The Diviners (The Diviners #1)

“Give our regards to the Italians, chump,” Paddy yelled from the other side, and the other boys joined in with their own insults. Tommy could hear their laughter moving away from the warehouse, along with their quick footsteps. Tommy threw himself against the doors, with no luck. Unless he could find another way out, he was stuck there till somebody came. That somebody might be one of Lucky Luciano’s men, which was a scarier thought than spending the night alone in the old warehouse. From the riverside, the moon pushed through the building’s high, narrow windows. Its fractured light fell first on the chains and hooks suspended from the ceiling, then across the pale carcasses of the pigs hanging in a long line to the back of the warehouse. A rat scuttled across his foot and he shouted.

“Big fellow, wasn’t he?” a man’s voice said.

Tommy whipped around. “Who’s there? Who said that?”

The man stepped out of the shadows. He was as big as a boxer, and he looked important and out of place in his full suit and bowler hat. Tommy swallowed hard. What if this man was one of Lucky Luciano’s goons?

“It was a dare. M-my friends locked me in,” Tommy managed to say. “I swear, mister. I don’t want no trouble.”

“What is your name?” the man asked.

“Tommy.”

“Tommy,” the man said, tasting the name. There was something about his eyes that didn’t seem right. Tommy chalked it up to the weak moonlight. “Thomas the disciple. Doubting Thomas, who had to be shown before he could believe.”

“Huh?”

The stranger smiled. It was an unsettling smile, but Tommy felt drawn to it. “Since you seem to be in a bargaining mood, Thomas, I will also make you a bargain. Tonight is the sort of night in which men of great daring can be made. But you will have to put your doubts aside, Thomas.”

The man pulled a crisp hundred-dollar bill out of his pocket and snapped it taut between fingers blue-black with markings. Tommy’s eyes widened.

“Whaddoo I gotta do?” he asked warily.

“All you have to do is walk to the far end of the warehouse and retrieve my walking stick. It has a silver tip.”

The man waved his hand and Tommy saw the walking stick’s silver knob glinting in the distance on the other side of the pigs.

“What’s the catch?”

“Ah. That would be telling, wouldn’t it? Life is a game of chance for men of daring, Thomas. You must be willing to risk in order to be rewarded. What say you?”

Tommy thought it over. In his brief life, he’d found that most bargains weren’t bargains at all. And the thought of walking through those pale dead pig bodies to get to the stick at the far end seemed daunting. Then he remembered that he was there because his so-called friends had locked him in for laughs. He would not show up without that hundred dollars to rub in their faces.

“Okay, mister. I’ll do it.”

The man smiled his discomfiting smile. “A man of daring after all. May I see your hands?”

Tommy frowned. “What for?”

“A man in my position must take precautions. Hands, please.”

Tommy held out his hands, turning them palms up, then palms down. The stranger’s eyes gleamed.

“You may put them down now.” The man reached into his pocket and produced a leather pouch, shaking what looked like dust into his palm. He blew it into Tommy’s face.

“Wha-what’d you do that for?” Tommy sputtered, wiping at his nose and mouth.

“Upping the ante,” the stranger said, holding the hundred-dollar bill between his second and third fingers like an offering. “Game of chance. Men of daring.”

Tommy snatched the bill from the man’s fingers and stuffed it into his own pocket. The man’s eyes seemed to burn with a strange fire, and Tommy looked away quickly. He focused instead on the walking stick at the far end of the warehouse. He took a deep breath and entered the long, dark tunnel between the butchered pigs. All those dangling dead bodies, the eyes fixed and staring, the mouths open in a final silent scream, made him feel a little sick and woozy, and he struggled to keep his own eyes on the silver tip, which seemed a million miles away. Tommy chanted to himself quietly, King of the Streets, King of the Streets, King of the Streets.

“That’s it, Thomas. Keep walking. You’re doing very well. Soon you’ll put all those doubts to rest.”

Tommy kept moving. A hundred bucks was a world of money. When he showed up at Paddy’s in new clothes, his hair freshly oiled and green in his pocket, he’d show the others who was really the chump. Nobody’d be locking him in a warehouse again.