She tried to talk him into going home, but he wasn’t having it, and she eventually gave up. “The bar is on the fringes of Bridgeport,” she told him as they headed south on Halstead. “Right by Bubbly Creek.”

“Bubbly Creek?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve lived in Chicago this long and never heard of it.”

“I’ve been a little busy.”

“It’s the South Fork of the Chicago River, but nobody calls it that. A hundred years ago, all the meatpacking companies around the Union Stock Yards dumped their waste in it. I did a term paper for a college biology class.” She paused and glanced over at him. “Term papers are the things all of us who actually went to class had to do.”

He gave her his cowboy drawl. “Wouldn’t know about that. I was too busy cruisin’ around town in the shiny red Corvette the alums bought me.”

She shot him her withering look, which was so damned cute he would have kissed her nose if she’d been another kind of woman. “So, Bubbly Creek?” he said.

“The slaughterhouses threw their carcasses in the water—guts, blood, hair—every putrid thing you could think of, then tossed in all the processing chemicals, too. After a while the creek started to bubble from the decomposition. That’s how it got its name. Sometimes the sludge got so thick that people could walk on it. The government’s poured millions into cleanup, but it can still bubble on a hot day.”

“Mother Nature takes a long time to get over being pissed off.”

“Women are like that.” She pulled into a crumbling parking lot next to a squat, aluminum-framed building with an Old Style sign hanging above the front door. “Keith’s come down in the world,” she said.

He needed to get this over with. “Before we go in, you should know... I was doing some paperwork at the club today, and when I came out, somebody had slashed my tires.”

“What?!”

He’d known she’d go ballistic, and she didn’t prove him wrong.

“Why didn’t you tell me this right away?”

Because he hated to admit she was right about these incidents not being arbitrary. Worse than that, he hated knowing somebody was getting the best of him. “It could have been random,” he said.

“Don’t even start with me about that.”

She began peppering him with questions, as he’d known she would. When had it happened? Who might have witnessed it? Had he seen anyone hanging around the alley?

He told her everything he knew, which was exactly nothing. Tony and the cleaning staff had been inside the club. None of them had seen anything. He hadn’t reported it to the police.

She set her jaw in that way she had. “Let’s see what your pal Keith has to say about this.”