The Fifth Floor by Michael Harvey

hair with a vein of pink running through it. He wore black jeans and a shirt that fit my vague notion of turquoise. He had a gold earring in each ear and a tattoo of a yellow star on the side of his neck. He was twenty years younger than everyone else in the place and wore his air of bored indulgence like a badge of honor.
    “Actually, no, I don’t have a parcel number.”
    “Have to get a parcel number before we can help you,” my soon-to-be friend said. “Top of the stairs, two doors down. Room 206. Give them the address. They’ll get you a parcel number.”
    “I’m thinking this piece of property is not going to be in your system. At least not with a parcel number.”
    “All property in Cook County has a parcel number.”
    “I believe you,” I said. “It’s more a matter of when. What’s your name?”
    “Hubert.” He said it with an edge, daring anyone to comment.
    “Hello, Hubert.”
    I sidled him a bit out of the aisle so his boss couldn’t see us. She had blue hair, gold mascara, and gold glasses on a string around her neck. She wore nothing less than a muumuu and was snapping gum and pretending to index property books two aisles away. She wasn’t fooling me, however. Hubert and I were up to no good and she was determined to find out exactly what kind of no good it might be.
    “Listen,” I said, dropping my voice just enough to get him interested without being scared. “The listing I’m looking for is old.”
    Hubert was nonplussed. “Our records cover the entire twentieth century.”
    “Eighteen hundred sort of old.”
    “Before the fire?” I caught the ghost of a gleam in the young man’s eye. This was sexy stuff. Relatively speaking, that is.
    “Exactly.”
    “What did you say your name was?”
    “I didn’t.”
    For Hubert, that was even better. He pushed me down the aisle toward a gray door in the back. The last thing I saw was the lady with the blue hair, looking our way and picking up the phone.

CHAPTER 14
    T hrough the doorway was a set of black iron stairs climbing two flights up and back, to another door of government gray. Hubert found the key and opened it. The air was like the inside of a closed coffin-if the inside of a closed coffin had any air, that is.
    “This is our historical section, 1890 and before. Don’t come in here too often.”
    Hubert found a switch and pulled it. Pale light dropped down from a single forty-watt bulb. I tried to get my bearings. Hubert was already whipping into the darkness.
    “Come on. The bitch out front will wonder what we’re about in here.”
    It was like the main room but even older. Shelf after shelf of property books, creaky and yellow. We took two lefts, a right, and then straight into a wall.
    “Sorry,” Hubert said. “Back this way.”
    We backtracked down one aisle and then across to a sagging set of shelves that ran from the floor to just below the ceiling. Above that was a long thin window, covered in wire mesh and set at what I figured to be about sidewalk level. Dirty light filtered in from the street, along with the smell of what I could only imagine to be Panda Express on a very bad day.
    “Sorry. Chinese takeout has their Dumpster in the alley right outside.”
    I ran my finger down one of the bindings. It was covered with spider scrawl in what appeared to be quill ink.
    “Not a problem,” I said. “At least we can see. What does this say?”
    Hubert bent down and took a closer look. “It says Shortall and Hoard. Then it gives a plat number and date.”
    “Who is Shortall and Hoard?”
    “John Shortall,” Hubert said. “Basically saved Chicago’s property record system.”
    “Really?”
    “Sure. The fire destroyed all of Cook County’s official real estate records.”
    “Everything?”
    Hubert snapped his fingers. “Gone. Shortall ran a title abstract company. Kept copies of almost all Cook County conveyances in his office.”
    “Convenient.”
    “Yeah. As the fire approached, Shortall commandeered a