“What were you saying, Mags?” I prompted her.
She blinked a few times as if clearing something, coming back to us. “Oh, um …” She looked at me. “Right. Right. So, I need you on this, Iz. I have a motion to suppress that’s taking a lot of time.”
The other thing Maggie had been doing lately was throwing a lot of casework my way. I appreciated that, since I was a civil lawyer by training now learning the oh-so-different criminal defense world. In general, I would do anything in the world for Maggie. Now that she was my boss, I’d certainly do anything she needed for one of her clients, no matter who they were. Drug lords from Mexico, though? Interesting, sure, but actually representing them? That made me nervous.
But this was my job now, I reminded myself. I had to make a living, and although I’d been on top of the world a year ago, I was far from that now. So, I was a criminal defense lawyer. When Maggie threw work my way, I would perform. Because this was my job. One of them. For better or worse.
I sat up straighter. “You need me on this in what way?” I asked Maggie.
“Well, in the short-term, I need you on the boat. Can you go now?”
2
I have known mad love. And once you have known that sort of thing, you don’t forget. So you don’t lightly enter into it (or what you sense could be it) because you know the absolute high that resides there is matched by a crushing low if it ends.
If you’re fortunate enough that the rest of your life is fairly good, you might think maybe you don’t need that high again. You certainly know you don’t need the crush.
I thought about this as I took a cab down LaSalle Street toward the Chicago River and the boat owned by the Cortaderos. I thought about how I had started to tell my boyfriend, Theo, that I loved him when I knew he couldn’t hear me—when he was asleep, when he was in the shower with the water pounding, when he worked on his laptop and the music from his earphones (some combination hip-hop, head-banging-type stuff) was so loud and screeching, it leaked into the room.
“Love you …” I’d say, my voice low, testing the feel of the words, experiencing a slight thrill and at the same time relief that Theo had no idea I was uttering them. Really, was I ready to go there?
It’s such a cliché when people say they’re “not ready” after getting out of a big relationship, but hell if I didn’t understand that concept now. Sam, my former fiancé, and I had broken up a little over a year ago. Then we’d considered and rejected putting our relationship back together at the end of the summer. (That’s making it sound easy. It wasn’t. But life’s struggles are always more simple in the rearview mirror.)
What I’ve learned is that plans only exist in the quiet space of our minds, because the fact is, the universe doesn’t respect them. Or at least the gods in my universe don’t. So I had taken great pains to weed the term fiancé from my vernacular, just like I was cleaning it of that plan thing. But also, if I were honest, I was unsure if Theo would return the sentiment.
A few months ago, we decided to call each other boyfriend and girlfriend. I had blurted it out unintentionally once during a fairly random discussion. Panic had flooded my brain at what Theo might think, but he just smiled that sexy smile of his and called me his girlfriend, over and over again. Never before had that word made every inch of my body tingle.
Now we were using the terms loosely—boyfriend, girlfriend. But I kept asking myself, what would the three words—those three little, but oh-so-big, words—do to him?
My cell phone bleated from my purse, as skyscrapers on LaSalle streaked across the cab window in a smear of white and gray.
I snatched the cell phone out of my bag, keen to get away from my musings. “Hello?”
“McNeil. I need you for a thing.” Ah, Mayburn. I could always count on him to dispense with the pleasantries.
“What kind of thing?”
John Mayburn was the private detective I occasionally moonlighted for. It was sometimes fun, though often I found myself in big, big trouble and had to do a fast scramble to escape. But Mayburn had helped me way too much to not at least listen. Plus, my father worked for him now.
“Super easy,” he said. “I need you to dress kinda … well, slutty and then open a checking account at a bank in the Loop tomorrow morning. Simple.”
I stopped myself from rolling my eyes. Nothing was ever simple with Mayburn. A simple undercover retail job at a lingerie store had almost gotten me killed once. “What aren’t you telling me, Mayburn?”
“Lots of stuff. But seriously, that’s all we need you to do. Christopher and I have the rest covered.”
Christopher. My dad and Mayburn had the rest covered. My world was so weird.
“All right,” I said. “Text me the info.”
A year ago, I almost married Sam. Shortly after, I’d been accused of a friend’s death. Then the father I thought was gone had returned. It had been a hell of a year.
But really, my life was returning to normal now. I was a full-time lawyer again. I had a wonderfully hot boyfriend. And the first holiday of the season, Thanksgiving, was just two and a half weeks away. What harm could a little P.I. work do?
3
By the time I reached the dock at murky Lower Wacker Avenue in the shadows of the Merchandise Mart, any contents of the riverboat were gone, removed, wiped out.
I headed toward a government evidence tech who was wearing gloves and a mask. I tried to put an officious jaunt to my walk, a concerned look on my face. “I’m here on behalf of the Cortaderos.”
“Better you than me.”
I asked him a couple of questions. He claimed not to know anything or have any information.
I climbed back over the ramp to the dock and called Maggie.
I waited for quick directives, sharp orders—that was the way Maggie usually worked. But this time she only said, “Umm …” Then nothing.
“Mags, I need some help here.”
She sighed. “Okay, ask for the warrant,” she said. “Be indignant.”
Back over the boat ramp, and I did as ordered. No luck from the tech. His boss had the warrant, he said, but his boss was nowhere to be found.
I called Maggie again.
“Order them off the boat,” she said.
“Can I do that?”
“Yep.”
“Really?”
“Yep.” Maggie mentioned a couple of federal statutes having to do with evidence collection, warrants and search-and-seizure that the government techs were clearly running afoul of.
“Sounds fun,” I said, and I meant it. I stood a second, thinking how much my career had altered. Instead of representing refined, elegant media moguls, I was now representing a Mexican drug cartel family. Instead of going into TV stations to negotiate contracts, I was going into a big, ol’ boat that had just recently held a big, ol’ pile of drugs. And I was about to throw some figurative muscle around.
I clapped my hands like a player in a huddle. “Break,” I said under my breath.
Once again, I was back on the boat, and this time, I raised my voice. I rattled off the statutes, hoping I was getting them right. Maggie must have nailed it because the evidence tech stopped and glared. He knew