Page 84 of Fade Out
It sounded terrible, but I couldn’t help wishing I’d done a better job of killing her. I’d thwarted her again. She was going to be very angry. I was going to have to stay away from Brian. And Sugar. And Terry. And anyone else I cared about even a little.
“You need to throw it away,” Brian said, when we’d gotten as far as Fullerton.
“What?” I asked.
“You need to throw the knife away. Somewhere they’ll never find it.”
“Where?”
“Go west,” he suggested. “Cut over to a major street like Lincoln or Ashland.”
I turned on Diversey and began heading west. “What are we looking for?”
“I don’t know. An alley? Apartment building. Someplace with a dumpster.”
We drove around. There were a lot of apartment buildings on Diversey, some of them looked big, but I thought it might be better to get out of any neighborhood I was familiar with. Ashland was a street I barely used, so I went straight for it.
At the light, I turned north and drove a few blocks until I saw what I wanted. On my left was a Jewel market. I turned on Wellington and went around to the back. Along the wide, solid brick wall at the back of the store was a metal dumpster. I pulled into the loading area, jumped out of the Lincoln and lifted the lid to the dumpster. I dropped the knife in.
When I got back into the car, I said, “My guess is they empty that pretty often.”
Brian nodded. He looked a little pale. I wondered if he might be going into shock. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I want Franklin.”
I nodded. He was probably in shock. “We’ll be home in a few minutes.”
Cutting back over to Ashland, I drove up to Belmont then I turned toward the lake. I tried to say a few encouraging things as I drove. “You’ll be okay. It’s all okay.” I think I said them as much for me as I did for Brian.
When we got to Aldine, I pulled around the back of his building and parked in the alley. We went up the wooden staircase on the back of the building up to Brian’s backdoor. He unlocked the door and we walked into the kitchen.
Franklin was wiping down the counters. He was kind of a neat freak; I wasn’t even sure the counters needed wiping. When he turned around and looked at us the look on his face made me wonder if he might have a stroke right there.
“It’s not ours,” Brian said quickly. “It’s not our blood.”
“Okay. Whose is it?”
“Rita’s friend,” I said. “Accomplice, whatever.”
“Is he dead?”
“They kidnapped me. Nick saved me.”
“Okay.” He looked concerned. “And the police just let you go?”
“We’re not calling the police,” Brian said. “They won’t treat Nick fairly. You know that.”
“Yes, but—” Franklin was struggling with this. He was a rule-follower even when the rules were wrong. “It was self-defense, though. If they kidnapped you—”
“We’re not calling the police,” Brian said, in a tone I very rarely heard from him. Franklin seemed to recognize it right away. Brian was putting his foot down and clearly not for the first time. Though certainly the first time in front of me.
“What about Rita?” Franklin asked.
“She got away,” I admitted.
“So this could all happen again?”
“It won’t,” I promised. “I’ll make sure it doesn’t.”
