Crossroads

A dazzle of light—and people vanish. Tom Jurgen tracks a team of burglars with the power to teleport anywhere. 

Crossroads, Part One

“Hi.” Jody Hopper closed her magazine as I sat down. In her late 20s, she wore a loose gray T-shirt featuring a heavy metal band I’d never heard of. A black bra strap dangled down one shoulder, next to a tattoo of a blue turtle.

She dropped a half-size manila envelope on the booth’s Formica table next to my coffee and business card. “There’s a check in there. And some stuff about Stepan. He’s my boyfriend. He disappeared on me. I mean really—vanished.” She gulped some coffee. “This is going to sound weird. But that’s why I called you.”

Yeah, weird is sort of my business. I’ve gotten a reputation for it that follows me whether I like it or not. “Tell me.”

A waitress came by. I ordered coffee, although I could have taken a bagel. We sat in a diner. I don’t have an office like a TV private eye. Too expensive. So a lot of my business is conducted at diners and coffee shops. At 11:30, the diner was quiet, and the waitress seemed okay with us just ordering coffee.

A few people sat the counter with coffee and bagels. A family sat a large table, trying to keep their kids occupied until their food came. Two booths behind Jody Hopper, a man in a White Sox baseball cap chowed down on some pancakes.

“Okay.” Jody Hopper sighed. “We were arguing. He was breaking up with me. And then he . . . just—disappeared. Not through the door.  He just sort of—his body was this big silvery swirl. Like the transporters on Star Trek? And then he was . . . gone.”

“Gone how?”

She waved her hands. “Just gone! One second he’s there, and then . . . poof!” She slapped the table. “I’ve been ghosted before, but never like this. Where is he?”

“What were you arguing about? Why were you breaking up?”

“He said he was taking a new job out of town, but he wouldn’t tell me anything about it. I thought he was seeing somebody else, and we started arguing. Then he got a phone call. He just looked at his phone, and then—” She waved her hands again. “Like I said, a silvery flash, and then he was gone.”

She tapped the envelope. “I’ve got some stuff in there. Pictures, his address and phone number, a couple of articles, that kind of stuff.”

I pulled it toward me. “What does he do for a living?”

“Construction work. He does floors, mostly. There’s a lot going on in Chicago right now, so he keeps pretty busy. That’s why I was suspicious that he had to go away.”

“How long have you been dating?”

“Six months. Right after he got out—what the hell?”

I turned. And found myself face to face with a handgun.

Two men, both in sunglasses. One African-American, one Caucasian with a thick black beard. He held the pistol.

My heart stopped. And then it started pounding again like a thunderous drum solo in the pouring rain. The snout of the handgun looked like a cannon. And the bearded white guy’s finger was on the trigger.

He swung the muzzle of his weapon. “Come on, Jody. We’re taking you to see Stepan.”

“W-what? Why? No!” She shook her head, her voice shaking. “He wouldn’t—you can’t—” She looked at me. “Help?”

For a split second I considered throwing my coffee into the guy’s face. But his partner could just shoot me too. Plus, the coffee wasn’t very hot.

“Don’t do anything stupid.” The white guy leaned forward. “Just come on, Jody.”

“I can’t—I can’t . . .” Her body wobbled with fear. “I just . . .”

Then she vanished in a flash of silver flame.

Just like she’d told me Stepan had done. A literal blaze of light.

“Shit.” The gunmen looked more annoyed than surprised. As if they’d seen this before.

“Let’s get out,” said the black man.

“Yeah.” The other guy stared at me. He spotted my business card on the table. “Tom Jurgen?”

I gulped, my mouth too dry to speak.

“You stay out of this.” He jammed the card into a pocket.

Then they turned and left.

The waitress dropped her coffee pot. It shattered on the tile floor, as she collapsed on a counter stool, hyperventilating. The guy in the White Sox hat dropped some money on the table and hustled to the restroom.

            My stomach lurched. But I managed to slide Jody Hopper’s envelope into my jacket as I tried not to throw up from terror.

 “Hey!” Someone shouted. “Where’s my order?”

“How’d your meeting go?” Rachel came out of our office to get more coffee as I locked the door.

            I sank onto the couch, trying not to let her see me tremble too much as I unbuttoned my jacket. “Guns. Men with guns.”

            “What?” She slugged my arm. “You said this was a missing boyfriend case!”

            “Yeah.” I rubbed my arm. “Turns out it’s something else.”

            I’d told the cops everything. They were skeptical, of course, even when the waitress confirmed that Jody had vanished in a flash of light. The diner had security cameras at the front and rear entrance, so they called someone to come in and check them. They took my name and number and told me someone downtown would be in touch.

            “Huh.” Rachel sat down next to me. “So what are you going to do now?”

            I pulled out Jody’s envelope. I figured I could tell the cops I’d forgotten about it—if I had to. “This is what she gave me.”

            Rachel’s back stiffened. “So you’re going ahead with this?”

            I shrugged. “I just want to know what’s going on.”

            She punched my shoulder. “Okay. It’s too late to complain that you’re an idiot. Good thing I don’t have my own place anymore.”

            We’d been living together for six months. Dating for a long time before that. Rachel’s got red hair, hazelnut eyes, and vaguely psychic powers. She helps me on my supernatural cases—and punches me when she thinks I’m being a jerk. It’s a thing.

            We moved to the dining room table, and I emptied the envelope. First the check, which I set aside. I wasn’t sure I was even going to work on the case, so I’d hang onto it until something happened.

            Then a few printed snapshots of Stepan. Shirtless in one, with skinny arms and a thin chest. Smiling in another, wearing a tight black T-shirt. He had a scraggly beard and yellow teeth.

The third was a mugshot. He scowled at the camera, his lips tight.

“Ugh.” Rachel grimaced. “Why did I ever go for the bad boys in high school?”

I glanced over at her. “Anything you want to tell me about?”

“Shut up.” We both had stories from our past that we didn’t talk about.

“Wait a minute.” I stared at the photos. “He was there. Eating pancakes.” The guy in the White Sox hat was Stepan Milos.

            Rachel picked up the photo. “Oh-kay. Why didn’t his girlfriend notice him?”

            Good question. I tried to think. “Her back was to him. He had a hat. And she was reading a magazine.” I remembered him heading for the restroom after the gunmen left, and I hadn’t noticed him come back out—although I hadn’t been watching.

            I pushed the photos aside. “So maybe Stepan can . . .  teleport?—and maybe he can teleport other people, so that’s why Jody Hopper disappeared.”

            Yeah, it was the kind of leap that made a lot of people call me crazy. But I’ve seen lots stranger. And it fit with Jody’s story about Stepan’s vanishing.

            Rachel shrugged. “That would mean she’s all right, and she found her boyfriend. Sounds like your work is done.”

            I smiled. “Still curious.”

            She glared. “I’d punch you, but my arm’s getting tired.”

I looked at the rest of it. A scribbled notebook page listed Stepan’s contact information: address, phone numbers, email address, and his latest work address, a construction company on the south side.

I called his cell phone. No answer. I left a message. I sent an email. Then I went back to the documents in the envelope.

            A brief article printed out from the Chicago Tribune website: CONVICTED IN ARMED ROBBERY, MAN GETS THREE YEARS. That explained the mugshot. Stepan and two other people had robbed a drug store—for pharmaceuticals, mostly, and about $150 from the register—five years ago. Stepan only stood near the door, and then drove the getaway car, but the other two had been armed with handguns. When they got caught, Stepan flipped and made a deal, so he only did three years at the Vandalia Correctional Center, a minimum security prison in Fayette County.

Which meant he would have been released about eight months ago. Right around the time Jody Hopper started dating him.

The only other item was an obituary. Clyde Hanisch, 48, had died two years ago of cancer. Survived by his mother, sister, and a brother, Dr. Brad Hanisch. “I wonder what this is doing here.”

            Rachel picked the obit up. “Huh. There’s a Brad Hanisch I’ve heard of.”

            “Old boyfriend from your bad-boy days?” I tensed for a punch.

            She laughed. “He’s a doctor, a neurologist, I think. And a wizard. Or he used to be. I don’t really know him, but Carrie does.”

            Carrie is Rachel’s friend. She doesn’t like me, but she’s pretty knowledgeable about magic and the supernatural.

            In the office we shared I turned on my computer and did a search for Clyde Hanisch. It didn’t take long. Clyde had done time for robbery, and check forgery. He’d been in Joliet, Menard, and his last sentence had been served at Vandalia—where Stepan had done his three years.

            “That’s the connection.” I saved the file. “Call Carrie.”

            Rachel sighed and picked up her phone. “She’ll be thrilled.”

“Wake up!” Rachel kicked me under the covers in the middle of the night. “Something’s going on.”

            I rolled over and rubbed my eyes. “Wha—?”

            Then I saw it. A swirling flash of bright light, just like I’d seen at the diner. It hovered above the rug, slowly descended, and exploded in a burst of cold white flame.

            Jody Hopper staggered forward. Wearing the same gray T-shirt from this morning, her bra strap drooping lower, but in just a pair of blue panties. She leaned against the edge of the bed, gasping.

            “Who’s she?” Rachel shoved her covers down.

            “My client. Sort of.” I swung my legs to the floor, glad I was wearing boxers. “Ms. Hopper? What’s going on?”

            “I don’t . . . have much time,” she panted. “They’ve got us, both of us. I don’t know where we are. They’re going to knock over a rib joint later tonight. Then they . . .” She shook her head. “Can you help us?”

            Rachel and I looked at each other. “What rib joint?”

            “I don’t know.” Her legs were shaking. “They found us at Stepan’s mother’s house. She wasn’t there. They’re going to—”

            Then the silver fire returned, enveloping her like a sheet of lightning. It whirled around like a dog chasing its tail, then imploded with a sharp crack like thunder, leaving behind a lingering smoky odor.

            “What the hell?” Rachel stood up and walked around the bed, waving her hand in the space Hopper had just been standing in.

            I looked at the clock radio. 1:36 a.m. I picked up my phone.

Then I put it back down. What exactly could I tell the police? “Hi, a woman teleported into my bedroom to tell me that her boyfriend and two other guys are going to teleport to a rib restaurant that I didn’t know the name of”? The cops laughed enough about me in the break room already.

            “What are you going to do?” Rachel crossed her arms.

            I stood. “Get a drink of water and go back to sleep. Maybe. Tomorrow I’ll . . . think of something.”

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.