Immortal Read Online Free Page B

somewhat trained eye, to be genuine sable. Nobody cared anymore who they were dancing with, which undoubtedly would have had the idiot Puritans who authored the alcohol ban in the first place pitching fits, had any of them been there.
    “What kind of friends?” I pressed Looie. “You’re not selling out, are you?” Looie had been under pressure to join one of the Chicago families, and I was one of the few people who knew about it.
    “I may be, my friend,” he said. “I am tired. This business is for the young.”
    “Business is great and this is the best place in town. Everybody knows it. Why mess that up?”
    He smiled. “It will be no less good with another man behind the bar.”
    I shook my head. “It’s not the man at the bar, it’s the man at the door, and you hire the man at the door.” I was speaking metaphorically. The doorman was another one of Looie’s nephews. He was somewhat slow—not apparently fluent in either Italian or English—but he did comprehend each night’s password. My point was, Looie’s nephew let everybody who knew the password through. Under new ownership, that could change. Most of the other speakeasies in town were stratified according to race, class, and musical preference. Franchised, in today’s lingo.
    “We will see,” he said simply. Then, hailed at the other end of the bar, he toddled off.
    I checked on Irma again, but with the surging crowd it was difficult to spot much more than her raised hands. Fairly soon I was going to have to join her, but I wasn’t nearly drunk enough yet to try dancing. I downed my scotch. Still not drunk enough.
    That was when I saw her.
    The surprising red hair is always the first thing I notice. Even in the poor lighting of Looie’s place it stood out quite clearly, almost glowing. I squinted. She turned. I met those magnificent eyes. It was definitely her.
    “Hey!” I called out uselessly. Nobody could hear me, and if they did, hey was pretty non-descriptive anyway.
    I ran to the dance floor and started to push my way through, positioning myself between the red-haired woman (she was at the far end of the floor, near the band) and the exit. In the past, every single time I spotted her, she was either too far away to reach or somehow managed to slip away before I could get to her. I wasn’t going to let that happen this time.
    Then fate intervened, as it always seemed to. Just as I started forcing my way through the dance floor crowd, the front door—which was made of solid iron—blew open with a loud BANG that startled everybody and knocked Looie’s corpulent nephew backward several feet. The band came to a discordant stop, and as one, we turned to see what had just happened.
    From where I stood, I could see right up the short flight of wooden stairs and outside. A car blocked the entrance. It had been fitted with a wooden beam, a rudimentary battering ram. Someone had crashed their car specifically to take out the door.
    Keep in mind this was prefire code and an illegal establishment to boot. The front door was the only public exit.
    I had a very bad feeling about this.
    The room remained silent, all except for Looie’s nephew, who had been knocked down the stairs and was groaning unpleasantly. I think we all knew what was coming next.
    The first Molotov cocktail spun into the room, shattered on the wooden railing, and started spreading fire down the stairs. The second made it all the way to the edge of the cement floor and caught on the sawdust. The third reached the wall near the bar about two feet from where I’d been standing a minute earlier. It caught as well, as it should have. Except for the cement floor, the entire building was made of wood.
    I had landed in the middle of a Chicago-style hostile takeover and asset liquidation.
    As you can imagine, I’ve been in quite a few tight situations in my long life. One of the first things I learned was if there’s going to be a mob panic, don’t be standing between that mob and