Officer Patti Black

There's this place in Chinatown.

Off Wentworth Avenue in the 25th Ward, where the four­-­story walkups lean out over the street. Buildings not yet leveled by urban renewal, mattress fires, or debts to the wrong politicians. The kind of neighborhood that scares people who look too close.

A block east the 'L' screeches overhead, sharp like it's mad, metal­-­on­-­metal that bitters the back of your throat. Amtrak runs up there too, on iron bridging painted gray to match the concrete it shades. Above and below and beyond the trains, twenty lanes of loud expressways rumble and honk in four directions. Everything at ground level vibrates, the sense of movement so strong you can lose your balance.

During the day Great Lakes sailors and bus­-­tour adventurers shop for trinkets and a glimpse of something that isn't here; at night it's a Mexican border town selling vice in Mandarin. Behind the pagoda storefronts and across the alley, the Outfit runs dice and card rooms, and the Chinese Merchants Association with their teenage hitmen run everything else.

Me, I'm sitting in a side­-­street restaurant with faded Chinese characters for an address and six tables for locals who should know better. It's dim in here, and that's unusual. The floor's dirty, and that isn't. Rice kettles and radiators steam the stale air humid. Back by the kitchen an old woman sits smoking unfiltered cigarettes down to her fingertips and has for as long as I can remember. We don't speak, her and I; we stare out the front window. Her eyes hide behind the smoke and that's probably a good thing -- she hears what I hear: the echoes of a long, violent struggle between me and the d