DO YOU THINK SOMEONE WILL COME LOOKING FOR ME? — ONE LITTLE GIRL'S QUESTION BROKE THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN THE CITY

The rain had turned into a steady, needle-like sleet by three in the morning.

In the basement office beneath The Iron Kettle—the West Loop lounge where the Monday meeting had taken place—Brennan was sitting behind a laminate desk, counting a stack of twenty-dollar bills with a greasy thumb. A half-eaten pork chop sat on a paper plate beside a half-empty bottle of cheap bourbon.

The room smelled of stale tobacco, frying oil, and wet wool.

The door didn't burst open. There was no crash of splintering wood. The brass latch simply clicked, and Hector Voss stepped inside, shutting the door behind him with a gentle push of his heel.

Brennan froze, three twenties held mid-air between his thick, yellowed fingers. He was fifty-two, thick around the middle, with a face that looked like it had been scrubbed with wire wool and left to dry in the sun. He blinked, his small eyes darting from Voss’s face to the doorway behind him.

"Hector," Brennan said, trying for a broad, easy smile that died before it reached his eyes. "Didn't hear you come down. I thought you were upstairs getting some sleep. You look... tired, man."

Voss walked to the single wooden chair across from the desk. He didn't sit down. He rested his right hand on the back of the chair, his fingers loose, his posture relaxed.

"You have a good memory, Brennan?" Voss asked quietly.

Brennan swallowed. He set the money down on the desk, his hands moving slowly, carefully, as if he were handling unexploded artillery. "I get by. Why?"

"Twelve years ago," Voss said, "you owed twelve thousand dollars to a loan shark named Petey Guns out of Bridgeport. Petey came to your house on a Tuesday morning. You weren't there. Your wife was. She was six months pregnant with your first kid."

Brennan’s face went white. The yellow tint under his skin turned a dull, sick gray. "Hector... come on. That’s old history. That’s—"

"Petey sat on your porch for four hours with a baseball bat," Voss continued, his voice dropping into that rhythmic, monotone roll that made grown men feel like they were standing on thin ice. "He told your wife he was going to wait until you came home, and then he was going to let her watch him break both your legs. You called me from a payphone behind a gas station in Berwyn. You were crying so hard I could barely understand your name."

"I remember," Brennan whispered. His throat worked hard. "I remember, Hector. You paid Petey. You gave me three years to work it off."

"I didn't pay Petey to save your legs," Voss said softly. "I paid Petey because your wife was nineteen years old and looked like she was about to drop dead from terror on her own front steps. I don't like seeing people who didn't ask for trouble get dragged into the mud."

Voss took one step forward. He didn't raise his hand. He didn't reach into his coat. He just leaned down until his face was six inches from Brennan’s.

"So explain to me," Voss murmured, "why Cruz’s phone pinged three miles from here six minutes after I brought a seven-year-old girl into my kitchen."

Brennan didn't try to lie. A smarter man might have tried, but Brennan had known Voss long enough to understand that lying to Hector Voss was like setting fire to your own house while you were still locked inside.

"They offered fifty," Brennan choked out, his hands trembling as he gripped the edge of the desk. "Fifty grand just for a address if she showed up near your properties. They said... they said she ran off with her mother's sister, but the sister got picked up by the state police last week. They said the kid was roaming the West Loop."

"Who is 'they'?" Voss asked.

"Cruz. And... and Morales’s brother. Marcos." Brennan’s eyes were wide, wet with a sudden, greasy fear. "Hector, you don't know what’s going on down there. It’s not just a family thing. Ramon Morales is sick. He’s got six months left, maybe less. The brothers are cutting up the business now, before the old man goes into the ground. Elena... the girl... her mother left her a third of the shipping docks in South Chicago in her own name. If the kid isn't around to sign the trust transfer when she turns eight... it all goes to an independent conservator."

Voss stared at him. "They’re hunting a child for a dock deed?"

"It’s not just a dock," Brennan rasped. "It’s forty acres of deep-water access with no city oversight. It’s worth thirty million dollars clear. If Marcos gets his hands on her... she doesn't make it to her eighth birthday, Hector. You know how those people work. She signs the paper, and then she has an 'accident' in the lake."

Voss slowly straightened his back. He looked around the small, dingy office—the metal filing cabinets, the faded posters of old fights on the wall, the paper plate with the cold pork chop.

"You sold a child's life for fifty thousand dollars," Voss said softly.

"I have debts, Hector!" Brennan pleaded, his voice rising into a wet, desperate whine. "The casino in Indiana... they’re gonna take my fingers if I don't—"

Voss’s hand moved.

It was not a punch. It was a fast, vicious strike with the heel of his palm that caught Brennan directly under the chin. Brennan’s head snapped back with a loud crack, his chair tipping over as he slammed onto the concrete floor. The stack of twenty-dollar bills exploded into the air, falling around him like green snow.

Brennan lay there, groaning, clutching his jaw, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.

Voss looked down at him, his expression completely unchanged. He reached into his coat, pulled out his phone, and dialed three digits.