~Al Capone”
So not Johnny after all, but Chicago’s leading gangster.
Callie untied the ribbon and opened the box, gasping at what lay within: a rich, sable fur wrap. She was almost certain, given Capone’s business reach, that it hadn’t cost him a dime. It seemed his men had healed well after her ministrations.
She still couldn’t explain her abrupt descent into unconsciousness directly after. She’d taken a few days off work, and Johnny had kept her safely at home several nights in a row to make sure. She also couldn’t explain the strange dreams that accosted her since the incident.
A woman that reminded her vaguely of her mother hovered in a black dreamscape, her hair neither blond, nor brunette, nor red, but combination of all three that should have been riotous, but was instead lovely beyond imagining as it curled to her knees. Her eyes whirled an indeterminate rainbow of blue-gray-green-brown. When she spoke, Callie could not make out her blurred and echoing words, as though she spoke underwater. And when she reached a welcoming hand, Callie could not touch her.
Then Callie would awaken, gasping for air and reaching back.
Callie wondered, as she lifted the wrap from its fine tissue, if one wrote violent gangsters thank-you notes. One certainly did not, she mused, return the gift—no matter how unsavory it made her feel. As exciting as her whirlwind life with Johnny was, she had begun to think it best if she broke things off, if only for her own good. She couldn’t continue on like this.
It was early yet, so she bathed and dressed, and had a driver take her home to her boarding house on North Clark Street, situated fairly equidistant between the Northwestern nursing program she’d attended and its sister hospital where she worked.
When she entered her rooms, however, she experienced another dizzy spell, her hand clutching painfully around her keys, the teeth grinding into her flesh. She leaned back against the door until it shut, then staggered across the room to her bed, where she collapsed.
By the time she awakened, it was dark outside and she had less than an hour to get ready before Johnny’s driver arrived to claim her. In fact, she was still pulling on her shoes as the car pulled up to the curb, its headlights illuminating the crime scene tape cordoning off the garage across the street. Her sense of unease deepened as she slid into the car’s backseat.
Nor did her unease fade as what should have been a magical evening unfolded before her in a parade gleaming silver platters of elegant food, followed by a sea of electrifying jazz and illegal liquor. If anything, her discomfort only increased as the night progressed, the sable wrap on her shoulders making her feel like a snake desperate to shed its skin. Johnny didn’t appear to notice her extreme distraction, even when she stepped on his toes for the third time.
Alcohol didn’t help, not even the fruity Rum Runners coyly named for the rum smugglers making waves along the Atlantic coast, or the daiquiris Johnny plied her with that were so delicious they seemed to transmute to empty glasses the moment they reached the table.
Johnny’s “business associates” came and went all night, paying their respects, and for the first time Callie’s stock was on the rise. She was now not “just another dame”, but a figure of respect in her own right. Word seemed to have gotten around—not only had Johnny Sinclair taken her for his own, but now even Al Capone treated her with deference. She had mouthed off to the Big Man even while promising to save the lives of his most valued men, and pulled off both. Capone had been right: she was some broad.
And Callie wanted out.
Where could she go that these people wouldn’t find her? Johnny’s reach stretched across the whole of the United States and into Canada as well as Cuba. And all of them—every last one—was violent in the extreme. Johnny might let her go—but then again, he might not. She considered, not for the first time, joining the Red Cross as a nurse as her mother had, to follow her husband headlong into the Great War.
She polished off another daiquiri, inhaling the last frothy bits through a straw absentmindedly. She should have been at least respectfully tipsy by now, but strangely the rum had no affect on her. As she contemplated yet another empty glass, wondering how it had got that way so quickly, the conversation around the table leaked through her mental walls.
“Of course, they won’t catch him,” someone was saying with great authority. “No evidence. Besides, he’s in Miami living it up at that new house of his, right on the water.”
“Evidence of what?” Callie asked.
The Chief of Police smiled indulgently, thinking her too sloshed to keep track of the conversation. “The call came in this morning. Seven men from Bugs Moran’s crew were lined up and shot down in a garage over on North Clark. We all know it was a botched assassination attempt on the part of Capone, but there’s not a damn bit of evidence to support it.”
A garage on North Clark Street. A garage, across the street from her boarding house, framed in crime scene tape in the lights of Johnny’s new car. Suddenly she felt nauseous, and it had nothing to do with the rum.
It was no longer a matter of wanting to get out. Now she had to get out.
Rumor had it that Louie Armstrong was playing over in Lincoln Park. Johnny lit a cigarette as they waited for the car to be brought around, parking in the city becoming more scarce as its nightlife boomed and more cars packed in. Chicago pulsed with activity at night, jazz and booze and violence its second heartbeat. Callie pretended to drink it in as her mind raced ahead into the future, making plans and elaborate cover ups to hide them. When she disappeared, it would have to be for good.
A faint, eerily resounding click echoed in the night, piercing through honking horns and laughing crowds as though targeted directly at her. The same instincts that gave her a reputation for acting quickly with minimal information as a nurse kicked in to high gear. Turning her head, she saw the dull gleam of moonlight on metal in the opening of an alleyway. Her feet moved before she could stop them, and her hands shoved Johnny out of the way just as gunfire rang out.
The bullet ripped through her on a path of searing pain and percussive resonance that rattled through her. She spun with the impact, gaping in need for oxygen and understanding. Then she hit the ground.
She’d been shot. The healer in her took mental inventory, even as the blood poured from her, slowing her heart. A shadow loomed over her like the angel of death, its shoes polished to a high shine before her eyes. “Johnny.” She had to tell him to use her fur wrap to stop the bleeding, before it was too late. She refused to believe she was dying.
Johnny leaned down to smile into her eyes in genuine affection and concern, if not love. He cradled her cool cheek in his hand as it began to snow. His eyes were brighter than ever. “Happy Valentine’s Day, my love,” he said. “Now we will never be apart.”
As it happened, he couldn’t have been more wrong.
Callie awakened in an endless field of black empty, gasping for air. Her chest burned, and it took her a long moment to remember she’d been shot. Further consideration could not reveal to her whether she was dreaming, or dead. She rolled over, coughing, lungs constricting as a body she wasn’t sure she had anymore fought for life.
“Hello, Calista.”
Callie jerked, spine twisting painfully as she turned to see who had spoken. The woman from her dreams, holding in her hands a slim gleam of metal.”Who are you?”
“I am Brighid,” the woman said, proffering the plain, yet somehow alive-looking length of metal that turned out to be, of all things, a sword. “And this belongs to you.”
FOUR