Chapter 3 - Midnight at Union Station
The heavy autumn rain turned into a driving, relentless downpour across the city of Chicago.
Luca Moretti did not change out of his formal evening clothes.
He stripped off his dinner jacket, pulled a dark, waterproof wool trench coat over his white shirt, and slipped a black leather-holstered sidearm beneath his left shoulder seam.
He didn't take an entourage of black SUVs with tinted windows.
He took a single, nondescript black sedan, sliding into the passenger seat while Daniel drove through the rear service gates at ninety miles per hour.
Beside Luca’s knee sat the small navy blue handbag.
His phone buzzed against the center console.
It was Marco Ruiz, the catering driver.
Two of Luca’s men had intercepted the refrigeration van four miles south of the estate on an interstate access ramp.
Daniel put the call on speaker.
“Boss,” one of his enforcers reported, his voice competing with the sound of the rain beating against the truck’s aluminum roof.
“We have Marco.”
“Put him on,” Luca ordered.
A trembling, frantic voice came through the dashboard speakers.
“Mr. Moretti! Please, Mr. Moretti, I swear to God I didn't know who she was!”
The man was weeping, the terror plain in his ragged breathing.
“Miss Bellini gave me two hundred dollars in cash and told me an elderly cleaning lady had stolen a silver tea service from the pantry and was trying to cause a scene!”
Luca’s eyes were cold as slate as he watched the wet asphalt blur beneath the headlights.
“Did my aunt look like a thief to you, Marco?”
“No! No, sir, she was crying the entire ride! She didn't have any bags, no coat, nothing! She just kept clutching her chest and looking out the window!”
“Where did you leave her?”
“Under the south bridge at Union Station, near the commuter drop-off! She didn't want to get out in the rain, but Miss Bellini texted me and said if I didn't leave her on the curb immediately, she’d have my commercial license revoked by the city inspector!”
“What time was she dropped off?”
“Four forty-five, boss! I swear on my children, that was the last time I saw her!”
Luca reached forward and tapped the screen, cutting the connection instantly.
“Step on the gas, Daniel.”
“Yes, boss.”
The sedan surged forward through the flooded lanes of the Kennedy Expressway, cutting through the midnight traffic like a razor blade.
Inside the car, the silence was suffocating.
Daniel had driven for Luca for twelve years.
He had seen Luca negotiate with ruthless cartel bosses from Sinaloa and corrupt federal prosecutors with the same icy, detached calm.
He had never seen Luca’s hands tremble.
Tonight, Luca’s right thumb was tracing the worn, hand-sewn nylon stitches on the handle of his aunt’s purse, over and over, until the leather was warm.
Memories of a Chicago winter twenty-eight years ago surfaced unbidden in the dark interior of the speeding car.
A freezing basement apartment on 18th Street.
His father’s body had just been removed from the morgue in a pine box.
The rival factions were hunting for the eleven-year-old heir to the Moretti name to ensure the bloodline ended permanently.
It was Teresa who had hidden him behind a false wall behind a water heater for three days, feeding him dry crusts of bread soaked in warm milk.
When the enforcers came kicking in the wooden door, demanding to know where the boy was hidden, they had broken two of Teresa’s ribs with the butt of a shotgun.
She had spat blood onto their boots and told them the boy had died of pneumonia two weeks prior and had already been buried in an unmarked potter’s field.
She had taken a beating that nearly cost her the use of her legs, and she had never uttered a single syllable of complaint.
And today, in a house bought with the fortune she had bled to protect, a girl whose family traded political favors over country club martinis had thrown her out into the rain like common garbage.
The sedan skidded to a halt against the wet curb of Canal Street outside the massive stone columns of Union Station at precisely twelve-fifteen.
The station was largely deserted at this hour.
The grand Great Hall, with its sweeping barrel-vaulted skylight and massive stone statues, echoed with the hollow hiss of steam pipes and the distant rumble of diesel locomotives idling underground.
Luca pushed open the heavy brass doors, his long trench coat sweeping behind him.
Six of his plainclothes security operatives were already scattered across the floor, their earpieces glowing faintly in the dim yellow illumination.
Daniel jogged up beside him, his phone pressed to his ear.
“Security cameras show she entered through the Burlington corridor at four-fifty-two, boss.”
“Where is she now?”
“She wandered through the main concourse for almost an hour, asking several people for change to make a payphone call, but nobody stopped to assist her.”
Luca’s teeth ground together with a sound like crushing stone.
“She had no money.”
“She had twelve dollars tucked inside her dress pocket, boss. She bought a hot tea at five-thirty, then went down toward the lower tracks.”
Luca walked past the marble pillars, his sharp eyes sweeping every wooden passenger bench.
A few homeless men wrapped in tattered blankets slept beneath the architectural alcoves.
Two cleaning workers pushed floor buffers across the terrazzo tiles.
There was no sign of a frail woman in a navy lace dress.
Luca walked toward the ticket windows, which were currently shuttered behind heavy iron grilles.
On a bench near the entrance to Track 14, an old wool cardigan lay abandoned on the polished wood.
Luca walked over and picked it up.
It smelled of lavender and almond extract.
“Daniel.”
“Yes, Mr. Moretti?”
“Pull the exterior street cameras facing west toward Clinton Street.”
Daniel tapped his tablet rapidly, scrolling through high-resolution security feeds patched directly from the transit authority’s central server.
“Ten minutes ago, an elderly woman matching her description was seen leaving through the western handicap ramp onto Clinton.”
“Was she walking alone?”
“She was leaning against the concrete retaining wall, boss. She was struggling to stand.”
Luca didn't wait.
He turned and sprinted toward the west exit doors, bursting out into the freezing deluge of rain.
Clinton Street was an empty canyon of concrete, wet brick, and shuttered warehouse fronts.
The rain fell in sheets, washing street debris into the overflowing gutters.
Luca ran along the pavement, his eyes scanning every dark doorway, every alley alcove, every steam grate where an elderly person might seek shelter from the hypothermic wind.
The city’s temperature had dropped into the low forties.
A woman of seventy-one in a light summer lace dress would not survive three hours in these conditions.
“Teresa!”
His voice roared down the empty street, bouncing off the brick facades.
The sound of his shout was swallowed by the roar of the wind.
Two blocks down, at the corner of an alleyway adjacent to an all-night diner with a buzzing, half-broken neon sign reading GRILL, a small silhouette sat slumped on an overturned milk crate.
Luca stopped dead in his tracks.
His heart hammered against his ribs with a violence he hadn't felt in twenty years.
He closed the distance in five long strides.
Sitting against the greasy brick wall of the diner’s kitchen exhaust vent, shivering uncontrollably, was Teresa Moretti.
Her navy lace dress was soaked through, clinging heavily to her frail, trembling frame.
Her bare arms were covered in goosebumps and purple blotches from the biting cold.
Her silver hair was plastered across her forehead, and her lips were a terrifying, pale shade of cyan.
In her lap, her arthritic fingers were clutching a paper napkin containing three small, crumbled pieces of almond biscotti that had survived the confrontation in the ballroom.
She didn't look up when the heavy footsteps approached.
She assumed it was another transit officer coming to tell her she couldn't sit behind the dumpsters.
“I’m sorry,” her voice came out as a fragile, breathless rasp.
“I’m just waiting for the rain to stop... I don't have enough for the bus ticket yet...”
Luca dropped to both knees directly in the wet grime of the alley floor.
He didn't care about his thousand-dollar trousers, his polished leather shoes, or the dirt soaking into his clothes.
He wrapped his long arms around her trembling shoulders and pulled her cold, soaking body against his chest.
“Teresa.”
The old woman froze.
Her frail hands slowly moved upward, touching the damp wool of his trench coat, then rising to touch his cheek, his jaw, and his hair.
She squinted through the darkness, her vision blurry and unfocused without her glasses.
“Luca?” she whispered, her voice breaking on a sob of pure disbelief.
“Is that my Luca?”
May you like
“It’s me, Aunt Teresa,” Luca choked out, burying his face into the wet lace of her shoulder.
“It’s me. I’m here.”
