Bad Luck Girl (11 page)

A streetlight turned red, and Jack stopped.

“Do you want to get in, Mr. LeRoux?” he asked.

“Yeah,” breathed Papa. I noticed his knuckles had turned white where he hung on to the door. “I think I’d better.”

It took him long enough to climb into the sedan’s backseat that the traffic behind us was starting to honk. Jack ignored them until Papa tapped the seat to say he was ready, and then Jack drove on at the same stately pace.

“Where do we go now?” asked Mama. “The train left hours ago.”

“And the station’s watched,” added Papa. He was looking at his palms. They were blistered. My own hands tightened up in sympathy.

“This is Chicago.” Jack shrugged. “We can get a hotel someplace. You can protect us, can’t you, Mr. LeRoux? Callie said you put a protection on the Imperial, back in Kansas.”

“It’s not that easy. I can set a protection around a place, yes, but it’s got to be a home, not just a hotel.”

“What? Why?”

“Because otherwise it won’t work, that’s why!” Papa shouted, and I jumped. “This blasted and bedamned world of yours! It’s got boundaries, it’s got
time
. It plays Cain with what magic can do! It—”

“Daniel!” said Mama coldly and Papa stopped. I felt him trying to wrestle his temper back into place. “We’re going to need
somewhere
to stay while we work out what to do next,” Mama went on. “Have we got any
useful
ideas?”

“Jack?” I said softly. I knew what had to happen. I also knew how bad Jack was trying to come up with a different answer. I was having a hard time believing any place could be safe again. We had the courts at war on the other side of the gates, and the Halfers (the Undone, whoever they were) after us on this side. But we had to at least try to get out of sight. “Jack, we’re in a stolen car and you’ve only got”—I tapped the gauge—“half a tank of gas, and no real money. And those guys, the Halfers, they saw this car. We try to get out of the city like this, they’ll be after us in a heartbeat.”

Jack stopped at another streetlight. He clenched the steering wheel. I watched his face. He was struggling with something at least as tough as Papa’s sudden burst of temper or my fear of being caught again. When the light changed, he
eased us forward. His eyes flickered to the street signs, to the street in front of us, and back again. Not once did he look over at me. “All right. I guess I’m gonna have to take you home.”

Chicago’s a pretty flat place. I don’t quite know why it seemed like we were going down as we drove, and down deep at that. At first, we made our way between skyscrapers and stores with signs like Walgreens, O’Malley’s Gentleman’s Tailoring, and Paddy’s Saloon. White men and women in stout but stylish clothes walked the streets. Slowly, the buildings got lower and older and crowded closer together. The signs changed to things like Polanski’s Quality Butchers, Petrovski’s Fresh Fish, and Gutman’s Pawnbrokers. The women weren’t so stylish here. They wore dark skirts with their hair tied up in colored scarfs. Another few blocks and I couldn’t read the signs at all because they were written in swoopy, squared-off script. The men wore black coats and black hats with round crowns here, and most of the women were in black dresses and had dark wigs on their heads. There weren’t any street signs that I could see. But Jack, as usual, knew where he was going.

He turned up a narrow side street that was more mud than cobblestone. Raggedy kids in short pants who had been playing stickball scrambled out of the way, and then ganged up behind to chase after us and cheer, because we were in what was easily the fanciest car on that block. The buildings here were mostly wood: squared-off, three-story clapboard
places with peaked roofs, dark windows, and faded curtains. They were crowded so close together you could have sat in your kitchen and still snatched a doughnut off the dining room table in the house next door. Smokestacks made a distant, forbidding fence for one side of the neighborhood. There was a smell too, and it was everywhere. I’d never been in a barnyard or outhouse that smelled as bad as that smudged-over, crowded-up, worn-down street.

The roadster splashed through a long set of potholes as Jack drove right up to the street’s dead end. Beyond it was the kind of muddy, open space I’d hesitate to call a field. Heaps of ashes and clinker had been dumped there, making a set of gray and black dunes that stretched to the river. Crows and seagulls traded insults across the ash heaps. More raggedy kids climbed over the piles, calling to each other in raucous games of king of the hill. Jack parked, and I climbed out of the car, stunned. I’d known he came up poor, but I never imagined he came from someplace that made my dust-bowl home seem rich.

Jack wasn’t looking at me. He was walking over to the last of the narrow buildings on the right-hand side of the street. The porch steps creaked as he climbed up to the front door. The screen door squeaked even louder when he pulled it open, and we all followed Jack inside.

The outside stench was replaced by smells of old fish and cabbage. A narrow staircase ran up along the left-hand wall. A dark and dingy hallway ran along the right. As we crowded
inside, its one door opened so a hatchet-faced woman in a sack of a dress could peer out at us.

“Well, Jacob Hollander.” Her words were thick and hard. “You’ve come home, have you? And brought some friends.”

“Looks that way, Mrs. Burnstein,” said Jack. He didn’t look back at her either, just started climbing the stairs and we all followed. Papa touched his hat to the woman. She slammed the door shut.

Jack stopped at the second floor. There was another dark door, with a worn spot on the varnish that made the silhouette for the number seven. A radio on the other side blared hot jazz. There was a thing hanging on the threshold that looked like two little tubes tied together with blue thread. Jack looked at it and a muscle in his cheek jumped. He touched it, and my magic told me something sparked way down inside him. Then Jack shouldered the door open.

The room on the other side was a match for the hallway: narrow, dim, and dingy. Somebody’d tried to make it respectable once. There were lace curtains on the windows, but they were as worn as the carpet on the floor. There was a sort of sitting room with a sagging sofa and a pair of threadbare chairs drawn up to the radiator like it was a fireplace. A dusty upright piano stood in one corner. The blasting radio sat on top of it. A Murphy bed had been unfolded from the wall and it was covered with a mess of tangled sheets and newspapers. There was a tiny, dirty kitchen with a sink and a
cookstove. A table and six mismatched chairs created the dining room. Two of those chairs were occupied by hard-eyed men who twisted around as Jack led us inside. One man jumped to his feet, his hand digging into the pocket of his corduroy jacket. Jack froze in place, and the man stared, and then he smiled.

“Well, well. Hello there, Jacob.” The man was tall like Jack was, with Jack’s kind of popped-out blue eyes and curly brown hair. But where Jack was skinny, this man was filled out thick with muscle and fat. He brought his empty hand out of his pocket and I saw how the knuckles were a mess of scars. He used that scarred hand to smack the other man on the arm and point at us. “Look, Simon! Jacob’s home.”

“Well, well. Who’d’ve thought,” the second man said, without bothering to take the cigarette out of his wide mouth. He wore a blue work shirt and dungarees. The bridge of his nose had been mashed flat against his broad face and all in all, he looked like the world’s biggest, whitest frog. His hair was starting to thin on top, and he had at least a day’s worth of dark stubble on his soft, round chin. He had the Hollander blue eyes too, but his lids seemed to be half closed, making him look like he was sneaking a permanent peek out at the world.

“Hello, Ben,” said Jack carefully to the thick-muscled man with the scarred hands. “Hello, Simon.” The frog-faced man grinned at him, squinting his eyes down even farther. “Where’s Ma?”

Ben’s jacket rumpled as he shrugged his broad shoulders. “Dead.” The word dropped cold and hard from him. He cracked his scarred knuckles as if for emphasis. “Pop too.”

Jack froze like he’d been cornered, except for his Adam’s apple, which kept bobbing up and down.

“When?” he croaked finally.

“Last year.” Simon puffed hard on his cigarette. It wobbled between his lips and sent a shower of ash sprinkling down on the tabletop. “Doc said it was the diphtheria.”

I moved closer beside Jack. Nothing could have stopped me. Mama and Papa closed up behind us, not saying anything, just being a wall at our backs. I wanted to say sorry to Jack. Something. Jack was just finding out his parents were dead and he shouldn’t have to face it with nothing but silence. But I didn’t want to say anything soft in front of these two.

“So.” Ben dropped himself back down in his chair, one leg kicked out in front of him and his blunt, hard fingers brushing the battered tabletop. “What’re you doing back here? And what’s all this?” His popped-out eyes looked us over as sharp as his brother’s half-closed eyes had.

“Friends of mine,” answered Jack stonily. “We need a place to stay.”

Simon finally took the cigarette out of his wide frog mouth. He fished a battered pack out of his shirt pocket with the other hand, shook a fresh cigarette out of it, lit the new one off the stub of the old one, and slotted that fresh cigarette
into place between his lips. There was an old saucer on the table that did double duty as an ashtray, and he ground the other cigarette butt out thoroughly. It was only when he finished with that important business that he peeked up at us again. “Got any money?” he asked.

Ben cuffed Simon’s arm again. “Now, Sy, is that any way to talk to your brother?”

“Brother. Right,” wheezed Simon. His half-moon eyes narrowed down to slits. “He’s such a brother he don’t even bother to write his poor old mother to say where he’s got to. He runs out on his family, until he needs a place to stay.” He hawked and spat on the floor. Mama winced. “So, like I said, you got any money?”

Ben rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “See what I gotta put up with? Better answer him, Jacob.”

Jack’s eyes shifted sideways to me and Papa. I saw the anger and the shame, and I understood like I never had before why he’d run away. I’d thought it was the bootlegging, and how his sister died. But if these two were his brothers, what could his parents have been like?

Papa stepped up. He fixed his gaze on Ben and Simon and the fairy light behind his eyes flashed. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills in a gold money clip. He peeled off a fifty and laid it down on the scarred and greasy table.

“Will that be enough, gentlemen?”

By then I’d seen a lot of nasty things, but nothing quite as nasty as the way Simon looked my father slowly up and
slowly down again. It was only when he nodded that Ben’s hairy, scarred hand closed over that fairy fifty-dollar bill and dragged it across the table to his pocket.

“You can stay in the back room.” Ben jerked his chin toward a door at the rear of the flat. “No one is in residence there at this time.”

“Thank you,” said Papa evenly. “I’m sure that will be just fine.”

The back room wasn’t any better than the front. Its one bed had a rusty iron frame, a torn quilt, and a mattress that looked like it had been starved for stuffing since birth. The dresser had a broken leg. A crack ran straight across the middle of its speckled mirror and the bottom drawer was missing. There was an old, stained pot in the corner and a smell I really, truly did not want to think about.

But none of that was as bad as seeing the way Jack’s face twisted up as he sat on the edge of that rusted bed. He pressed his elbows against his knees, and his face into his hands. I sat down next to him and wrapped my arm around his shoulders. Jack shuddered, and he shuddered again. He wasn’t crying. He didn’t dare, I was sure of it. If he started, those two mooks out front who happened to be his brothers would hear. A sudden picture flashed in front of my eyes, of Jack sitting in this room, shuddering just like this, just after his sister died, just before he decided to hit the road. I stared up at my parents. They stood shoulder to shoulder, their fingers twined together, and in Mama’s blue human eyes and
Papa’s bright fairy eyes I saw the same sympathy, the same wish to make things better. I saw they understood what Jack meant to me and I saw they were glad for it.

I bit my lip hard, because if I didn’t, I would have bust out crying myself.

Eventually, Jack stopped shuddering. Even though his eyes had stayed dry, he wiped his face hard against his sleeves. I pulled away and kept my mouth shut. As hard as that was, the grateful glance he gave me made it worth it. He knew I understood, and I knew he was thanking me, and we needed nothing else right then.

“So.” Jack took one more deep breath and squared his shoulders toward Papa. “We’re home. Now how’re we gonna get ourselves out of here?”

Papa pushed back the tattered curtain and eyed the clinker piles, the river, and the towering smokestacks like he was sizing them up for a fight. But when he faced us again, his manner was bright and brisk.

“First things first. I’m sure you are all as hungry as I am.” He pulled out his money clip again. “Jack, if you’ll oblige us by finding a delicatessen or diner and getting us something? You need to pay before full dark.”

“Sure thing.” Jack slid a bill in his pocket. Could he feel Papa was holding something back? I could, and I didn’t like it. “I just need to go around the corner, and you don’t need to worry … I mean …” He fumbled and nodded toward the door.

“We’ll be fine,” Mama said firmly, but I saw the “I hope” look on her face. Jack was in too much of a hurry to notice. He slammed out our door, and then the apartment’s front door. The sound of his running footsteps vibrated through the walls as he barreled down the stairs.

“What was that about?” I asked Papa. “Why’d you want him out of the way?”

“That was about needing to set the protection for us.” The light in Papa’s eyes sparked. “Jack does not need to see how that involves his brothers. Callie, will you please come with me?”

Mama frowned at him. “Daniel, are you sure?”