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

I didn’t try to hide a snicker. Lucky for us, Sarah chose to use her many talents for good instead of evil, or the world would be out of luck.

“You didn’t happen to get a map, did you?” West asked.

Sarah produced some drawings on the back of the daily specials menu insert. “It’s been years, but she remembered most of it. What she couldn’t draw, she described. We need boots because some of the oldest tunnels hold rainwater, and we should take lots of flashlights.”

“I’d suggest bringing whatever we need to handle a rogue vampire because if Capone’s ex-prisoner is still on the loose, old abandoned tunnels are going to be where he’s hiding,” West warned, echoing my thoughts.

“Do we tell Ness?” I asked, although I felt sure I already knew the answer.

“Hell, no!” Sarah replied before West could open his mouth. “This is our adventure. Besides, I don’t want Louise’s name to come up. She’s married to a dreary banker who has absolutely no sense of humor.”

West and I gathered the weapons and the supplies we’d need for exploring and vampire hunting from our gear. Sarah sent the concierge to buy Wellingtons for all of us and had them delivered with extraordinary speed. Charm, wealth, and being an extravagant tipper will get those kinds of results.

We headed over to the Lexington Hotel, and Sarah took a suite on one of the former Capone floors. That gave us a reason to hang around and explained the trunk of equipment we brought with us. Of course, we kept our real base at The Drake as a fallback when we were done.

I threw our boots into my gear bag so we didn’t have to tromp through the hotel in them, and we headed out. Capone’s people had only recently been cleared out, so with the help of a master key West pickpocketed from a housekeeper, we started with the rooms the mobster had inhabited personally.

“I imagine Ness and his boys picked this place over pretty well,” West mused as we fanned out through Capone’s suite. I feared he was right. Beds were stripped down to bare mattresses, upholstered furniture slit open where the Feds had looked for contraband, small personal items gone except for a few crumpled papers. In one corner, flush against the outside wall, stood a lead safe. The thick door hung open, but I eyed the vault as my mind worked out possibilities.

“Looks like they beat you to whatever was in there, Joe.” West stood beside me, then took a few steps and bent down to do a futile double-check and came up shaking his head.

“Betcha they didn’t look behind it or under it.”

West looked at me in disbelief. “Probably because they couldn’t get a mule team in here to drag it out.”

I shrugged. “Good thing you’ve got me.” I had better than normal strength without calling on Krukis, and I didn’t want to wear out my welcome with the god, so I figured I’d do this on my own. I inched the big safe out, “walking” it first one way and another until we had enough room for West to see behind it with a flashlight.

“Yeah, there are a couple of things. Can you tilt it so I can see under?”

I obliged, although I grunted at the weight. Fortunately, West moved fast. “Got it!” he said, coming up dusty but triumphant.

I shoved the safe back into place, and then Sarah and I clustered around West as he laid the treasures out on an empty desk.

“A red pair of dice, a carved ivory elephant, some saints’ medallions, and a pocket watch,” Sarah observed. “Maybe they were on top and got knocked behind.”

“Or maybe they were pushed behind as a last-minute hiding place if the Feds surprised Capone,” I theorized. “They could be ritual items.”

“There’s also this.” West added an old-fashioned key to the pile. “What are the odds it opens the locked door to that ritual room with the busted wall?”

I wasn’t a bookie, but I figured that was a safe bet. “Okay, Sarah. You’re the one with the map. Where do we go now?”

“Louise said there were eleven secret staircases—counting the two Capone added when he was living here—and ten different tunnels out of the hotel, not including the coal and ash passageways,” Sarah replied. “Supposedly, some of Capone’s new additions led to his favorite brothels and speakeasies.”

“Let’s have a look at that ritual room, and then that secret vault,” I replied. “We’re burning daylight, and we don’t know if the rogue vamp even needs to sleep during the day down in the passageways.”

We gathered our equipment, and West pocketed the loot from behind the safe. I had a funny feeling about the seemingly meaningless items like they weren’t random at all. They’d been hidden for a reason; I felt certain of it. I just wasn’t sure what it all meant.

The Lexington was a much older hotel dating from before the turn of the century, while The Drake was not quite a decade old. The age showed, mostly in the behind-the-scenes passageways Sarah led us into, following Louise’s directions. While the guest areas had been refurbished, the service hallways showed water stains on the plaster, peeling paint in places, scuffs, and dinginess that came with age and hard use.

We found the “hidden” room more easily than I expected. “Easy to ignore” was more like it, a locked door in an off-jog in the hotel’s sub-basement. From the location, I guessed it was initially a storage room. Although with the secure door and heavy lock—neither of which looked new—I suspected whatever had originally been stored was valuable or dangerous—or both. Capone had certainly made good on that with his latest “guest.”

“This looks even weirder the second time,” Sarah murmured as we walked inside, and she flicked on the lights. Now that we had translations for the words scrawled across the walls and the symbols interspersed between them,