Embers & Ash (4 page)

I love you,

Papa

A pleasing chill tiptoed over my shoulders as I stared at the words. From the distant past, my great-grandfather not only affirmed the existence of ultimate power, he'd spoken of it in the context of saving his, and my, family. The description was far from specific but it was enough—more than enough—to reignite the hope I needed to begin the trip underneath the streets of Chicago.

Freedom,
I thought with a shiver.
Ultimate power is freedom.

I placed the notebook aside and closed my eyes.

My sleep held no dreams, but also no nightmares.

The last thing I remembered was saying thank you to Nunzio.

THE SUN ROSE LIKE AN ORANGE BALLOON OVER
Lake Michigan, spreading morning light through the Bird Cage Club as I stared at the triangle of thumbtacks.

A tiny, momentous secret waiting to be discovered.

I wondered if my dad had left them pinned there, similar to how he'd left the steel briefcase and its contents for me to find. The .45, cash, and prepaid credit card had been placed inside to keep me safe and moving, while the notebook's purpose was to guide me through the dangerous maze of the Outfit. If he'd left the pins in place, then he must've suspected that I'd need ultimate power at some point. Knowing the peril of being associated with the Outfit, three generations of Rispolis had compulsively planted clues and safeguards in case something catastrophic happened to their children.

It had, and I was grateful for their paranoia.

In their lives and mine, someone (from Elzy and Uncle Buddy to Juan Kone and now Elzy again) was always watching, listening, or plotting. So they'd obscured facts and information and then relied upon the love we felt for one another to keep us moving toward the truth. In that way, the past six months of my life had been spent scratching at surfaces, trying to find what was hidden beneath—and here I was again, plunging into the unknown. It was enough of a reason to stare at an aspirin in the palm of my hand that morning and then put it back into the bottle. More than hope, more than luck, finding ultimate power might require a little extra power of my own.

“Spelunking anyone?” Doug said. He stood grinning in an oversized Blackhawks jersey and camouflage pants, hair mashed from sleep, holding a pair of miner's helmets with electric lights above the brims.

“Where'd you get those?” I said.

“Snuck out last night to Trader Jack's Survivor Emporium, down on Halsted Street. That freaky joint has everything,” he said. “Rubber knee-high boots, flashlights, rope, because you never know. Water, of course. What am I forgetting?”

“The .45, loaded this time,” I said, “and the notebook.”

“The gun, I get. There might be giant zombie rats,” he said. “But the notebook? Is there a map in it I missed? In case we want to tour Chicago's prettiest sewers?”

“In case we don't make it back.”

“Ri-i-ight,” he said uneasily. “Hadn't thought about that. Guess we can't just leave it lying around, huh?”

“Nope. Look, Doug . . . it may be pretty dangerous down there.”

“You're telling me. The notebook said Joe Little connected the tunnels to the subway. You know how deep that is? Might be poisonous or explosive gases in the air, not to mention cave-ins. Anyway, we should be fine,” he said, smiling. “Excited?”

“Thrilled.”

“Take your aspirin this morning?”

“Yep,” I lied, using a rubber band to contain my wild hair.

“Good girl. So, where's our entry point? Which Capone Door?”

I looked at the pins on the map, with my dad and the steel briefcase in mind. “Club Molasses. Where it all started,” I said, thinking of the speakeasy hidden deep below my family's bakery, Rispoli & Sons Fancy Pastries.

“Are you sure? That's way over on Taylor Street,” he said. “We're right here in the Loop. There are a dozen old buildings nearby with Capone Doors.”

“With hundreds of people milling around,” I said. “The bakery is deserted, locked up since Uncle Jack and Annabelle left last month. Why risk being seen?”

“You're the boss,” Doug said, putting on a miner's helmet and striking a pose. “How do I look?”

“Like you should be in an old music video singing about the YMCA.”

He nodded, smiling. “Compliments will get you everywhere.”

• • •

Fifteen minutes later we were in the Lincoln, battered but a rocket on wheels. The window Skull Head had broken out had been replaced by a thick piece of plastic duct-taped into the empty frame. It wasn't pretty, but it worked.

I wanted to get to Taylor Street quickly, and stepped on the gas, past a slow-moving station wagon, around a pair of buzzing scooters. As we sped beneath the El tracks on Wells Street, spraying sidewalks with leftover rainwater, the
blip
of a siren sounded behind us. The light turned red and I came to a halt, looking over at a police car easing next to me. My other foot hovered over the gas pedal, ready to step on it if the cop made a threatening move, but he simply pointed and mouthed the words,
Slow down.
I nodded agreeably. When the light was green, I drove slowly ahead, just a law-abiding teenager and her pal out for a Sunday-morning spin. The cop passed by without a glance, cut in front of me, and sped on. “Holy shit.” Doug exhaled. “What if he'd stopped us and looked through the car? The backpack's right there, in the backseat, with a gun inside! Not to mention all the other suspicious crap, the helmets, the rope!”

“That would've sucked,” I said, shaking off the jumps.

“And you don't have a license!”

“There's lots of things I don't have. Relax,” I said, turning onto Randolph Street.

“You're talking to Doug ‘Ice Man' Stuffins. I'm relaxed,” he said, thumbing at a line of sweat. “Besides, how can I not be? We're going, like, five miles an hour.”

He was right. We'd come up behind a street-cleaning truck taking its time, weaving toward the sidewalk, back into the lane, scrubbing the pavement. Watching it slosh through the avenue, an alarm went off in my gut. “Weird,” I said quietly.

“What? That the city is actually cleaning a street?”

“No. That it's happening the day after a huge storm,” I said, picturing its driver in crimson goggles.

“Maybe they're saving money. Using water that's already there,” he said.

“On a Sunday? Does the city even work on Sunday?”

“Gee, I don't know, Sara Jane . . . let me check my city utilities handbook,” he said sarcastically, as a horn began to blare behind us. Doug looked through the back window. “Careful. That idiot is trying to pass.” Seconds later, a rusty van swung out and then screeched to a halt next to us as the street cleaner wove back into the lane, blocking its path. I looked over at a stringy guy in a White Sox cap and at the side of the van, which read,
A-1 HOME PLUMBING—YOU B
REAK IT, WE SNAKE IT!
His eyes were wild as he screamed muffled obscenities through the windshield. When the truck moved, the van roared past. A hand jutted from the truck's cab giving the stringy guy a one-finger salute.

“My turn,” I said, and hurried past the street cleaning truck, too.

The driver was chewing a cigar, back at work. He wore nothing over his eyes and didn't even look our way, much less flip us off. I exhaled, relieved, and continued down Randolph. A few blocks later, traffic grew heavier, beginning to slow. I changed lanes, impatient to keep moving, and glanced in the rearview mirror.

Somehow, the rusty van was directly behind us now.

I'd been too preoccupied with cops and street cleaners.

Keeping my eyes on the mirror, I watched the stringy guy at the wheel slide something over his face. “Doug,” I said, trying to remain calm, “I need the gun.”

“What? Why?” he asked, brow furrowed.

“The van behind us . . .”

He turned, staring, and swallowed hard. “Is it one of them? A Russian?”

I nodded. “The gun.”

“It's in the backseat, in the backpack!” he said.

“Go get it, please . . . now,” I said. Without pause, he climbed over the seat and began tugging at the backpack.

“I can't . . . get it . . . open,” he said, breathing heavily. “My hands . . .”

“Are you okay?!”

“Panic . . . attack. Hands are . . . shaking too badly . . .”

I was in the left lane; a gap appeared in the right and I called, “Hang on!” twisting the steering wheel, jumping ahead with the van on my bumper. I flew toward a side street and made a screaming right as Doug tumbled onto the floor of the backseat with a yelp. The side street was deserted and I treated it like a racetrack, peeling rubber. “Grab the gun, Doug!” I said, looking back at him.

“I'm trying . . . to get up,” he grunted. “You're . . . going too fast . . .”

A flash caught the corner of my eye, and I turned, staring through the windshield at a woman pushing a stroller through the crosswalk. I hit the brakes, stopping inches from her as the van came to a skidding halt, nearly smashing into me. The woman, face and body frozen, now gathered herself, shooting daggers as she continued across the street. When she reached the sidewalk, the van pulled around next to me.

The stringy guy leaned across the passenger seat wearing normal sunglasses.

It was his turn to flip someone off—me—as he sped away.

“He's . . . gone,” I said, leaning my head on the steering wheel, catching my breath. “The guy was just a plumber. He wasn't chasing us. He was just . . . in a hurry.”

“God almighty,” Doug said, giving up the struggle to right himself and lying back on the floor. “That was nerve-racking . . .”

“Can you breathe?”

“Yeah, I'm fine now. The panic, like, evaporates when the danger passes—”

Out of nowhere, the buzzing of giant mosquitoes cut off his words.

I looked up at a guy on a delivery scooter stopped in front of the car several feet ahead, facing us, and around at his partner, parked on another scooter the same distance behind. The drivers each wore T-shirts—one bearing the image of a pizza, the other a taco—helmets, and crimson goggles. The pizza guy in front straddled his scooter, leveling a short-barreled shotgun, while the taco guy jumped off his machine and hustled toward us, popping a clip into a handgun.

“Doug! Stay down, turn over, and get ready to open the door! Hard!”

He did as told without a word, the urgency in my voice moving him.

When Taco Guy reached the car, I screamed, “Now!” The Lincoln was blessed with a vintage feature called suicide doors that opened from the middle outward, like barn doors. Doug pushed against it with all of his strength, nailing Taco Guy like a linebacker, laying him out on the street. It gave Pizza Guy pause, a precious few seconds for me to jam down the accelerator. The Lincoln leaped, and all Pizza Guy could do was raise his arms as I hit him, sending him and the shotgun up and over the car with a thump and a roll. Doug yanked the door shut and scrambled onto the backseat, gaping through the rear window, and we sped away.

“Did you kill him?!” he asked.

“I . . . don't know,” I said, staring ahead, foot pressed on the gas pedal.

“He's not moving.” Doug turned and sat on the seat. His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “We got away, Sara Jane,” he said. “That's all that matters.”

“Right,” I said quietly, knowing he was wrong.

As bad as my enemies were, as evil as their intentions might be, my life was not an action movie, where the good guy mindlessly blows away assailant after assailant without a second thought. If anything, I was closer to a soldier at war, aware that body counts mattered. It wasn't that the corpses were piling
up
as much as piling on
top
of me, threatening to smother my better self once and for all. If the old Sara Jane had hit someone with a car, if he'd died, she would've felt it for the rest of her days. I knew that within an hour, maybe less, I'd forget all about Pizza Guy.

It scared me more than the Russians and their anonymous vehicles.

Every day, I was growing nearer to the line that shouldn't be crossed.

I wondered again who I'd be if I stepped over it, or if I'd even notice that I had.

• • •

The rest of the trip to Taylor Street was fast and quiet.

I pulled to a stop at the curb in front of the bakery, staring at leaves and litter piled against the door, the unlit neon sign, and the brown paper covering its windows. The
REMODELING—PARDON OUR
DUST!
sign had slipped sideways at an odd angle.

It looked like an abandoned property, forsaken by its owners.

My heart sank, feeling how vibrant the place had been before my family disappeared, and further back, when my grand-parents were alive and Uncle Buddy hadn't yet shapeshifted into Uncle Judas. I looked past the bakery to the unrolled awnings of Coffinetto's Funeral Home on one side and at Lavasecco's Dry Cleaning next to it. A pair of signs were posted in the cleaner's window—a plain, sad one announcing it had gone out of business and a larger, flashier one that screamed
COMING SOON . . . T
HE CUPCAKE BOUTIQUE!
Not long ago, the idea of opening a cupcake-anything next to the venerable Rispoli & Sons Fancy Pastries would have been laughable. The block had been central to my life, a vital piece of my identity. Now it was changing and there was nothing I could do about it. Life marched on, with or without me.

“I don't want to go through the front,” I said. “Seeing the place empty sucks too much.” Doug said nothing, just opened the door and slid out. It's one of the best things about my friend; he knows that sometimes, silent commiseration is more important than encouraging words. After making sure neighborhood snoops weren't watching, I led him down the alley behind the bakery. Using a red key on my dad's key chain, I unlocked an electrical box and pushed the button inside. A rusty grumble was followed by a section of brick wall rolling open like a garage door. A small elevator revealed itself, done in mahogany and green leather, complete with a small crystal chandelier.

“The alley-vator, right?” Doug whispered, climbing aboard. “Cool.”

I locked the electrical box and joined him. The chandelier tinkled as we descended, and then we stepped into the foyer of Club Molasses. During Prohibition, the alley-vator had been the main entrance to the speakeasy, depositing customers thirsty for booze and gambling into a luxurious anteroom where coats, hats, and guns were checked by Outfit goons. Now, ancient silken wallpaper hung in strands, powdery dust blanketed plush, worn divans, and cobwebs, long deserted by their original spinners, fell from wall sconces like clumps of gray cotton candy. Doug kicked at a flat, padlocked box and said, “This is where they checked the tommy guns, right?”