My bag banged against my shin. One squeeze of the trigger—to punish my father, avenge my mother, and see how it felt to have a gun kick in my hand. The law would find no fault with me for gunning down a bootlegger—if the law even came to the Westside to investigate at all—and perhaps it would let Vivian Pretzker’s ghost rest a little bit easy. I played the fantasy over in my mind a few dozen times. If she had put this gun in the hands of the man who killed Margie Fournier, the last bullet was meant for her.

The tunnel dipped down, and we came to a wall hammered together from old wood. On the far right, a metal door hung loosely. Thorne was about to knock when I drew the pistol. It was heavier than I remembered. I cracked it across his skull. He crumpled across the rails, and I left him there. It would not be the first time he awoke in a strange place.

I hopped across the tracks to the downtown side. I crawled underneath the makeshift wall, dragging my belly through the muck, and reminded myself that stains do not show on black.

A lavender subway car occupied the center track. From the far side came soft pink light and strange industrial sounds—liquid boiling and the clank of a wrench on iron. In the dim glow, I could just make out the tile: “Christopher St./Sheridan Sq.” A pristine station where the trains would never run.

Still holding the gun, I pressed my back against the subway car and crept around its nose. In the darkness of the tunnel, I saw shapes in the shadows, moving with the rhythm of breath. Surely, I thought, they were not people of smoke. Surely the flickering of the shadows was only my imagination. I put them out of mind and looked for the woman I had come to fight.

Running the length of the uptown platform were two dozen metal tanks, each slightly taller than myself, which bubbled and chirped and dribbled out endless gallons of bootleg alcohol. The stench of spoiled wheat nearly caused me to retch. A shadow flitted back and forth at the far end of the platform, roughly the size and shape of the still it was tending. A hiss of steam, a trickle of liquor, a long gulp—and the station echoed with a formidable burp. Here was Andrea Barbarossa.