Chapter 4 - The Hideout
The garage on Western Avenue sat between an abandoned auto-body shop and a wholesale poultry distributor whose blue-painted windows had been cracked since the 1979 blizzard. The neighborhood was quiet in the five o'clock hour before dawn—only the heavy diesel trucks carrying meat from the stockyards moved along the wet asphalt, their headlights cutting yellow slices through the gray mist.
Eliti pulled the Lincoln into the narrow alley behind the poultry shop, turned off the lights, and stepped out into the rain.
The green door was made of reinforced sheet metal, set into a low brick building that had once been a sausage factory. There was no handle, no keyhole—only a small brass plate near the frame with three small indentations.
She reached into Sodor’s coat pocket and pulled out the small horn-handled knife. She remembered what he had said about the key in his apartment: It's not for money.
She used the tip of the narrow blade to press the second and third indentations simultaneously.
Inside the frame, a series of heavy mechanical tumblers dropped with a soft, oily clack, and the green door swung inward six inches.
The interior was cold, dark, and smelled of dry brick, motor oil, and dried lavender.
Eliti drove the Lincoln inside, the low bumper scraping slightly on the concrete threshold, then pulled the green door shut until the deadbolts re-engaged.
The space was forty feet deep. It was not a garage; it was a sanctuary.
Along one brick wall stood three steel army cots made up with wool blankets and white cotton sheets that were clean and smelled of bleach. On the opposite side stood a heavy wooden work table bearing a shortwave radio, four five-gallon glass jugs of spring water, a military-grade medical kit, and a small gas stove connected to a propane cylinder.
In the corner sat an old iron stove, its chimney pipe running through the brick wall into the alley vent.
Eliti ran to the cots, pulled the heavy blankets off two of them, and spread them over the rear seat of the Lincoln. Then she opened the back door and reached for Sodor.
His skin was dry now—dangerously dry. The high fever had burned through his perspiration, leaving his face looking like carved horn. His lips were cracked and bleeding, his eyes rolled back so that only the yellowed whites showed beneath his thick, dark lids.
"Mr. Kresnik," she called out, slapping his cheek three times with the flat of her palm. "Sodor. Listen to me."
He didn't move.
She hauled him out of the car, her knees buckling under his heavy weight as they crashed together onto the concrete floor. She dragged him three feet to the nearest cot, lifting his heavy legs onto the canvas frame before falling back against the wooden work table, her chest heaving, her hands covered in grease and old blood.
She opened the medical kit.
It was not a standard home first-aid box. It contained surgical scalpels wrapped in paper, three bottles of pharmaceutical-grade medical alcohol, boxes of broad-spectrum antibiotic vials, sterile syringes, three bags of saline solution with IV tubing, and a bottle of veterinary-grade penicillin.
Sodor had built this room ten years ago, long before he took the forty-seventh floor penthouse, long before he had forty men in charcoal suits waiting for his word in the restaurants of Taylor Street. He had built it for the day his family would do what all families in his business eventually did.
Eliti picked up one of the glass bottles of saline. She had seen her aunt, who had been a nurse in Casablanca before moving to Illinois, set an IV line for her uncle when his diabetes turned his feet gray.
She swabbed the dark blue vein in the crook of Sodor’s left arm with alcohol. Her hands were cold, but they didn't shake.
"Hold still," she said to the empty room.
She inserted the needle with a quick, practiced thrust. The thin clear tube filled with a dark drop of blood before the clear saline began dripping through the sight chamber—one drop every two seconds.
She hung the bag from a brass meat hook set into the ceiling beam above the cot.
Then she lit the propane stove, filled a small aluminum pot with fresh water from one of the glass jugs, and dropped six tablets of aspirin into it until they dissolved into a milky white liquid.
She sat on the edge of the cot next to the man who had controlled half the city twelve hours ago.
She raised his head, placed the edge of the aluminum pot to his split lips, and slowly tipped the warm fluid into his mouth.
"Drink," she murmured in Arabic—the soft, northern dialect her mother had used when the winter rains came down off the Atlas mountains. "Drink, you old wolf. You have too many enemies to die in a dark room."
Sodor swallowed once. His throat clicked, his chest hitched, and then his eyes opened.
They were no longer glassy. The cold, black focus had returned—faint, like a small fire seen through ten miles of winter fog, but real.
He looked at her white headband, now dark with oil, at her torn collar, at her small hands covered in dried salt and blood.
"Eliti," he said. His voice was low, clean, and stripped of the fever's whistle.
"I am here," she said.
"Why... did you... bring me here?"
She looked at the small silver knife resting on the work table beside the shortwave radio.
"Because," she said, leaning back against the cold brick wall and closing her eyes, "your brother promised me five hundred dollars and a watch I didn't steal. I prefer to work for a man who pays his debts."
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Sodor looked at her for a long minute. Then his head fell back onto the pillow, his breathing deep, even, and quiet as the saline dripped slowly into his vein.
Outside, on Western Avenue, the first morning bus lumbered past, its heavy tires splashing through the rain, carry people who knew nothing of the war that had just begun in the dark.
