Chapter 14 The Diner

The gap between the buildings was narrow enough that Marcus had to turn sideways, the music box digging into his ribs, and he came out the other side into a service alley that smelled like old grease and garbage and the particular sourness of a city that never fully slept.

He didn’t look back. Looking back was what amateurs did, and what amateurs who looked back got was a clear picture of how close the problem was , information that almost never helped and frequently made you run slower. What Marcus did instead was listen. Two sets of footsteps behind him, not sprinting yet, which meant whoever they were, they weren’t worried about losing him. They knew where he was going, or they had enough people out that it didn’t matter which way he turned.

That was the more frightening interpretation, so Marcus chose to act on it.

He went left at the end of the alley, then immediately right through a fire door propped open with a brick , a laundromat, still running machines at three AM because Chicago laundromats ran perpetually, a civic constant , past a row of spinning washers and a woman in her sixties who looked up from her phone with the complete calm of someone who had seen stranger things come through this door and decided not to make any of them her problem.

“Sorry,” Marcus said without slowing.

“Hon, the exit’s on Cermak,” she said, turning back to her phone.

He went through the front door onto Cermak, took the first staircase down to a CTA station, jumped the turnstile , the overnight attendant shouted something Marcus filed for later , and hit the platform just as a southbound Red Line train was pulling in. He got through the doors with two seconds to spare and stood in the middle of the car breathing hard, watching the platform through the window as the train moved.

One man appeared at the platform edge just as the train pulled out. Marcus didn’t recognize the face , which was itself information. Not Sal. Not anyone from the warehouse. Whoever Rafael had deployed tonight, he’d gone outside his usual crew.

Or it wasn’t Rafael.

Marcus sat down in an empty seat, the music box on his lap, and worked on breathing normally while the train rattled south and his head continued doing the thing it had been doing for the last twenty minutes , the light slightly too bright, sounds carrying a half-second longer than they should, every face in the car hitting his peripheral vision with the same pattern-firing insistence that had put his father at the end of an empty street.

A kid across the aisle, maybe nineteen, was watching him with the cautious attention of someone deciding whether to move seats.

“I’m not crazy,” Marcus told him. “I’m just having a very long week.”

The kid moved to a different seat. Marcus almost laughed. It came out as a sound he didn’t entirely recognize as his own.

He rode three stops, got off, took a different line north, rode two more, and surfaced on the north side at three thirty-eight AM, relatively confident he’d lost whoever had been behind him. What he was less confident about was whether the man in the gray cardigan he kept seeing at the far end of every platform was real or not.

There was a twenty-four-hour diner on Clark Street that Marcus had eaten at exactly once, three years ago, after a job that ran long. He remembered it because the coffee had been genuinely good and the overnight cook had been a man named Terrence who had strong opinions about the designated hitter rule and had shared all of them over forty minutes without being asked.

Terrence wasn’t working tonight. The overnight cook was a young woman who looked like she was running on the same fuel Marcus was , determination and the absence of better options , and she set a coffee in front of him without being asked, which meant whatever he looked like right now, it was the kind of thing people responded to with coffee.

“You want food?” she said.

“Please. Anything fast.”

“We do good eggs and toast at four AM. I’m not going to lie to you about much else on the menu right now.”

“Eggs and toast. Perfect.”

She went back and Marcus called Holt.

She picked up on the third ring. “Marcus. Where are you?”

“North side. Safe enough. Holt , I need you to hear something and sit on it for twenty-four hours. Can you do that?”

A pause. “Don’t ask me to compromise an active , ”

“Rafael called me. Directly. From his personal number. He offered me two million dollars for the ledger and gave me until six AM.”

Silence. Then carefully: “You have direct contact with Rafael Moretti and he’s willing to go on record offering a bribe for evidence in a federal case.”

“I’m telling you that if someone were recording that call , not saying I was, because that would require equipment I don’t have , but if someone were, hypothetically, that would be significant evidence in its own right.”

“Hypothetically.”

“Absolutely hypothetically.”

“Marcus, a recording without a warrant would be inadmissible and potentially , ”

“Illinois one-party consent,” Marcus said. “Looked it up. One party to the conversation consents to recording, it’s admissible. I was party to the conversation.”

A longer silence. “You looked up Illinois recording law.”

“I’ve had a lot of time on buses tonight.”

He heard something that in another context he might have identified as Dana Holt almost laughing. “Where is the recording?”

“Somewhere safe. I’ll hand it to you when I hand you the ledger. Twenty-four hours, Holt.”

“Twenty-four,” she said. “I can manage that. After that Whitfield escalates and it’s out of my hands.” Then: “One more thing , are you all right? You sound , ”

“I think I’ve been dosed. Scopolamine derivative. Visual disturbances, auditory lag. I’ve been seeing people who aren’t there.”

The almost-laugh disappeared entirely. “Marcus. You need to stop moving and get somewhere safe. If you’re showing dissociative symptoms , ”

“The field is where the situation is,” Marcus said. “So that’s where I’ll be. Is there a short-term intervention I can actually access in the next hour?”

“High-dose vitamin C and a benzodiazepine can blunt the visual symptoms. It’s not a treatment, it’s a patch. You’d need a prescription for the benzo , ”

“Forget the benzo. The C I can get.”

“Marcus , be careful. And I mean that professionally, not personally, because I am a federal agent and this is a professional relationship.”

“Of course,” Marcus said.

“Also personally,” she added, and hung up.

The eggs arrived. They were good , very good, in the specific way food was good at four AM when you hadn’t eaten in eighteen hours and the world was trying to kill you and the cook hadn’t asked a single question. He left forty dollars on a twelve-dollar bill and went to find a pharmacy.