Chapter 8 - THE GHOSTS OF UNION STATION
The silence in the SUV was deafening, broken only by the hum of the engine and the rhythmic thud of my own racing heart.
Ruth stared blankly at the dashboard, her face washed out by the passing streetlights.
“We have to go,” Ruth whispered, her voice entirely devoid of fear now. It was replaced by a hollow, terrifying resolve. “Turn the car around, Claire. Head to Union Station.”
“Mrs. Ellis, it’s a trap,” I pleaded, gripping the steering wheel. “Marcus isn’t going to let Luca go. He’s going to take the documents and kill both of you to cover his tracks.”
“I don’t care,” Ruth said firmly. She sat up straighter, smoothing down her soot-stained blue cardigan. “If there is a one percent chance it saves my boy, I’m taking it. I failed his mother twenty-nine years ago. I hid in the shadows while she died. I will not hide while he dies.”
Tears pricked my eyes. “We need help. Let me call Captain Miller.”
“No cops!” Ruth snapped, surprising me with her sudden authority. “If Marcus sees flashing lights, he’ll give the order to Paulie. Luca will be dead before we even pull into the station. Take me to the station, Claire. Then you walk away. This isn’t your fight.”
I looked at the frail, 72-year-old woman sitting next to me. She was prepared to walk into a slaughterhouse to save the boy she chose to love.
“It became my fight the second Vanessa told me to leave you behind,” I said.
I whipped the steering wheel, taking the ramp onto the I-90 expressway toward downtown Chicago. I pushed the heavy SUV to eighty miles an hour. We didn’t speak for the rest of the drive.
Twenty minutes later, the massive, imposing columns of Union Station loomed in the darkness. At 2:00 AM, the station was virtually abandoned. A few homeless individuals slept on benches outside, and a single janitor was mopping the sprawling Great Hall inside.
I parked the SUV illegally on Canal Street, keeping the engine running.
“Do you know where the locker is?” I asked as I helped Ruth out of the car.
She nodded slowly, looking up at the grand architecture. “The old long-term storage banks down in the lower concourse. They haven’t renovated that section since the nineties.”
We walked through the heavy brass doors. The Great Hall echoed with our footsteps, the massive vaulted ceiling making us feel small and vulnerable. Every shadow felt like a sniper; every echo sounded like a footstep.
We took the escalators down to the lower concourse. The lights flickered overhead, casting long, eerie shadows down a narrow hallway lined with rusted, dark-green metal lockers.
Waiting at the end of the hallway were three men in tailored suits.
One of them was Marcus Thorne.
He checked his gold Rolex and smiled a thin, humorless smile. “Right on time, Ruth. It’s a pleasure to see you again. Though I must say, you haven’t aged well since 1997.”
Ruth didn’t flinch. She walked forward, leaning slightly on my arm.
“Where is Luca?” Ruth demanded.
Marcus gestured to one of his men, who held up a cell phone on a video call. The screen showed Luca, battered and bleeding from a cut above his eye, kneeling in the dirt outside his burning mansion. Paulie stood behind him with the shotgun aimed at the back of his head.
Ruth let out a choked gasp at the sight of him.
“He’s alive. For now,” Marcus said smoothly. “Open the locker, Ruth. Give me the envelope, and I give the order to let him go.”
Ruth stepped forward, her hands trembling. She walked past Marcus and approached locker number 412.
“The lock is a heavy-duty combination,” Marcus noted, stepping up behind her. “We couldn’t break it without drawing attention. What is the code?”
“It requires a key, not a code,” Ruth said quietly.
Marcus frowned. “I thought Luca didn’t find the rosary. You don’t have the key.”
“I didn’t need the rosary,” Ruth said. “Because the key was never inside it.”
Marcus’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
Ruth turned to face him, her eyes burning with a fierce, unexpected defiance.
“Elena knew you were coming that night,” Ruth said, her voice echoing in the empty hallway. “She knew you had police on your payroll. She knew if she hid the key in her jewelry, you would steal it off her body.”
Marcus stepped closer, his face turning red with anger. “Then where is it, you old hag?”
Ruth reached into her mouth.
With a sickening click, she removed her upper set of dentures.
Marcus recoiled in disgust as Ruth reached into the hollow acrylic plate of the false teeth. Her fingers pulled out a tiny, silver locker key wrapped in plastic.
“I had a dentist mold it into my bridge twenty years ago,” Ruth said, her voice lisping slightly without the teeth, but dripping with absolute triumph. “I’ve carried it in my mouth every single day. I told Luca about the rosary tonight because I knew Vanessa was listening in the closet. I knew she would run and tell you.”
My jaw dropped. Ruth had manipulated Vanessa. She had manipulated all of them.
Marcus stared at the tiny key in horror, realizing he had been outsmarted by a cafeteria worker.
“Open it,” Marcus snarled, pulling a silver handgun from his coat and aiming it at Ruth’s chest. “Open the locker right now, or I blow your heart out.”
Ruth calmly turned to the locker. She slid the tiny key into the rusted slot.
It turned with a heavy click.
She pulled the metal door open.
Inside was a thick, brown leather satchel covered in decades of dust.
Marcus lunged forward, grabbing the satchel. He ripped it open, a manic grin spreading across his face as he pulled out a stack of aged, official-looking documents with heavy wax seals. The shipyard deeds.
“Yes!” Marcus laughed, clutching the papers. “It’s over! It’s finally mine!”
“You’re right, Marcus,” a voice echoed from the top of the escalators. “It’s over.”
Marcus spun around, raising his gun.
May you like
Standing at the top of the stairs, flanked by ten heavily armed FBI agents, was Luca Moretti.
TITLE: THE BLOODLINE AND THE BADGE
