Area 4 Headquarters was at Harrison and Kedzie and I pulled up to it and sat staring at the front door for a few minutes, composing myself, dreading going inside. The building was all red-brick and reinforced glass. The only way to break into the place would have been to liquefy yourself and ooze through a freaking air vent. Jung was a putz.

The front desk was packed with cops, unusual for four in the morning. A blue wall of uniforms turned to watch me make the long, lonely trip from the front door to the counter. It was obvious from the smirks on their faces that Ben had made a call and everyone knew who I was and why I was there.

“You Raines?” the stocky detective standing front and center asked, jaded eyes holding me to the spot. I nodded. “Then you’re here for the criminal mastermind.” The cops behind him chuckled. This was the most fun they’d have all tour.

Hicks was an old-timer, a sturdy black man with years of filthy street ground into every pore on his face. The look he gave me told me he’d seen it all a million times over and knew how it all worked. Jung’s crowbar assault probably wasn’t even enough to raise his heart rate, but formalities still had to be satisfied.

I winced. “How bad is it?”

“On a scale of one to ten? Minus three. For all the elbow grease, he barely scratched the paint.”

“Has he been processed and charged?”

“To do all that, the uniforms upstairs would have to stop laughing and talking shit, and that hasn’t happened as of yet.”

I sighed. “Then he’s free to go?”

Hicks scowled, and then shook his head ever so slightly. “Cop a squat. I’ll have somebody bring him down.” Hicks strolled over to the phone and called upstairs. “We’ll be keeping the crowbar and glass cutter,” he said when he hung up. “He can come back for the bike he rode to get here.”

C’mon, a getaway bike, really? I cleared my throat. “Sounds fair.”

Hicks looked at me hard. “You know next time nobody’ll be laughing. And you can tell Mickerson this makes us even.”

I smiled politely at Hicks, then at the other cops. “I’ll relay the message.”