Chapter 4 - The Poison in the Silver
The concussive shockwave blew the surveillance monitors off the wall, raining sparks and smoke across the mezzanine.
"Stay down!" Orson roared.
He leaned over the steel railing of the catwalk and opened fire. The drum-fed shotgun barked with rhythmic, deafening fury. Down on the warehouse floor, two men entering through the smoking breach were instantly thrown backward into the alley by the sheer stopping power of the buckshot.
The intruders returned fire. Suppressed rounds cracked through the air, pinging off the steel girders and chewing into the drywall around us.
"Move toward the ventilation shaft behind the rack!" Orson shouted, firing another three rounds to suppress the doorway. "There's an old industrial ice chute that leads down into the storm drains!"
I scrambled on my knees across the mezzanine floor, clutching the nickel-plated revolver against my chest. Dust choked my throat.
Below, I heard boots hitting the concrete.
"He's up top! Flank left!" a voice screamed. It was Kellen. His nose was bound in surgical tape, his eyes wild with sadistic hatred. "Take Dramore alive if you can! The girl gets a bullet in the ditch!"
A mercenary appeared at the top of the metal spiral staircase, his submachine gun raised directly at me.
Time slowed to an agonizing crawl.
I had never killed anything. I was a jeweler. I spent my days polishing sapphires, soldering broken links, listening to old women talk about their anniversaries.
The barrel of the mercenary’s gun swung toward my chest.
*Aim for the center,* Orson’s voice echoed in my head.
I raised the nickel-plated revolver with both hands. I squeezed the trigger.
The gun kicked violently. The deafening report tore through the enclosure. The bullet struck the mercenary in the upper shoulder, spinning him off balance. He tumbled backward down the spiral stairs with a sickening crash.
My ears rang. My hands were shaking so hard I nearly dropped the weapon.
"Good girl!" Orson appeared beside me. He didn't have time to praise me further; he shoved the heavy metal grate off the ventilation chute. "In! Now!"
"You first!" I yelled over the din of gunfire.
"I said *now*, Rosie!"
He scooped me by the waist with his left arm and dropped me into the darkness of the chute.
I slid down the slick, rusted metal slide, plunging thirty feet through the belly of the old warehouse before landing hard on a pile of sodden burlap sacks in the Chicago sewer network. The cold, fetid water rose to my ankles.
An instant later, Orson hit the sacks beside me.
He didn't get up immediately. He gasped, rolling onto his side, his right arm pinned against his chest.
I crawled to him in the dim, murky runoff. "Orson! Are you hit?"
"No," he wheezed, his teeth clenched so tight a thin line of blood escaped his lip. "The exertion... the poison... it's seizing the muscles."
I looked at his right hand.
In the dim light penetrating from the storm drain grate above, his fingers were curling into an involuntary, claw-like spasm. The blue discoloration had crawled past his wrist, spreading up the veins of his forearm like spiderwebs of frost.
The bullet fragment had migrated. The sudden physical shock of the gunfight had pushed the sharp silver edge directly into the median nerve.
"If we don't get that shard out of you right now," I said, terror giving way to cold, clinical certainty, "you're going to suffer complete respiratory paralysis within three hours."
Orson stared at the ceiling of the brick tunnel. Water dripped onto his face.
"There is an underground clinic," he muttered, fighting through the wave of agony. "Dr. Julian Vance. Chinatown. He owes me his life. But we have to cross three districts to reach him."
"We can't walk the streets looking like this," I said, gesturing to his ruined suit and my soot-stained sweater.
"We won't walk," Orson said, struggling to his feet using the brick wall for support. His voice was raw, but the iron in his spirit was unbreakable. "The storm drains connect to the old underground freight tunnels. They run beneath the entire Loop. We move in the dark."
He reached down with his good hand and pulled me up.
For a second, his body leaned heavily against mine. The heat radiating from his skin was feverish, dangerous. Yet, even as his strength failed him, his arm instinctively wrapped around my shoulders, shielding me from the cold dripping water.
"Why are you doing this, Rosie?" he asked quietly as we began trudging through the knee-deep water. "You could have run out the side door when the bomb went off. You could have surrendered the ledger to Kellen."
I looked up at the scarred, dangerous profile of the man who ruled Chicago's underworld.
"Because my grandfather was a good man," I said softly, my voice echoing off the curved brick. "And someone turned his art into a murder weapon. I won't let them finish what they started nine years ago. Not to you."
A faint, rare smile touched the corners of Orson Dramore’s lips. It transformed his harsh face into something devastatingly handsome.
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"Then let's go hunt some ghosts, Miss Fenomore."
***