Chapter 2
The fluorescent lights hummed their usual welcome as Trish unlocked the laundromat at six a.m.
She'd been opening this door for ten years now, ever since Aunt Mae died and left her the building along with twenty-four washers, sixteen dryers, and a neighborhood that needed somewhere safe to go.
The smell hit her first—detergent and fabric softener and the faint mineral tang of Chicago water. Familiar. Comfortable.
Then she saw the machines.
"Son of a bitch."
Three washers in the front row, their control panels pried open like gutted fish.
Hoses slashed. Wiring torn out and left dangling.
The same targeted sabotage that had been killing her equipment for six weeks, always three machines at a time, always the ones closest to the windows where customers could see the damage when they walked in.
Trish dropped her purse on the folding table and crouched beside the nearest washer, assessing the destruction with the practiced eye of a woman who'd learned appliance repair out of necessity.
Control board fried—that was two hundred dollars she didn't have.
Hoses she could replace herself. The wiring...
She sat back on her heels and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
Six weeks. Six weeks of Warren Zielinski and his crew systematically dismantling everything her aunt had built.
First the threats, delivered by men with prison tattoos and dead eyes.
Then the offer—let them run money through her books, wash their cash alongside her customers' clothes, and she'd never have to worry about repairs again.
She'd told them to go to hell.
That had been a mistake, apparently. Or maybe just the truth, which amounted to the same thing when you were dealing with men who'd spent a decade in Stateville learning that the truth was whatever they decided it was.
Trish pushed herself to her feet and went to the supply closet for her tools. The machines wouldn't fix themselves, and she had customers coming in an hour—the few who still dared.
She worked for sixty minutes, salvaging what she could, disconnecting what she couldn't. Sweat dampened her graying hair, and her knees ached from kneeling on concrete. Forty years old and she felt sixty on mornings like this. Tired in ways that sleep didn't fix.
By seven, she had one of the three machines limping back to life. The other two were gutted, dead, joining the six she'd already lost to Warren's campaign of patient destruction.
The front door chimed.
Trish looked up, her hand automatically moving toward the wrench on the floor beside her. But it was just Mrs. Okonkwo from the building on Ashland, wrestling a laundry basket through the door while her two kids trailed behind with backpacks and sleepy eyes.
"Morning, Trish." Mrs. Okonkwo's smile faltered when she saw the gutted machines. "Again?"
"Again."
"Those men—"
"I know." Trish stood and wiped her hands on her jeans. "Use the machines in the back row. They're still working."
Mrs. Okonkwo hesitated, glancing at the front windows like she expected Warren's crew to materialize from the morning light. "Maybe we should go to the place on Kedzie—"
"That place closes at eight and charges double." Trish softened her voice. "You're safe here. I promise."
It was a lie, and they both knew it. But Mrs. Okonkwo needed to wash her kids' school clothes, and Trish needed to pretend that her laundromat was still a place where people could feel safe at any hour. So they both accepted the fiction and moved on.
The morning crawled by.
A few regulars came and went, washing fast and leaving faster.
They used to linger—sitting in the plastic chairs, chatting while the dryers spun, letting their kids do homework on the folding tables.
Now they loaded machines with their eyes on the parking lot and bolted the second the cycle finished.
At eight o'clock, the sedan pulled up.
Trish watched it through the front window, her jaw tight. Black Crown Victoria, tinted windows, parked directly across from her entrance. Two men inside, both with the hard stillness of ex-cons who'd learned patience in a cell.
They didn't get out. They didn't need to.
Their presence was the message. Anyone walking into the laundromat had to pass that car, had to see those men watching, had to understand that Trish Callahan was being observed by people who didn't observe casually.
She'd tried calling the cops. Twice. Both times, the officers had taken notes, promised to "look into it," and done exactly nothing.
Warren Zielinski wasn't stupid—his men never threatened anyone directly, never touched anyone where witnesses could see, never did anything that would hold up in a report.
They just sat and watched and waited for her business to bleed out.
By noon, the laundromat was empty.
Trish sat behind the counter, watching her machines spin with nobody's clothes inside, listening to the hum of dryers that used to run eighteen hours a day and now barely managed six.
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead—always on, always burning electricity she couldn't afford, because the lights being on was the whole point.
Her aunt had opened this place in 1987, the year Trish turned twelve.
Mae Callahan had been a force of nature—five-foot-nothing, voice like a foghorn, absolutely unwilling to accept that Back of the Yards was beyond saving.
She'd run the laundromat for twenty-three years, through recessions and gang wars and the slow decay of a neighborhood that kept losing pieces of itself.
"The lights stay on," Mae used to say. "That's the deal. People need to know there's somewhere safe to go at ten o'clock at night. Somewhere the lights are on and someone's watching."
Trish had kept that promise for a decade.
Through her husband's death—Danny, crushed under a beam at a construction site when she was thirty-two.
Through the recession that closed half the businesses on the block.
Through the nights when she was the only person in the building, folding strangers' laundry just to keep her hands busy because the alternative was going home to an empty apartment.
The lights stayed on.
But now Warren Zielinski's men were parked outside, and her customers were too scared to come, and the lights didn't mean anything if no one was brave enough to walk through the door.
The afternoon passed in silence.
At three, Mrs. Delgado came in with her usual Thursday load, but she kept glancing at the sedan outside and left her clothes in the dryer when she fled. Trish folded them herself and set them aside, knowing Mrs. Delgado would be back tomorrow with an apology she didn't owe.
At five, a young guy in a Warren's crew jacket walked past the windows, slow and deliberate, making sure Trish saw him looking.
At seven, the sedan was still there. Different men now—shift change—but the same message.
By eight, Trish had stopped pretending anyone else was coming.
She sat in one of the plastic chairs, the same chairs where neighborhood kids used to do homework while their parents folded clothes, and watched the empty machines. Twenty-four washers. Sixteen dryers. A decade of her life and every penny she'd ever saved.
Dying. Slowly, methodically, under the patient pressure of a man who'd spent twelve years planning exactly this kind of operation.
The smart thing would be to give in. Let Warren run his money through her books, take whatever cut he offered, survive.
Half the businesses in the neighborhood had made that deal—the ones that were still open, anyway.
It wasn't betrayal. It was just Chicago.
Just the way things worked when the predators moved in and nobody was left to stop them.
But Mae's voice was in her head, and Danny's too, and the combined weight of everyone who'd ever told her that the lights staying on mattered.
She couldn't give them this place. She couldn't let it go dark.
Even if it killed her.
At ten o'clock, Trish locked the front door.
The sedan had finally left—Warren's men keeping their own schedule, proving they could come and go as they pleased. The block was quiet, streetlights flickering, the L train rumbling somewhere in the distance.
She walked to her car alone, keys between her knuckles like she'd learned to do thirty years ago when girls in this neighborhood started walking alone. The parking lot was empty. The night was cold.
She drove home through streets she'd known her whole life.
Past the corner where she'd had her first kiss at fifteen.
Past the church where she'd married Danny.
Past the building where her parents had lived until they moved to Florida and left her the only one of her family still crazy enough to stay.
Back of the Yards. Her neighborhood. Her home.
It looked darker than it used to.