Dead Certain

only places within city limits that still have a working Dark Invaders game,” he replied. “Their machines aren’t in the same kind of cherry condition as the one we sent Hurt, but I figured they’d do for you.”
    “For me what?” I demanded.
    “For you to practice.”
     
    Three hours and seventeen dollars in quarters and all I had to show for it was a matching set of blisters on my thumbs from working the flippers on the Dark Invaders machine at Mother’s, the yuppie watering hole on Division. If that wasn’t bad enough, my head ached from tracking the quicksilver ball and my ears rang from the game’s incessant mechanical chirping. The only consolation was that I was billing the time to the Delirium file, which meant that if and when we made the deal with Icon, Gabriel Hurt would wind up paying for my crash course in his favorite game.
    Unfortunately, I still wasn’t any good. I suspected that pinball, like an appreciation of the Three Stooges, was one of those exclusively Y-chromosome activities. Not that it mattered. Tonight’s “tournament” was like being invited to join in a pickup game of hoops with Michael Jordan. You went in knowing that you were going to get killed.
    While I was busy dropping quarters at Mother’s, Jeff Managed to track down Bill Delius, who was attending the COMDEX engineering banquet. According to Jeff, Delius was so excited by the news that he practically hyperventilated. I planned on using the drive from COMDEX to the Four Seasons to deliver a little seminal on the importance of keeping cool and the hidden costs of gushing.
    Like Soldier Field and the Field Museum of Natural History, McCormack Place was one of those landmarks I passed by every day but seldom visited. Yet in the years since I’d first moved to Hyde Park, I’d watched the city’s convention center spread and mutate like a fungus. From a simple, albeit gigantic rectangle of smoked glass and steel, it now squatted on both sides of Lake Shore Drive. With completion of the latest, most ambitious phase of construction, it now resembled not so much a public building as a space station, self-contained and turned inward on itself against an inhospitable environment.-Futuristic walkways connected the far-flung buildings, while the exhibition halls were linked by a catacomb of underground service passages. When I thought about it, I realized that the building was the nightmare stuff of childhood, the kind of place one might venture into and yet never emerge from alive.
    Millman was supposedly having dinner downtown with a group of Japanese businessmen and therefore unreachable. I had no way of knowing if this was true. I suspected that Delius wanted to have Gabriel Hurt all to himself. As far as I was concerned, it was probably better that way. As when dealing with two-year-olds, I found that it was easier to handle the Delirium partners one at a time.
    But when I pulled into the service drive on the west: side of the building, there was no sign of Bill Delius. Wretchedly certain that he was panicking in front of a distant door in some other part of the building, punched in the number of his cell phone. But before could press SEND, I spotted him in the shadows. He was sitting on the edge of a waist-high concrete planter. He was mopping at his brow with a handkerchief.
    “Oh, no,” I groaned. Even from a distance I could see that he looked drunk. The couple of times I’d had dinner with them I’d noticed that Millman was a hard drinker of the old school, but I’d thought Delius didn’t drink alcohol at all. Obviously I’d been mistaken.
    I got out of the car and crossed the concrete plaza toward him, wondering how on earth I was going to get him sobered up in time, when it occurred to me that instead of being drunk, he’d probably been mugged. The area south of the Loop around McCormack Place was the current hotbed of gentrification, but it was also still gang turf. That was the reason that conventioneers were funneled in and out of only a handful of entrances. It was also why the long lines of cars and unwieldy crowds sent convention veterans scrambling for alternate exits.
    “Hey, Bill,” I said when I got close to him. “Are you okay?”
    “Oh, Kate, it’s you,” he said. He sounded startled to find me there. As usual, he was dressed entirely in black. Indeed, every time I’d seen him, Bill Delius had been wearing exactly the same thing: black trousers, a black single-pocket T-shirt, and a