Bitter Spirits
Page 54

“Winter,” Aida whispered as the man raised a rifle.
“Go.” He shoved her behind the screen as the Fed shouted in their direction. Her hand shot out for the door handle. Unlocked! They burst through the door and found themselves in a small back hallway.
“Kitchen?” she said, hearing clamor behind a set of swinging doors.
“Obvious place to find liquor—might be blocked with Prohis on the other side,” he said, pulling her down the hallway. “We need to get to the front desk without being seen.”
That sounded like the last place they needed to be.
“Trust me.” They sprinted together, Winter leading her through back corridors of the hotel, inside a supply room, up stairs, down stairs, squeezing past rolling luggage carts until they finally made it to the front desk. Two Feds guarded the front entrance as another argued with the concierge and someone who appeared to be hotel management.
They hid behind an elaborate floral arrangement and waited. Aida’s heart knocked inside her chest. Winter gripped her hand so hard it began to throb. She peeked around the flowers to see the hotel manager’s face reddening as his voice rose—the raid was an outrage, he was saying. They were ruining his guests’ evening and besmirching the hotel’s sterling reputation. When the Fed turned his back to answer the manager, Winter jerked her toward the registration desk. “Up and over,” he whispered, lifting her by the hips onto the curved counter. She scooted across as he leapt the desk neatly and helped her down on the other side.
At the end of the counter, a door led to a small room with several large safes. Dead end. “Can we wait it out here?” she whispered. “We can’t walk out the front door. Will they recognize you? Do the Feds know you?”
“Oh, they know me, all right. And we’re not going through the front door. He stood on tiptoes and touched something on the wood paneling. Part of the wall opened to reveal a small door; he opened it.
Aida peered into darkness until he flipped a switch. A string of temporary warehouse lights illuminated a steep set of stairs, from which cool, dank air wafted. “What is this?” she whispered. “A basement?”
“This,” he said as he urged her down the stairs, “is a tunnel that runs beneath the road. They dug it when prohibition passed. Used to be a glass bridge between the Palace and the building across the street—before the earthquake leveled the hotel, which gave someone the idea for the tunnel. We drop off shipments at a gentleman’s club called House of Shields, and the hotel stashes it there and only takes what it needs a little at a time through the tunnel. That’s why the Feds aren’t going to get the big bust they want tonight. They’ll haul a few people away—high-profile guests, if they can nab ’em—but the hotel’s fairly clean.”
The tunnel was narrow and poorly lit, the walls lined with brick and patchy concrete. Winter’s head nearly bumped the arched ceiling . . . the head that had been between her legs a half hour ago. Had she really just let him do that to her?
His shadowed face peered down at her. “Hello.”
“Hello.”
“Still okay?” he asked in a teasing voice.
God, yes. “As long as we don’t go to jail.” She felt a low, erratic rumbling in the soles of her broken shoes and looked up.
“Cars and trolleys,” he said.
“We’re under the street right now?”
“We are.”
Rather exciting. The passageway was barely wide enough for the two of them to walk abreast. Their feet kicked up dust from the concrete. “Does this happen a lot?” Aida asked.
“Raids? Not really. It did in the early days, or so my father said.”
“Do you worry about your customers giving you up if they’re caught? Your employees?”
“I don’t have a paperwork trail leading away from my customers, and my people know that they’ll make more money keeping their mouth shut than ratting me out. Feds questioned my father once in ’23. They couldn’t make the charge stick.”
“Are they watching you?”
“Off and on. I employ a lot of people—dispatchers, truck drivers, ship crews, warehouse workers. So on one hand, I generate a lot of money, and that always gets the Feds’ attention. But I don’t make as much as a couple other bootleggers in town, and I don’t pursue other illegal enterprises—gambling houses, narcotics, that sort of thing.”
“Do you worry?”
“All the time,” he said, steering them around a murky puddle. “But I’ve made some changes to the way my father set things up. I’ve ditched most of the high-risk customers, I pay taxes on the fishing business, and I bribe the police, which keeps things quiet.”
He sounded nonchalant, but she knew better. Though half the city might see bootleggers as Robin Hood figures, if his illegal import operation was ever uncovered, he could go to jail. For years and years. Lose his house. Be unable to take care of his family. Maybe his dead wife had legitimate reasons to worry. This kind of business certainly wasn’t for the faint of heart.
Then again, neither was what she did for a living.
He changed the subject. “You know President Harding died here four years ago.”
“Sure. Everyone knows that. Apoplexy in a penthouse suite at the hotel.”
“Nope. He died across the street in an apartment above the House of Shields, drunker than the devil with a bed full of women. His aides dragged his body through the tunnel so that he’d be found in his hotel room and his family spared the disgrace.”