Chicago Stories: West of Western by Eileen Hamer

where it had fallen over her face and reached to steady her with his other hand. Examined her face to see if he'd hurt her.“You're okay. Just take a deep breath, now.”
    “Of course I'm okay,” she said, shaking off his hand and straightening up. He guided her gently away from the doorway.“I reported shots fired,” she said.
    Trying to make sense of the scene before her, dark and cold and unreal in black and white, like an overexposed photo in the high-intensity glare of the searchlights. White cop faces, black shadows. Flashing blue lights pulsed urgency. Fine rain haloed street lights. Static-filled bits of radio transmissions splintered the air with disconnected voices. Tense, focused men. Cold, hostile night.
    Seraphy rubbed her eyes. Too many cops.
    “What happened?” She coughed in the exhaust from the idling patrol cars. “I thought I heard shots, but I was asleep. Could have been a backfire.” Suddenly she felt cold and shivered. That was no backfire. With no one to tell her what was going on she lost her sense of time.
    Two more police cars, flashing blue but running without sirens, swooshed the wrong way down Cortez. One stopped to idle in the intersection, the other turned on Rockwell and stopped half a block south, blocking off the street.
    She looked past the uniforms. A pair of ragged men stood on the porch next door and she could just make out other figures behind cars in the intersections. Great, sightseers already.
    “Here, come out to the car. It's warmer.” The uniform took her arm.
    “I'll go back upstairs—” Where it was warm. Where she wasn't an alien.
    “No,” he gestured toward the doorway, now crowded with three patrol officers. “Not until the detectives get here. We need to keep everyone away from the crime scene.”
    “Crime scene?”
    The cop pointed and she followed his finger to the body. Almost at her door. On its side, slim, smoky hair ragged, the victim looked to be smaller than she, dark clothing already sparked with drops of rain. Tiny round hole behind his ear, maybe from a .22? Black in the street light, a pool of blood grew under his head as she watched. A neat shooting. Cops on the sidewalk looked down at the body, the tallest muttering into his phone.
    “Oh shit. Who—”
    He shook his head. “Get in the car. No, you can't go back inside until we know what happened. Stay in the car. Detectives are on the way.”
    Three o'clock according to the dashboard clock. Shivering from shock and wet from her few minutes in the rain, even the warmth of the patrol car didn't seem to help. Someone had left McDonald's wrappers in the backseat and the car smelled like old hamburgers. Her stomach turned over. Eventually one of the cops came to check on her and handed her a blanket from the trunk.
    Wrapped in the blanket, Seraphy sat watching the police go about their work, cool and professional in the rain, and tried to make sense of the scene. Was this connected to the threat on her garage door? First the windows, then the garage, then a body? Surely not, not her, she only just moved in, no time to make enemies, at least not enemies who'd kill. Shit. Duh, she thought, remembering the image of a naked and bloody white body, and shook herself. Not to worry. Fortress Pelligrini, Tony had called it, and right now she wanted more than anything to be safe behind its walls.
    Maybe she was supposed to be terrified?
    “Well, hell, Pelligrini, like that's going to work. Shape up or ship out,” she muttered to her reflection in the windshield, channeling the voice of her old Marine Corps sergeant. “You've seen worse. What's one body more or less? Every God-damned day in Anwar was worse.” Deliberately she called up images of the carnage after roadside bombs, picking up pieces—a finger there, a foot here, an unidentifiable lump of flesh—bits of Darkpool friends.
    “Okay, Pelligrini,” her voice curt now, “that was way worse and you functioned through it. Straighten up and fly