I Hid a Mob Boss in the Stacks, So He Claimed My Nights novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Staff Door
At midnight in a Lake Erie gale, a bleeding stranger walks into Zofia's library and asks her to keep reading; she lies to two men at the glass door to hide him and learns he is Lucio Castaldi.
The man who came through the staff door had one hand pressed to his right side and blood down to the hem of his coat.
I was in the stacks with a cart of returns and a water-stained copy of Rebecca.
I was reading aloud to the empty building, as I do after closing.
The power had flickered twice since ten.
The gale off the lake was rattling every window on the street.
I stopped in the middle of a sentence.
"Don't stop," the man said.
His voice was low and rough, and he gave it as an order.
He was huge, gray in the face, and wet to the skin.
He slid down the end of the biography shelves until he was sitting on the floor with his legs out in front of him.
"Keep reading," he said again.
My mouth was already moving.
I think I was afraid that if I stopped, I would have to look at what was happening.
So I read the next line, and the next.
While I read, I took the clean towel off the cart, where I keep it for spilled coffee, and knelt down.
He moved his hand.
The cut under his ribs was as long as my palm, and it was still bleeding.
"I'm calling an ambulance," I said.
"No." His hand closed on my wrist, not hard.
"Not the phone. Not anybody. Read."
He was not looking at the book.
He was watching my mouth the whole time, not the page.
I took that for pain.
I pressed the towel against the cut with both hands and he made a sound through his teeth.
"Sorry," I said.
"Don't be sorry. Read."
So I read about a house called Manderley with my knees in his blood.
My voice shook and then stopped shaking.
The sound of it was the only thing in the room keeping him still.
The first-aid box was bolted to the wall behind the circulation desk.
I could not carry it and read at the same time.
I told him to hold the towel himself and went to get it, shouting the next page from across the room.
When I came back his eyes were closed.
"I'm still here," he said. "Louder."
I got the gauze on him.
I had the superglue from the craft shelf in my cardigan pocket before I understood I was going to use it.
I was not proud of that.
I was reading the third page after the glue when somebody knocked on the glass of the front doors.
It was a slow, polite knock, two knuckles.
I looked up over the shelves.
Two men in dark raincoats stood under the awning with the rain running off their hats.
The one who knocked had his cuff pulled back, and I saw a small gold anchor on it, catching the streetlight.
"Miss?" His voice came through the glass. "We're looking for a friend. He's sick. His family's worried about him."
The man on the floor opened his eyes.
"Not them," he said, very low. "Not anybody."
I looked at him.
He did not explain.
He looked back at me, afraid of the two men on the step more than of the cut.
"Stay down," I said.
I stood up with his blood on my gray cardigan and the book still open in my left hand.
I walked to the front doors.
The lock turned with a sound that seemed to fill the whole building.
I opened the door three inches and held it there with my foot.
"We're closed," I said. "Nobody's come in since nine."
"That's blood on your sleeve, miss," said the man with the cuff.
He had a broken front tooth, and when he spoke it whistled a little.
"I cut my thumb on the returns cart." I held up my right hand. It had his blood on it too, and a real cut across the thumb that I had not felt until then. "Do you want me to fill out an incident report?"
The second man was looking over my shoulder, down the long aisle between the shelves.
There was a dark drip on the tile, just visible, six feet inside the door.
I did not look at it.
I looked at the first man's face.
"I have a branch to lock and a cart to shelve," I said. "If you want to come back during open hours, we open at ten."
The man with the tooth looked at me for a long time.
Then he touched his hat.
"Sorry to bother you," he said, and he went down the steps with the other man behind him.
I shut the door.
I locked it, and then I leaned my forehead on the glass until I could see their taillights go.
When I got back to the biography shelves, the man was unconscious, and his breathing was slow and even.
His wallet had fallen out of the coat.
I picked it up because I was going to put it back in his pocket.
The license was on the top.
Lucio Castaldi, it said, with an address on Murray Hill Road.
I knew the name.
Everyone in Cleveland knew the name from May, when the news ran two hundred black cars down Mayfield Road behind the hearse of his father.
I had my phone in my hand.
I had the number ready, and I had a whole city's worth of reasons.
I looked at the man on the floor.
He looked young for a moment, and tired.
He had not let go of my wrist until he passed out.
I put the phone in my apron pocket.
Then I pulled a blanket from the story-hour shelf and laid it over him.
I sat down on the floor with my back against the biographies.
I found my place on the page and went on reading aloud.
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