. There’s no one else I’d use, for law firm work or personal matters, as a private eye.
She half smiles as I approach, looking younger than her mid-forties in her black leather jacket and dangling earrings, short-cropped blond hair with bangs that fall in her face.
“Tell your client he can relax,” she tells me as I take a seat. “He’s in the clear.”
When I reached out to Harp, I wanted her to think I was representing a client.
So I called her on my normal phone, not the burner I use for personal matters.
And I told her as little as possible, just that a client needed this information.
I did all that for a reason: if it’s law firm work, our communications are privileged work product.
“I’m short on time,” I say, when what I really mean is Tell me tell me tell me.
“First off,” she says, “the road-rage guy in the parking lot? He survived. Got a concussion, but nothing more. No spinal injury, nothing permanent.”
I release a quiet breath. Among the many things I’ve contemplated over the last four days, while I waited for a detective or patrol officer to knock on my door, was whether the lead charge would be murder or attempted murder.
“Tell me about him,” I say. “The road-rage guy.”
She flips open a folder. “Name is Marlow Luckett, age thirty-four. High school grad, a laborer, a journeyman. Lives in Cicero, a few towns over from you. Real prince of a guy, this one. Check out his history. Did some time for aggravated battery. Two DUIs. An arrest for sexual assault but never charged. Four, count ’em, four domestic-battery charges, but lo and behold, the complaining witnesses, a girlfriend each time, kept getting bouts of amnesia every time they took the witness stand. ”
That fits to a T the guy who confronted me in the parking lot. I let out a shudder.
“Drives this big-ass yellow truck with jacked-up tires? A Ford F-250?”
“That’s it,” I say. “I mean, that’s…how it was described to me, yes.”
“You know he brought his buddies to the scene?” she says. “Apparently, he called in reinforcements. Whoever your client is, they were going to beat the shite out of him.”
Oh, yes, I remember that he called his friends. But they had something different in mind.
We got ourselves a live one.
“You were right about him being intoxicated, too,” she says.
“They drew blood at the hospital. Marlow’s BAC was double the limit.
Lucky for him he wasn’t driving the vehicle when the cops showed, or he’d be in the joint for another DUI.
Anyway, that level of intoxication, plus the concussion, may account for his less-than-precise description of the assailant.
” She slides a copy of the police report across the table. “Turn to the page I flagged.”
I hold my breath. I find the page in the police report and go straight to the marked line, highlighted by Harp:
Victim described driver as muscular caucasian male mid-30s
I double-blink and read it again. A muscular Caucasian male. This can’t be real. This must be wrong. Marlow Luckett identified the person who hit him as a man?
“Does that generally describe your client?” Harp asks.
I manage to say, “Yes.”
“But only generally,” says Harp. “Nothing to pin down. And in terms of the car he was driving, Marlow could only say it was an SUV. Not a model, not a make, not even a color. Which narrows the suspect vehicle to about six million cars in the greater Chicagoland area.”
I slowly nod, like I’m dispassionately taking in this information, but I feel my life being handed back to me. He identified a muscular man in an unspecified SUV.
“Cops had a lot of questions for Marlow,” she says.
“Like why they found a crowbar lying right next to him. Or why he’d used his truck to pin another car into the corner of the parking lot, which was literally the only conclusion they could possibly draw from the evidence.
His buddies on the scene, Fric and Frac, they just said Marlow called them for help.
For help, like he was in distress.” She smirks.
“What I hear, cops didn’t buy what they were selling. ”
I get it now. I understand why Marlow lied to the cops and said the driver was male.
The same reason his buddies lied. How would that story look in hindsight if he cornered a woman in that parking lot, then called in his friends?
It would look like what really happened.
So he changed the driver to a “muscular male” to recast the whole thing. A fight, not a gang rape.
“I’ve left out the best part,” says Harp. “There were security cameras all over the school’s parking lot. Only, when the cops pulled the security discs from the school later that night, they were all blank. A malfunction or something.” She raises her glass. “Lucky.”
Not luck—Luke. After my call, he ran down and switched out the actual security discs for blank ones.
The next morning, he handed me the security discs in his living room, and I broke them into more pieces than a jigsaw puzzle.
I could get you a hammer, he quipped. We could grind them into a fine powder.
I nod along as Harp speaks, trying to act like a professional. “That is lucky,” I say.
I return to my car and breathe a sigh of relief. I am in the clear. Nobody will ever know what I did. Not Harp. Not Finley. Not even Luke, whom I did not correct when he assumed that it was Finley, not me, who got caught up in this road-rage affair. Nobody will ever know this story but me.
Me and Marlow Luckett.
I haven’t lost sight of what I did. It was not my proudest moment.
I hit a man with my car and left him behind without calling for assistance.
But I surely would have faced criminal charges for hitting him, and he would have known my identity.
I wasn’t willing to jeopardize myself in either way for that monster.
I will let the rest of summer pass. I will be grateful for the bullet I dodged and tolerant of my cheating husband until the fall, when we say goodbye to our son, Grayson, off to college in New York.
Then I will decide what to do with Finley and our train wreck of a marriage. I will decide when to end it. I will decide how to end it. And I will decide how much it will hurt.