Embers & Ash

by T. M. Goeglein

  And then a high-pitched whine was followed by the roar of eight angry cylinders.

  The chrome face of the Cadillac exploded through the front window in a cacophony of shattering glass, twisting steel, and erupting brick.

  There was a moment of collective shock, a short one, in which I mustered every ounce of strength to drag my dad to the passenger door, shove him inside, and leap in afterward. A hail of bullets rained down on the old car as Doug grinded into reverse, and we roared onto the street. The tires bit asphalt as we sped down Hoyne Avenue in a cloud of gassy smoke.

  “Plan B!” Doug screamed. “I saw the blue flash and—what’s plan C?!”

  I pushed my dad in back, onto the floor, and leaped on the backseat watching a wave of men scrambling into vehicles. “Just go!” I shrieked. “As fast as you can!”

  “This old thing’s got power!” he said, glancing into the rearview mirror, “but Jesus! They have an entire army!”

  “The guns,” my dad said.

  “This one?” Doug said, pointing at the radio.

  “No,” he said, clawing his way beside me, pushing at a decorative button sewn into the upholstery, “these.” A section of backseat slid away revealing two tommy guns. Facing me, throat clogged, he said, “Sara Jane, don’t give up until the gun is empty.” His words were smothered by bullets battering the Cadillac, punching into metal, and shattering the back window. I grabbed a gun and peeked out at a dozen scooters bearing down, each manned by a goggle-wearing assassin. Close behind, the careening garbage truck led a ComEd van followed by a packed school bus. Another barrage of ammo hit the car as the scooters split, six buzzing along each side of the Cadillac.

  “It’s too many guys!” I shouted. “They’ll rip this old car to pieces!”

  “Maybe not,” my dad said, grasping a tommy gun. “It’s armor-plated.” He closed his eye, took a deep breath, and when he opened it, said, “You take one side. I’ll take the other. All you have to do is aim and squeeze.” He leaned out the side window. “Ready?”

  I was always in a state of readiness, but not for this—seeing my dad as I’d never seen him before. He knew how to handle the gun, that was a surprise, but what shocked me even more was his calmness, as if he’d done this a thousand times. Maybe he had.

  “Sara Jane!” he said. “Now!”

  I came back to myself, squinting down the barrel, and letting off a round of bullets, understanding immediately how the guns got their nickname—Chicago typewriters—as I was deafened by a resounding tack-a-tack-a-tack-a-tack-a-tack! First one scooter collapsed, and then another and another, some with slumped bodies still attached, others flinging riders into the air.

  “Hang on!” Doug said, squealing onto North Avenue. The garbage truck barreled through the intersection behind us, hurtling toward the Cadillac’s bumper.

  “It’s going to—!” I said, as the huge vehicle rammed the back of the car so hard that it threw me to the floor. Doug swerved maniacally, trying to shake the relentless truck. When it hit us a second time, I felt the Cadillac lose its bearings like a dizzy ice skater. “One more shot like that and we’ll tip!” I cried.

  My dad was huddled next to me. “You have to take out the driver . . . my eye . . . I can’t aim well enough.”

  “What!”

  “Kill him, sweetheart,” he said.

  I pulled myself onto the backseat and peered out at the truck gathering speed, coming closer, so near that I could see the nose ring of the thug in the passenger seat holding an AK-47. I glanced from him to the rigid face of the driver. In one motion, I stuck the barrel out the window, ducked down, and squeezed. The report of bullets was followed by splintering glass and an emphatic groan, like a giant that had stumbled over its own feet. I looked out at the steel beast sliding on its side, skidding and sparking, the bloody driver hanging lifelessly from his seat belt, the passenger screaming, seeing his fate coming as they plowed into a building with crushing force.

  The ComEd van hurtled past the wreckage and I leaned out to shoot, hearing a dull click from the empty ammo magazine.

  “Dad!” I yelled, and he used both hands to throw his tommy gun at me. I snagged it and heard a short crack! from the van, felt a sharp, cutting sting, and rolled inside with pain and moisture soaking my shoulder. “I think . . . I’m shot,” I said stupidly.

  My dad pushed his thumb into the wound, making me scream. Then I saw something I thought I’d never see again—my dad smiling, though only briefly, there and gone—and he said, “It’s a graze. No bullet,” and lifted the tommy gun. “Kid, whatever your name is,” he said to Doug. “Slow down, and when I tell you, swerve into them.”

  “Yessir, Mister Rispoli!”

  “Wait . . . wait . . . now!”

  Doug cranked the wheel, slammed into the van, and it bounced away. In that instant, my dad seemed to gather every last shred of power left in his body. He kicked open the passenger door, held on to the inside of the car with one hand, stepped onto the running board, and said, “You shot my daughter,” as he sprayed the van with ammunition. There was ripping metal and splintering glass, a screech of brakes, and then everyone inside was killed for a second time when the school bus hit the van, spun it, left it for dead, and bore down on us.

  There was a guy in every seat gripping an automatic weapon that put the tommy gun to shame; armor-plated or not, there was no way the Cadillac, or we, would survive.

  My dad flopped inside, sucking air, and threw the rifle on the ground. “Empty,” was all he could manage to say. Doug’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror as everything went eerily quiet, the only sound a rolling clink of bootleg whiskey bottles.

  “Whiskey . . . whiskey!” I said, groping for the wooden crate.

  “What the hell? A farewell drink?” Doug yelped.

  “Not for us. For them,” I said, pulling out bottles, pushing them aside, and opening the box containing the cop uniforms. I yanked at a sleeve, the old wool peeling away in strips. “They’re Russian. Maybe they’d like a Molotov cocktail.”

  Doug’s eyes widened. “Chapter six . . . ‘Methods’! ‘How to Build an Incendiary Device’!” he said. “Please tell me you’ve still got the lighter?”

  “I’d never leave home without it,” I said.

  When my dad saw what I was doing, he began quickly shredding the uniform. We worked at hyperspeed, splashing whiskey over pieces of cloth and jamming the soaked strips into bottles, leaving an inch hanging out as a fuse. It took thirty seconds to make three sloshing alcohol bombs and another thirty seconds for the nose of the bus to reach our bumper; the onslaught of bullets would begin at any second. I flicked the lighter but wind rushing in the open window snuffed it, did it again, same thing. I said, “Quick, anything that will take a spark . . . anything that burns. I need a flame.”

  My dad fell to the floor, ripped open the Rispoli & Sons Fancy Pastries box, and pulled out a sheaf of blood-spattered cash. “I never knew why I kept this,” he said, “but now I do. Light it.” I flicked the lighter, a spark bit the crispy greenbacks, and then my dad was holding a ten-thousand-dollar torch to the Molotov cocktail. The fuse smoked and caught, filling the car with the stench of burning molasses. “Give it a second . . . wait . . . now, throw it!” he yelled.

  I side-armed the bottle and it skittered over the bus’s hood, rolled, and exploded in a burst of flame. The bus swerved crazily but no real damage was done, and it sped after us without pause.

  My dad said, “Kid, you ever see The Godfather?”

  “Are you kidding?” Doug called out. “I’ve seen everything! Twice!”

  “When the Turk is taking Michael Corleone to the sit-down in Brooklyn and he thinks they’re being followed? Remember what he does? Can you do it?”

  “I—I don’t know. Maybe!” Doug said.

  “Good enough. Sara Jane, switch sides with me, and get ready,” my dad sai
d as I rolled to his side of the car and grabbed a Molotov cocktail. “Both of them,” he said. “This is our last chance,” and I picked up the other one, too. He lit the first, got it smoking. “Now, kid!” my dad said, as Doug cranked the wheel, and spun the Cadillac into a stuttering U-turn.

  “Like that?” Doug said.

  “Perfect. Okay, sweetheart, one after another!” my dad said, as we sped straight for the bus, engaged in a deadly game of chicken. We roared up to the big yellow vehicle, Doug swerved, and I threw a cocktail, watching it shatter against the bus’s windshield before it could detonate. I heaved the other a split second later—a bull’s-eye that sailed through an open window. A pair of guys leaped from the rear door, but Doug couldn’t hit the brakes fast enough, nailing one of them as we passed by, crushing him beneath the Cadillac with a body-shattering thump! We skidded to a halt and looked back. The bus had stopped, too—maybe the rest of the Russians inside were scrambling to get rid of the bomb? And then the cocktail made a muted, burping nose, blowing up the bus like a firebomb from hell. It rocked on its wheels, consumed in white flames.

  “Drive, kid,” my dad said weakly, slumping onto the seat.

  “Huh? Oh,” Doug said, peeling his eyes off the conflagration from which no one emerged, and speeding away. We were turning onto Ashland Avenue when I heard a scrape-thunk and turned to see the other Russian who’d made it off the bus. He stood on the running board leering with a mouth full of gray teeth, pulled a handgun, and shot wildly into the backseat. I drove my fist into the Orthodox cross tattooed on his face, but he held on, swinging the gun, clipping me in the mouth. I tumbled backward as he yanked open the door and pushed inside. The car skidded to a stop.

  Calmly, Doug said, “Don’t touch my friend—”

  The guy turned to the radio pistol, muttered in Russian, and Doug shot him in the arm, saying, “Ever,” blasting him once more, this time in the kneecap. The guy screamed, slumped, and I kicked him in the face, into the street, as we screeched away, barreling toward the Currency Exchange Building.

  “Doug,” I gasped. “You’re not shaking. You didn’t panic.”

  His eyes flicked to mine in the rearview mirror. “You didn’t flinch,” I said, and he nodded with a tight smile. I sat back, staring at my dad, thinking of how he’d swung onto the running board and gunned down the van with ease, even grace, cold and composed. It seemed wrong to be impressed, but I was. He’d done it because he had to, but more so, for me. “Dad?” I said.

  “What, sweetheart?”

  “The last time I saw you, I . . . was so mean to you,” I said. “I wasn’t sure—I never really knew if we’d ever see each other again, and, anyway, I’m sorry.”

  He sat up, licking dry lips. “Sara Jane. It’s me . . . I owe you a lifetime of apologies.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Tired, darling,” he said, reaching out to squeeze my hand. “So tired . . .” And he lay back again.

  We made it to the Bird Cage Club, where he wrapped up in a warm blanket and collapsed on my mattress, battered and scarred but free.

  I treated my bullet graze and then slept next to him, holding his hand.

  It wasn’t until early the next morning when he woke me, groaning, that I realized he’d bled all night.

  27

  WHEN I WAS LITTLE, MY DAD WOULD SOMETIMES glance out the window of our house on Balmoral Avenue, see dark feathery clouds massing in the sky, and rush us all to Hollywood Avenue beach. He loved living by Lake Michigan, that large inland sea, and loved it best when it was raining. The hurried race to watch a storm roll in became a family ritual. By the time we arrived, the lake would be a pane of green glass engulfed by the sound of nothingness, as if the interim between the world being a dry place and a wet one required a moment of silence. There was an old park bench on the boardwalk, a front-row seat to lightning over the lake. We’d jam onto it, the four of us, and wait, smelling the rain before it arrived. And then the heavens would crack open and we’d sprint for the car, trying to get ahead of something that was faster than we were.

  It was raining lightly now, the drops feeling like the touch of soft fingertips.

  My dad and I sat side by side on the park bench. He was hunched over, wrapped in the same blanket.

  He’d woken me that morning as the sun rose, looming over the mattress like a specter. His scarred eye socket was purple against sallow flesh. “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Where?” I asked groggily.

  “I want to see the lake.”

  “Now?”

  He nodded, coughing from deep in his lungs, and said, “Yes, sweetheart. Now. It’s important.”

  “I’ll wake Doug.”

  “No,” he said, stifling another cough. “Just the two of us.”

  We took a cab to Hollywood Avenue, crossed the cold, deserted boardwalk, and sat on the bench. It was six forty-five in the morning, with a dome of fog rising over the chilly lake water. My dad seemed to have fallen asleep sitting up and I spoke his name softly.

  He lifted his head, and said, “I’m going to die in a few minutes, Sara Jane. Maybe ten minutes . . . maybe less . . .”

  My body and brain turned to ice. I didn’t laugh with incredulity or cry out in horror; I was incapable of either. Skin is the ultimate indicator of a failing body, its temperature and tone. I took his icy, gray hands in mine, watching a red line stream from his nose.

  Later, I would see only a few red spots on the mattress.

  The Russian who fired into the Cadillac had hit him, the bullet staying in his body, tearing through vital organs. All the bleeding, the damage, was on the inside.

  “I didn’t feel it,” he said. “Something Juan Kone did . . . my nervous system, brain. Pain barely registers anymore. But I’m dying, Sara Jane. The bullet was too much.”

  He was such a diminished human being—beaten, malnourished, experimented upon for too long. If there had been a remote chance of survival, we’d slept through it.

  “This is crazy. We need a doctor,” I said, mind reeling, looking around the boardwalk.

  “Wouldn’t help me now . . .”

  “But how do you know?”

  “Because I’ve murdered men, and watched them die,” he said. “I know what it looks like . . . how fast it happens.”

  I stared at him, the heaving chest, the whites of his eyes gone yellow, and knew he was correct. “I have, too,” I said. “Murdered people.”

  “I know,” he said quietly, looking away. “I never wanted that . . . all of this, for you. When you were born with blue eyes, I thought maybe, because you were a girl, ghiaccio furioso would skip you, but that was silly . . . delusional . . .”

  “Why didn’t you take us away from Chicago?” I said.

  He scared me with a bark of laughter. “I asked my father the same thing when I was about your age, when he told me about being counselor-at-large and what I possessed. He said that we were trapped by our responsibility, there was only one way out . . .”

  “Ultimate power,” I said.

  “You found it?”

  I nodded, as a chilled wave of wind blew across us.

  “It’s a trap, too—of wishful thinking. My dad, my grandfather, they clung to it, thinking that if life in the Outfit ever got too bad . . . but it was always too bad and the worst things happen too fast . . . no time to plan. I tried though, Sara Jane. I tried . . .”

  “What? What did you try? Dad?”

  I squeezed his hands and he shuddered, his breath ragged, breaking up his words. “Removing those bricks . . . turning it into money without drawing attention . . . it’s impossible. But one at a time . . . even two,” he said. “We’d been planning for so long, to make an escape, your mom and me . . . almost five years . . .”

  “Five years?” I said.

  “Never the right time. The Feds made an offer but . . . too d
angerous . . . so . . .”

  “What?”

  He glanced away, staring across the water. “Lake Michigan isn’t really a lake. It’s a sea, like the Sea of Cortez . . . bought a villa . . . going to run . . . but Juan Kone . . . ,” he said, voice fading, head sinking between his shoulders.

  “Dad! Dad, can you hear me?!” I said, shaking him harder and harder until he faced me. When he did, his eye was clear and focused, as if he were seeing me for the first time.

  “He helped you, didn’t he, Sara Jane?” he asked.

  “Who, Dad?” I whispered.

  “Buddy, at the Ferris wheel. Lou told me . . .”

  My teeth chattered with the effort not to cry, to remain as strong as he was not, and I told the truth. “Yeah, Uncle Buddy helped me. You can be proud of him.”

  “I always was. Buddy . . . Benito, my little brother,” he said, and straightened with an insistence that startled me. “Your brother, Lou. Sara Jane, your mother . . . what you did for me . . . do for them. There’s not much time left . . .”

  “But how? Greta—”

  “Give her . . . ultimate power. Give her that . . . golden trap,” he said.

  It was my only chance left—to hope that she’d be so overwhelmed by the glittering prospect of its value that she’d make a deal to release my mom and Lou without considering how she’d ever actually cash it in. Doubtless, she’d still demand that I serve as counselor. If she freed Lou from being a hostage, though, I would. “Okay, Dad. Okay.”

  “Last night . . . the Russians we killed . . . ,” he said.

  I nodded, remembering the carnage we’d left behind.

  “You’ve been forced to do terrible things, I know. But there’s still time for you, sweetheart . . . choices you can make . . . so you don’t become like me,” he said, blood bubbling at the corner of his lips. “Remember . . .”

  “Please, Dad. Let’s go back, find a doctor . . .”

  “There’s a line,” he said. “There’s always a line.”