Chapter 6 - The Ghosts Beneath The Linoleum
The wail of the distant police cruisers echoed like an alarm clock counting down the end of their lives.
Teresa stood frozen beside the small laminate kitchen table, her knuckles pressed against her lips.
Her gaze remained pinned to the black leather ledger as if it were a venomous snake coiled on her tablecloth.
"We have less than four minutes before the Berwyn squad cars arrive," Alio said, his voice flat and commanding.
He tucked the Sig Sauer firmly behind his kidney into the waistband of his trousers.
His tactical sweater was now soaked with dark, glistening crimson around his lower left ribcage.
Norah grabbed her mother by the shoulders, forcing Teresa to break her trance.
"Mama, grab your coat and your medication right now," Norah ordered, her voice trembling but authoritative.
"Where are we going?" Teresa whispered, tears finally carving paths through the powder on her gaunt cheeks.
"Anywhere but here," Norah replied, rushing to the small bedroom closet and pulling out a heavy down parka.
She shoved Teresa's arms into the sleeves, zipped it to the chin, and scooped the black ledger off the table.
Alio moved to the apartment's rear kitchen window, lifting the cracked glass sash with a quiet grunt of pain.
Outside lay a rusting iron fire escape overlooking a narrow alley choked with trash dumpsters and muddy snow.
"Down here," Alio said, gesturing with his head.
"The street out front is blocked by the crash, and the patrol cars will bottleneck the main entrance."
He climbed through the opening first, his boots hitting the iron grating with a sharp metallic clatter.
Norah guided Teresa through the narrow sill, holding her mother's frail waist until both of Teresa's feet were planted on the metal stairs.
The wind off the prairie tore through the alley, carrying stinging crystals of fresh snow that cut into their eyes.
They scrambled down three flights of rusting stairs into the shadow of a commercial dry cleaner's brick wall.
At the alley exit, a beat-up silver minivan with tinted windows was idling quietly in the driving blizzard.
The driver's window slid down two inches, revealing the scarred, weathered face of an older man with graying temples.
"Boss," the driver grunted, clicking the locks open from the master panel inside.
"Get in the back," Alio commanded, opening the sliding side door and lifting Teresa in with his uninjured right arm.
Norah jumped in behind her mother, pulling the heavy door shut until it clicked into the frame.
Alio dropped into the front passenger seat, letting his head fall back against the headrest with an exhausted groan.
"Take 22nd Street west, Mateo," Alio instructed the driver, his eyes closed.
"Avoid Ogden and keep off the interstate cameras."
The minivan slid out into traffic, its tires churning through the thickening slush of the suburb.
Behind them, red and blue emergency strobes washed across the brick facades of 16th Street as Berwyn police cruisers arrived at the wreckage.
Norah wrapped an arm around Teresa, holding her mother close as the older woman trembled uncontrollably against her chest.
Across the center console, Norah looked at the back of Alio's neck.
His dark hair was plastered with sweat and melted snow.
"You're bleeding through your sweater again, Alio," Norah said, her voice tight with anger and concern.
"The sutures tore during the crash."
Alio didn't open his eyes.
"They'll hold until we get to the warehouse."
"They won't hold if you get an infection from street grime," she snapped, leaning forward between the front bucket seats.
"Mateo, is there a first-aid kit in this rust bucket?"
The driver glanced at Norah in the rearview mirror, a flicker of surprise and respect flashing in his hardened eyes.
"Under your seat, lady," Mateo answered in a low, gravelly rasp.
Norah reached down, hauling out a green canvas military field pack filled with sterile compresses and rolls of medical tape.
She grabbed Alio by the shoulder, forcing him to turn toward her in the seat.
"Pull your sweater up," she ordered.
Alio opened his dark eyes, staring at her with that intense, penetrating stillness that had unnerved her in the café.
"Norah, this isn't the time—"
"Pull it up or I'll cut it off with the shears again," she interrupted, refusing to back down an inch.
For the first time since they had collided in her coffee shop, the ghost of a real smile touched the edge of Alio's scarred mouth.
He winced as he pulled the hem of the dark knit wool above his ribcage.
The wound was ugly.
Three of the nylon stitches had ripped through the torn dermis during the high-speed impact with the Dodge Charger.
Dark venous blood was pooling steadily beneath the fresh gauze she had applied only an hour earlier in Pilsen.
Teresa leaned forward from the back bench, her eyes widening as she saw the mangled flesh along Alio's ribs.
"Dio mio," Teresa murmured in Italian, the language of the neighborhood she had spent forty years trying to forget.
"That's Moretti blood," Teresa whispered, her voice hollow.
"Just like Lorenzo."
Norah pressed a thick stack of sterile gauze against the tear, leaning her entire body weight into the wound to stop the hemorrhage.
Alio's breath hissed through his clenched teeth, his fingers digging into the vinyl dashboard until the plastic creaked under his grip.
"Keep pressing," he muttered, his jaw muscles jumping violently.
"I don't need your permission to do my job, Alio," Norah retorted, her face inches from his neck.
"Who is Silvio to you, Mama?" Norah asked suddenly, turning her eyes to Teresa while her hands stayed locked on Alio's wound.
"You recognized the ledger, and you recognized Lorenzo Moretti's name."
"You told me Grandma Elena never dealt with criminals."
Teresa lowered her head, her hands knotting together in her lap like tangled roots.
"Your grandmother didn't deal with them, Norah," Teresa whispered, looking out into the blinding white storm.
"She survived them."
"Silvio Moretti isn't just Alio's uncle."
"Silvio is the man who ran your father out of this state thirty years ago."
Norah's hands froze against Alio's ribs.
The air in the minivan felt suddenly thinner than the freezing atmosphere outside.
"What did you just say?" Norah whispered.
Teresa looked up, her brown eyes swimming with old, unresolved grief and shame.
"Your father didn't abandon us, Norah," Teresa said, her voice cracking under the weight of three decades of silence.
"He was an auditor for the city's water department."
"He found the dummy payroll accounts that Silvio Moretti was using to launder money through the sanitation unions."
"When your father refused to take the bribe, Silvio had his car crushed with him almost inside it."
"Elena went to Lorenzo Moretti—Alio's father—and begged him to intervene before Silvio murdered my husband."
Alio turned his head slowly, looking back at Teresa from the front seat, his dark eyes sharpening with focused attention.
"My father gave him a way out," Alio said, completing the thought for her.
"Yes," Teresa sobbed softly, wiping her cheeks with the rough wool of her sleeve.
"Lorenzo gave your father ten thousand dollars and a fake identity, telling him never to contact Chicago again if he wanted Elena and Norah to live."
"Elena took the ledger as a guarantee that Silvio would never touch us."
"She kept it buried beneath the café because she knew that if Silvio ever found it, he would slaughter all of us to wipe the record clean."
Norah felt the foundations of her life shifting beneath her feet like tectonic plates grinding in the dark.
All those years of believing her father had simply packed a suitcase and walked away because he didn't love them.
All those years of watching her grandmother work eighty hours a week in the terracotta-tiled diner, silent and unyielding as granite.
Elena wasn't just running a business.
Elena was maintaining an armed truce with the deadliest predators in Cook County to keep Norah breathing.
"He died three years ago, Norah," Teresa added softly, looking at her daughter with eyes full of sorrow.
"Your father died in an industrial accident in Oregon under the name David Miller."
"He sent me a postcard every Christmas with no return address, just three words: 'Is she safe?'"
A single tear escaped Norah's lashes, falling onto the bloody gauze resting against Alio Moretti's ribs.
Alio reached out with his uninjured right hand and caught her wrist.
His fingers were warm, steady, and unyielding.
"Silvio destroyed your family," Alio said, his voice dropping into a register that sounded like steel scraping across stone.
"And he murdered my father in an arranged car fire on Lake Shore Drive four years ago."
"He took your father's life, he took my father's honor, and now he is trying to burn your life to the ground."
Norah looked down at Alio's hand on her wrist, feeling the pulse of his anger matching the rhythm of her own racing heart.
"Where are we going, Alio?" she asked, her voice dropping all traces of fear, replaced by a cold, sharp resolve.
Alio looked forward through the frosted windshield as the minivan turned off the highway into an industrial park near the rail yards of Cicero.
"To the only place Silvio can't touch us," Alio answered.
"To my father's old foundry."
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"And tonight, we don't hide from Silvio Moretti."
"Tonight, we take his empire apart, brick by bloody brick."
