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.I’m to work with you on the Sweet Pea Osborne job.”“Identification?”I reached for my pocket, very slowly; his hand twitched on the shotgun.I flipped out my shiny new ID.Rawson snorted.“How old are you, Aldis?”“Twenty-six, sir.”“Twenty-six.Hell.” Rawson took his hat off and ran a hand through his hair—light brown, streaked with gray, a good deal longer than Bureau standard.Then he rose and shrugged into his coat.I must have stepped back, because he stopped and looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time.His face was craggy, bony jaw unshaven.His eyes were a striking, clear gray.I wouldn’t call him handsome, but there was something about him that drew my attention, even then, before I knew him at all.“Are you afraid of me, Agent Aldis?”Telling the truth seemed unwise, but so did lying to that gimlet stare.“Well, back at the Bureau, they say—” I cut myself off, but his eyes were like steel.“Oh? Go on.What do they say about me back at the Bureau?”I’d gotten myself into this.So I gave him honesty.“They say you have no heart, sir.”“Is that what they say? Perhaps you should see the truth of it, then.”He unbuttoned his greatcoat and began undoing his shirt.My face heated.He couldn’t know about that part of me.No one knew; I’d never have passed the Bureau’s exhaustive background checks if I hadn’t been scrupulously discreet.“I don’t think this is necessary—”“As your senior agent, I’ll tell you what’s necessary, Aldis.”Rawson pulled back the shirt to reveal a ruined devastation of scar tissue.A part of me wanted to recoil; a larger part was drawn, compelled.His chest was a cracked and seamed wasteland, pink scars running in all directions from a steel plate, about eight inches in diameter, embedded in his chest and slightly offset to the left.When I held my breath, I could hear a soft, steady ticking that I had presumed to come from a clock somewhere in the room.Forgetting myself in my curiosity, I stepped closer, peering at the inset steel plate with fascination.The exact mechanism by which it was held to his flesh was difficult to determine, though I could see bolts or rivets ground off flush with the polished surface.At a guess I would say it had been bolted in and the flesh allowed to grow around it.“How do you wind it?” I asked and then looked quickly to his face, clamping my jaws shut.“Sir, I’m sorry.Professional curiosity, that’s all—”Rawson looked neither offended nor amused; his stubbled face was stonelike, impassive.“Some secrets are best kept for security reasons, Aldis.” He began to rebutton his shirt.I forced myself to tear my gaze away, granting him privacy to cover himself.“It’s exquisite work,” I said, staring fixedly at the corroded gas ring with a cold coffeepot sitting atop it and trying not to listen to the small rustling sounds as he arranged himself properly again.“On par with the very best arts of the German doctors.Who was your physician?”“That’s my business.” I risked a glance to find him all done up again.“Have you eaten yet, Aldis?” he asked me as if nothing had happened.“No, sir.I just got into town.”“Driving?”“Train.”“Let’s grab a bite, then.”Before we left the room, he tucked a book into the pocket of his greatcoat—a habit so practiced it was automatic.A gleaming, well-oiled.45 revolver went in the other pocket.RAWSON had a car, an ancient Locomobile steamer with an electric refit, but he left it parked and we walked to a neighborhood diner.The sky was the flat gray of a Midwest winter, and the sharp wind made me turn up my collar.“You’re gonna need a decent coat,” Rawson said, holding the door for me.A blowsy waitress smiled at him in a familiar way, and he angled straight to the farthest booth in the back.He sat with his back to the wall.“Where you in from?”“Los Angeles,” I admitted.“Movie star country,” he drawled.“The Wild West.Lotta crime out there?”“There’s crime everywhere.”Rawson took his coffee black and ordered a steak nearly raw.I had the meatloaf.While we waited for our food to arrive, he studied me with those too-sharp gray eyes.I felt like I was being taken down to my parts: the Bureau regulation haircut, my new Sears suit, the slight bulge under my jacket where I carried my piece.I wondered if he was making a mental file for me: George Leon Aldis, age twenty-six, five foot eleven, one hundred sixty pounds, blue eyes, brown hair.It’s what I would have done.I’d read his Bureau file cover to cover, but seeing him in front of me was something else.I couldn’t help cataloging all the little things that weren’t in the file: the way he laid out his knife and fork neatly beside his plate, his pressed shirt contrasting with the scuffed shoes.After the waitress poured his coffee, he added a small dollop from a silver flask.I pretended not to notice and lit a cigarette to cover the sharp smell of illegal rotgut.I offered him one; he shook his head.His file said he’d had no relationships at all in the past fifteen years.No girlfriend, no close friends in the Bureau, no known associations outside it.All Rawson did was work.And, apparently, read.His file said he was a voracious reader but hadn’t mentioned how wide-ranging his interests.“Earlier, you said it was professional curiosity that made you wonder about me.” His voice was casual.“What exactly is your background, Aldis?”“I studied medicine and engineering in college.”His eyes narrowed a bit.“And now you’re with the Bureau?”“It was the problem solving that always appealed to me,” I tried to explain.How could I tell him, when I could hardly justify it to myself, that cutting into human flesh with my scalpel appalled me, let alone some of the abuses that went on under the guise of legitimate medical research? Terrible creations like the sex-doll clockworks in the bordello, or women with gear-driven butterfly wings to suit rich men’s fancies.Huge clockwork war engines destroying cities during the Great War.Capone’s goons with guns and knives for hands—Men with clockwork hearts, perhaps, who walked around like any other men.I could hear Rawson’s heart ticking quietly, now that I knew what to listen for.“Anyway, the case,” I said, getting back to business.“You’ve been pulling surveillance on the docking tower up at Kankakee.”Rawson nodded.From the seemingly bottomless pockets of his greatcoat, he brought a stack of photographs and handed them to me.He had nice hands, I couldn’t help noticing—long graceful fingers, marked with scars, but nimble.The elegant beauty of those hands, so much at odds with his gunslinger persona, wasn’t in his file either.I’d already seen the photos, but I looked at them again anyway.Sometimes you miss things the first time.Airspace over Chicago is crowded, and the capricious weather around the lake plays havoc with airships, which are just big balloons, after all.So a lot of the major freight lines unloaded at Kankakee, transferring their cargo to trains that rolled on up to Chicago.“Sweet Pea” Osborne’s shipping company was one of Capone’s supply lines for moving bootleg booze out of the Midwest.“Trouble is, I don’t think the Kankakee tower is the hub they’re using,” Rawson said.I looked up at him sharply.“It has to be.All the supply chains from both directions lead there.”“I’m just telling you what I’ve seen.They bring in a lot of empty barrels, but I haven’t yet seen ’em put on a full one.”I opened my briefcase and pulled out a map marked up with Osborne’s shipping routes.“Well, they come in with a load of empty barrels, so they must be going somewhere after that
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