Chapter 8 - The Aftermath of Silk
By eight o'clock that evening, the rain had cleared, leaving the streets of Chicago slick and black under the streetlamps.
The Mercer penthouse on Lake Shore Drive was dead silent.
Dom Russo sat on the silk sofa in the main room, his face white as salt, his hands shaking so violently he couldn't light his own cigarette.
On the glass coffee table lay six cell phones, all of them ringing intermittently with frantic calls from the city’s underbosses, union leaders, and police lieutenants.
Marcus Voss was dead. His inner circle was wiped out. The Marlowe Hotel was currently crawled over by fifty federal agents trying to understand how six professional killers had been liquidated in less than fifteen seconds without a single guest on the eighth floor hearing a gunshot.
"She... she did it?" Dom whispered, looking at Leo, who sat in the armchair by the fire with a unlit cigar between his fingers. "All six of them? By herself?"
Leo didn't answer him. He was looking toward the balcony.
Quinn stood outside in the cold wind, looking out over the dark expanse of Lake Michigan. She had taken off her pea coat; she wore only a thin grey cotton shirt and her old denim jacket, her hands buried deep in her pockets as the wind blew her dark hair across her face.
"She isn't a driver, Leo," Dom whispered, leaning closer, his voice low with raw terror. "I ran her print from the Sig. The system didn't give a name. It gave a red flag with an intelligence routing code out of Fort Meade."
Leo looked at his underboss. "And?"
"And that code means she doesn't exist!" Dom gasped. "It means she was part of a black unit that was liquidated three years ago in Ukraine. She's a ghost, Leo! A ghost that kills people like she's filling out a tax form!"
"She's my bodyguard," Leo said flatly.
"She's a bomb!" Dom yelled, forgetting himself for a second before dropping his voice back into a frightened hiss. "What happens when she decides she doesn't like your orders? What happens when she realizes she can take this whole city by herself?"
Leo stood up slowly. He walked past Dom, opened the heavy glass sliding door, and stepped out onto the cold balcony.
The wind off the lake was freezing, smelling of ice and industrial coal smoke.
Quinn didn't turn around as he approached.
"Dom is scared of you," Leo said, leaning his elbows on the iron railing beside her.
"Dom is scared of everything he can't buy or hit," she said softly.
"He says you were part of a unit that doesn't exist."
Quinn looked down at the dark water three hundred feet below. "Units exist until they become inconvenient. Then they don't."
"Why did you come to my office, Quinn?" Leo asked, turning his head to look at her profile. "A woman with your skills could be living in South America on a pension from three different agencies. You could be working for the cartels making fifty thousand a week. Why are you driving an armored Lincoln for a mid-level boss in Chicago?"
Quinn was silent for a long time. The wind whipped her hair across her cheeks, but she didn't bother to push it away.
"Because you were the only man in the city who didn't try to tell me what I was," she said softly.
May you like
Leo frowned. "I called you a joke."
"Yes," she said, her muddy hazel eyes turning to meet his. "And jokes are left alone. Nobody looks closely at a joke. Nobody expects a joke to survive the winter."
