Torc and Amy's Chicago is both the setting for Brendan Cronin’s first sustained encounters with ordinary suffering and the city where those encounters begin to acquire an extraordinary dimension. In its children’s hospital, a police car, a wounded officer’s hospital room, and a police laboratory, the narrative links practical acts of care to miraculous recoveries and official alarm. Later, Chicago is also the destination that witnesses hope to use as a platform for exposing what happened in Nevada.

A priest among the sick

On his first day as an orderly at St. Joseph's Hospital for Children, Brendan’s priesthood was a secret known only to Dr. Jim McMurtry. Father Stefan Wycazik had secured both the doctor’s promise not to reveal Brendan’s identity and an assurance that Brendan would receive the same work, including the unpleasant tasks, as any other orderly. At the hospital, everyone called him Brendan. He emptied bedpans, changed urine-soaked linens, helped with passive exercises, fed a partly paralyzed eight-year-old boy, pushed wheelchairs, and cleaned up after two young cancer patients made ill by chemotherapy. His discomfort at being treated as a layman sharpened the sense that he was performing a role, but the work itself was not a performance: it placed him directly among people who needed care.

The first day overwhelmed him. Twice he withdrew to a staff bathroom, locked himself in a stall, and wept. The sight of children with rheumatoid arthritis, muscular dystrophy, burns, or injuries inflicted by abusive parents brought pity and grief that he could not contain. The hospital therefore introduces a defining tension in Brendan’s life: his religious vocation gives him a language for service, but it does not make suffering easier to witness or explain.

The Uptown patrol and the shooting

After beginning his hospital work, Brendan also spent five days riding as an observer with Winton Tolk and Paul Armes. Father Wycazik arranged the placement with a precinct captain. Brendan wore an ordinary suit, tie, and topcoat and was presented as a church-employed lay consultant studying the need for Catholic charity outreach programs. The cover story was accepted, allowing him to accompany the officers without disclosing that he was a priest.

Their beat, Uptown, Chicago, extended from Foster Avenue in the north to Irving Park Road in the south, and from Lake Shore Drive’s high-rises in the east to North Ashland Avenue in the west. The account describes it as the city’s poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhood, inhabited by Black and Native American residents and, in the greatest numbers, Appalachians and Hispanics. Brendan grew fond of Winton and Paul and developed sympathy for the people trying to live and work amid decaying buildings and filthy streets, while recognizing the danger posed by predatory criminals.

During a snowy December evening, Winton left the cruiser to buy three hamburgers and Cokes at a corner sandwich shop. Paul remained at the wheel, with Brendan in the back. Festive pictures of Santa, reindeer, wreaths, and angels covered the shop’s windows; the forecast promised eight inches of snow by midnight. Brendan and Paul had been discussing Christmas films when gunfire shattered the ordinary conversation. Brendan could hear the violence but did not dare expose himself to see who had been hit. The shootout was the worst incident he had encountered on patrol, and Winton was shot twice in the chest at close range. The violence turns the city’s holiday setting into the beginning of a recovery that will later defy ordinary expectations.

Christmas care and an extraordinary recovery

On Christmas morning, Father Stefan Wycazik visited Winton at University Hospital. Winton had spent the previous afternoon and night in intensive care after emergency surgery; by morning he had been moved to a monitored semiprivate room. His wife, Raynella, was with him. Wycazik then sought a fuller account from the physician on duty, Dr. Royce Albright, presenting himself as the family’s priest and implying that Raynella had asked him to learn the details of her husband’s condition. Albright said that the bullets had missed the heart and other vital organs, that Winton was progressing remarkably well, and that he was already out of intensive care roughly a day after being shot twice with a .38-caliber handgun. The account stresses how unusual this speed of recovery seemed even to the physician.

Wycazik’s Christmas rounds also took him to the Chicago Police Scientific Investigation Division laboratory. Although the laboratory ordinarily restricted information to police and judicial personnel, Wycazik had Catholic friends on the force who helped make a path for him. He arrived on Christmas Day, while municipal crews were still clearing the previous night’s snow, and entered an aging government building whose largely deserted rooms amplified footsteps across tile floors and high ceilings. The visit shows that his efforts to understand events were not confined to pastoral conversation: he was also seeking access to institutional information, using personal relationships to cross boundaries that would normally keep an outsider away.

At St. Joseph's Hospital for Children, Christmas offered a contrasting atmosphere. The wards were crowded with relatives bearing gifts and good wishes; music played over the public-address system, and patients who usually endured a grim routine were laughing and talking. Wycazik moved through the hospital in especially buoyant spirits. Physicians there were eager to discuss Emmeline Halbourg’s remarkable recovery with him. The juxtaposition matters: the hospital remains a place of serious illness, but on this day visible happiness and reports of recovery briefly alter its emotional landscape.

Faith, departure, and the call back to Nevada

The events in Chicago do not restore Brendan’s faith by themselves. In conversation with Wycazik, he remains unable to believe more strongly in God than he had the day before. Later, after his appetite returns, the despair that followed his loss of faith has lifted, though an inner emptiness remains. He begins to imagine that he might one day lead a meaningful life outside the Church—a striking possibility for someone who had once found no temporal pleasure as compelling as the spiritual joy of Mass.

Brendan eventually tells Wycazik that he intends to leave for Nevada. The dream that directs him there has shown only brilliant light, but he has awakened with the knowledge that he must return to Elko County to seek an explanation for Emmeline’s cure and Winton’s resurrection. Chicago is thus not simply the site of his priestly work; it is the place from which he prepares to pursue the connection between two recoveries that, in his understanding, have outgrown ordinary medical explanation.

The city as a public and political pressure point

As the story develops, Winton’s recovery becomes part of a broader sequence of unsettling events. In Uptown, Chicago, a stabbing and shooting in the Mendoza family’s apartment draw reporters and television crews to the building after Winton brings a stabbed child back from near death. An FBI agent reports that Winton is giving no interviews and has withdrawn to his own house, where reporters have gathered. The possibility that he may eventually speak publicly alarms officials because his account could lead people from Brendan to Emmeline and reveal a connection between their recoveries.

The Halbourg family is consequently placed in an FBI safe house. Agents are told to treat its members as people who must be both feared and protected, and not to be alone with any of them. The response makes Chicago a site not only of public attention but also of attempted secrecy: extraordinary events attract witnesses and media scrutiny, while officials try to contain the people who might explain them.

That conflict gives the city a further role when the witnesses plan their escape from Nevada. Jack Twist directs Brendan, Sandy Sarver, Jorja Monatella, and Marcie Monatella to travel separately from Ginger Weiss and the Blocks, then fly to Chicago when the blizzard allows. Brendan is to contact Wycazik, whose influence might secure an emergency meeting with the head of the Archdiocese of Chicago. The plan treats Chicago’s religious connections as a potential route to influential advocates and wider circulation of the witnesses’ story. Yet the city’s reach is not a guarantee of safety: when Wycazik arrives in Elko and calls Father Michael Gerrano in Chicago, he learns that Brendan’s telephone is not working, and Gerrano already knows of the problem. Chicago is therefore both a planned refuge for testimony and part of a communications network whose silence raises new suspicions.