Flicker & Burn: A Cold Fury Novel Page 2

  In front of me, the summer wind whistled.

  Below me, deep brown water swirled.

  My heart hammered at my chest, and somewhere far away a duck quacked.

  For a moment all I could hear was my own disjointed breathing. And then, quietly, Sinatra began crooning behind me as the truck crept up the bridge, eased to a halt, and the creature slid out from behind the darkened windshield, staring intently. I looked into the rearview mirror, wondering why it wasn’t torn and bleeding, when its mouth moved and it ferociously licked at pinkish soft-serve ice cream. When it was done, it flicked its hand like shaking liquid from a cup. Something silvery glinted as the thing climbed back into the truck, and I knew it would come for me now, or, more accurately, my brain. Months earlier, Lou told me the captors had invaded my dad’s head. It would be the same for me; besides invaluable gray matter, the rest of me was just gristle.

  Some days really are fine to die, I thought, stepping out of the car and onto the bridge. But maybe it requires some help to do it. I moved carefully, slipping a bit on the slick steel, regaining my balance as I glanced through the girders beneath my feet. All I could see were construction cables and, farther down, the river, and I stopped only when I was equidistant to the truck and the edge to nowhere behind me. The creature now had a clear shot. Standing perfectly still, I pointed at it and then touched my head with the same finger. “You want this? What’s inside?”

  The truck revved its engine, dying to burst forward.

  I closed and opened my eyes, exhaled, and said, “Well then . . . come and get it.”

  Back tires squealed as the thing barreled straight for me—fifteen feet, ten—and I smiled, extended a middle finger, and stepped between a gap in the girders. I fell a few feet before grabbing a cable and swinging like a pendulum while the truck roared above me. Its brakes complained, searching for traction, but the slick girders rejected them. I hauled myself up just in time to see the truck slide over the edge of the bridge and come to a precarious, tilting halt. I sprinted for it, determined to shove it into space, as a gentle gust of wind blew past. The truck teetered once and was gone. I heard it hit the river before I saw it, and when I looked over, it was already sinking. Water pressure blew out the windshield as cold brown liquid rushed into the truck. The creature stared up at me, clawing at the seat belt, convulsing like it was an electric chair, trying to scream while its mouth filled with water. Grimly, feeling no joy, I murmured, “Fine day, isn’t it?”

  The river covered its face, the red eyes flickered once, and it sank slowly away with Frank Sinatra gurgling to silence.

  I rose to my feet, watching an eruption of fat belching bubbles and stringy motor oil, experiencing the same conflicted feeling as when I believed the thing had been run over by a moving van; I’d saved my own life but lost a connection to my family. The last trace of the truck swirled away and I turned from the river, seeing something shiny lying nearby. I picked up a small ice cream cone the size of a Dixie cup; it was hewn from silver, its conical shape crisscrossed with a waffle pattern. It must have been the object hanging at the creature’s neck from which it lapped up the disgusting soft serve. Looking closer, I saw how the creature had lost it—a broken chain hung from a loop—and an engraving on the inside. After two years of high school Spanish at Casimir Fepinsky Preparatory (known as Fep Prep) I was able to read, “Soy belleza y belleza es yo. I am beauty and . . .”

  “Beauty is me,” a voice whispered.

  I jumped back, shocked at the creature nearby, its eyes on the cone in my hand. The ghostly thing moved lithely to the edge, peering at the oil slick on the water’s surface. I noticed something different about its face—the shape of its forehead, a smaller nose—and that its sexless model body was bone dry. It was like seeing tiny discrepancies in one-third of identical triplets, and I realized that the creature from my house, the thing at the bottom of the river, and the one standing several feet away were three distinct but eerily similar ice cream creatures. A red line appeared beneath its eye as a bloody tear cut across its snowy cheek. “You killed Beauty,” it whispered.

  “I didn’t . . .”

  “You killed my Beauty!” it shrieked, and I gagged a little, looking at gray stumps where teeth had been and a tongue as slickly black as the truck. The thing was shaking so violently that the silver ice cream cone at its neck danced across its chest. I looked at another truck parked at the bottom of the bridge—I hadn’t heard it approach—and realized that they’d chased me tag-team style throughout the past month, one picking up where another left off. After all, a caravan of speeding black trucks would draw the attention of even the most indifferent Chicago cop.

  I also realized that whatever they’d been to one another—siblings, friends, something else—they’d loved one another.

  When I looked back, the thing’s eyes were glued to mine—I’d already begun to think of it as Teardrop—and what I saw in them was different from its dead partners, who had faced me with the detachment of hunters. On the contrary, Teardrop trembled with malice and revenge. I didn’t have time to lift a hand before it deftly sprinted the short length between us and punched me in the face like Mike Tyson at his baddest, sending me onto my butt, scrabbling not to fall through the girders. I got to my feet quickly and carefully, spitting blood and pain, knowing it was too strong and fast for a thing that belonged on a Fashion Week runway; it had to be fueled by insanity, chemicals, or both. Its drowned partner slurped soft serve before trying to run me down, and I wondered only briefly what was in that shit before Teardrop charged me again. I couldn’t deploy ghiaccio furioso against it, but the flame leaped nonetheless, and I put it into my left hook. Teardrop caught my fist and squeezed, and it felt like bones being crushed. I swayed, enervated and limp as cold fury jumped to my chest, needled into my brain, and I saw my own worst fear.

  It was my parents and Lou alone in an empty room, throats cut and eyes wide open staring at the end of the world.

  Reality and fear melded into one dark thing and I had no ability to convince myself the image was anything but true. They were dead. The creatures had murdered them, and I was suddenly vibrating with a hellish desire to kill Teardrop because I owed it to my family—and because I was wired to kill things just like it. My left hook failed but I still had my right, and I connected to its face with what felt like a thousand deadly volts as it went into the air and skidded onto its back. I was determined to crush its bleached face like a rotten egg, and I brought my heel down against its cheekbone, hearing it splinter and crack, filling me with morbid pleasure. I lifted my foot, ready to do it again, when that inner electricity buzzed, faded, and I thought, What am I doing?

  An answer came just as quickly—I’m about to commit murder.

  The need for self-preservation came flooding back, washing me away from the limp form at my feet as I sprinted to the Lincoln and gunned the engine. A single thought pushed through the surface of my roiling mind—how the creepiest things lurk beneath a veneer of sweetness, like leering clowns and possessed baby dolls.

  “Like ice cream creatures,” I whispered, racing toward the safest place I knew.

  2

  CHICAGO PASSED BY IN A WHISTLING SMEAR of shapes and colors as I sped through the streets. Images leaped from the jumble—a giant little girl with an umbrella and rain boots on the Morton Salt warehouse on Elston Avenue; an old man’s lonely face as he stood on the corner of State and Randolph; the flag of Chicago with its red stars and bands of blue, snapping above the Damen Avenue firehouse—and then disappeared as I left them in my dust. Gripping the wheel with both hands, I thought obsessively about the electricity that had taken over my brain, body, and—deeper—the edges of my soul. It wasn’t so much that I’d decided to kill Teardrop but that I needed to kill it, hungered to kill it, couldn’t not kill it, and now couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  An angry horn screamed as I veered into its lane.

  Escape demands concentration, and I shook my head, ridding my mi
nd of the creature’s bloodred eyes.

  I changed directions and doubled back in case another phantom truck appeared, and raced south on Lake Shore Drive. Venerable apartment buildings on one side of the drive and the gray lake on the other were momentary streaks, the park a green flash, Buckingham Fountain a burbling blink of the eye. I exited at Roosevelt Road at the last minute, cutting lanes and pissing off drivers, and sped past college campuses, belching factories, and blocks of storefront businesses with Italian names. Finally, I crunched past the limestone tower guarding the entrance to Mount Carmel Catholic Cemetery. It’s a short drive to the Rispoli family mausoleum—right at Al Capone’s grave, past the Genna brothers’ tombstones, left at Frank Nitti’s monument—and there was the small, moss-covered building. A molasses barrel carved from marble perched on its roof, our name was etched above the door, and a small stand of poplar trees (planted by Great-Grandma Ottorina after Great-Grandpa Nunzio’s death) grew behind it, leafy enough to conceal the Lincoln. I cut the engine and went to the trunk. Ever since I can remember, my dad has kept a blanket, first-aid kit, flashlight, and bottled water in the car, just in case. I’ve kept up the practice since my life has become an unending series of just in cases.

  Stretching to grab water, my fingers felt the edges of a book.

  It was this one, the one I’m writing in now, my Fep Prep journal.

  It had been there, gathering dust in the trunk, since school let out for the summer.

  As I stood reading, the sun cast its last pink rays of the day over fields of slumbering dead. I could not believe the naïve, innocent girl who wrote those words was me; for a person so young, death as a possibility had occurred too often. My family’s duplicity and the violent consequences of their decisions had worn away parts of the old me, and again I asked myself a persistent question, Who am I becoming? I shot at the first creature through the convertible top without the slightest hesitation. It was an act of self-preservation, as was helping the second one drown instead of being crushed by its truck. But nearly murdering Teardrop was not about survival; on the contrary, it was guided by an undeniable urge to kill.

  It was clear now that whether or not I’d gone through with it, I’d failed my family terribly. A basic Outfit rule (which I obviously hadn’t learned) is that sometimes an enemy can be much more valuable alive than dead. I badly needed a creature to lead me to the Mister Kreamy Kone headquarters, which would’ve been impossible if it had a crushed skull. On the other hand, running away and leaving it lying there was almost as bad. I was too beat up to consider it further. I sighed, lifted the briefcase, and moved carefully to the mausoleum entrance. There were no graveside mourners nearby, so I pulled a false stone from the wall and removed a cobwebbed skeleton key. The door unlocked easily. I ducked inside and locked it behind me.

  A shaft of twilight streamed through a stained-glass window, while dust motes danced toward four caskets holding my great-grandparents and grandparents. It may not have filled me with inner strength or cosmic peace, but it calmed me down a bit, being with other Rispolis. I’d taken cover in the mausoleum for the simple reason that I couldn’t risk being followed to my hideout at the Bird Cage Club, where Doug Stuffins, my loyal friend, and Harry, my somewhat loyal dog, lived as well. So far, I’d managed to avoid being tailed to the forgotten Loop high-rise, the Currency Exchange Building, where an old speakeasy occupied the penthouse. But that was when I thought only a single truck was pursuing me. Now I knew there were more and that they’d doubled their efforts to trap me.

  The mausoleum was cold and damp, and I spread out the blankets, treated the wounds on my neck and face with the first-aid kit, flicked on the flashlight, and opened the briefcase. I set aside the stack of cash that was thirty-two thousand dollars lighter than its original ninety-six (bills, bribes), AmEx Black Card (unused; scared I’ll be tracked), and Sig Sauer .45 (warm from recent use) and lifted the notebook.

  Its final chapter, “Volta,” is the source of my frustration.

  I believe it contains what I want and need more than anything else—the secret to “ultimate power,” a mysterious force that could be the solution to finding my family. The notebook was assembled and written by my great-grandfather Nunzio, and added to by my grandpa Enzo and dad, as an instruction manual for each generation of Rispolis to navigate and operate within the Outfit. It’s educational, yes, but as much as anything the notebook was created to protect ourselves from the violent, double-crossing organization that we serve as counselor-at-large. I don’t know what “ultimate power” is, but of all the Outfit secrets revealed by the notebook, it’s the one that seems to have been purposely obscured and hidden. The effort put into concealing that secret in particular by my great-grandfather Nunzio convinced me not only of its extreme value, but that it could be used as some sort of deadly weapon, as well. I’m aware that putting blind trust into such an unknown quantity is desperate, even foolhardy, but in this life of despair, I had to pin my hope on something.

  The problem is, the entire chapter of “Volta” is indecipherable and incomprehensible, a jumble of senseless sentences. The term volta (which means “vault”), the brass key taped to the back cover of the notebook (with the mysterious inscription U.N.B. 001), and my trustworthy gut led me to conclude that ultimate power is buried within its pages—but I simply can’t understand the words. Throughout the summer, I’ve sat late into the night with an Italian-English dictionary trying to comprehend the carefully hand-printed paragraphs, the phrases inscribed so closely together that the whole thing seems like a ten-page-long sentence. For example, one passage is so tightly written it looks like this:

  ciavissijutusitum’avissidittunniestie’siccomuancoraèn’amicuviracifarivagnariupizzupicciotto.

  Smaller verbs reveal themselves, as well as some blunt nouns, but the majority of it doesn’t translate—it’s mostly written in some other language than Italian, flowing together like a rushing river of letters. Also, maddeningly, nothing is capitalized. I can discern where a sentence ends based on punctuation, but have no idea where individual words begin. It was during one of these hair-pulling sessions that Doug looked over my shoulder at the notebook, massaged his chubby chin, and said, “Hmm. I wonder . . .”

  “You wonder what?” I said.

  “Remember the movie we watched, the noir flick from the 1950s set in New Orleans? Blood on the Bayou, with Richard Widmark and Ida Lupino.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So, he spoke French, but when he tracked the murderer into the swamp, he barely understood a word anyone said. Even though it was still sort of French. That’s why he needed her to go with him.”

  “She spoke Cajun, right?”

  Doug nodded and flipped open his laptop. “Cajun is a dialect, like Sicilian,” he said, tapping the keys like a concert pianist.

  “Sicily . . . where my family is from.”

  Doug looked at the screen and said, “It says here that there are a lot of different Sicilian dialects.”

  “How many?”

  “So many that most are understood only by people in the remote villages where they’re used.” Doug read aloud how Sicily’s century-upon-century history of being conquered by one punishing invader after another taught its native people the value of speaking and writing a language that their occupiers couldn’t understand. The problem was that Sicilians themselves sometimes couldn’t understand other Sicilians—the dialect of one region differed from another to begin with, plus generous helpings of old Roman, Greek, Arabic, Spanish, and French, and pretty soon it was impossible to comprehend what someone was chattering about only a few miles away. The unification of Italy established a common language, which only encouraged always-suspicious Sicilians to determinedly preserve and practice their dialects. Unification or not, Italy was just one more occupying country. Sicily was forever.

  “What’s the name of the village your family came from?”

  “Buondiavolo,” I said. “All I know is that it’s as far south on the isla
nd as you can go before falling into the Mediterranean.”

  Doug’s fingers flew over the keyboard. A moment later he stared at the screen and said, “Um . . . was.”

  “Was what?”

  “Was as far south on the island as you can go.” He looked up and said, “It did fall into the Mediterranean.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said, staring at the screen, reading how little Buondiavolo sat at the base of simmering Monte d’Peccato for a thousand years, looking nervously over its shoulder until the volcano finally erupted with fury in 1956. Billowing clouds of smoke and ash suffocated the village, and then a merciless lava flow swept it up and dumped it into the sea.

  “Holy shit” was all I could think to say.

  Doug nodded in agreement, sighed, and said, “If that chapter is written in—what would you call it . . . Buondiavolese?—well, good luck finding anyone to translate it.”

  He was sadly correct in two ways. It wasn’t just that the entire population of Buondiavolo had been wiped out decades ago, but that if someone actually understood the dialect, I couldn’t ask for help without revealing the existence of the notebook. Whoever wrote the chapter—my great-grandpa or grandpa—intended for ultimate power to be discovered only by someone who understood Buondiavolese. So far all I’d discovered was that the language, or at least anyone who spoke it, was long dead.