Embers & Ash (13 page)

Nothing, no luck, while footsteps on the run sounded behind me.

I reached over and pushed down the passenger-door lock, spun toward my side, pulling my knees to my chest, and when Medium yanked open the door, I hammered him in the face with both feet. Small grappled uselessly with the locked passenger side with one hand, a gun in the other. I swung out my door, lifted myself on top of the truck, ran its length, and jumped onto the SUV. Doug was coming for me, speeding backward, as I leaped to the alley floor, hauling ass. Small was on the run, too, gun raised, when I threw myself into the Lincoln. There was a
ping!
against the trunk, another against the bumper, but we were gone, grinding out of the alley and squealing away.

“I told you to wait for me on Glenwood Avenue!” I said, jittery.

“Too risky,” he said. “Too much running through the neighborhood, exposed.”

“But I told you—”

He cut me off with a shrug. “Partners don't
tell
each other . . . they discuss. Short of that, if one's wrong, the other one takes appropriate action to correct her. Consider yourself corrected.”

Knowing he was right, I mumbled, “Well . . . all I'm saying is, Glenwood Avenue was the plan.”

“A good plan, but not great,” he said. “There was no way I would leave you alone back there. If something happened, I was going to ram the shit out of them in reverse.”

I nodded. “Great plan.”

Doug stared through the windshield, driving carefully. “Thanks, partner,” he said with a small, satisfied smile.

WEDNESDAY MORNING ARRIVED WITH A BOOM
of thunder that sounded as if half the planet—and my skull—had exploded. I sat up on both elbows, still feeling Large's fist to the back of my head. Standing unsteadily, hearing a distant buzzing noise, I wondered if I'd suffered neurological damage. The buzzing stopped, started, and I kicked the blankets aside, bent, and lifted my phone. The text message read:

Ed Debevic has invited you to a football game on Friday, noon, at Soldier Field. A Redskin running back is in town! Be wise, bring a friend, and prepare to have a swell time!

It was a text message from Lucky—I was being whistled in, digitally. It surely hadn't come directly from the old man himself; few things in the Outfit, especially an order from the Boss of Bosses, traveled in straight, traceable lines. Although I regularly dumped my phones, I had to at least give my ever-changing number to Knuckles and Tyler for business reasons. One of them had passed it to someone else who had handed it over yet again, to the shadowy underling who'd sent word that Lucky demanded to see me.

“Ed Debevic” was his code name, one he'd been using for decades.

“Football game” meant a private sit-down with the man himself.

“Soldier Field,” one of Chicago's most well-known landmarks, referred to one of its least known, Lucky's headquarters at the Algren Hotel. A specific day of the week required a single-day subtraction (so “Friday” meant Thursday, tomorrow) and the time, “noon,” meant 9:00 a.m. “Redskin” (“Red” for Russian) was obvious and “running back,” a player, meant a mobster. “In town” meant under lock and key—that is, a Russian mobster had finally been captured and I was being called in to interrogate him. A tingle of opportunity went through me. If by chance an officer had been captured then, as Goatee had told me, he'd know where Elzy was holding my family.

I looked at the text again, rereading the last line:

Be wise, bring a friend, and prepare to have a swell time!

Its true meaning was a warning—be stupid enough to bring someone to watch your back, and prepare to die—which signified that the sit-down was so important that anyone other than me even knowing about it was strictly forbidden. It was odd. By now, everyone in the Outfit was probably aware that we had a Russian prisoner, so what was the big secret? And why did it come with the threat of death?

I'd be a fool to question it.

Not that I hadn't considered asserting myself with Lucky.

When he'd told me I would have to decide the fate of Russian hostages—either torture or kill—I hesitated at the prospect of ordering even more violence. The only way I could refuse would be to use cold fury—to hold his gaze and command him to absolve me of the duty. But then I learned that someone was always watching when the counselor-at-large met with the boss. Lucky's girlfriend, Peek-a-Boo Schwartz, told me as much—she monitored every one of the old man's sit-downs via closed-circuit camera and other methods. If she or anyone else saw me administer cold fury to the Boss of Bosses, I wouldn't escape the Algren Hotel with my eyes, much less my life.

The other reason I'd never use it on him was the one that nagged me most—I still wasn't sure how long the effect lasted on someone. I'd ordered Knuckles never again to question me about my dad's supposed illness or my family; months later, he'd continued to comply. And although the past half year felt like a lifetime, ghiaccio furioso was still new to me. There was nothing in the notebook about its lasting effects. I directed it at Outfit members without compunction only because I was protected in my role by Lucky.

Using it on my protector would not only be foolish; it could be a death warrant.

I would present myself at the sit-down as his loyal counselor.

More than anything, I needed time with the Russian prisoner.

I hoped that I'd be allowed to interrogate him alone, but if not—if hidden eyes were watching—I could at least force him to tell me where Elzy's headquarters were. I might not be able to free my family, but I'd contact her and offer her a deal—four billion dollars in gold for them. And then the question Doug posed in the vault came back to me:
How can you trust her? Not just to make the deal, but to honor it?

I couldn't, but it was all I had left.

A growl of thunder sounded overhead as clouds massed outside the window.

I left the Bird Cage Club, headed for school with Doug, looking over my shoulder every five seconds for Small, Medium, and Large. The attack and narrow escape at my house had driven my internal paranoid-meter through the roof; instead of a safe haven, Fep Prep now felt permeable and open to attack, too. Entering school that morning, even a happy thumbs-up from Mr. Novak failed to calm me. The rest of the day passed in gut-churning anxiety, and when it mercifully ended, Doug and I spent the evening formulating how best to interrogate the Russian without raising suspicion about my true motives. He wondered aloud what the ominous warning meant. I brushed his concerns aside, but by the time I returned to my mattress, one thought dominated my mind.

Be stupid, bring someone to watch your back, and prepare to die.

It wasn't the most comforting lullaby.

I lifted the aspirin bottle, stared at the little white pills, and put it down. There was no way I'd use cold fury on Lucky. But I also wouldn't walk into that sit-down without a measure of electrical security.

• • •

Staring at myself in the mirror Thursday morning, trying to subdue my hair like a lion tamer with a whip, I sighed, gave up, and clipped it back. Rain oozed down the glass block window—it seemed biblical, like it would never stop. The way my life was going, plagues and locusts would be next. As I reached for my toothbrush, Doug said, “You already did that.”

He was leaning in the doorway, flicking the lighter, an old Cubs cap jammed on his head. At his feet, Harry lifted his soft, gray skull and blinked at me.

“I did?”

“Nervous, huh?” he said.

“Did you make the call?”

He dropped his voice an octave and said, “Good morning, this is Anthony Rispoli. My daughter, Sara Jane, is under the weather today with her monthly . . . well, ha-ha, you get the picture. She'll be back at school tomorrow.”

“Did you really need to add that detail?”

“All great actors improvise,” he said. “No one will question that excuse.”

“Time?” I said, walking past him to my room.

He glanced at his watch, following me. Harry's claws tick-tacked behind him. “It's seven forty-five. Thing with Lucky is at nine?”

“Sharp,” I said, taking my standard sit-down outfit from the closet—black skirt, starched white blouse, black heels.

“Okay, well, I'm going to walk Harry before school. Seen his muzzle?”

“In the front closet,” I said. “Why?”

“He's been going for the pigeons lately, haven't you, naughty boy?”

“I hate that thing. He can't bark when he's wearing it, can barely even whine.”

“That's okay,” Doug said. “He could use a little quiet time.”

“You have to take his collar off for the muzzle to fit,” I said. “Don't lose it. Lou made that collar for Harry.”

Doug slipped it off Harry, inspected it, and handed it to me. “It's cool.”

I looked at the small rectangle of copper into which Lou had etched
Harry
in curlicue script; it was attached to a band that fit snugly around the dog's little neck. “He's getting aggressive with pigeons, huh?” I said.

“You know what they say—dogs feels the stress of their owners.”

“In that case, he should be going for something a lot bigger than a pigeon.”

“It's going to be fine. Just be careful,” Doug said, turning away. “Break a leg!”

“If that's all that gets broken, I'll be a happy girl,” I muttered.

I heard the closet door shut, the elevator clank and whirr, and I was alone. If I were someone who prayed regularly, now would've been the time. I started to dress, thinking of a helping hand, how welcome it would be, and recalled what Tyler had said about watching each other's backs. Lucky had made it clear in his text that our sit-down was a secret, but—screw it. Tyler had been correct; he and I were outliers in the organization. If the results of my interrogation of the Russian were as dire as I thought they might be, it would affect him, too. Short of any information I learned about my family, I resolved to tell him what I learned.

I finished dressing, and as I went for the elevator, noticed the rain had eased back. Looking closer, I saw that the sky was like a boxer between rounds—brooding, restless—
Waiting for the bell,
I thought.

At the last moment, I grabbed an old raincoat of my dad's I'd taken from the house, a huge, truly hideous thing.

I needed all the protection I could get, even if it was only from precipitation.

I threw it in the backseat, roared from the parking garage, and splashed through the Loop. It occurred to me then that the first time Lucky summoned me, he'd requested three dozen Rispoli & Sons famous molasses cookies.

This obviously wasn't a cookie sort of meeting.

Twenty minutes later, I eased to a stop across from the Hotel Algren on a bland side street off Michigan Avenue. Lucky didn't occupy a suite or a wing; all thirteen floors were the Boss of Bosses' personal residence and fortress, a multimillion-dollar address as purposely plain and deceptively unremarkable as the man himself. At 8:58 a.m., I walked briskly across the puddle-filled street. Like the last time I was here, the lobby's single occupant was an anemic potted palm. The elevator doors parted, I stepped aboard, and was soon creaking upward. The thirteenth floor was tomb-like in its stillness. I walked slowly down the hall, crinkling my nose at a bitter, medicinal scent.

Outside Suite 1306, I made a fist and knocked once.

A slot opened, revealing a pair of stone-cold eyes. “Password,” a voice demanded.

“Password?” I said, trying to remember from the last time I was here. “Um . . . oh! ‘I refuse to answer on—on the grounds that it may incriminate me'?”

The slot closed, a lock was released, and another, and the door swung open.

The figure filling it was tall and lean in a slate-gray suit. Just as on my previous visit, he stared down his aquiline nose at me, his brow furrowed beneath cropped silver hair. The difference was that then he hadn't been holding an AK-47. Now he nodded me quickly inside the drab room with its scuffed furniture and small, neatly made bed, looking both directions down the hallway before shutting and locking the door. The street war had made everyone in the Outfit jumpy, but the assault rifle set off alarms in my gut—the atmosphere was bristling with urgency, as if something was just about to happen. I crossed toward the pink-tiled bathroom where, on my previous visit, I'd stepped through a Capone Door into Lucky's lair.

“Not there. Over there,” the guy said in Chicagoese, sounding like,
Not dere. Over dere.
He pointed the gun at an ancient, scarred wardrobe.

“Oh . . . okay,” I said, pulling open its tall wooden door to find a small elevator. I stepped inside, ready to push the Down button, when the guy shook his head. “Up?” I said. “But I thought we were as high up in the building as possible?”

He gave me a shows-how-much-you-know smirk as the elevator doors closed. I rose quickly, trying to figure out how many floors I was passing—three maybe, which meant the thirteenth was actually the tenth?—and smelled the medicinal odor again as the elevator reached its destination.

There was nothing there but a steel door with a red light next to it.

I moved forward as a disembodied voice said, “Look up,” and I craned my neck at an eye-in-the-sky camera. “There's an antibacterial dispenser by the door, counselor. Use it.” I did as instructed, the light turned green, and the door opened to a room that was half medical center, half guard post. A nurse in scrubs stared at a beeping digital monitor. Rows of pill bottles stood next to plastic bags filled with clear liquid. Several armed thugs milled around, the types regularly used for Outfit security—thickly muscled with hard guts, dead eyes, and rifles strapped over their shoulders. A tall, gaunt man stood inspecting a clipboard, wearing a white coat with the word
Doc
stitched on it; if the guy was a real physician, he was the first I'd ever seen wearing a shoulder holster filled with a .38.

He looked up as I approached, handed me a surgical mask, and said, “Put it on.” I did, and he nodded me toward a circular staircase.

I twisted up the steps, ending at another steel door and another watchful camera, followed by a metallic buzz.

I pushed inside a world made of glass.

The room was a dome, thirty feet high, its vast panes spotted with rainwater. I looked up and around at the idling clouds over Lake Michigan to the east, at surrounding buildings everywhere, and finally at a hospital bed in the center of the room. A large TV stood at its foot. Closed-circuit cameras were attached at intervals to the steel skeleton holding the glass panes. The rest of the space was empty except for a bank of flashing, blipping machines with tubes snaking to the bed.

Drawing near, I saw human remains lying beneath a thin blanket.

Lucky was beyond skeletal, as if constructed from brittle twigs. His flesh clung to him, its texture parchment-like and the color of a rotting banana peel.

The balance had clearly tipped, the old man so much more dead than alive.

I cleared my throat, drawing his attention. He turned to me, rheumy eyes behind thick glasses, breathing with effort. “You're . . . pretty sick, huh?” I said.

“There's the no-shit statement of the day,” he said, shaking his head. “Take off that silly mask, it's too late for me to get any sicker. It's the Big Casino . . . cancer everywhere, eating me alive.” He pushed weakly at a button attached to a tube in his arm. “Morphine on demand. Kills the pain before the pain kills me. They tried chemo, that filthy poison, but no use. It was sadistic . . . which reminds me, Knuckles Battuta ought to use chemo as a torture method for Muscle. Make a note of it, kitten . . .”