Schrödinger's Gun by Ray Wood Page A

around and whistled.
    â€œNice little set-up he had here. You know half the joints in this neighborhood carry his booze and no one else’s? Not that he gave them much choice in the matter.”
    It was West Chicago’s worst-kept secret that Johnny Rivers’s gang of toughs had bribed, bullied, and beaten the owners of half the local speakeasies into supplying their patrons exclusively with liquor from his distilleries. I’d have been dumb to think that this basement was the biggest one; Rivers’s operation spanned a lot of streets and ruffled a lot of feathers. The list of people in Chicago who might want him dead would be as long as my arm.
    â€œTwo bullet wounds, probably from a small firearm,” I said. “Our shooter comes in, gets Johnny clean in the back while he’s checking the equipment or whatever, and makes his escape. Any wild hunches on who did it?”
    Moore took his hat from his head and went over to the body. The stink of spirits crawled into my throat.
    â€œI know the Montagnios are sore with Rivers,” he said. “He makes his stuff a lot cheaper than they can. Sells it cheap, too. There was an attempted shooting over on West 14 th a couple days ago—one of the boys working the case reckons it was the Montagnios butting heads with Rivers’s lot.”
    I chewed my fingernails. Using the heisen for any length of time left me dying for a smoke, but there was no way I was going to light up in here, not with everything soaked in moonshine. “What about Big Dakota? He still doing the dirty work for the Montagnios?”
    â€œYeah…”
    â€”a slight frisson of something in my head, like my brain had passed over a set of points on a railroad and clunked onto a different track—
    â€œâ€¦but it wasn’t him,” Moore continued. “One of our boys over on the east side took him in last night—raided a brothel on 18 th and caught him with his pants down. Literally.”
    I pinched the bridge of my nose. “And Rivers was last seen when? And by whom?”
    â€œBy his wife, around seven thirty.”
    I folded my arms across my chest and looked up at the light bulb. Why did I never get the universes where things were cut and dry? I fished in my pocket for my cigarette case.
    â€œI guess I’d better speak to his wife, then.”
    *   *   *
    I interviewed the newly-widowed Mrs. Rivers in the station that afternoon. It was grey and frigid still, and on her way inside the building a cab kicked up a puddle by the sidewalk and splashed her heels with slush. I helped her dry off when we got up to the office. I offered her a glass of water, which she declined, and told her to take as long as she needed, which she did. I let her sit in my chair and watched her eyes follow the plainclothes detectives around the room. The office rattled to the sound of typewriters.
    â€œI’m real sorry,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. “I think I’m still—Johnny, you know. I still can’t believe it.”
    She was a delicate little thing; the kind of broad these gangsters tended to go for, I guess. Her first name was ‘Kitty’, although she looked more like a china doll: big timid eyes, bow lips, a nose with the slightest pig-snout lift. Her cotton candy hair looked like mine had when I was a little girl.
    â€œMrs. Rivers,” I said, pushing that unwanted association aside. “Could you tell me—?”
    â€œ Kitty , please,” she said earnestly, and pulled yet another handkerchief out of a sleeve apparently stuffed with them.
    My implant twitched. “I don’t know if that’s really—”
    â€”petite shoulders slump a little further; a white hand comes up to pull the fur scarf over the tip of the chin—
    â€œKitty, then,” I said, jumping with both feet into the universe that kept us on good terms. Her head lifted slightly. Her face was buried under