Chapter 3 - The Weight of Leather
The heavy armored Lincoln Continental glided through the grey gloom of Michigan Avenue like a black ship cutting through dirty water.
In the back seat, Leo held a file folder containing the lease agreements for the South Side railyards. Up front, Quinn drove with both hands at ten and two, her seat adjusted so far forward her knees almost touched the lower dash. In the side mirror, she looked tiny—a dark-haired shadow floating above the high leather headrest.
"You don't talk about your past," Leo said from the back. The privacy divider was down three inches, letting his voice drift forward through the dark leather interior.
"Past doesn't pay rent," Quinn said, her eyes scanning a delivery van that was tailing them two cars back.
"Everyone has a trail, Quinn. Dom ran your name through the State Police database. Nothing. No priors. No tax records for six years. No driver's license until you renewed it three months ago in Cook County."
"Dom wastes time," she said.
"Where were you for those six years?"
Quinn turned the heavy steering wheel left, taking them down an alley behind the historic district to bypass a line of yellow cabs. The Lincoln moved smoothly, its thick bulletproof glass muffling the sound of the city into a soft, underwater hum.
"I was in a state where people don't use names," she said after a long pause.
"A prison?"
"No," she said. Her voice didn't change pitch, but the air in the car seemed to drop three degrees. "A facility. In Southern Illinois. They teach people how to organize logistics for federal contractors."
Leo smiled bitterly into the dark. "Logistics. That's what we're calling it now?"
"Logistics is just moving items from where they are to where they aren't," Quinn said softly. "Sometimes the items are boxes. Sometimes they're people. Sometimes they're the reasons people don't come home."
Leo leaned his head back against the leather seat—the seat that had been scrubbed clean of Tommy’s blood three days ago on his orders, though he could still smell the copper under the chemical lemon spray.
"Did you kill people down there, Quinn?"
"I organized things," she said.
The Lincoln pulled into the subterranean garage of the Marlowe Hotel. The hotel was an old-money brick tower from the nineteen-twenties, filled with brass elevators, velvet curtains, and private rooms where politicians buried their scandals and mobsters buried their associates.
Two of Marcus Voss’s lieutenants were already waiting by the service elevator. They were wide, broad-shouldered men wearing expensive Italian leather coats that couldn't hide the heavy shoulder holsters underneath.
They looked at the Lincoln as it stopped. They looked at the driver's door.
When Quinn stepped out—small, frail-looking in her cheap coat, her boots squeaking on the wet concrete—the two men looked at each other and laughed.
It wasn't a loud laugh. Just a quiet, dismissive snort from two predators who had spent their lives measuring strength in pounds and chest inches.
Quinn didn't look at them. She walked to the back door, opened it, and stood with her hand behind her back as Leo Mercer stepped out into the damp air of the garage.
"Mr. Mercer," one of the guards said, wiping a bit of grease from his mustache. "Voss is upstairs in the Gold Room. Just you. The girl stays in the hall."
Leo adjusted his cuffs. "She comes to the door."
"Voss said—"
May you like
"I don't care what Marcus said," Leo snapped, his voice hard enough to cut glass. "She holds my coat."
The guard shrugged, turning toward the elevator. "Suit yourself. Just tell her not to trip on the carpets."
