Chapter 26
26
J ohnston’s eyes went wide. Before he could react, Vic grabbed Sam and pulled him away while shouting, “Stay where you are placed!”
To Sam’s shock, Johnston made no move. In fact, he stood absolutely frozen. His eyes darted about frantically, but otherwise he might have been a statue.
“Are you all right?” Vic asked, running his hands down Sam’s arms as if checking for injury.
“I-I’m fine. What the hell is going on?”
Vic walked over to where Johnston stood, then kicked up the very edge of the welcome mat beneath the agent’s feet. Sam glimpsed part of a hex painted on the wooden floor beneath the rug.
“A stasis hex. I worried I might be paranoid when I put it in, but it turns out I needed it after all.” Vic reached into his pocket and pulled out a small revolver. “Silence is golden,” he murmured to it, then pulled the trigger.
The words must have been to activate a silencing hex, because the sound of the gunshot seemed distant, as if it had been fired a block away rather than just a few feet. Johnston had no chance to fight back, held in the stasis hex as he was. Blood poured out of the hole the bullet made in his forehead, and he collapsed into a heap on the floor.
Sam stumbled back, grabbing onto a chair to keep from falling himself. “What’s going on? He was a federal agent! He…he…”
“It’s all right,” Vic soothed. He put the gun away and caught Sam by the elbow, guiding him into the chair. “Sit down. Do you need some water?”
His gaze was drawn to the other dead man, the one on the floor near the living room couch. It took him a moment to place the square jaw and dark hair as one of the guards from the brewery. “Is that O’Brien?”
“It is.” Vic went to a liquor cabinet and poured himself a drink. “I don’t know how long he’s been working with Johnston—probably recently, since Bobby…died.”
His hesitation before using the word made something settle into place. The poisoning. The missing body.
Had this all been some kind of elaborate hoax?
“Wait… is Bobby dead?”
“Not exactly,” Vic hedged. “But neither is he precisely alive.”
“I don’t…I don’t understand,” Sam said, voice barely above a whisper. His thoughts spun, all the events of the night jumbling together. He shook his head sharply, tried to focus on a single thing. “Alistair. He’s in jail. The prohees caught us waiting for an airplane from Canada.”
“Ah. That explains a great deal. O’Brien came to warn me about Johnston’s plan.”
“I thought you said O’Brien was working for him?”
“I made a better offer.” Vic sighed and glanced at O’Brien’s crumpled corpse. “People are so easily corrupted by greed. It makes them blind to everything else.”
A whole new frisson of fear went down Sam’s spine. “So you killed him?”
“I’m afraid he didn’t leave me any choice. Just like Agent Johnston.” Vic turned back to Sam. “Did they have any evidence? The prohees, that is—were you caught with any booze on you?”
“No, the plane took off…it exploded.” So much death tonight: the bootlegger, O’Brien, Johnston.
“Then Mr. Gatti will be fine. They have nothing on him.” Vic crouched beside Sam. “I’m sorry it came to this. I never wanted to kill anyone. But what’s done is done, and now I need you to come with me to finish the hex.”
“What?” Sam stared at him, confused. “Now?”
“Before anyone else shows up and forces me to shoot them.” Vic put his hand over Sam’s and squeezed. “Mr. Gatti will be fine, but your mother might not. I made sure everything is in place earlier tonight. Come with me, and I’ll answer any questions you have, holding nothing back.”
His heart told him to say no, to leave and run to Alistair. But Vic was right—Alistair would land on his feet. Sam’s mother wouldn’t. “All right.”
Vic gave him a warm smile and stood up. “Let’s go, then. It’s time to bring all of this to an end.”
Alistair lunged at the nearest man, knocking him back. But it wasn’t enough; before he could take advantage, the other three were on him.
Blows rained down, and he fought back blindly, calling on every scrap of training he remembered from the army. It wasn’t nearly enough.
They grabbed his limbs, twisting his arms behind his back and kicked his legs out from under him. He struggled to get loose—and a leather belt looped around his neck.
He tried to duck out of it, but it tightened in an instant, cutting into the flesh of his throat.
Choking off his air.
Alistair heaved wildly, got one arm loose and clawed impotently at the belt biting into his throat. His pulse pounded in his skull as the blood was cut off, pain spiking in his head and eyes. The belt pulled tighter and tighter, and black spots appeared in his vision.
“Just another jailhouse suicide,” Zywarski said in his ear.
He tried to strike the man, but his strength was slipping away. The world seemed to be slipping away as well, becoming more and more distant.
He was going to die here, on the filthy floor of the cell. At least Sam wasn’t in here with him, was safe.
Sam…they hadn’t had enough time. If only he could do it all over again…
“Break it up!” someone shouted from very far away.
Male voices argued—then the grip on the belt was released, along with his arms and legs. He collapsed to the floor, barely able to loosen the belt enough to breathe. His lungs heaved, his head swam, and for a moment he thought he might throw up.
“Get up,” said the jailor, and half-helped, half-hauled him to his feet. Alistair swayed, leaning heavily on the man.
“You were paid to look the other way,” snarled Zywarski.
The jailor shrugged. “And then I was paid more to bring him out.”
“Fabiano—”
“Is all the way over in Cicero.” Another shrug as he escorted Alistair out. “I’m more interested in keeping the local elements happy. Pays better in the long run.”
Alistair concentrated on remaining on his feet as the jailor led the way back out, through the steel door to the block, and into the precinct offices. Wanda waited in the lobby, dressed in her red suit and looking annoyed at the whole business.
When she spotted Alistair, though, her eyes widened. “What happened?”
“He slipped,” the jailor said.
Alistair’s voice rasped when he spoke. “You heard from Doris, then.” It made sense; if the point of all this had been to get him killed by Fabiano’s men, there was no reason for the prohees to have left a guard on the truck.
“Yes.” Wanda looked at the copper. “And the other prisoner?”
“What other prisoner? The prohees only brought in this one.”
Alistair’s pulse, which had barely begun to settle, raced again. “There was another man with me. Sam Cunningham.”
“Sorry, buddy.” The copper, clearly done with them, turned away. “There’s no one here by that name.”
Vic seemed perfectly at ease as he hailed a taxi outside the apartment hotel. Once they climbed in the back, he chatted with the driver, directing her to take them to the university on the Midway Plaisance. If the driver thought it an odd request given the time of night, she didn’t let on.
As for Sam, he could only stare out the window, fingers worrying at the cuffs of his sleeves. Shock had overwhelmed him, leaving him with a strange combination of numbness and anxiety.
Vic had killed two people without blinking. Surely he could have just tied up Johnston once he was paralyzed, or knocked him over the head, or something other than shoot him right between the eyes.
God. Sam closed his eyes, then opened them again quickly when the motion of the cab threatened to make him sick. This was madness: the bust, the kidnapping, the deaths, and now the rush across town to finish the panacea hex in some secret location known only to Vic.
The hex. He had to focus on that. As soon as they were done, he’d take the panacea to the station and get on the next train to Gatesville. Before noon, he’d be at Mom’s side. Saving her.
That was all that mattered. He couldn’t worry about anything else.
They climbed out in front of an imposing building he assumed to be part of the university. As the taxi drove away, Vic said, “It isn’t far—just down the Midway in fact.”
A wide boulevard spread in front of them, leading to Jackson Park. Vic began to walk, and Sam followed numbly after.
“Why are we here?” he asked.
“It seemed appropriate.” Vic looked around them as if taking in their surroundings as fully as possible. Unlike Towertown, this part of Chicago was dead silent this time of night. “Remember when I told you about the Columbian Exposition? It doesn’t look like much now, but back then, when all of this was The White City…it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. All the buildings gleamed in the sun and glowed in electric lights once the sun went down. The Midway here was packed with people, with life.”
He stopped outside of a darkened building; faded letters proclaimed it The Columbian Hotel . Now all its windows were dark, the doors boarded up. “This is where we stayed, my family and I,” Vic said with a nod at it. “Now it’s been bought by the University of Chicago and is scheduled for demolition. The Exposition promised so much, shone so bright, and rose so fast—only to fall into decay almost as quickly.”
“I don’t understand,” Sam admitted.
“All that is born becomes corrupted and falls to death.” Vic led the way around the side of the building, pulling out a flashlight as soon as they were away from the street. “I realized it as a child, when the closing ceremonies for the Exposition became the funeral for the fallen mayor. But I never truly understood just how ugly that process is until France. Lying in that old shell hole, staring into the decaying face of my dead witch, I realized that death is the true enemy to be conquered.”
They reached what had once been a service door. The boards had been pulled down, and Vic put his hand on the doorknob and said something in Latin. There was a soft click, and he pushed it open. The corridor beyond was dusty, with cobwebs hanging from every corner. Scuff marks covered the floor; some of the gouges seemed new.
Vic’s flashlight revealed first the service corridor, then a hall with rooms on it. Most of the doors stood open, empty bed frames visible inside. Paint chips littered the carpet, and the ceilings were stained with water from leaks above.
Sam grew more and more confused. Why had Vic decided this was a good place for hexwork? Even if he wanted to stay out of Sullivan’s sight, surely there were a hundred better options than a decaying hotel.
None of this felt right. But what was he supposed to do?
He didn’t want to bond with Vic. He wanted to go home.
He couldn’t let his mother die.
They reached what had once been the grand ballroom. Great chunks of plaster had fallen from the ceiling, but they’d been swept and shoveled back into the corners, to make room for a large steel boiler attached to a tall copper distilling column.
“Why is that there?” Sam asked.
“It’s for the final step in creating the panacea. I had it moved here in secret, at personal expense, from a shuttered distillery. I needed something larger than anything we had in the lab.”
Sam stopped. All the hair on his arms stood up, and every alarm bell in his mind was ringing. “You said Bobby isn’t exactly dead. Where is he now?”
“I’m taking you to him, as a matter of fact.” Vic continued to walk, forcing Sam to follow him. “I knew Bobby was playing the spy, always trying to get into my private lab. Looking for anything he could take back to Miss Fabiano in exchange for a payout. Undone by greed, just like all the rest.”
Vic opened a staff-only door and led the way into an enormous kitchen. All of the implements such as pots and pans were long gone, and the steel counters covered in spots of rust. “Which made it easy to invite him back to my apartment and slip him poison.”