Chapter 2 - The Red Cross in the Ledger
I knew that ledger. It was bound in black calfskin, kept in the bottom drawer of my father’s mahogany desk down at the social club. Most names had numbers beside them—amounts owed from card games, protection fees for the butcher shops on Halsted, or loans with interest rates that could strip the skin off a man’s back. But the red crosses were different. They meant the person had become a liability.
"My father was a hard man, Sarah, but he didn't touch girls from the neighborhood," I said, though the words tasted like ash as soon as they left my mouth. I remembered the coldness in his eyes when he spoke about people who couldn't pay their way.
"He didn't touch me," Sarah whispered, pulling the thin blanket higher up her collarbone. "He used me as collateral. When your older brother, Vincent, lost that poker game to the Outfit boys over in Cicero, your father needed twenty thousand dollars by sunrise to keep them from burning the docks. He didn't have cash. So he traded the title to the old laundry, two tenements on Racine, and my future."
The room grew colder. The rain outside turned to sleet, rattling against the glass like birdshot.
"I was seventeen, Nate," she continued, her voice dropping to a harsh rasp. "One night, a man with a scarred lip came to the back door of the laundry. He didn't talk like our neighbors. He talked like someone who owned judges. He told me that in three years, when I turned twenty-one, the debt would be called in, and I’d be married off to a loan shark named Vinnie 'The Hook' Marcone as settlement."
"Vinnie Marcone?" I stepped forward, the floorboards groaning under my boots. Marcone had gone down in a federal RICO sweep back in ninety-four, but his crew still ran half the unions on the South Side. "Marcone died in Leavenworth ten years ago."
"His boys didn't die," Sarah said, her gaze shifting to the doorway where Lily was peeking in with the yellow tin. "And they don't forget a debt, even if it's thirty years old. Especially when the daughter of the debtor is old enough to start catching their eye."
I froze. The blood drained from my face so fast my knees wobbled. I looked from Sarah to the little girl standing by the door with her tangled brown hair and serious, old-soul eyes.
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"Lily isn't your daughter's age, Sarah," I said slowly, the arithmetic finally clicking together in my brain with the terrifying precision of a guillotine. "Lily is seven."
"Which means she was born right after Marcone’s chief enforcer got out of prison," Sarah whispered. "And two months ago, they found me."
