PART 3: THE SOUTH SIDE AUDIT
The emergency red lights kicked on inside the SUV, casting a bloody glow over everything.
The silver-haired doctor was unconscious against the partition.
Landon was bleeding from a cut near his temple, but his gun was already in his hand.
"Mave," he hissed, grabbing my collar.
"Get under the seat."
The glass of the rear windshield exploded inward.
A man in a tactical mask reached through, his hand holding an automatic rifle.
Landon fired three times through the roof liner.
The body above us slid down the side of the car with a heavy thud.
"They're not trying to capture us," Landon said, wiping the blood from his eye.
"They're clearing the board."
I scrambled toward June, checking her neck for a pulse.
It was faint.
Too faint.
"She needs a hospital, Landon!" I yelled over the sound of gunfire outside.
"There is no hospital if we don't move!" he shouted back.
He kicked the jammed side door with his heavy boot until the lock gave way.
The freezing Chicago wind hit us like a wall of knives.
We were on the lower level of the I-90 expressway, surrounded by concrete pillars and abandoned construction barriers.
Two more SUVs were parked fifty yards away, their headlights blinding.
A man walked out from between the vehicles, holding an umbrella against the sleet.
It was Hal.
My manager from the diner.
He wasn't wearing his grease-stained apron anymore. He wore a cashmere overcoat.
"Landon!" Hal called out, his voice echoing off the underpass.
"You should have let the girl die in the room."
"It would have been cleaner for everyone."
Landon stood in front of me, his gun leveled at his former partner.
"You sold out my family, Hal," Landon said.
"Your family was costing me ten million a quarter, Kee," Hal laughed.
"The Varga boys offer better margins."
"Now, tell the fat girl to hand over the SD card, and maybe I’ll let you keep the house in Lake Forest."
I stepped out from behind Landon.
My uniform was torn. My hair was wet with sleet.
But for the first time in my life, I wasn't thinking about my weight or my bank account.
I was looking at the small digital voice recorder I had pulled from June's designer coat while Landon was arguing with her.
It had been recording the entire conversation inside the SUV.
"Hal," I called out, my voice surprisingly loud in the concrete canyon.
"You're right about one thing."
"I am just a waitress from the South Side."
"But my father didn't teach me how to count money."
"He taught me how to wire old radios."
I pressed the button on the side of June's phone, which was still connected to the SUV's emergency satellite transmitter.
The audio of Landon admitting to the pharmaceutical fraud and Hal admitting to the Varga payout began to broadcast over the local emergency band.
Every police scanner in a five-mile radius went static before our voices cut through.
Hal’s smile vanished.
"What did you do?" he roared.
"I just closed the register, Hal," I said, dropping the silver micro-SD card into a gap in the storm drain beneath my feet.
The tiny piece of plastic disappeared into the black water below the highway.
"The files are gone."
"But the recording is live."
From three blocks away, the high-pitched wail of city sirens began to rise through the blizzard.
Dozens of them.
Landon looked at me, a strange, dark admiration flashing across his sharp face.
"You just ruined us both, Mave," he said quietly.
"No," I said, leaning against the side of the wrecked SUV as the flashing blue lights began to paint the concrete walls.
"I just settled the debt."
Hal turned to run toward his car, but the first police cruiser slammed into his bumper at sixty miles an hour.
The world went red and blue.
Landon dropped his gun into the snow, his hands rising slowly as the SWAT officers flooded the underpass.
I knelt back down next to June, wrapping my stained cardigan around her shoulders as the paramedics finally arrived.
The South Side was cold.
May you like
The diner was probably gone.
But as they lifted me into the ambulance, I knew nobody was going to call me "sweetheart" ever again.
