Chapter 9
“Mr. Clifton,” she said stiffly.
Fern hadn’t expected to see anyone who recognized her.
Especially not this horrid man. He smiled at her, but she couldn’t think of anything other than what she’d overheard him say at that Saturday night dinner.
She glanced at his wrists. Silver cuff links.
Had those been his reward from her parents?
“Call me Matthew. What, ah…what are you doing out here?” His eyes flicked up and landed on Cal, who stood close behind her.
A bevy of men and women surrounded Mr. Clifton, all of them dressed in the right kind of glad rags. Furs and jewelry, bow ties and hats. They all stared at her, then at Cal, and then at Fern again, their discomfort plain.
“I’m just out,” she answered. He had spared her a few pitying glances at one Saturday dinner. Why did he care what she was doing here?
“Who’s your date?” he asked, still picking Cal apart with his assessing stare.
He wasn’t Fern’s date, but she didn’t need to explain that to Mr. Clifton. She didn’t need to explain anything to him. The same humiliation and anger she’d felt while overhearing him and Mr. Halbert returned. “This is Mr. George Black.”
Fern didn’t think it wise to announce Cal’s real name, but after a few whispers among Mr. Clifton’s friends and an openly loud snort, she guessed they already knew.
Mr. Clifton took a step forward. “Does Buchanan know where you are?”
“It’s none of his business,” she said shortly, wanting only to be on their way again.
He angled himself closer. “I don’t think he’d want you being seen with…questionable company.”
Behind her, Cal remained silent, but a quick glance at him suggested Mr. Clifton’s words had not been soft enough. Cal stood as ominous and threatening as the storm bearing in over the lake.
“I choose my own company, Mr. Clifton, regardless of my brother’s opinion,” she replied, surprised by how cool and lofty her response was. She could hear an echo of her mother’s voice in there somewhere.
Before he could say another word, Fern turned to walk away. “Good evening.”
His reply came at her back. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He sounded like a petulant child who’d thought he’d been slighted, and she couldn’t imagine how she’d ever found him handsome.
Fern walked on, and Cal fell into step beside her. She held her breath as they weaved through the crowds, until her head started to feel dizzy from the lack of oxygen.
“Let me guess,” she said as Cal took the lead again. “He knows you from the Lion’s Den?”
“Never seen him,” he answered as they entered a less crowded part of the promenade. “A lot of people just know me.”
They didn’t converse for the rest of the walk out to the end of the Pier.
The revelry bloomed again there, bursting out in light and sound.
A brass band played, and a carnival-type strength tester clanged endlessly as men took whacks with an oversized mallet and shoved each other around.
Fern nearly lost Cal as he hooked a left and made a straight line for a row of food carts set up near the pier railing.
There, a big, yellow pretzel-shaped sign was propped up over a cart.
The man behind the cart didn’t look like he was boarding up, as Cal had put it, but he also didn’t have many soft pretzels left to sell.
A spare half dozen or so hung on a glass-enclosed rack under warming lamps.
He was leaning on the counter with one elbow, watching passersby when his eyes caught on Cal.
He instantly straightened, and the bored expression tightened with alarm.
Mostly, I get fear.
She understood now what Cal had meant.
Pretzel John swallowed visibly as they approached the cart.
“Cal.” The name squeaked from his lips, which Pretzel John licked and then wiped with the back of his hand. He had a fading bruise around his right eye and some healing scrapes along his right cheek and chin.
“John.” Cal’s hands settled into his pants pockets. He stood before the cart and waited.
John fidgeted for a moment before a light clicked on in his eyes. He laughed at himself and opened the pretzel case. He pulled down a pretzel and wrapped it in a white paper napkin.
“Two,” Cal said, and John paused. He saw Fern then and blinked. She didn’t hold his stare. Instead, she glanced toward the hot dog stand set up a few yards away.
“Oh,” he spluttered. “Oh, right. Two. You got it, boss.”
Boss?
The vendor took out another pretzel and handed both to Cal, who turned and held one out to Fern. It was warm, the dough soft and shiny, with clinging flakes of sea salt.
“Thank you,” she said before catching John eyeing her again. He’d seemed to relax a little.
“You got the other thing I’m here for?” Cal asked around a mouthful of pretzel.
John’s face tightened again. “Listen, Cal…I already told Vinny I don’t know nothin’ about that—”
“I need a name.”
“Maybe I know some faces, but I don’t got names.”
“Vinny says you do.” Cal calmly brushed the salt from his pretzel before taking another bite.
Fern hadn’t touched hers yet. Vinny’s name had set her on edge.
Their exchange was obscure, but John looked as if he had swallowed something, and it was choking him.
His eyes darted around, searching the Pier as if expecting someone to interrupt.
“Give me a little time, and I can maybe ask around, find out some more—”
“I need a name now,” Cal said, still eating.
Whatever they were talking about, it had to do with Rodney, and Fern was almost certain it wasn’t legal.
She stood there, pretzel fast cooling in her hand, forgotten by both Cal and the squirming vendor, though not by the other people passing by.
Looks drifted her way, and one girl walking toward them jerked backward when Fern met her eyes.
She angled her scarred half away from view and refocused on John.
“Listen,” he said, his voice dropping, “I tell you a name, and I’m fish bait, okay? I got eyes on me, Cal.”
“Here? Now?” Cal asked as he finished his pretzel.
“Maybe. I don’t know. Jesus, I shoulda never started in with this shit.”
Cal wadded up his napkin after wiping his hands and mouth and walked casually to a nearby trash can to toss it in the garbage. He brushed off his coat sleeves and readjusted his hat as he ambled back to the pretzel cart.
“Those two goons by the photographer’s stage—don’t turn your head, princess,” Cal tracked on quickly. “They’re Jacky Boys.”
“I didn’t tell you that,” John said, his voice rising. As Cal instructed, she kept her eyes on other things, the photographer’s stage hazy in her periphery. A line of couples, waiting to pose for the camera, seemed to shuffle and move. But there were two figures that stood still.
“You with them?” Cal asked John, and for the first time, his calm exterior blistered with anger.
John put up his hands in obvious surrender but then lowered them immediately. “No. I swear it. You know me. I’m with you. I’m with Rodney.”
“Yeah, I know you,” Cal muttered as he took Fern’s arm. “I know you’re a coward. You watched three pals swallow some lead, then you develop a real convenient case of amnesia.”
Fern stared up at Cal’s face. His disgust for the man in front of him had turned his eyes black. The muscles along his jaw jumped, and his nostrils flared with barely contained fury. He kept his voice low, but his grip on her elbow was starting to intensify.
“What are you accusing me of?” John asked, no longer timid. His lips thinned. Gone was any show of fear.
“You know what you did,” Cal answered and, with a tug on Fern’s elbow, started away. “And so do we.”
With his command to walk, Fern’s legs fell into step. He kept her close to his side, his free hand reaching under his long coat and staying there as they retraced their steps toward the center of the Pier.
“Don’t look back,” he said, his eyes straight ahead.
She realized her head was already half turned. “You don’t want to know if they’re following us?”
“They’re following us.”
It suddenly felt as though the whole Pier was shaking and sinking straight into the harbor.
“What was all of that about?” she asked, her pretzel pressed pancake flat in her clenched hand.
Cal surprised her with an answer. “Some trouble last week. One of our runs got ambushed. Everyone but Pretzel John got a permanent lead headache, and our supply got nabbed.”
Their feet ate up the old boards on the promenade as they hurried back inland, her mind working hard and fast to keep up with Cal’s turns of phrases.
“Supply?”
“Gin,” he explained.
Then, without warning, he steered them through a pair of doors, straight inside a cabaret.
The lights were dim, the music blaring. Clouds of pipe and cigarette smoke stung her eyes.
A man standing sentry in the foyer held up his hand as if to stop them—but he immediately lowered it and parted a pair of heavy velour drapes.
Cal leaned toward him and whispered in his ear before whisking her through the drapes. Fern gave in to the urge to twist around. The drapes fell as the two men from the end of the Pier turned into the club entrance.
“They’re here,” she said to Cal. He continued through the room, around tables and people imbibing despite prohibition orders.
Tall, multipaned windows lined the far wall, overlooking the lake and the lights of the shoreline.
On the congested dance floor, people kicked their legs wildly doing the Charleston.
“They won’t get in,” he said above a trombone solo.
They cut around the dance floor, drawing attention. Fern turned her head away from the dancers toward Cal’s shoulder. He still held her arm, their bodies awkwardly jouncing into one another as they walked.
She was starting to wonder if they were going to stay tucked inside the cabaret when she saw a door behind a grouping of tables, covered in white linens and crystal wine glasses, and occupied by men and ladies dressed to the nines.
“Excuse us,” Cal said as he nudged his way between chairs, startling the people sitting there. Fern avoided eye contact and followed, exhaling in relief when he opened the door and whisked them into a hallway. He closed the door, and there was no light at all.
“Cal—”
“Just follow my lead.” He gripped her elbow tighter and steered them left.
“Stairs,” he announced, and then they were heading down, the steps bathed in dim light coming from an open exit below.
The stairwell emptied onto a narrow boardwalk, edged by the harbor and iron mooring posts.
Roped-off boats rocked alongside the docks.
The hollow sounds of water against hulls, creaking deck boards, and metal fastenings smacking against the masts and rigging overtook the cacophony inside the Pier.
Cal started them toward the entrance to the Pier again, only this time, they were alone.
There was no entertainment on this walkway, and hardly any light either.
Fern wondered if it might have been safer to stay surrounded by other people, but Cal seemed to know what he was doing. She wanted to believe he did, anyway.
The walkway merged into the main, arched entrance to the Pier, and once their feet hit solid ground, they picked up speed to cross the parking lot toward Cal’s Roadster. He let go of her arm moments before Fern reached the passenger side door, and he went for the driver’s side.
Once seated inside, key in the ignition, she felt the buzzing of blood in her veins and the warm throb of her calf muscles from walking so quickly. As Cal pulled out of the parking spot and drove away, the two men in fedoras who’d been following them exited the Pier.
The engine of Cal’s auto was the only sound for at least a few minutes. Fern breathed heavily, her pulse slowing.
“You going to eat that?” Cal asked. He looked at her hand, and she remembered the crushed pretzel.
“Oh. No.” She wasn’t hungry in the least. She held it out to Cal, and he took it. “What just happened?”
He ate as he drove, his eyes steady on the road.
“Jacky Boys.” He swallowed. “They’re known for public displays. Those two wouldn’t have thought twice before opening up on me in front of everyone.” Cal paused before taking another bite of the pretzel and glanced her way. “Bullets go sideways most of the time.”
Her stomach pulled low with a sudden urge to retch. She could have been shot. Anyone else out on that Pier could have been.
“Are you taking me home now?” They were heading south along North Lake Shore Drive.
“Yeah,” he answered.
It was one word. One syllable. She knew she shouldn’t try to read into it, but as he drove on in silence, she couldn’t resist. It was either disappointment or regret or something else unsatisfying.
Maybe he wished he hadn’t brought her to the Pier.
Or perhaps he wished he hadn’t told her about Pretzel John and their run of bootleg gin.
“Did any of that back there scare you?” he asked after a few minutes.
Instinct told her to say yes. Fear made hearts pump erratically and pulses race; it made people breathe unevenly and their senses sharpen.
Fear carved a narrow tunnel through the world ahead of you, and for Fern, people had been gawking at her along the blurred edges of that tunnel.
But she hadn’t cared half as much this evening as she’d thought she would.
But…had she been afraid?
“A little, maybe.” Shouldn’t she have been?
Her heart rate slowed to normal as they drove. If anything, she felt strangely, surprisingly…alive.
“How did you know there was a back door at that nightclub?” she asked.
“What makes you think I knew?”
“You just seemed so confident.”
Fern’s house came into view, and he slowed to a stop in almost the same place as where he’d been parked earlier. He didn’t turn off the engine, but he shifted his body toward her, his arm resting on the top of the wheel.
“In my world, confidence is like air,” he said. “You either breathe it, or you end up in the ground.”
The brim of his hat cast his eyes in a darker shadow than the ones filling the car’s interior. It was a harsh sentiment, but true. At least for his world, she supposed. And tonight, she’d seen a little more of it.
“Your old man has until tomorrow,” Cal said. Fern blinked. The reminder felt like the prick of a knife against her ribs, right under her heart.
She nodded and opened the door. The moment she shut it behind her, Cal pulled out from the curb and drove away.