Read Online Set the Night on Fire by Libby Fischer Hellmann - Free Book Online Page B

half a dozen book covers. She was an adult. A professional. She made important financial decisions. Whatever demons were plaguing her, she wouldn’t let them win. Aunt Valerie would never allow herself to feel intimidated. She would laugh in the face of danger. Lila mustered her courage. Whatever was out there, she would deal with it.
    She spun around. No one was there. No pedestrians on this side of the street. No one entering or exiting the stores, no one getting in or out of a car. No one across the street, either.
    She’d passed an alley a few yards back. If someone was tailing her, they might be lurking there. She trotted back to the alley and peered in. A few blue dumpsters. The musty smell of rotting garbage. Cracked concrete. Garage doors, all of them closed. The sound of the receding motorcycle. Otherwise nothing. Except the snow. It had started in earnest, big flakes whispering down, coating everything with white.

 

TEN
     
     
    T he Cherokee Lounge was a place that catered to people who lived below the radar—people who didn’t want others to know who they were or where they were going. Maybe they didn’t know themselves. Tucked away in the suburb of Schiller Park, it was a brooding, dark bar with blue and red neon signs on the windows, one of them buzzing as if it might take off from O’Hare, only a few miles away.
    Dar nursed a beer. This was the second night he’d come in, but nothing was different from the first. The same people at the bar, the same haze of cigarette smoke, the same roar of airplanes shuddering the walls and quivering the glasses. He could feel the apathy in the air.
    He’d rented a room in a nearby boarding house. Told the owner he’d been laid off from the O’Hare baggage detail, and his wife kicked him out. The woman eyed him, clearly not believing a word, but rented him the room anyway. Everyone needed cash. He found another job washing dishes, this time in a cafeteria. He hoped it would buy him enough time to figure out what to do next.
    He’d spent the afternoon on the computer in the library and discovered that Casey Hilliard had perished in a house fire a few weeks ago. One of the twins, the boy they called Daniel, died in the fire with him. The girl, who wasn’t at home, had survived. The news had sent a shockwave through him, and he hurried to a pay phone to call Rain.
    He didn’t reach her. A distraught man who said he was her husband told him that she’d been killed in a freak car accident on I-94 in December. She was driving back from Illinois when her car unexpectedly swerved off the highway into a ditch, rolled over, and caught fire. The police speculated she’d fallen asleep at the wheel.
    “Were you a friend?” her husband asked.
    “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Dar replied and hung up. He’d started to shiver as if he’d stepped naked into a bathtub full of snow.
    Now, hunched over the bar in the Cherokee Lounge, he tried to make sense of the events. An analytical, scholarly mind was one of his strengths. Not like his father, an auto worker with over thirty years on the line, much of it as UAW shop steward. They’d fired his father during a particularly brutal strike, and his subsequent unemployment destroyed him. Men like Will Gantner didn’t lose their jobs. Dar, fourteen at the time, was furious. How dare Ford steal his father’s self-worth? He tried to tell his dad he could do better someplace else, but six months later his father hanged himself in their basement. Dar vowed never to depend on a corporation for anything.
    Now he slid his glass of beer around on the bar, avoiding the whitish stains embedded in the wood. He’d come back to Chicago, called Teddy, met with Rain. He wanted to visit Casey, but went to Michigan to see Philip Kerr. He came back to find someone had rolled his room. Then, a few days or weeks later, Rain died in a car crash, Casey in a fire. Logic told him the string of events was not a coincidence. The link between them