Calumet City by Charlie Newton

right shoulder aches like somebody kicked it until they tired. On the bright side, Cisco’s doing fine in the hospital; his voice in my phone an hour ago sounded as smooth as Mel Tillis singing, like painkillers and student nurses were definitely the way to go. He didn’t know I’d been transferred and I didn’t tell him. My new partner finishes the turn and says,
    "Patti Black in the flesh. Either I’ll be dead or make detective by the weekend." He smiles like that’s a compliment. "No offense, but you’re kinda young to be on the job seventeen years."
    Exhale. "Guess so."
    He’s about thirty and surprisingly, not an asshole. I say surprisingly, because he’s wearing light-colored pants and has peppered me with cop slang—attributes one needs to be the TV police, a rank of limited value in a gunfight. He’s also wearing a wedding-ring tan line and has a second gun I can see, but he does have on the right shoes. Shoes tell you a lot about whether a cop plans on working or not. We’re passing buildings that mean nothing to me. Same for the early street gangsters out from Cabrini Green—crack’s a 24/7 business now—that much is the same.
    "Young ’cause of the history, you know, back in the day. LT said you rode with Denny Banahan."
    Denny’s name makes me smile. Denny Banahan didn’t drive a desk like most bosses or field offers from Hollywood. He didn’t mince words either. Denny Banahan showed me and Sonny and every other gunfighter in 6 how to be the police. The gangsters tagged him with "Zorro" and with good reason. If you were a banger, Denny and the law met only occasionally; the rest of the time he was Irish and disinclined toward your rehabilitation.
    "Zorro was one crazed copper. LT said that since Banahan retired back to Homicide, you’re the most decorated cop in the city."
    I tell my window what I tell the reporters, "That’s a misprint. All the old guys who actually worked retired."
    "So, you really work like they say?"
    I glance, knowing what he means, but not where he wants to go with it.
    "Rumor has it there’s a bunch of these shitheads," he nods at the crack crew on the corner, "still alive because you don’t shoot till they make you."
    "That’s what they say, huh? Up here on the Northside?"
    "Yep." No tone change, no bait. "That’s what they say all over."
    This is not the first time I’ve had this discussion. Usually it’s with uniformed patrol officers sporting tight sleeves and hard eyes, peacekeepers who think I’m putting the good guys unnecessarily in danger. "I’ve been where a lot of these folks are; don’t have to hate ’em to arrest ’em."
    He wants to know what I mean, like we’re gonna be best friends and need to share all this shit. I just want to go back to bed and hide. We pass a busted-open section of wall and I see Annabelle Ganz and her hand, hear the whoosh of the steel mills twenty years ago and taste the metal air on my tongue.
    He asks, "That where you’re from, down there in 6?"
    Without thinking, I say, "Calumet City."
    He breaks into a half smile. "You’re
from
Calumet City?"
    Calumet City touches Chicago just the other side of the city’s main sanitary district. Not so much a city as a switching yard for the Michigan Central, B&O, and Penn Central railroads, all shoehorned between the Port of Chicago and the Indiana border. Picture transients, dead elm trees, bust-out strip joints, and pawnshops with no customers. Add smokestack winter all year long, and you’re in Calumet City.
    In its only heyday, my hometown was the Outfit’s prime gambling and vice locale—"The Strip" before the one in Vegas was named. In the ’80s, when I was still there, John Belushi made it famous again as the home of Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues. Belushi got the look down, but the humor was new—there wasn’t one thing funny about it I can remember.
    My new partner tries again. "Calumet City.
No shit?
That’s where Monday’s stinker was from; the one in the wall.