Crossroads, Part Two

The next morning I checked the news on my laptop while I ate my cereal and drank my coffee.

            The headline RESTAURANT ROBBED AFTER HOURS jumped out at me right away.

            After closing, a restaurant called Rick’s Flaming Ribs on the west side had been robbed by three men who emerged from the restroom with handguns. They emptied the cash register, forced the manager to open a safe, and taken a bottle of Jack Daniels from the bar. Then they returned to the restroom. They weren’t found when the police arrived.

            “I know we checked the restroom when we locked up,” the manager was quoted as saying. “And there’s no window, there’s no way anybody could get in and out of there.”

            Rachel staggered out of the bedroom in her T-shirt and poured herself some coffee. “It took me three hours to get back to sleep. You snored like water buffalo after five minutes.”

            “Sorry.” I turned the laptop. “Does this sound familiar?”

            She skimmed the story. “So what now?”

            I still didn’t have enough to go to the police. So I gulped some coffee. “Did Carrie ever get back to you?”

Dr. Brad Hanisch lived in a house in Evanston. I’d called him at 9 a.m. after getting his number from Carrie. At first he didn’t want to talk, but eventually he agreed to an appointment.

            I parked down the street at 11 a.m. and rang his bell. After 20 seconds the door opened, and I pulled the screen door back. “Dr. Hanisch?”

            “Mr. Jurgen.” He sighed. “Come on in, I suppose.”

            He had white hair and a thin goatee, and he wore a corduroy blazer, jeans, and slippers. He led me down a hallway into a room filled with bookshelves that looked ready to topple over onto the oriental rug on the floor. Then he sank into a heavy armchair next to a small table, poured tea into a cup, and then offered some to me.

            I sat on a couch. “Thanks for seeing me.” I sipped the tea. Earl Gray. Hot.

            “Yeah.” He frowned. “I don’t really like talking about my brother.”

            “What about Stepan Milos?”

            He looked at the oriental rug on the floor. “He knew Clyde when he was—in prison. Clyde must have told him about my work.”

            “You’re a neurologist?”

            Hanisch chuckled. “Retired. Thirty years at hospitals around the city. But I studied . . . other things.”

I waited.

“All right, I know what you’re looking for.” He drew a deep breath. “I was obsessed with magic when I was a kid. First, card tricks and stuff like that. Then . . .” He paused for more tea. “I started studying real magic. Let’s just say I learned a lot more tricks—and they weren’t tricks.”

            “Like how to teleport.”

            “It’s called crossroads.” Hanisch smiled. “That’s the least interesting thing I learned how to do.”

            I nodded. “But Stepan knows how to do it.”

            He sighed. “Yeah. Like I said, he came to visit me after he got out of prison. Look . . .” Hanisch gulped some tea. “Clyde was my brother, but we were all embarrassed by him. My mother kept giving him money, but it all went to drugs, and my sister finally got her to cut him off. I gave up on him years ago. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but I was working hard, helping people with real problems. He’d come here, begging for help, and . . .”

He bent his head. “I sent him away. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but I was—he was . . . anyway, he went to jail one more time. And then after he got out, he died. Cancer.” He leaned forward to pour me some more tea,

“Did he ever want you to . . . make a crossroad to get him out of prison?”

            “I don’t know.” He set the teapot down. “I never answered his calls, I never opened his letters. But then Stepan Milos showed up at my door a few months ago and wanted to talk about my brother, and . . . I let him in.”

            “When was this?”

“Four or five months ago.”

“So what did he do?”

            Hanisch leaned back. “He stole the crossroads key. It was in a book, over there—” He pointed to a teetering bookshelf. “I went into the kitchen to make more tea, and when I came back—it was gone.”

            He seemed like the kind of guy who would notice immediately if a book was missing. “So, it’s a key?”

            Another nod. “He took the instructions with him. I never should have translated them from Latin.”

            “He can use it to make a crossroads? For himself and other people?” He’d teleported Jody Hopper without her having any key, or even knowing he was there.

            A sip of tea. “Yeah. Within limits. You can’t move yourself or anyone else across the world—just a mile or so. You have to have some connection to the place you’re going to—been there before, know enough about the place or person to visualize it, or have something physical from the location. But it takes a lot of energy. You can’t do it all night. The more people you move, the more it takes and the harder it gets. Everything has a cost, you know. It all has a price.”

            “Yeah.” For the restaurant owners, a few hundred dollars. For my client? Maybe more.

My phone buzzed on Lake Shore Drive. “Tom Jurgen speaking.”

            “Mr. Jurgen? This is Detective Schaffer of the Chicago Police. We’d like you to come down and look at some photos.”

            “Sure thing.” I let a Hyundai pass me. “Give me thirty minutes?”

            Down at CPD headquarters on South Michigan Avenue, I showed my ID, went up an elevator, and looked at a series of photographs on a computer monitor. Detective Schaffer was a white guy in his fifties, with thin gray hair and sharp brown eyes. He stood patiently, arms crossed over his chest, as I ran through the images.

            It didn’t take long. I’d gotten a good look at them, even with a handgun pointing at my chest. The white gunman with the heavy beard was Ray Glick. The African American was Errol Jewell.

            “All right.” Schaffer took back his chair and tapped some keys on his computer. “Anything else you want to share?”

            I sighed. “You’re going to want to talk to Anita Sharpe. She’ll tell you I’m crazy, but she knows me, and she might tell you to believe me.”

            “Sharpe.” He picked up a mug of lukewarm coffee. “Good cop. What the hell are you talking about?”

            I braced myself. It had cost me my job as a reporter, but I’ve always told people everything—even though they usually assumed I was insane, hallucinating, on drugs, or all three. “They were trying to kidnap the woman who was hiring me to find her boyfriend, Stepan Milos. I think they’re holding him and his girlfriend prisoner. They robbed a place called Rick’s Flaming Ribs last night. Because he can teleport to any location.”

            Schaffer set his coffee down and leaned back in his chair, raising his arms behind his head. Not a good sign. “Teleport? Like on Star Trek?”

             I nodded. “Exactly.”

            He laughed. “I’ve heard of you, Jurgen. We all have. This isn’t even the craziest story we talk about in the break room.” Then he sat forward. “Okay. How do you know all this?”

            I hesitated. “I saw it happen. First time at the restaurant, then last night, in my . . . apartment. She told me about the robbery coming up at a rib joint, but she didn’t know the name.”

            “And you didn’t call us.”

            I sighed. “It was 1:30 in the morning, I didn’t know where they were going, and the 911 operator would have called an ambulance to send me to Cook County General.”

            Schaffer nodded. “All right. How does he do it?”

            Again I hesitated. I wasn’t a reporter anymore. The First Amendment doesn’t cover private detectives. I hated to do it, but I couldn’t legally keep Hanisch out of it.

            So I told him about my chat with Hanisch, and made a mental note to call him with a heads-up.

            Schaffer typed up some notes. “This is going to be fun in the break room.” Then he stood up. “Okay. Get out of here. Call me if you hear anything else. Or get another flashy visitor.” We exchanged cards with our numbers

            I put his card in my wallet. “Sure thing.”

            I thought about stopping by to see Sharpe, but I hadn’t bothered her for a few weeks, and she was probably grateful—although she wouldn’t be happy to hear about me from Schaffer. Going home seemed safer. So I headed for the elevator.