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

look at to guess what it might be. Down in the coal ash tunnels, the ones the garbage collectors use to cart waste away without clogging street traffic, there’ve been disappearances. Only one body was found, but something had ripped out its heart.”

“You think someone wanted to make it look like a monster?” West asked. “People can kill other people in monstrous ways.”

Ness shrugged. “Possible. But I don’t think so. The workers’ union pays kickbacks to Capone’s men for protection. It would be a pointless attack by the other families—high risk and low payoff.”

“Wendigos eat flesh, but hearts aren’t their thing. A werewolf, maybe,” I mused. “Or a rougarou.”

Ness gave a bitter laugh. “Werewolves belong in Chicago, along with vamps. They’ve been part of the Mob since there’s been a Mob. They don’t really count as monsters here anymore. The families keep them on a tight leash, and they have a place, a purpose. They would be stupid to risk everything to snack on a few sanitation workers.”

I’d already decided that Chicago wasn’t my kind of town, but Ness’s admission removed all doubt. Cleveland had its Mafia witches—I counted one of them as an almost-friend and sometimes ally. But the Lavecchia family was strictly human. Still monsters, but human ones.

“So you think it’s another creature Capone was using to do his dirty work?” West asked.

Ness nodded. “Yes. And I think he found a way to bend the ghosts of Death Alley to do his bidding too. There’ve been several suspicious deaths there, all people Capone was known to have a beef with.”

I’d heard of Death Alley. When the Iroquois Theater burned more than two decades ago, killing over six hundred people—many of them children—the bodies were stacked in the alley behind the building until they could be identified. Many spirits never left. It’s been one of the most haunted places in Chicago ever since.

“I knew there were ghosts. Never heard they were violent,” I said.

Ness met my gaze. “They didn’t used to be. Then all of a sudden, Capone’s enemies started turning up dead there, not a mark on them. No traces of poison. Just some strange gray goo leaking from their ears and eyes.”

Ectoplasm. Linked to high-energy hauntings, it was the slime-trail of a dangerous ghost, one that had enough juice to harm the living and interact with the material world, like poltergeists.

West looked to me. “What can power up ghosts like that?”

“Nothing good.” I could think of a few possibilities. Necromancers. Demons. Dark magic. Ness definitely hadn’t been forthright with West when he dragged us into this.

“What else?” I growled. I could afford to take my chances, but West and Sarah were all-too-human and, therefore, breakable.

Ness gave me a look, and all of a sudden, I understood. Eliot Ness wasn’t afraid of Capone or his enforcers and hitmen. He could go up against the Chicago machine—vamps, weres, and all. They were normal in his mind.

But this other stuff…scared him. Big, bad, ball-busting Eliot Ness was afraid. He didn’t know how to handle that or how to ask for help. It wasn’t all vanity. He needed the Mob to fear him in order to clean up the rot in Chicago. Ness might have a team for fighting criminals, but he sensed that they might not believe him about supernatural threats, and he couldn’t afford to undermine his authority.

It must have cost him to reach out to West, and to bring in a stranger—me—to a volatile situation and potentially jeopardize everything he’d worked for. But he did it for Chicago, and I could respect that. Maybe I could bend my own stiff neck, just a little, for a good cause.

“The only thing I’ve ever run into that could affect ghosts like that is bad magic—powerful and very dark,” I said. “Did Capone have a strega?”

“Not that we’ve ever known,” Ness replied. “But he’s been obsessed with the occult for a long time. It’s strange because these mafia guys are normally so superstitious. But Capone never shied away from using any weapon that served his purposes. He’s a very practical man.”

That was the other missing piece I needed to hear. Ness could loathe everything Capone stood for, hate his methods and his crimes, but only a fool underestimates his opponent out of disdain. Ness was nobody’s fool. He didn’t admire Capone—I’d seen lawmen seduced by the appeal of the outlaw before, and it always ended badly. But Ness also didn’t write his nemesis off in a bout of hubris, and he was willing to step way outside his comfort zone to do the right thing, to protect the city he had sworn to serve.

I could work with him.

“We might be able to get some inside information on those tunnel deaths,” I said, glancing at West, who gave me a barely-there nod to continue. “An associate of ours invited us to dinner with Jonathan Kirkpatrick.”

Ness’s eyebrows rose. “The CEO of Kirkpatrick Mining?” I could practically see the wheels turning in his brain, trying to figure out how West and I were possibly connected.

West cleared his throat. “Our associate, Mrs. Sarah Grace McAllen Harringworth, is a friend of the Kirkpatrick family. We may be able to get an unguarded reaction about the disappearances—which could be…informative.”

“Well fuck me sideways,” Ness said, rolling his eyes. “Damned if you don’t walk right into the access my team’s been trying to get for over a month. Normally I’d say that the goings-on in the tunnels were beneath the bossman’s notice, but Kirkpatrick has a reputation for immersing himself in the details. On top of that, the ash removal contract with the city puts a pretty penny in his pocket, so anything that threatens his workers threatens that revenue.”

I felt kinda bad for him if he’d been chasing that lead without success, but it wasn’t something West or I planned in advance. Sarah had insisted on joining us, and having her along never steered us wrong before. She’s good with a gun, her connections are legion, and if