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warm rain descended unannounced. Big, fat dollops hit the roof, the sidewalk, cleansing them, leaving behind a humid, silver scent. Mike and I exchanged looks. He’d once told me blue dragons had power over rain.
    Jeez. I was getting downright superstitious myself. I took my coffee cup and left without saying another word. I didn’t need to. Superstition aside, I had a funny feeling the Chinese gods were about to fling some ox pies our way.

Chapter 5
    To Lola with Love
    I rony sucks.
    At least it did when I went to see Lola on Howard Street in the Rogers Park neighborhood to make sure she was okay. I arrived thinking I understood the extent of my mother’s shenanigans and left realizing I didn’t know the half of it.
    Two blocks east of the public transportation station, Lake Michigan lapped on the sandy shore in the glare of the moonlight. I couldn’t hear the waves, but I remembered them from my childhood—remembered intrepidly diving into water that was cold even in July.
    Back then I’d wanted to be a mermaid when I grew up. I used to practice holding my breath underwater so that one day I could live in the lake, but I always had to come up for air. That was my first clue that I might be destined for something else.
    I was six, and the lake was an oasis from Lola’s parlor, where mobsters of every ethnic origin came to have their fortunes told or, more likely, bets placed. One year later, when Lola went to prison for bookmaking, I was yanked out of there by the Department of Children and Family Services. Since I didn’t even know who my father was, D.C.F.S. plunked me into foster care, if you could call it that, in one of the sprawling suburbs, a concrete oasis known as Schaumburg. I didn’t see the lake again for two years. By the time I returned I didn’t believe in mermaids anymore.
    I brushed the memories aside as I exited the superconductor platform onto the grimy street. I turned left and walked one block until I saw the red neon Fortunes Told sign blinking outside Lola’s second-floor window. The T had shorted out so it read Fortunes old. That was for sure.
    More childhood memories came flying at me, and not all of them bad—Lola and I holding hands as we walked to the corner ice-cream shop, trying not to step on cracks; laughing together when she tried to curl my hair and it ended up looking like she’d put my finger in an electric socket; lying in my lumpy bed at night, listening to the sounds of traffic and gunfire, so grateful I had my mother to keep me safe.
    Even then I must have known it wasn’t going to last. I’d cherished the chaotic and neglectful life Ihad, not knowing it could be better. And later, when I knew it could have been, I yearned for it still. You never stop missing a mother when she’s gone, even when you can’t stand to be near her.
    I picked up my pace. I’d been worried about my mother ever since her visit and Mike’s ominous dream. I felt guilty about blowing her off. Why I worried about a woman who could outsmart the devil himself, I didn’t know. That is, not until I drew close enough and saw that the police had cordoned off the sidewalk in front of her brick apartment building. The cops had used old-fashioned yellow police tape. They didn’t waste decent laser barriers in a neighborhood like this. Not when they’d probably be stolen. There were a couple police aerocars hovering on the street outside.
    I ran the last few feet and ducked under the police tape, fully intending to dash up the crumbling concrete steps to the second-floor apartment.
    “Hey!” shouted a patrolman from his car. He turned off the engine and the squad car sank a foot to the pavement with a hiss. He climbed out. “You can’t go in there!”
    “I’m a relative!” I shouted over my shoulder.
    Just then an older cop came out of the door. By the time I met him on the small porch, he had drawn his taser. “Stop right there. Who are you?”
    I looked up into his deeply lined face and my