“I wouldn’t suggest checking it out, but I heard his crew is based out of this one place down South. Night Market’s what they call it.”
“Oh, no. Best friend is slamming her foot on the brakes for this one,” Tamara said. “Stacey, you cannot go there by yourself.”
“Who said I was going to?” I asked.
Tamara looked at me with that look she got on her face, the consternated one, the disapproving Auntie look.
“Okay, fine, so I was considering it,” I said, and Tamara shook her head. “You know, I’m a confident, capable woman of a certain age. You can’t just police me like I’m a child. Weren’t you just telling me this morning I needed to loosen up and own myself?”
“Seriously,” Costanza said. “You cannot go there on your own. You think this side of town is bad. I heard cops won’t even head out to Night Market.”
“Sounds like Mafia stuff to me,” Brett said.
“The Mafia?” I laughed. “Really? I thought that was, I don’t know, movie stuff.”
“No,” Costanza said. “Look, it’s Chicago. It’s got a history. There’s families here older than the country itself. Families with power. They have a certain sway over, you know. The pecking order. Unions. Politics. That sort of thing.”
“Look, I know you’re gonna go,” Tamara said. “But you have to promise me you take someone with you.”
“I’ll talk it over with the boss and see what he thinks in the morning. Best case scenario, he lets me kidnap Gabriel for an afternoon. Worst case… what are you doing tomorrow?”
“I had a self-care day planned.”
“And now you may get an adventure out of it,” I said.
“Yeah, well, hooray for me,” Tamara said.
We chatted and drank as the evening went on; I watched the clock, eyes peeled on the crowd for Eddie to return from whence he had flown. One or two guys came up to talk to me, but there was nothing there, even if one of them was extra handsome.
For whatever reason, I couldn’t get the sight of Eddie, the smell of him, the feeling of him out of my mind. His phantom in my mind was like a drug, a dancing illusion beckoning me after him…
Chapter 5
“The Night Market,” Andy was saying. One intern was holding Andy’s eyelids open, another bobbed nearby with a bottle of eye drops, a reluctant look on her face. “Don’t be afraid. Just get in there. Look, I’m going to fight you, it’s natural, just don’t scratch the lens, and we’ll all leave here with our dignity intact.”
“It would probably be simpler if you did this yourself,” the intern said.
“It would not,” Andy said. “Just quit bobbing around like a chicken and do it already! Or I’m going to fire you.”
The intern tried not to have a panic attack and then moved forward, Andy batting at her with slaps and squirming.
“What do you think, though, Andy?” I asked.
“Come on, you stupid bitch, two more drops, just drop them in the hole—there, oh my God, that’s amazing. How hard was that?” He put his palm over his right eye and sat up. “Go get me a coffee. Make sure you don’t spill it, shaky.” He turned to me, acknowledging my presence directly for once as the two assistants ran. “Sorry, you were saying something about the Night Market?”
“I heard it’s the territory of this gang called the Flames of Hell,” I said. “Can you imagine, biker gangs, protecting a neighborhood? I heard they kill dope peddlers there.”
“I have heard word,” he said. “I’m gonna level with you. This sounds a little outside of the scope of your department. And that side of town… I don’t know, I just think you need more time to focus on you. You know. Actual job.”
This was, admittedly, mostly a ruse so I could go find my Cinderfella. Still, I knew there was something here. I thought about how to pitch this.
“Okay. So let’s say it’s a transitional project to get me in the headspace,” I said. “I could look around a little—do some snooping—see if there’s anything else there, some kind of story. You know, as well as I do, that insular communities frequently have their own unexplained mysteries. Just consider this headline alone: ‘Exposing Chicago’s Biker Underground: The Weird and Wacky World of Community-based Policing.’”
“Oh my God, I would read that article in a heartbeat,” he said. “Or skim it. I don’t know, not much of a reader, if I’m being honest. No, you’re definitely onto something. I just think it might be diffusing your energy to focus on anything not exclusively weird. You get what I’m saying?”
“Right,” I said. “This does seem weird to me, though.”
“But is it that weird to the Netflix generation? The ones who grew up on Breaking Bad or Sons of Anarchy? Now, if you can find me some reason or another for why the urban legends department would be investigating Night Market, that’s an entirely different story. You could, theoretically, work on both stories at the same time.”
