Chapter 2 - The Scar on the River
The apartment on the North Side was quiet when Paige arrived at eight that night.
It was a small two-bedroom on the second floor of a brick courtyard building that smelled of damp oak leaves and old radiators. She hung her wet raincoat in the narrow hallway, lined up her rubber-soled shoes against the baseboard, and walked straight to the kitchen to boil water.
Her phone rang while the kettle was still warming.
"Paige?"
"Hi, Sarah," Paige leaned her hip against the counter, closing her eyes. "How was her afternoon?"
Sarah was the head nurse on the second floor at St. Jude’s Senior Living. Her voice was always too bright, the artificial cheerfulness of someone who spent twelve hours a day delivering bad news in soft tones.
"She had a little trouble at dinner," Sarah said gently. "She didn't recognize the soup. She thought she was at the old house on Pulaski Road, waiting for your father to come home from the steel mill."
"My father died twenty-two years ago," Paige said flatly.
"I know, dear. We redirected her. But she kept asking for her blue coat. She said she needed to go to the bus stop."
Paige rubbed the bridge of her nose. "Did she eat anything?"
"A few spoonfuls of custard. She’s sleeping now. But... Paige, the pharmacy statement came through for the new cognitive modifiers Dr. Chen prescribed last week. Insurance denied the prior authorization."
"How much?"
"Eight hundred and forty dollars for the month."
Paige stared at the small toaster on her counter. The chrome was peeling around the edges.
"Put it on my card," Paige said. "The one ending in four-zero-two."
"Are you sure? We can try to appeal the denial—"
"The appeal takes six weeks, Sarah. She needs the pills tomorrow. Put it on the card."
She hung up before the nurse could offer any more sympathy. Sympathy was like rain; it made everything damp without fixing the drought.
She made her tea, carried it to the small kitchen table, and opened her laptop.
Her job at Gallagher Freight & Harbor paid ninety-two thousand dollars a year. It was forty percent more than any legitimate administrative post in the city offered for a woman with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and six years of office management experience.
She knew why the pay was high.
It was danger pay. It was hush money. It was the cost of sitting three feet away from a man who had two federal grand juries trying to indict him and three rival crews on the West Side trying to find out where he slept at night.
She opened her browser and typed in a search query she had made a hundred times since her second week on the job: Patrick Doyle Chicago 2019.
The news articles were sparse, buried under seven years of newer homicides and corporate press releases.
LOCAL BUSINESSMAN FOUND DEAD NEAR SOUTH BRANCH. NO CHARGES FILED IN DOYLE SHOOTING. POLICE CITE SELF-DEFENSE IN RUST BELT WAREHOUSE ALTERCATION.
There were no photos of Arthur in the articles—his lawyers had scrubbed his name from the public record within forty-eight hours of the grand jury’s refusal to indict. But Paige had seen the internal legal files in the locked cabinet behind her desk.
She had seen the crime scene photographs.
The photos showed a small, greasy kitchen behind an abandoned seafood distribution center near the river. There were two plates of cold fried fish on a Formica table. A bottle of mid-shelf Irish whiskey sat between them, two glasses half-full.
And on the linoleum floor, a massive smear of dark brown blood that dragged from the table toward the back door.
According to the coroner’s report, Patrick Doyle—sixty-two years old, former union steward, mentor to the young Arthur Gallagher—had pulled a nine-inch boning knife from his coat pocket while reaching around Arthur’s shoulders to hug him goodbye.
The knife had gone in six inches, missing Arthur’s abdominal aorta by less than four millimeters.
Arthur had broken Patrick Doyle’s neck with his bare hands while lying on his back in his own blood.
Paige closed the laptop.
She understood the three-foot rule now. It wasn't pride. It wasn't the arrogance of a mob boss who thought he was too good for the touch of common men.
It was the reflex of a man who had felt the cold bite of steel from the only hand he had ever trusted not to hit him.
May you like
She set her tea mug down and looked at her fingers. Her knuckles were still slightly red where they had brushed the coarse fabric of Arthur’s collar.
"You're an idiot, Paige," she whispered to the quiet room. "You're going to get yourself killed for ninety-two grand a year."
