The words came out agonizingly slowly. The man recoiled as my fetid breath hit him. He belonged to a different species than me: he was alert, he’d breakfasted, I could smell coffee on his breath, and a heavy dollop of after-shave on his skin. He’d had a shower, he’d shaved. I probably smelled like the landfill itself, since I’d spent most of the night walking through the garbage-laden swamp.

“I’m looking for Billy Bysen. I don’t know anything about these people. How come you answered his phone?”

“It was in the dead man’s pocket.”

I turned away from him and stumbled over to the helicopter, remembering only at the last second to stoop under the blade. The motion sent me sprawling, and the clean-shaven man dragged me to my feet, yelling at me to tell him where Billy was. He was getting really annoying, like the boys on the playground chanting “Iffy-genius” at me, and I wanted to take out my Smith & Wesson and shoot him, but that would really get my father mad. “You can’t go around telling your schoolmates I’m a cop and I’ll arrest them,” he’d said. “You can’t go trading on my badge. You solve your problems without using a club on people. That’s the only way good cops and honest men and women act, you hear me, Pepperpot?”

I twisted out of the shaved man’s grip and flung myself into the helicopter’s open door. The pilot looked at me without interest and turned back to his instruments. I didn’t think I could climb into the helicopter on my own, and I couldn’t make myself heard above the racket of the rotors. I clung desperately to the struts while the clean-shaven man grabbed my sore shoulder and tried to pry me loose.

Suddenly, the racket of the engines stopped. The pilot was taking off his headset and getting out of his seat. The world around me was filled with flashing reds and blues. I looked around and blinked at the array of cop cars and ambulances.

The man let go of my shoulder as a familiar voice spoke behind me. “That you, Ms. W.? I thought I told you to stay the hell out of South Chicago. What you been doing down here? Bathing in the landfill?”

29

On the DL—Once Again

It was only later, after the IVs were pulled out of my arms and County Hospital pronounced me rehydrated and fit to leave, that I was able to make sense of the confusing swarm of cops and stretchers that descended on us, and later still that I found out where the helicopter had come from.