Chapter 3: Everything a Waitress Was Not Supposed to Know
Nora had never been inside a car that cost more than her father's apartment building.
She knew this the moment the door closed behind her and the city disappeared behind tinted glass.
The leather was the color of charcoal.
The interior smelled like cedar and something colder she couldn't name.
One of Gabriel's men sat in the front passenger seat without speaking.
Another followed in a second vehicle she could see in the side mirror.
Gabriel sat beside her.
Not close.
But present in a way that filled the space completely.
"You can drop me at the corner of Halsted," she said.
"No."
"I have a father at home."
"How old?"
"Sixty-three.
He has a bad hip and he falls asleep waiting up for me."
Gabriel looked at her for a moment.
Then he picked up his phone and typed something.
"Someone will check on him."
"I don't want a stranger going to my father's apartment at midnight."
"Then give me the address and I'll send a woman.
She'll knock, tell him you're running late, and leave."
Nora stared at him.
"Why would you do that?"
"Because you saved my life tonight and you're worried about your father.
It's a simple problem."
She gave him the address.
She wasn't sure why.
Maybe because nothing about the last forty minutes had followed any logic she recognized, and her usual instincts had stopped working somewhere between the lipstick crescent and the name Marco.
"Who is Marco?" she asked.
Gabriel didn't answer immediately.
He was watching the city move past the window.
The lights of the river district slid across the glass.
"Someone who used to work for me," he said finally.
"Used to."
"He left.
Badly."
Nora understood that badly covered a great deal of ground in his world.
"And Anthony?" she said.
Gabriel turned to look at her then.
Not with anger.
With something more careful.
"What about Anthony?"
"He sat down when I said that name.
Not from shock.
His legs gave out."
The driver's eyes moved briefly to the mirror, then back to the road.
"You notice a great deal," Gabriel said.
"I told you.
It's how poor people survive."
He was quiet for a moment.
Outside, Chicago moved past in fragments — a lit pharmacy, a woman walking a dog, a bus pulling away from a stop with its windows glowing yellow.
"Anthony has been my closest friend for twenty-two years," Gabriel said.
"We grew up six blocks apart.
He was at my father's funeral.
He was the first call I made when my mother got sick."
"I'm sorry," Nora said, because she meant it.
"Don't be sorry yet." His jaw tightened slightly.
"Be sorry when we know what he did."
His phone rang.
He answered it on the first ring.
"Talk to me."
Nora could hear a voice on the other end but not the words.
Gabriel listened without moving.
Then something changed in his face — not dramatically, not the way it would in a film.
Just a small, precise shift around his eyes, like a door closing in a room she would never enter.
"Where?" he said.
Another pause.
"Alone?"
His hand tightened on the phone.
"Don't touch anything.
I'll be there in twelve minutes."
He ended the call.
He looked at Nora.
"Sofia is at her apartment," he said.
"She's not answering her door.
Her husband says she left for dinner three hours ago and hasn't come back."
"Her husband." Nora kept her voice even.
"What's his name?"
Gabriel's expression was unreadable.
"Marco," he said.
"His name is Marco."
May you like
The car turned north and accelerated.
Nora pressed her back against the seat and said nothing, because there was nothing left to say that the silence wasn't already saying for her.
