Chapter 1 - The Blood on the Linoleum
The floorboards in our third-floor walk-up on 48th Street always creaked in a rhythm I had learned to memorize. Three short squeaks near the threshold, a heavy groan over the warped oak in the hallway, and the long, sharp scraping sound of Tommy’s boot heel as he dragged his right foot.
Tonight, the smell in the tiny apartment was a suffocating cocktail of stale Schlitz, damp wool, and the copper tang of my own blood that had dripped into the collar of my uniform coat while I walked seven blocks through the freezing rain.
Tommy didn't move from the vinyl couch immediately. He just lay there, a half-empty bottle resting precariously on his chest, his eyes bloodshot and heavy as they tracked me from the door to the kitchen counter. He was twenty-six, but the salt-and-pepper stubble along his jaw and the permanent sour downturn of his mouth made him look ten years older. Two years ago, when we met at a neighborhood street fair, he had seemed protective. Now, I knew the difference between protection and possession.
"You're home early, Amelia," he said, his voice flat, raspy, and laced with the dangerous edge of a man who had been drinking since noon.
"It was slow," I said, keeping my voice utterly devoid of emotion. I knew better than to sound defensive. Emotion was fuel to Tommy. If I sounded scared, he fed on it; if I sounded angry, he used it as an excuse to clear his throat and raise his fists. "The rain drove everyone home by eleven."
He sat up slowly, the springs of the couch groaning under his weight. He set the bottle down on the milk crate we used as a coffee table, his eyes locked on the swollen, purple mass that stretched from my upper lip down across my right jawline. There was no flicker of remorse in his face. No sudden realization that he had crossed a line. There was only a cold, calculating evaluation—the look a man gives a tool he accidentally scuffed while using it.
"Look at you," he muttered, shaking his head with a theatrical sigh. "Always making a scene. You probably let every bastard at the Grill see that, didn't you? Wanting 'em to think I'm some kind of monster."
"I kept my head down, Tommy."
"You better have." He stood up, towering over me in the narrow strip of linoleum that separated our stove from our sink. He wore a stained gray undershirt, his shoulders broad and thick from his years working the docks before he got fired for stealing copper wire. He took two slow steps toward me, his boots loud in the small room. "You got your tips, right?"
He extended his right palm. The skin was calloused, the knuckles reddened from where they had smashed into my mouth an hour before I started my shift.
"The guys are coming tomorrow for poker," he said, his fingers twitching in an impatient gesture. "I need a buy-in. Fifty at least. Give it here."
My hand was inside my coat pocket. My fingers were locked around the crisp, stiff paper of the three hundred-dollar bills Vincent Rossi had left on the laminate table at the Brass Grill.
Three hundred dollars. In 1982, three hundred dollars was two months of rent in a brownstone basement in Queens. It was a bus ticket to Ohio, a fresh pair of shoes, a lock on a door that only I held the key to. It was the difference between breathing and suffocating.
"I didn't make fifty tonight, Tommy," I said. My heart was hammering so violently against my ribs I was certain he could see my coat moving. "I told you, it was dead. I made four dollars. Four singles."
Tommy stopped. His eyes narrowed, the pupils reduced to tiny black pinpricks in the dim yellow light of the overhead bulb.
"Don't play with me, Amelia," he growled, taking another step forward until his chest was almost touching my shoulder. "You work six hours at the Grill on a Tuesday, you bring home twenty minimum. Where's the money?"
"I had to pay for the broken glass," I lied, the words tumbling out with a desperate, practiced smooth precision. "I spilled a pot of coffee over a customer's coat. Mr. Henderson took it out of my envelope before I left. He said if I complained, he'd fire me."
Tommy stared at me for three long, agonizing seconds. The silence in the room grew so dense I could hear the rain hammering against the fire escape outside, each drop sounding like a tiny nail being driven into wood.
Then, his left hand shot out.
He didn't punch me this time. He grabbed the lapels of my coat, twisting the damp wool in his grip, and slammed me backward against the wall. The back of my head cracked against the plaster, sending a dull, sickening throb through my skull.
"Search the pockets," he muttered, reaching with his free hand directly toward my right coat side.
Panicked, I reacted before I could stop myself. I shoved his chest with both hands, twisting my body sideways. "Get off me!"
That was all it took.
The rage flashed across his face like a spark hitting gasoline. Tommy pulled his arm back and drove his fist straight into my stomach. The air exploded out of my lungs in a wet gasp. My knees buckled instantly, and I slid down the wall onto the cold linoleum, doubled over, clutching my ribs as I tried to pull in a breath that wouldn't come.
"You don't push me in my own house!" Tommy roared, leaning over me, his hand reaching down to yank my purse off my shoulder. He unzipped it with a violent tug, dumping the contents onto the floor.
A small plastic hairbrush, a half-used tube of dime-store lip balm, two rusty keys, and four crinkled one-dollar bills scattered across the linoleum.
He kicked the purse aside, then looked down at me as I lay on my side, gasping for air, my right arm pinned beneath my torso to protect the three hundred dollars hidden in my inner coat pocket.
"Four dollars," he spat, kicking one of the singles toward my face. "You're useless. Absolutely fucking useless."
He grabbed his denim jacket from the hook by the door, yanked it on, and turned back to look at me. "I'm going to Jimmy's bar. I'm taking the four bucks for a draft. When I get back at two, you better have found some money, or we're going to have a real talk about who pays the bills around here."
The door slammed shut behind him. The deadbolt didn't even click—he never bothered to lock it when he left in a rage.
I lay on the cold floor for ten minutes, listening to the rain, waiting for the burning sensation in my lungs to fade into a dull, manageable ache. Slowly, agonizingly, I pushed myself up onto my elbows, my body trembling so hard my teeth rattled.
I reached inside my coat.
The three hundred dollars was still there, dry, crisp, and untouched.
I pulled the bills out and looked at them. In the bottom right corner of the top bill, there was a tiny, faint smudge of dark red—my blood, transferred from Vincent Rossi’s linen handkerchief when I had tucked the money away.
Your boyfriend disrupted my routine.
The words echoed in my mind, cold, precise, and completely devoid of warmth or pity. Vincent Rossi hadn't looked at me like a knight looks at a damsel in distress. He had looked at me like an engineer looks at a broken gear in a machine he depended on every Tuesday night at 11:40 PM.
I pushed myself to my feet, walked over to the small kitchen mirror, and looked at my reflection.
The right side of my face was ruined. My lip was split wide open, the skin around it black and swollen, and my jaw was already turning a deep, sickly shade of plum. I looked like a woman who was three weeks away from being found in an alleyway with her throat kicked in.
"No more," I whispered to the empty room. My voice was raspy, but for the first time in two years, it didn't tremble. "No more."
I walked to the closet, pulled out an old navy canvas duffel bag, and threw it onto the bed. I didn't have much. Three pairs of work pants, four shirts, a heavy sweater my mother had knitted before she died, and a pair of sensible winter boots. I packed it all in five minutes.
I took the three hundred dollars, folded it tightly, and slipped it inside the lining of my left boot. Then, I grabbed my coat, zipped my bag, and walked out of the apartment without looking back at the unmade bed or the four crumpled singles on the floor.
The rain outside was turning into sleet as I stepped onto 48th Street. The wind whipped through the buildings, freezing the wet wool of my coat against my skin. I had nowhere to go. My manager at the Grill, Mr. Henderson, would never let me sleep in the back room—he was too afraid of city inspectors and vagrants. I had no family left in New York, and my only friend, Sarah, lived in New Jersey with a husband who didn't like visitors.
I walked south toward Midtown.
The streets were nearly deserted, save for the occasional yellow cab splashing through slush and the shadowy figures of night-shift workers huddled in diner doorways. By 1:15 AM, the wind was cutting through my wet boots, and the pain in my ribs had transformed into a deep, sickening throb that made every step an exercise in endurance.
I found myself standing across the street from the Brass Grill.
The neon sign was turned off, the windows dark, but as I stood under the awning of the closed hardware store across the avenue, I saw a long, sleek black Lincoln Continental idling at the curb near the corner.
The exhaust rose in thick white plumes against the freezing air.
Inside the car, through the tinted, rain-streaked glass, I could see the silhouette of a man sitting in the back seat. The faint glow of a burning cigarette illuminated the side of his face—sharp, silver hair at the temples, a straight, unyielding nose, and the calm, absolute posture of Vincent Rossi.
Two men in dark coats stood on the sidewalk near the rear bumper, their collars turned up against the cold, their hands buried in their pockets. They weren't moving. They were just watching the empty street.
My heart caught in my throat.
He was still here. An hour and a half after the Grill had closed, Vincent Rossi was sitting in a running Lincoln on a deserted Manhattan corner in the middle of a sleet storm.
I hesitated for a long, terrifying moment. Everything my father had ever told me about men like Rossi rushed through my head: They aren't men, Amelia. They're sharks. They don't have hearts; they have ledgers. If a shark gives you something, it's only because he intends to eat you later.
May you like
But then I thought of Tommy. I thought of his boots coming up the stairs at two in the morning. I thought of the way my ribs felt right now, like splintered wood beneath my skin.
I stepped out from beneath the awning and walked across the wet street.
