Chapter 9: A Rainstorm Over the Loop
The warning had scrolled across the bottom of every local news broadcast by four in the afternoon: a severe squall line, bowing westward over Lake Michigan, packing straight-line winds and torrential downpours that would lock down downtown Chicago by nightfall. Most of the junior analysts and administrative staff had cleared out by five, their coats pulled tight against the rising chill, eager to beat the sirens. By six o'clock, the high-rise felt entirely hollow. The only sound left on the floor was the low, steady hum of the HVAC system and the distant rumble of thunder rolling in off the water, shaking the reinforced glass of the exterior walls.
I stayed at my desk because the courier logs for the restructuring accounts still needed reconciling before tomorrow's board review. The black leather folder sat open beside my keyboard, its columns of numbers illuminated only by the amber glow of my task lamp.
A sharp pop echoed from the hallway ceiling, followed instantly by the heavy, rhythmic thrum of emergency generators kicking on. Across the open-plan office, the banks of overhead fluorescent fixtures flickered once, twice, and then died completely. The floor plunged into a dim, shadow-streaked twilight, save for the emergency battery strips glowing low along the baseboards and the intermittent strobe of lightning flashing against the floor-to-ceiling windows.
"The power grid in this ward always was fragile," a voice said from the doorway.
I didn't jump, though my pulse ticked upward. He was leaning against the doorframe of his corner office, his jacket discarded over the back of his chair, his shirtsleeves rolled up to expose the dark ink winding across his forearms. He held a heavy crystal tumbler with a single large sphere of ice catching the pale blue flicker of the storm outside.
"The backup generator will hold the servers," I said, not looking up from my ledger, though my fingers paused over the ten-key pad. "We'll lose the printers, but the local drives are secure."
He walked slowly across the Persian rug, his leather-soled shoes making almost no sound on the dark wood floor. He didn't go back to his office. Instead, he pulled out the visitor chair opposite my desk and sat down, resting his forearms on the edge of the mahogany. In the half-light, the sharp angles of his face looked less severe, stripped of the harsh glare of the daytime fluorescents.
"You've been here past eight every night this week," he noted, his voice quiet, pitched low enough to match the steady patter of rain driving hard against the glass. "And you skipped breakfast again this morning. I checked with the lobby cart."
I closed the black folder with a quiet snap. "My eating habits are not part of my employment contract."
"Neither is uncovering nine years of cooked books by a retiring vice president, yet here we are," he replied. He took a slow sip from his glass, his dark eyes fixed on me with an intensity that had nothing to do with the corporate audit. "Why don't you talk about yourself, Ms. Hayes? You've spent months organizing my life down to the minute, yet I know nothing about yours except that you don't scare easily."
"There isn't much to tell," I said, turning my gaze toward the window where the Chicago skyline had vanished behind a curtain of gray sheet-rain. "People who grow up in neighborhoods where the winter heat gets shut off every November tend to develop a very narrow definition of what constitutes a crisis. A man in an expensive suit laughing or threatening to break someone's jaw doesn't rank very high on the list."
He was silent for a long moment. The wind slammed a sheet of rain against the glass with the force of a handful of gravel, and the entire high-rise seemed to sway slightly on its steel anchors.
"Who shut your heat off?" he asked quietly.
"The city. Twice," I said, my voice flat, stripped of self-pity because the years had sanded the edges off it long ago. "My mother worked two shifts at a laundry plant on the West Side until her lungs gave out. After that, you learn how to read lease agreements when you're twelve years old so the landlord doesn't cheat you out of your security deposit. You learn that fear is a luxury item—something people who have savings accounts and insurance policies get to indulge in. When you're busy making sure the pipes don't freeze, you don't have room for it."
He looked down at the dark tattoos on his hands, turning his wristwatch slowly around his wrist. The amber emergency strips cast a warm, low light across his profile.
"Nine years ago," he began, his voice dropping an octave, sounding rougher than usual, "after the federal indictment against my uncle fell apart on a technicality, I sat in that exact chair you're using now. My father told me that if I ever let anyone see me smile or show a fraction of relief, the families out in Cicero would take it as an invitation to move in. He told me that power requires absolute, unbroken numbness." He looked up, meeting my eyes directly. "So I stopped laughing. I stopped feeling the ground under my feet. For nine years, every day was just a ledger of who owed what and who was trying to put a bullet in my back."
"That sounds exhausting," I whispered, the professional barrier slipping away before I could catch it.
May you like
"It is," he said softly. "Or it was, until this morning when you handed me a tax folder, told me my own people were robbing me blind, and looked at me like I was an inconvenience holding up your morning filing."
A heavy flash of lightning illuminated the entire office in a blinding white glare, followed instantly by the deafening crack of thunder directly overhead. The emergency lights flickered once more, holding steady. Neither of us looked away. The space between the desk suddenly felt very small, the vastness of the empty corporate floor shrinking down to the two of us sitting in the storm's center.
