The amusement park was seasonal work, but it paid well, and it was better than walking the haberdashery floor at Marshall Field’s, which is what Francis did during the rest of the year. The stray kids who ran around the park called him Fatty, but Bacon was tall and well built, with auburn hair and very light grey eyes. The summer sun had burnished his ruddy skin and streaked his mustache gold. Come fall, he’d be wearing an ill-fitting suit and escorting light-fingered men and women back out onto State Street.

“Hey, Bacon.”

Francis turned to see another Riverview sergeant hurrying toward him. O’Connell, the lanky young man who worked at the station office. He stopped beside Francis, flapping his hand in front of his face. “Jesus, it’s hot.”

“You ran out here to tell me that?”

“Nope. Lady said her reticule got stolen, over by the incubators.”

Francis made a face. “Isn’t D’Angelo over there?”

“Nope. Hickey’s got him at the Velvet Coaster, they got a big crowd, and Hickey don’t want things to wind up. Kind of a fat old lady, she’s waiting in the station. Hickey says check the incubators first, then come talk to her.”

“All right.” Francis sighed and walked toward the Infant Incubators.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

PIN HADN’T ALWAYS lived at the amusement park—only since her mother, Gina, started working there as a fortune-teller. Pin had been born when her mother was the same age as Pin was now, her sister, Abriana, two years later. Back then they lived in a tenement in Little Hell, the Sicilian slum on Chicago’s North Side. Over the years Gina had told Pin that her father was dead; had moved back to Italy; was mining gold in South America; had run off with the woman who owned the Chinese laundry in Larrabee Street.

Until one day when Pin asked about him, Gina slapped her so hard her left ear rang for an entire day. She never brought it up again.

Little Hell was overshadowed by a huge gashouse, which belched flames and fumes that blotted out the sun. Day and night, red-neckerchiefed men shoveled tons of coal into the furnace, then doused the glowing coals with water from the river. The resulting gas was stored in huge tanks, their cylinders rising during the day, then dropping overnight as the gas was piped into the surrounding tenements for lights and heat and cooking. As a very young girl, Pin had mistaken the furnace’s deafening thunder for that of approaching trains.

The women from the Relief and Aid Society complained constantly about how their white uniforms turned black as they approached Little Hell. They never drew near to Death Corner, where the Black Hand gangs that ruled Little Hell dumped the bodies of their victims beneath a dead tree twisted as a corkscrew. Pin had stopped counting the number of murders when it reached a hundred.