Vicious Grace Read Online Free PDF Page B

been a time not that long ago when MapQuest printouts had been part of my routine. The GPS was better. Rain was still coming down hard, and traffic on the highway was thicker and faster than I liked. The cheerful little map glowed in the dashboard, encouraging us on, making the city around us seem like a known quantity. The skyscrapers of Chicago glittered and glowed through the storm, towers of gold and darkness. We got off at Division Street, heading east. The low brick buildings seemed to crowd the street, leaning in toward us, and gray-white rain flowed angrily in the gutters. We followed the GPS directions, and the buildings we passed grew taller, the bars more like places college kids went when they wanted to be edgy. Then banks and restaurants. A Starbucks. My head had been filled with the stories I knew about Chicago—Al Capone and Millennium Field, Buddy Guy and deep-dish pizza. I’d never been here before, and looking out at the same corporate coffee joint I’d been to in every city I’d seen, I felt like I’d driven through someplace—some real, genuine Chicago—and wound up at a convention center. I half wanted to turn back.
    And then, the city ended. Between rain, darkness, and the four intervening lanes of I-41, I couldn’t see Lake Michigan itself, but the darkness was sudden and extreme. Aubrey turned us north at the GPS’s gentle, vaguely British suggestion, and the world on our right was towering electric light, glass, and concrete and on our left, blackness. I’d never lived on the water, and the contrast made me jumpy. Or maybe I was already jumpy, and it was just something to latch on to.
    The building we wanted looked like a hotel. Pale stone rose over twenty stories above us, lights glowing in over half the windows. Black-barked trees rose up the sides, their canopy covering the street and making the bulk of the building behind them seem even larger. The GPS announced that we had arrived. From the backseat, Ex whistled low.
    “We’re sure this is the right place?” I asked.
    “I think so,” Aubrey said, squinting past a parked FedEx truck as he drove. “Anyone see an address?”
    “This thing’s half the block,” Ex said. “Let’s park and find a security guard to ask.”
    “Right,” Aubrey said. “Anyone see where we park?”
    We circled the block twice, pulling in at a locked loading dock and then back out again before a figure darted out from the sidewalk. A brown-haired man in a suit and tie waved tentatively, and Aubrey paused, rolling down the window. The blast of air smelled of rain and cold.
    “Jayné Heller?” the man asked, pronouncing it Jane.
    I raised my hand.
    “I’m Harlan. Harlan Jeffers. I work for the building management,” he said with a smile, as the rain dripped down his cheek. “Your lawyer wanted me to meet you. Sorry if I’m late.”
    “Where do we park?” Aubrey asked. Harlan pointed him to a bush-camouflaged ramp and handed us a radio passkey before stepping back and promising to meet us inside. We turned the car down the ramp and around a sharp corner. A wide steel gate slid open before us, and we went in.
    The lobby of the building belonged in an architectural magazine. Gentle archways of butter-colored marble rose and fell all along a wide central court, and a fountain of black basalt in the center had water sheeting down the stone as if spouting up in the air would be too nouveau riche. Classical music played through hidden speakers like Muzak’s grown-up, sophisticated sister. The smell of rain wasn’t completely gone, but it was lessened. I more than half expected the security guard to stop us and ask for our papers. My traveling T-shirt and jeans seemed about as appropriate as an evening gown in a mosh pit. But Harlan appeared again, his hair slicked by the rain and his smile almost painfully eager to please. I wondered how much he knew about us, or if my lawyer had just put the fear of God into him by implication. She had that