The Chicago Way by Michael Harvey

was at least thirty feet.
    “Unless our suspect is Carl Lewis,” I said, “I’m guessing he took a pass.”
    Rodriguez shined his light down to the pavement. Just in case our guy thought he could fly. No body crumpled in a heap below.
    “Shit,” the detective muttered.
    I pointed to the El tracks crouched alongside the building.
    “What do you think?”
    Rodriguez’s flashlight found a service ladder bolted to the side of the tracks and within arm’s length of the roof’s edge.
    “Let’s go,” he said.
    We swung up the ladder and onto the tracks for Chicago’s Brown Line. Rodriguez shined his light on a thick piece of metal running alongside the main set of tracks.
    “Third rail, Kelly. Not good.”
    The third rail powers Chicago’s El, offering six hundred volts of heavy-duty current and instant death to anyone who touches it. I gave the rail a wide berth.
    “If he came up here, he probably headed south,” I said. “Away from the crime scene.”
    Rodriguez nodded and we started out at a jog. The next El stop was Diversey, maybe a half mile distant. The flashlight gave us two or three feet worth of yellow space. Otherwise our vision was limited to ribbons of streetlight cutting across steel. I felt a vibration under my feet, then the rumble of a train, still in the distance. We stopped and listened.
    “Which way is it headed?”
    “Not sure,” Rodriguez said. “We should be all right if it’s on our side. Plenty of room for it to get by.”
    I was glad he thought so but didn’t say anything. The rumble stopped. The train was probably picking up passengers. In the ensuing quiet, I heard a stumble, maybe a curse, then a footfall.
    “He’s out there,” I said.
    Rodriguez began to move forward again. Twenty yards later we made out the first outlines of a person, just a black smudge slipping along the far side of the tracks. In the distance the rumble began again and picked up steam.
    “Can we catch him?” Rodriguez said.
    I was a miler in high school. With a strong wind, on a good track, I can still clip off a six-minute mile. On train tracks, in the black of night, with six hundred volts humming two feet to my right, maybe not quite that fast.
    “Give me the flash,” I said.
    It was probably a quarter mile now to the next platform. I guessed our guy was maybe two hundred yards ahead. The only good news: I had a light and he didn’t. I settled into a run that was more of a lope. Behind me, the rumble had died again as the El train stopped at Belmont. I dodged a rat that scurried across the tracks and picked up my pace. I had a good sweat going now and could see a jumble of yellow up ahead. Diversey. I stopped just short of the platform, looked, and listened. The elevated was surrounded by taller buildings here, commercial stuff, cutting off any light from the street. There was no creeping, no scratching, no sound of movement. Then the rumble started up again. Much closer. I looked back as a flash of white came around a sudden corner. The 7:05 Brown Line express was right on time.
    I sprinted the last twenty yards and scrambled up onto the platform. Ten people were passing the time in various stages of waiting. One couple made out on a bench in a corner. Three people had headphones on, eyes closed, tapping away to their internal rhythms. Two people read the Trib; one, the Sun-Times. Another typed away furiously on his BlackBerry, waited, laughed furiously to himself, and typed away some more. Finally, there was one woman, alone on an island, talking to herself, never waiting for a response. None of the ten struck me as a desperate killer. Even worse, none took the slightest notice of yours truly, emerging from the soup of a Chicago night with a gun in one hand and flashlight in the other.
    Thirty seconds after I arrived, the train roared through the station without slowing an inch. Twenty seconds after that, Rodriguez climbed up from the depths.
    “That was fun,” he said.
    “Had to check it