A bone-chilling Chicago winter. Marlo is still dead, Phil the cat still purrs for Old Forester bourbon, and Mack still watches himself from above. But nothing else is as it seems. Mystery nests within mystery. Villainy secrets itself, burrowed within the corrupted hollows of polite society, biding its time. Pressing questions about the mayor and a pick-pocket prostitute on the run from the mob must go unanswered as Raymond Mackey is sidelined in a new job. On the upside, the Chandler Illinois Police Department pays him enough to help take the retirement squeeze off the booze and cigarettes. The downside is the department rule against smoking and drinking. That, and everybody with a badge hates Mack as much as ever.
A welcome diversion shows up in the form of Nadia King, an alluring single mother who asks Mack for some off-the-books help recovering a missing heirloom. It might just be the easiest assignment he’s ever had. Until it isn’t. The hand-carved Russian nesting doll is one hundred seventy-four years old. Open her up and she’s full of secrets. But first he has to find her. Then he has to stay alive long enough to understand that smile on her face.
The bedside clock is a branding iron. My retinas take the news about like you’d expect. I close my eyes again, but that turns out to be pointless. I can still see the numbers floating in the dark: 3:00 AM.
I pull back the covers and get myself upright. I get dressed in yesterday’s clothes and go downstairs, Phil at my heels meowing for attention. My head is still sloshing from the Old Forester. Coffee would be nice but there’s no time for that now, so I wake up the Camels and shake one free, patting my pockets for a light as I step outside on the stoop and close the door. I have to stop to set the flame, cupping the tip of the cigarette against the hot wind in my face. I drop the lighter back in my pocket and look around.
She’s already waiting at the curb.
“You’re late,” she says. I close the door and lean my head against the back of the seat.
“Stop talking nonsense,” I say. “It’s way too early for me to be late.”
She watches me with the lie on her face that we’re in no kind of hurry. Like we have all the time in the world.
“Those things’ll kill you, Mack.”
I let out the smoke and bend forward, feeling around under the seat.
“What, the Camels?” I ask as my fingers finally find the Sig Saur. “Maybe.” I sit up and nose the gun into my shoulder harness where it belongs. “But they’ll have to get in line and wait their turn. I’m betting they never make it.”
She pulls away and we ride without talking. I want to sleep. I close my eyes and the time once again glows red in the dark, throbbing with my pulse: 3:00 AM. I try to ignore it, feeling for the black space between the numbers, looking for anywhere my bourbon-soaked brain can curl up for a nap. Her car is plush and quiet. The city moves beneath me in soft thumps and rumbles. She smells like forest beneath fresh snow.
“Want to tell me where we’re going?” I ask.
“You’ll know when you know,” she says. “Maybe try being a big boy detective and figure it out for yourself.”
We ride in silence. I can’t keep my eyes open. Beneath me, Chicago is a city of muted vibration, mumbling up through my bones in rhythms of villainy and hope. All the buildings have eyes, and they watch us pass. Hard not to feel the conspiracies of malice, burning cold florescent inside. I don’t need to see the proof. I know it’s there. Just like I don’t need my eyes open to feel the moon up in its pocket of muffled light, begging to be untied and set free.
The Camel smolders between my lips. The Sig burns next to my heart. I don’t want to be here, sitting upright in a car next to a beautiful woman, packing a loaded gun under my arm. I want to be home. Lying down next to a beautiful woman and uncorking a loaded bottle. Forget the gun.
And then, finally and all of a sudden, we are still.
“Let’s go,” she says, opening her door. I lean forward in the seat, peering through the windshield. The headlights wash the end of a building on the far side of a hundred feet of gloom.
“Where is this?” I ask. “What is this?”
“You’ll know when you know,” she says. She reaches down and pulls the thing that pops the trunk. “Get to it.”
I push open my door and step out into a warm wind blowing in my face. I drop the Camel and walk around to the back of the car. I close my eyes. This part is never easy. I have to prepare myself. I lift open the trunk with a finger.
It helps that she is so tightly wrapped. Her body is easier to lift. Easier to manage in my arms. Easier to bend over my shoulder like a long sack of flour.
It’s a tough walk around to the front of the building. The snow is black without the headlights. Like I’m plowing through ash. The hot night air in my face is relentless. I look back to see if she’s still by the car, but then I can hear her in the dark up ahead of me.
“Getting old, Mack,” she says with a smile I can’t see. “Back in the day you could carry one of her on each shoulder.”
When I finally reach her, she’s leaning up against the front of the building. My shoulders and knees are starting to feel the weight.
“Here?” I ask, looking. The door is metal and black. The next door down is red. And the one after that too. They keep going off into the gloom.
The number on the front isn’t a number. It’s a word I can’t read. I look a little closer.
“What is this place?”
“You’ll know when you know, Mack. How many times do you want me to say it? I’d unwrap her face before you knock. Don’t make them do it.”
I prop the body up against the door, glad to have her off my shoulders. I yank the sheet down off her head and we both look at her for a few seconds in silence. I want to arrange her hair and clean up her face. Smith & Wesson did her make up like they were in a hurry.
“She’d have hated looking like this,” I say. “She was tough, but Suri cared how she looked.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have pulled the trigger,” says Marlo. She’s right and we both know it. My heart weighs more than all three of us put together. “You’re out of time, Ray. They know we’re here. Knock already.”
But I don’t have a chance to knock. The door starts to open on its own, and Suri starts to fall away with it. I let her go, wanting to protect Marlo from what’s coming, but Marlo is gone now. All over again she is gone. I pull Sig from the holster. No time to aim. I stiff-arm the thing into an opening darkness that is like a sideways jaw, a fetid maw looking to swallow me whole, and I start shooting, firing blind, the muzzle flashing a burnt orange into the void.
The noise is deafening and sets my ears to ringing.
It sounds like a telephone.