Chicagoland by Gail Martin (important books to read TXT) 📕

felt bad for the custodian, but not enough to stick around and clean up the mess. Ness was our stay-out-of-jail ticket, and if he couldn’t handle this, we were going to be in trouble.

Ness had a blank look, but I figured he was processing what had happened tonight, squaring it with the missing pieces and theories. He’d called West and me in to find and kill Capone’s pet monster, and we’d done exactly that—while uncovering a few additional threats along the way.

“I think we need to talk,” Ness said finally.

West gave me a once-over. I looked like I’d come from a battle, covered in blood with my jacket sleeve hanging tattered from the rougarou’s claws. “Go get a shower, Joe. I’ll take it from here. Get some rest.”

I figured that was West saying he would handle Ness Fed-to-Fed. Fine with me. A hot shower sounded heavenly to get clotted rougarou out of my hair, and I wouldn’t turn down a slug of Sarah’s bootleg whiskey either.

West and Ness stepped carefully around the pool of blood, and I went up the service stairs, hoping I didn’t run into anyone. I took off my ruined jacket, turned it inside-out, and used it like a towel to scrub away the worst of the mess. That way I merely looked like I’d been hit by a bus instead of bathing in the blood of my enemy.

Today had already lasted an eternity, and I couldn’t wait to get clean and grab some shut-eye. Relief settled over me when no one came to knock on the suite door after I let myself in, meaning Sarah was still drinking with her friend in the hotel’s secret bar. I really wasn’t up for conversation. I didn’t want to alarm her, and I didn’t feel like giving a play-by-play recap just yet.

Once I had stripped out of my blood-streaked clothing and stood under the shower, I started to feel human again. Getting the gore out of my stiffening hair took time and a lot of soap, but by the time I finished, my skin was pink from scrubbing, and every trace of the rougarou was gone.

Something pinged in the back of my brain, meaning an overlooked tidbit, probably important. It would have to wait. I pulled on pajamas, tossed off a slug of whiskey from Sarah’s stash, and nearly face-planted on my bed, utterly done with saving the world for at least a solid six hours.

5

Sarah’s friend, the daughter of the Lexington Hotel’s former general manager, had spent part of her childhood living in a suite at the property long before Capone took over two floors for his headquarters.

“I hadn’t seen Louise for years, although we kept in touch through our boarding school network,” Sarah told us at breakfast the next morning.

It was far too easy to get used to having a hot breakfast made to order and delivered to our suite, along with all the coffee we could drink and pastries to top it off. I fully intended to enjoy every moment, and nothing seemed to deter West, either. I had no idea how Sarah indulged and still stayed trim, but then again, her boundless energy probably burned the food off as soon as it was consumed.

“Of course, when she lived at the Lexington, she and her friends went exploring,” Sarah continued, licking the icing off her fingers. “Found all kinds of secret passageways and hidden rooms—and that was long before the Mob. Some of the corridors went down to the coal and ash tunnels…and to other places underground most people have forgotten about.”

I knew that at one point, parts of Chicago had been “mudjacked,” raised above the flood levels, and that often left streets and what used to be the first-floors of buildings permanently buried and eventually lost to memory. A perfect place for a rogue vampire to hide. My chances of finding him in all of that were nil, even with all of Ness’s G-men at my beck and call.

She grinned conspiratorially. “Louise was always a rule-breaker. She had a regular little explorer gang going, pretending they were archeologists, completely fearless. And she kept in touch with some of her friends whose fathers stayed with the hotel when hers moved on. Got an earful about Capone’s time there, and all the juicy rumors about how he used the rooms and passageways and made some additions to suit his lifestyle.”

“Are you going to keep us on tenterhooks, or tell us?” West asked, fondly vexed.

Sarah couldn’t help loving the spotlight. I had no trouble forgiving her excesses because she always came through in a pinch and had some of that fearlessness herself that she admired in her friend.

“She says Capone had a secret vault hidden in a room off the hotel basement. No one was allowed in the room except him, and whenever he went inside, the maintenance staff who caught a glimpse said he was wearing weird robes like some kind of priest.”

West and I exchanged a glance. “Or ceremonial robes to do magic,” I said. The true practitioners I knew weren’t into the costumes and folderol unless ritual required it. They didn’t swan around in velvet robes or wear pointy hats or call attention to themselves. But Capone had pieced his knowledge—and probably his grimoire—together on his own. That made it likely to be cobbled together from Lovecraft’s horror tales and Aleister Crowley’s mad ramblings—with just enough real information to be extremely dangerous.

“We had quite a nice evening,” Sarah said. “Polished off a couple of bottles of wine in the hotel’s hidden bar, reminisced a lot—and found out everything Louise could tell me about how to navigate the secret parts of the Lexington.” She had a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin again.

“Ness and I were in the very dry restaurant,” West observed. “Glad you and your friend didn’t happen to pop out at the wrong time. The Drake wouldn’t be happy if we brought his Untouchables down on them.”

Sarah shrugged. “That’s why I gave the maître d’ your