Jenn Bennett - Bitter Spirits

Winter yanked them against the wall and surveyed the mounting chaos, looking for an alternate escape route. “There,” he said, nodding toward a shadowed door hidden behind a standing screen, where pitchers of water sat on a console table. They slipped around the edge of the anxious crowd and made their way there.

It may have taken a minute, but it felt like an hour to sneak toward the unwatched door. She kept her eye on the Feds as they went. When they were a few feet away, one of the younger agents looked their way.

“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.”

“No!”

“Oh yes. He—”

The sight blocking their path halted them in their tracks.

A short man stood in the middle of the tunnel, his face lit by the string of crude lights scalloping the wall. His suit was so wet, Aida could hear water dripping from his sleeves onto the concrete floor. His face was striated and bloated; his eyes were solid white—no pupils or irises.

It didn’t take Aida’s cold breath to prove to either of them that the bloated man was a ghost.

NOT AGAIN.

Winter stared at the bloated corpse of Arnie Brown standing several yards down the tunnel while his mind flashed back to the day he died. It was almost three years ago, right after he’d married Paulina and moved them into their Beaux Arts home on Russian Hill. He’d been fighting with her about Bo. Winter thought she was worried about Bo’s character, as she complained that things were missing around the house, and the obvious culprit in her mind was a boy who’d been raised as a thief. But there was more to it. She didn’t trust Bo because his mind and mouth were both sharp. She also didn’t trust him because he was Chinese.

Winter and Bo had stayed out late one night making a deal at the pier—rather, trying to save a deal that Winter’s father had nearly lost after berating a client during one of his manic fits. After the deal was salvaged, Bo was telling Winter he’d rather move out of the Russian Hill house than have Paulina insult him with accusations of stealing. Winter knew he hadn’t stolen anything. Hell, he knew Bo’s character better than he knew his own wife’s. Spent more time with him, too. But Bo had his pride, and Winter was caught between it and the burden of having to placate his parochial wife.

That long-ago night, as Bo locked up the back door on the pier, Winter had walked the dock and came face-to-face with the man he’d just renegotiated the deal with—Arnie Brown. Arnie had a gun and was prepared to kill Winter so he could rob the booze being held at the pier. But the bullet grazed Winter’s arm when Bo sneaked around and grabbed Arnie from behind. The three of them grappled, but it was actually Bo who shoved the man off the pier. He couldn’t swim.

And now he was slowly shuffling down the tunnel toward Winter and Aida, bloated as he was the day the police found him floating a mile down the bay.

“Coins,” Aida said, already rummaging through his coat pockets.

As they backed away from Arnie’s ghost, he checked all his inner pockets . . . pants pockets. Nothing.

“Nothing tasted funny at dinner, did it?” she asked. “You aren’t poisoned again?”

“No, no—I felt strange almost immediately last time.”

Aida pulled off his hat and felt around under the band. “Shoes?”

“I’ve had those on the entire time we were in the room together.”

Arnie’s ghost picked up speed, shuffling with greater intent.

They backed up several feet, but Winter realized now that they were trapped. Couldn’t go back the way they came dragging a ghost with them into the middle of the raid. Couldn’t go forward. He hand went to his gun holster. The last ghost was solid—if Arnie was, too, could he be shot?

“No,” Aida said when he withdrew his handgun. “You might slow him down at best, might not. Let me see if I can send him away.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Absolutely yes. It’s a ghost, for God’s sake. This is my territory, not yours. Let me try.”

He hesitated. Released the gun’s safety. “I’ll stay right behind you.”

“Don’t shoot me.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Aida stalked down the tunnel toward the ghost a little too fast for Winter’s preference. The inexperienced woman in the hotel room was all confidence now. No fear. Winter supposed it was good that he had enough for both of them.