“You have your equipment with you?” I asked.
Mechanic shot me a look as if the question offended him. “Who are we gonna visit in paradise?” he said.
“Ice Culpepper.”
Mechanic smiled, which was a rare event. “Fun,” he said. “Time to party.”
K-TOWN HAD BEEN DESCRIBED in many ways the last couple of decades, but “a walk in the park” had never been one of those descriptions. Located on the notoriously dangerous West Side of Chicago in the North Lawndale neighborhood, K-Town was a city within a city. Only ten minutes away from the gleaming skyscrapers of downtown Chicago and the Magnificent Mile, yet K-Town might as well have been in another country. It had become a circumscribed stretch of gang-ridden, drug-fueled, crime-infested streets that unapologetically operated under its own rule of law.
North Lawndale had once been the home to thousands of Jews of Russian and Eastern European descent, but as they became more prosperous, they started moving out and staking claim in the farther northern reaches of the city and then the suburbs. Blacks from the southern states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama joined those who already lived on the South Side of Chicago and took up residence in the neighborhood that the Jews had vacated. In the span of about ten years, the white population of North Lawndale dropped precipitously from a high of 99 percent to only 9 percent. Then the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s happened, including the famous 1968 riots that erupted after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. K-Town had never been the same since.
Most now thought the K in K-Town stood for killing, and judging by its skyrocketing murder rate, that was a logical assumption. But K-Town really got its name from a 1913 street-naming proposal in which streets were to be alphabetically named according to their distance from the Illinois-Indiana border. K, being the eleventh letter in the alphabet, was to be assigned to streets within the eleventh mile west of the state line. Kedvale, Kenneth, Kenton, Kilpatrick, Knox, and Kostner were just a few of the names. The scheme, however, was only partially fulfilled, stopping with the P streets on the city’s western edge.
If we wanted to talk to Chopper McNair, we were going to have to venture into K-Town and speak to his uncle first. Those were the rules of the street. While Chopper was not part of his uncle’s enterprise, according to OCD, the Organized Crime Division, he was still under its auspices. It was an obligatory show of respect to Ice to speak to him first.
Ice kept an office above a dollar laundromat he owned on Kilpatrick. It was fittingly ironic—a laundromat as a front to launder money. The storefront was like the others in the neighborhood, except a small army of state-of-the-art security cameras worthy of the Pentagon had been positioned across the roof and over the door.
Two massive mounds of flesh stood outside in dark suits and sunglasses, with wires running from inside their jackets to their ears. One had dreadlocks; the other was bald. They were the size of NFL defensive tackles. They looked hard at us as we approached.
“We’re here to see Ice,” I said.
“He expectin’ you?” the bald one grumbled.
“No,” I said. “But I’m sure he’ll want to see us.”
“What the hell make you so sure?” the bald one said. He looked disapprovingly at Mechanic.
“Let’s just say it’s a little inkling I have in my gut.”
“Who the fuck is you, wiseass?” Baldy said. His voice had become decidedly less welcoming. He looked over at Mechanic. “This ain’t your part of town. Go the hell back where you came from.”
I looked over at Mechanic, who was staring hard at Dreadlocks standing in front of him.
“I’m gonna ask you one more time,” the bald guy said to me. “Who the fuck is you?”
“The boogie man,” I said, then stepped toward the side door that led to the second floor.
Baldy stepped forward to block me. Just as he stepped forward, I raised my arm back to strike. But Dreadlocks stepped in front with his hands up.
“We don’t need no trouble,” Dreadlocks said. “You the dude who works out over at Arnie’s sometimes.” I lowered my arm and looked at him again. I faintly recognized his face. He looked at his partner and gave him a nod to stand down. “I’ve seen you in there working the bag,” he said. “We all good.” He stepped to the side so that we could pass.
I nodded to Mechanic, and we walked to the door. With all those cameras, I was certain someone inside had seen us. A buzzer sounded, and I pushed the door open. We started up the narrow staircase, and by the time we had almost reached the top step, the second door had swung open. A short guy, rail thin and barely bigger than a prepubescent fifth grader, stood there with an AK-47 pointed at both of us. It looked at least several pounds heavier than he was.
“We don’t want any problems,” I said, raising my hands. Mechanic did the same. “We just need a few minutes with Ice.”
“C’mon up slowly,” the little guy said. “And keep your fuckin’ hands where I can see ’em.”
Mechanic and I did as we were told. We stepped into a very spacious waiting room. The place was immaculate and decorated in a way you would expect to find in one of those gaudy mansions on the Gold Coast. A big leaded crystal chandelier hung from the middle of the room, and the dark-cherrywood walls had ornate carvings that ran along the crown molding. A fresco painting of some religious scene with flying angels and angry beasts had been meticulously applied across the entire ceiling. All the fixtures were polished gold.
A short woman with closely cropped hair and large hoop earrings sat at a desk in front of a set of closed double doors. She looked up from her computer and, judging by the nonchalant expression on her face, was completely unfazed at the sight of two strangers standing there with their hands in the air and Shorty pointing an AK-47. Business as usual. She went back to the papers on her desk.
An older guy who looked ex-military stepped into the lobby from a side door. Same getup. He patted us down and removed our pieces, including the 9 mm I had strapped to my ankle.
“The Bears could really use you guys,” I said. “Their defensive line had more holes last year than a french sieve.”
The second guy looked at the first with an expression of “Huh?”
“A real wiseass,” Shorty said to me. Then he turned to the other guy and said, “Sieve. Fancy word for a mesh strainer.”
The second guy nodded, but the blank expression on his face clearly indicated that he was still working on it.
Shorty turned to the woman, who was still going about her work as if we weren’t even there. “Can Ice see these two clowns?” he asked.
Mechanic typically didn’t respond well to verbal insults, especially from strangers. I could see his shoulders tense up as if he wanted to make a move. I gave him the look. Going up against that 47 was a losing proposition, even for someone as quick and fearless as Mechanic. He arrived at the same conclusion and settled back. All experienced fighters knew they had to pick their spots. This was not one of them.
The woman got up from her desk and went through the double doors. She looked to be in her early forties and genetically blessed. I followed her as she walked in front of the desk and noticed that she had a nameplate sitting next to a vase of long-stemmed tulips in various stages of bloom. MS. PAM ELSWORTH, EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT. Ice Culpepper was making it clear that regardless of what you thought about his enterprise, he ran a very official operation.