AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Gordy was intimidating as hell to guys who killed for a living, never mind the effect of his steady gaze on this plump little seamstress. But with or without me, she had a bad night ahead.
“I’ll go along for moral support, but understand that Joe’s in for it. I can’t interfere with how Gordy does business.”
“But don’t you work for him, too? You ran the club and—and the other things. . . .”
I’d reluctantly filled Gordy’s big shoes for a brief and terrible time while he recovered from a case of lead poisoning caught during a botched assassination attempt. “Just the once, and I wasn’t in charge so much as a target. Some of those guys still hate me for it.”
Desanctis was one of them, but he’d been smart enough not to act on it at the time. He’d kept his distance to watch and wait for me to fall on my face, which didn’t exactly happen. He wouldn’t appreciate me putting my nose into this, though.
“You think they’ll kill Joe.”
“I couldn’t say.” There was a remote chance that they’d beat him to hell and gone and kick him out of Chicago, but I didn’t want to get her hopes up. An execution was far more likely.
“But if he gives back the money, wouldn’t that make a difference?”
“It’s not about the money, but the fact he took it in the first place. They can’t trust him. Crazy as it sounds, the gangs run on trust same as any other business. If a clerk steals money from the till, they’re gonna fire him, no matter if he returns everything.”
She looked down, visibly crushed, fingers brushing the sides of the parcel.
“What d’ya have there?”
“Joe left it for me. It was outside my door this evening. With a note. He explained what he did and why and what I had to do. I tried calling him, but I guess he’s hiding. It’s the money—all of it. He wrote that if I took this to Gordy, it would make things right. He doesn’t dare go in himself.”
“May I?”
She handed it over with no hesitation, a gleam of hope in her gorgeous dark eyes. I felt bad for inspiring that kind of trust. In my heart I knew hers was a lost cause.
The box felt a little heavy. Even eight hundred one-dollar bills wouldn’t weigh much of anything. Maybe some of it was in coin. I shook it, but nothing shifted or clinked.
“Here,” she said, pulling the loose ends of the bow. “He told me to wait for Gordy to open it, but you should check—”
The bow did not come undone; the twine slipped an inch and caught. She automatically gave it a strong yank with me reflexively tightening my grip on the box to brace it, and suddenly the string dangled free in her hand, a large metal ring looped fast to the intact bow.
In the space between one of her heartbeats and the next, I glimpsed a slit in the paper where the ring had popped out, and a dreadful understanding jolted me to panicked action. I lobbed the parcel behind the couch and flung Emma bodily through the doorway so quick and hard, she didn’t have time to blink.
I can move fast, but even my unnatural speed wasn’t enough for me to follow and pull the door shut behind. Instead, I used my momentum to slam it closed and vanished just as a hideous flat BANG clubbed the room into perdition.
A discharge of countless tiny things gusted through the space I’d occupied, the concussion flattening my invisible and formless self against the door, which shifted violently in reaction to the blast. It was like an army of machine gunners firing in unison for just one second. A Thompson can spit a dozen slugs in a single tick of the clock.
I’d been through this before, believe it or not, an experience I’d thought never to repeat.
But it was over. One horrible explosion and dusty silence.
It was safe. I could re-form and go solid.
Any time now.
No hurry.
No hurry at all.
A faint whimper from the hall drew me out of hiding. Emma.
I forced my terrified self to ooze back into solidity.
The office door was wood veneer over thick metal, specially made to keep intruders from breaking in to find me apparently dead on the sofa during the day. The thing was heavy and required an extra-strong metal frame to support the weight.
In the wake of the explosion it hung loose by one twisted hinge, steel showing through where the wood had been flayed off. I made a grab just as it gave and propped it against the wall with no small respect. The door had done its job of protection, just not in a way I could have anticipated.
