The dogs looked at me anxiously, trying to figure out my mood from my voice. Maybe Frenada’s experience with the cops was the same one I’d had this evening, so that he didn’t feel he could rely on them.

A wiser person would have followed Peppy’s advice and stayed home. Maybe I am that wiser person now—experience does change you—but in the middle of the night, with that sensation of looseness that made me think I was still thirty and able to leap tall buildings at a bound, I pulled on my jeans and running shoes, put my gun back together and stuck it in a shoulder holster under a sweatshirt, put my PI and driver’s licenses in my back pocket with a handful of bills, and made my cautious way down the back stairs. To their annoyance, I left the dogs behind—if I got involved in a shooting war I didn’t want them complicating the battle.

Lemour thought he could get me, but I would make a monkey of him. That seemed to be the gist of my thinking, if acting solely on impulse can be called thinking.

I drove past the plant at Grand and Trumbull. A light was shining through one of the rear windows on the second floor. In case Lemour had set a trap, I didn’t slow down but turned south at the next intersection. I parked three blocks away.

Saturday nights on the fringes of Humboldt Park are not quiet. The streets in this industrial section were empty, but sirens and dogs keened a few blocks away. I even heard roosters crowing. Someone was running a cockfight nearby. A freight train squeaked and hooted in the distance. As it drew near, its rackety clank–clank drowned out other sounds.

When I got to Frenada’s building I scouted it as closely as I could in the dark. I paused outside an old delivery van, listening intently at the rear doors to see if it was a stakeout vehicle, although it was hard to hear anything above the thundering of the freight train.

I stood across the street from the entrance for ten minutes, waiting for some sign of life. Or was I waiting for my courage to build enough for me to enter a rickety building alone in the dark? The longer I stood, the more inclined I would be to go home without looking inside. And what if that really had been Frenada on the phone? And what if he really was in trouble, bleeding, dead? Then what? I took a deep breath and crossed the street.

The front door was unlocked. It’s a trap, Vic, the sensible voice whispered, but I slid sideways through the opening, gun in hand, palm clammy against the stock.