Chapter 3 - Under the Cold White Lights
The brownstone on the Gold Coast was not a home. It was a fortress disguised as an antique relic of Chicago’s Gilded Age. Behind the hand-carved mahogany doors and leaded-glass windows were four inches of ballistic Kevlar, an independent air-filtration system, and enough firepower cached in the walls to withstand a sustained siege from a municipal SWAT team.
Dr. Paul Morales was already pacing the Persian rug in the grand entryway when Marco kicked the front door open.
Morales was sixty-two, with silver hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and hands that had sewn up gunshot wounds in illegal backrooms across three states for thirty years. He was terrified of me, as any intelligent man on my payroll was, but the moment he saw the bundle in my arms, the terror vanished, replaced by the instinct of a physician.
“Lay him on the dining table. Clear the silver,” Morales barked, stripping off his suit jacket without looking at me. “Marco, get my field kit from the trunk of my car! Now!”
I didn’t argue. I swept a priceless crystal vase and a sterling candelabra off the twenty-foot mahogany table with one violent sweep of my forearm. They shattered against the parquet floor with a deafening crash. Lily gasped, jumping backward, her back pressing hard against the wainscoting.
I laid Sam down. Dr. Morales sliced through the boy’s grimy layers of clothing with surgical shears.
“Bilateral pneumonia,” Morales said within ten seconds of pressing the cold bell of his stethoscope against the baby’s chest. “He’s in acute respiratory failure. Oxygen saturation is dropping below eighty. Look at the cyanosis around the nail beds.”
“Fix it,” I said.
“I need an intubation tray and nebulized epinephrine,” Morales said, sweat beading on his forehead as he unpacked vials. “Dominic, he should be in a pediatric intensive care unit. If I lose him here—”
“You won’t lose him,” I said, stepping right up to the doctor until the fabric of our shirts brushed. “Because if this baby dies on this table, Paul, I will hold you personally accountable for every single breath he didn't take. Do you understand me?”
Morales went pale, nodded once, and plunged a pediatric needle into the rubber cap of a vial.
From the shadows near the doorway, a small, furious blur suddenly launched forward.
Lily slammed into Dr. Morales’s thigh, kicking his shins with her scuffed sneakers, her tiny fists pounding against his ribs. “Get away from him! Stop hurting him! Give him back!”
Morales stumbled, dropping a sterile syringe onto the floor. “Get this child off me!”
I caught Lily by the shoulders. She was astonishingly strong for her size—all wiry sinew, pure adrenaline, and feral loyalty. She twisted in my grip, her fingernails raking across the back of my hand, drawing three parallel lines of bright red blood.
“Let me go!” she screamed, her voice cracking into a ragged sob. “You’re killing him! Don’t let them hurt my brother! Sam! *Sam!*”
I didn’t strike her. I didn’t raise my voice. I pulled her against my chest, locking my arms around her thrashing frame, absorbing her kicks against my shins.
“Look at me, Lily,” I commanded, my voice cutting through her panic like a steel blade through silk. “Look at my face.”
She stopped fighting, gasping for air against the lapel of my coat. Her cheeks were scarlet, her eyes wild.
“He is putting medicine into Sam’s body so he can breathe,” I said, keeping my gaze locked onto hers. “If you fight that man, your brother will die in three minutes. If you let him work, your brother will live. You are the older sister. Your job right now is to hold my hand and let the doctor save him. Can you do that?”
She stared at me. Her small, trembling chest heaved against my ribs. Slowly, tentatively, her tiny fingers uncurled from her fists. She reached down and gripped my right hand—the hand that had signed execution orders, the hand that had broken bones in the basements of South Side docks—and squeezed it with every ounce of strength her eight-year-old body possessed.
“I can do that,” she whispered.
For twenty minutes, the dining room sounded like a battlefield. Morales slid the plastic tube down the baby’s windpipe with the precision of a jeweler. He hooked up a portable oxygen concentrator that hummed with a low, mechanical drone. He administered antibiotics through a butterfly needle taped to the infant’s dehydrated vein.
Slowly, agonizingly, the gray cast vanished from Sam’s cheeks. The violent retractions of his ribs slowed to an even, steady rhythm. The baby let out a soft, clear, normal sigh and drifted into a chemically induced, healing sleep.
Morales collapsed into a leather armchair, wiping his face with a linen handkerchief. “He’s stabilized. Fever is down to 101. The antibiotics should clear the consolidation in forty-eight hours. But Dominic... what in God’s name have you brought into this house?”
Before I could answer, Marco entered the room. His expression was grimmer than I had ever seen it.
“Boss,” Marco said quietly, keeping his voice low so Lily wouldn't hear. “Castiglione just left Carmine’s. He told the middleman that since Dominic Vale didn’t show up to honor his word, the Vale Family has surrendered the southern freight corridors. And that’s not the worst of it.”
“Go on,” I said.
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“A crew from Silas Vance was spotted tearing apart an abandoned tenement over on Fourteenth Street an hour ago. Vance is claiming a woman skipped town owing him fifty grand in street loans, and she left collateral behind. Two kids.” Marco looked at Lily, who was standing by the table, resting her forehead against the edge of the wood, watching her brother sleep. “They’re hunting for her, Dominic. And Vance knows they were selling candy on Fifth.”
***
