Deep (Chicago Underground #8)(24)

Shelly had told me how he had taken care of his younger sister and brother, already knew how protective he was of them. It wasn’t only himself he’d been protecting with that steel pipe, wasn’t only his business. It was his brother and sister, saved with every dark, soul-crushing blow. It was the food they would eat and the safety in their beds.

No matter the reason, killing made him a murderer. And to some people, a monster.

No matter how I’d ended up in the situation, being sold to a man for money made me a whore. And to some people, not worth saving. Philip had never given up on me. He’d started protecting me the second he saw me, and no matter what explanations he claimed, whether it was for sex or selfish reasons, I instinctively knew he would continue protecting me in his own twisted way.





Chapter Eighteen

I KNEW I needed to contact my adoptive parents. Even if we hadn’t been close, even if I doubted they would care. So it was just a matter of finding a phone. Shelly had teased Philip about his aversion to technology, but he would put business first. If this was where he came when he needed to hide out from the cops—or worse—then he would have already had this place fully stocked.

The search took me through a tour of Philip that I wasn’t expecting.

In an otherwise empty kitchen drawer I found a glossy, corner-bent photograph of him and his sister. I had seen them in pictures before, austere half-smiles after one of her ballet performances.

This one showed them around a table, with Rose reaching over to smear something on Philip—cake maybe. Her smile lit up the picture, but Philip’s smile, a smaller version, more reserved even in the midst of revelry, was like a rare, precious jewel.

In the background I could see Colin, mouth open in the middle of some word. Probably encouraging Rose. The two younger siblings liked to team up against their older brother, but only for pretend. They worshipped him.

My heart twisted at both Philip’s happiness in the photograph and the strange reserve that had led him to stow this picture in a drawer instead of framing it on the wall. As if happiness was a weakness he couldn’t expose, even to the select few who visited this place—even to himself.

In a library I found wall-to-wall books. There were many on business, which I’d expected. The Art of War wasn’t a surprise. The many books on engineering, on physics, however, were a surprise. As were the array of tiny figures lined up on the shelves in front of books, a small army defending their country.

Not figures, I realized on touching one. Machines.

A little bird cage looked like it was made out of paper-clip wire. But when I tapped the bird that rested on the outside, its feet opened the door for the second birdlike bundle of wire perched inside. The legs of a man turned the wheels on a miniature bicycle—raised off the ground by wooden blocks so it didn’t move. A tiny lever drew an open-air metal bucket up and down the wire outline of a well.

And I knew without asking that he had made them. There were too many of them, some of them half-finished, others trying to be something else. None of them quite polished and pretty enough to be purchased from a store.

A Luddite, Shelly had called him once. Well, he might not prefer technology in the way most people did, with flashy tablets and apps, but he did enjoy technology. He enjoyed the mechanics of it, understanding how things worked. He enjoyed creating things.

So why then, did he earn his money destroying things?

He destroyed livelihoods. He destroyed lives.

He destroyed families.

God, he was destroying mine. So casually, too. My protests were just an annoyance, the flap of a sparrow’s wings against the great hurricane force of him.

Behind the well made of wire, I spied a section of books about Chicago. A biography of Frank Lloyd Wright—my second-grade class had taken a field trip to his house in Oak Park. There was a book on suspected haunted locations, with dog-eared pages and highlights for places in Chicago: an abandoned theater, a church.

As I moved to replace the books, the pages caught on something stiff and flush against the side of the shelf. Feeling around, I pulled out a thin stack of postcards.

Welcome to Chicago, the top one said in bold yellow writing.

Exactly the kind of postcard I had received. My heart twisted. I imagined him collecting these, storing them away. There was always a feeling of reluctance to them, the way more time would pass, then less, each one of them bare of any message—as if he’d rather not have sent them but couldn’t help himself. A magnet drawn north whether he liked it or not.

I found what I was looking for in the bottom drawer of an ornate desk against the window. There were passports and bundles of cash tumbled together, the way normal people might collect thumbtacks and pens for when they need them. And there were phones—all cheap and black, disposable. Burner phones. I had learned enough about the way they operated in my brief time with him and Shelly. Nothing traceable.

I picked one at random and dialed home.

At least that was how I thought of it. Home. The place where my adoptive family lived. The place I had spent most of my life. I tried not to think of how I’d always been the outsider in the spaces between rings.

“Hello?” My mother. Her voice was already strained, as if she was worried.

“Mom? It’s me.”

“Oh, thank God. We tried calling you and I couldn’t—” Her voice cut off, and I realized that they may have actually seen something on the news about gunfire at my dorm—or maybe even a hostage being taken. Maybe the police had actually worked quickly to notify them.