I smiled. I was used to hauling Dobie Tavares into the district in cuffs, me driving the squad car, him cooling his heels in back, trying to explain how I had him all wrong. Now here we were, no cuffs, no hauling, just me looking for information from a trusted confidential informant.

Dobie was a car thief—fast, thorough, nonselective—which made me wonder about the car I was sitting in. He didn’t much care about make or model. If it had wheels and he felt like taking it, he took it. He could watch you walk away from your car and have it hot-wired and halfway to the choppers almost before you got where you were headed. Despite his nimble fingers and long arrest record, good old Dobie, the Caribbean Cruiser, was the pride of his large Dominican family. It figured, since most of them were car thieves, too.

“I’m not going to lie. It’s a little strange.” I looked over the backseat, more than a little curious about the car’s history.

Dobie read my mind. “No worries, Officer Raines, this one’s cold as ice.”

I handed him a pair of fifty-dollar bills. “I’m looking for a couple of guys who hire themselves out for muscle work. They’re from your neighborhood.” I held up my phone and showed him the photos of the Williams brothers, which I’d snapped from the mug shots. “I need to know where they hang out, who they hang out with.”

Dobie focused, snorted, then looked at me as if he thought I was joking. “You’re serious?” He searched my face and saw that I was. “They’re small fries,” he said incredulously. “Little fish. Dum-dums? Hell, I got shoes with more sense than them two.”

I put the phone away. “Tell me about them.”

“I just did.” Dobie handed one of the fifties back. “They ain’t worth a hundred. Besides, I still owe you for keeping my sister’s kid out of the soup that one time. Dobie Tavares always pays his debts.”

“Okay, fill me in.” I was getting a little impatient. We’d already been in the alley too long. This was Chicago, not Shangri-La. Sitting in dirty alleys in a darkened car in the middle of the night was not a thing you did if you had long-term life plans.

“Never met them, but I’ve seen them around. They hang out at the laundromat picking up odd jobs, breaking legs, roughing up. They’re hard hitters who’ll work for just about anybody.” He pointed an index finger at the side of his head and drew a circle a couple of times. “And neither one of them is wrapped too tight, if you feel me.”

“Laundromat?”

Dobie chuckled. “You’ve been off the beat too long. It’s a shell. In the front, you fluff and fold your tighty whities. In the back, it’s a whole different story.”