It was war, then. The quiet kind that you notice only as an impersonal paragraph in the paper you read over the morning coffee or in the evening relaxing, after work. Bold black letters might spell out "Shooting Victim Found," and then go on to give some sparse details of the person's age, where they lived and died, and that the police were following some promising leads. Most of the time you never learn if they turned up anything or not. Life moves forward and new paragraphs on other casualties appear in the paper. New, but with a dreary similarity to all the others, as in any war. In my case I might not even get that much of an epitaph. Vaughn Kyler's enemies tended to simply disappear. Without an inconvenient body to trip over, the cops couldn't be expected to make an arrest. I gripped the wheel more tightly to control the tremors in my hands and took a second look in the rearview mirror. The Cadillac was still there and following close enough to make it obvious that the men inside wanted me to know about it. The side windows were smoked over, but I could make out four vague figures through the windshield, though little else. Maybe one of them was Kyler but that wasn't very likely. The wide streets of Chicago, even at night, were far too public for him. Last August he'd taken control of the Paco gang, and since Frank