slow.”
Torelli stiffened in surprise and wasted no time in complying. He turned his head slightly, looking for his other two goons. I could see a pair of feet lying toes-up in the hallway, but there was no other sign of them.
I stepped up to him and said calmly, “Take your men and get out. Don’t come back.”
He regarded me with dull eyes, then pressed his lips together, nodded once, and began gathering up his men. Thomas picked up Torelli’s gun and stuck it down the front of his pants, just like you’re not supposed to do. He walked quietly over to stand beside me, his eyes tracking every movement the thugs made.
They departed, half carrying the poor bastard with the broken hand, while the two in the hallway staggered along, barely recovered from being choked unconscious.
Once they were gone I turned to face Demeter. “Where were we?”
“I was questioning your motives,” she said.
I shook my head. “Helen. You know who I am. You know what I do. Yeah, I think Marcone is a twisted son of a bitch who probably deserves to die. But that doesn’t mean I’m planning on carrying out the deed.”
She stared at me in silence for ten or fifteen seconds. Then she turned to her desk, drew out a notepad, and wrote something on a piece of paper. She folded it and offered it to me. I reached out for it, but when I tugged she didn’t let go.
“Promise me,” she said. “Give me your word that you’ll do everything you can to help him.”
I sighed. Of course.
The words tasted like a rancid pickle coated in salt and vinegar, but I managed to say them. “I will. You have my word.”
Demeter let go of the paper. I looked at it. An address, nothing more.
“It might help you,” she said. “It might not.”
“That’s more than I had a minute ago,” I said. I nodded to Thomas. “Let’s go.”
“Dresden,” Demeter said as I walked to the door.
I paused.
“Thank you. For handling Torelli. He would have hurt some of my girls tonight.”
I glanced back at her and nodded once.
Then Thomas and I headed for the suburbs.
Chapter Twelve
Marcone’s business interests were wide and varied. They had to be when you’re laundering as much money as he was. He had restaurants, holding companies, import/export businesses, investment firms, financial businesses of every description—and construction companies.
Sunset Point was one of those boils festering on the face of the planet: a subdivision. Located half an hour north of Chicago, it had once been a pleasant little wood of rolling hills around a single tiny river. The trees and hills had all been bulldozed flat, exposing naked earth to the sky. The little river had been choked into a sludgy trough. Underneath the blanket of snow the place looked as smooth and white and sterile as the inside of a new refrigerator.
“Look at this,” I said to Thomas. I gestured at the houses, each of them on a lot that exceeded the building’s foundation by the width of a postage stamp. “People pay to live in places like this?”
“You live in the basement of a boardinghouse,” Thomas said.
“I live in a big city, and I rent,” I said. “Houses like these go for several hundred thousand dollars, if not more. It’ll take thirty years to pay them off.”
“They’re nice houses,” Thomas said.
“They’re nice cages,” I responded. “No space around them. Nothing alive. Places like this turn a man into a gerbil. He comes home and scurries inside. Then he stays there until he’s forced to go back out to the job he has to work so that he can make the mortgage payments on this gerbil habitat.”
“And they’re way nicer than your apartment,” Thomas said.
“Totally.”
He brought the Hummer to a crunching halt in the snow, glaring through the windshield. “Damn snow. I’m only guessing where the streets are at this point.”
“Just don’t drive into what’s going to be somebody’s basement,” I said. “We passed Twenty-third a minute ago. We must be close.”
“Twenty-third Court, Place, Street, Terrace, or Avenue?” Thomas asked.
“Circle.”
“Damned cul-de-sacs.” He started forward again, driving slowly. “There,” he said, nodding to the next sign that emerged from the haze. “That one?”
“Yeah.” Next to the customized street sign was a standard road sign declaring Twenty-fourth Terrace a dead end.
“Damned foreshadowing,” I muttered.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
We drove through the murky grey and white of a heavy snowfall, the light luminous, without source, reflected from billions of crystals of ice. The Hummer’s engine was a barely audible purr. By