But here I was, two months later, a hot late June afternoon at rush hour, just before six o’clock, cruising down State Street in a black Ford behind Ragen’s dark blue Lincoln Continental.

We’d started on foot, at Ragen’s office at 431 South Dearborn; it was hot and muggy and our clothes were sticking to us. Few of the men on the street were wearing their suitcoats; we stood out, some, accordingly. Of course Ragen-wearing a crisp-looking light brown suit and a green and yellow striped tie and a dark brown snap-brim-looked cool, unbothered by the heat. Except for that one day in my office, I’d never seen the little hardass otherwise.

When we reached the parking lot, two blocks later, Jim had climbed into his car alone (once a week his staff bodyguard, a racing sheet truck driver, got the day off, and this was the day) and we-me and Walt Pelitier, an ex-pickpocket detail dick, like most of my ops-got into the bodyguard car, Walt behind the wheel, me riding with shotgun in my hands, my nine millimeter automatic snug under my shoulder, an old friend I’d rather not get reacquainted with.

For fifteen minutes or so, we’d had an uneventful journey. We’d just passed through the remnants of the once-proud Levee district, reduced from its former red-light and saloon glory to a handful of rundown bars and weedy vacant lots. We were heading south on State, making our way to Beverley, a nice neighborhood on the far South West Side, one of those sedate upper-middle-class areas that whispered money. Ragen and his family lived there, in a spacious two-story with a sprawling lawn, at 10756 Seeley. So, for two months now, in the apartment over the garage, had Walt Pelitier.

We were not, at the moment, in a nice neighborhood. We were, in fact, in the midst of a colored corridor that might charitably be described as a slum; we were at the west end of the South Side Bronzeville, and the black faces that watched Ragen’s fancy car slide by were not sympathetic. Several blocks to the right, across the tracks, yet worlds away, was a nice neighborhood. A white neighborhood.