Chapter 5 - The Harlem Avenue Extraction
The McDonald’s on Harlem Avenue was classic working-class Chicago fringe: scuffed linoleum tiles, the smell of burnt fryer oil, and a corner booth occupied by two elderly men arguing in Polish over paper cups of black coffee.
Outside, the autumn wind was tearing yellow leaves from the scrubby maples along the curb, sending them skittering across the wet asphalt. It was 8:50 on Sunday morning.
Michael sat behind the wheel of our dark gray Volvo SUV in the far corner of the parking lot, the engine idling smoothly. I sat in the passenger seat, my hands clasped so tightly around my purse that my knuckles were bloodless.
“You don't have to go in alone,” Michael said, his hand resting warm on the nape of my neck.
“I do,” I answered, looking through the rain-streaked window. “If he sees a strange man with me, he’ll spook. He’s sixteen, Michael. He’s been told for twenty-four hours that I’m the devil. He needs to see that I’m just… a person.”
I opened the door, stepped out into the crisp forty-five-degree bite of the morning air, and walked through the double glass doors of the restaurant.
He was impossible to miss.
He was sitting in the booth farthest from the counter, his back pressed hard against the corner wall, his eyes fixed on the entrance like an animal expecting a stun gun.
He had Daniel’s square jaw and dark, straight hair, but everything else belonged to someone else. His eyes were wide, hazel, and ringed with dark, bruised circles of total exhaustion. He was wearing an oversized black hoodie with frayed cuffs, faded jeans that were an inch too short at the ankles, and beat-up Vans with the rubber sole separating at the toe. On the seat beside him sat a threadbare canvas backpack, stuffed so full the zipper was straining.
I stopped three feet from the table.
“Kevin?”
His gaze snapped up. He flinched—a tiny, involuntary micro-movement—before his posture stiffened into that borrowed, defensive belligerence I had heard over the phone.
“Claire?” he asked. His voice cracked slightly on the second syllable.
“Yes,” I said softly. “May I sit down?”
He didn't say yes, but he pulled his backpack half an inch closer to his hip. I slid into the hard plastic bench opposite him.
Up close, the tragedy of him was overwhelming. He had a faint patch of razor burn along his jawline where he had clearly tried to shave without shaving cream. His fingernails were clean, but the skin around his cuticles was bitten raw. He looked terrified, furious, and so profoundly young that the idea of him demanding three thousand dollars on a phone line felt like a grotesque parody.
He reached into his hoodie pocket, pulled out a folded piece of paper and a small blue plastic card, and slapped them onto the table between us.
“There,” he said, his chin jutting out defensively. “State ID. Social Security card. Just like you said.”
I didn't pick them up. I looked at the name printed on the card: Kevin Michael Jenkins.
“Did he wake up before you left?” I asked.
Kevin swallowed, his throat working hard. “He was still snoring. He had three empty cans of lager on the coffee table next to the remote. I took the key off his ring, opened the box, got my card, and put the key back on the table.” He paused, his fingers drumming an erratic rhythm against his knee. “I took something else, too.”
He reached into his backpack and pulled out a battered, navy-blue spiral notebook with Vance Trading – 2023/2024 written across the front in faded gold paint.
“What’s that?”
“His ledger,” Kevin whispered, leaning forward, his eyes darting toward the restaurant counter as if an alarm was about to sound. “The one he keeps in the nightstand. The one he said had all his stock transactions.”
I took the notebook, flipping it open with careful fingers.
The pages weren't filled with options chains or Nasdaq tickers.
They were filled with names, dates, and amounts, written in Daniel’s neat, arrogant script:
July 12 – Kevin paycheck transfer: $210 (Robinhood options – TSLA puts – LOSS)
July 19 – Kevin paycheck transfer: $185 (DraftKings – MLB parlay – LOSS)
August 3 – Kevin paycheck transfer: $220 (FanDuel – UFC 292 – LOSS)
August 14 – St. Jude’s enrollment fund withdrawal: $600 (Bovada blackjack – LOSS)
My heart dropped into my stomach.
DraftKings. FanDuel. Bovada.
It wasn't day-trading. It wasn't an index fund.
Daniel Vance was a compulsive sports bettor who had burned through his wife’s modest life insurance, drained his own credit lines, and was now feeding his son’s restaurant tips into digital blackjack tables and baseball parlays from a leather recliner in Berwyn.
I looked up from the notebook.
Kevin was watching my face, reading the horror in my eyes. The last shred of his defiant posture evaporated, leaving behind a terrified, hollowed-out kid whose entire universe had just been reduced to a ledger of degenerated shame.
“He’s gambling it, isn't he?” Kevin asked. His voice was barely a breath. “All of it.”
“Yes,” I said, closing the book. “He’s gambling it.”
A single, hot tear spilled over Kevin’s lower lid, tracking down his cheek. He wiped it away angrily with the sleeve of his hoodie, his shoulders hunching inward as if trying to disappear into the booth.
“He told me I was going to be an art director,” the boy choked out, his breath hitching in his chest. “He told me that if I worked the dinner shifts on weekends, he’d match every dollar for my laptop and my enrollment. I missed my junior prom because I was scrubbing the grease traps on Cermak, Claire. I missed the whole damn thing because he said we were a team.”
I reached across the laminate table, hesitated for half a second, and then laid my hand over his trembling, raw cuticles.
He didn't pull away.
May you like
His fingers curled upward, catching the edge of my palm, holding on with a desperate, white-knuckled grip that told me everything I needed to know about the last sixteen years of his life.
“You are going to be an art director, Kevin,” I said, looking straight into his bloodshot eyes. “And you’re going to St. Jude’s. But you are never going back to that apartment.”
