“Two minutes!” Johnson shouted but a moment later he yelled, “Forget it! Let’s go!”
“What’s wrong?” I said.
Raj shrugged. “A car’s coming or there’s something on the police frequency.”
“Come on!” yelled Johnson outside. “Go, go, go!”
Raj laid his weight against the crowbar.
“Come on,” I said.
“In a moment.” The door started to separate from the frame.
Outside, the other men were shouting.
Raj eased the crowbar, reached into his pocket, and tossed me a ring of keys. “Start the car.” He went back to work on the door.
I ran to the shed exit and looked back at Raj as he pried the door and it ripped out from the frame. Raj stood for a moment like he expected gold coins to pour over him.
Then three German shepherds lunged out.
“Fuck!” Raj yelled and one of the dogs landed on his chest. Raj fell back and rolled across the floor, the dog on top of him.
I started toward him but another dog came after me. I sprinted out the door to the SUV. As I fired up the engine, I looked toward the county highway. Two sets of headlights were approaching.
The other SUVs and vans spun their tires on the dirt, snaked across the lot, and shot through the gate and onto the road, heading away from the headlights. I followed them, but when I reached the gate, I hit the brakes. Two dogs, maybe three were ripping into Raj inside the storage shed.
I shifted into reverse, bounced back over the dirt, and looked over my shoulder in time to see Raj run from the shed, blood on his face, the dogs behind him, lunging at his hands and legs like he was a wild animal that they meant to bring down. I headed toward him but it seemed like he couldn’t see the SUV. He ran for the fence and, when he reached it, climbed and kept climbing until his clothes hung up in the barbed wire stretched across the top. The dogs stood against the fence on their hind legs and barked and howled.
With the crowbar I might be able to clear them. But the crowbar was lying on the floor inside the shed.
I drove the SUV to the fence, shined the headlights on the dogs. Raj hung onto the top of the fence, bleeding, his face wild with fear. The dogs ignored me.
The headlights on the road were a couple of blocks away.
I pulled the SUV away from the fence, turned it around, and shifted into reverse. I backed toward the fence until two of the dogs ran to the side and the other yelped and then followed them. The rear end of the SUV touched the fence and I opened my window and yelled, “Climb onto the roof.”
After a few seconds, Raj yelled, “Can’t.”
I leaned out the window. Raj’s clothes were tangled in the barbed wire. The German shepherds were running back and forth, whining, looking for a way to get to him. The cars on the road slowed as they reached the open gate. One of them pulled onto the driveway so its headlights shined on the scene.
I tried opening the driver-side door but a German shepherd came at me. I slammed the door, then squeezed myself through the driver-side window and pulled myself onto the roof. Raj was watching the dogs like they might climb the fence and eat him there. I crawled toward him. “Give me your hand,” I said and he reached toward me, his eyes still on the dogs. I cleared his sleeve from the barbs, cleared one of his pant legs.
“Get me down,” he said.
A voice yelled from the open window of the car that had pulled onto the lot. A woman’s voice. “I’ve called for help,” the woman said.
Help of the kind she would have called was the last thing we needed. “Thanks!” I yelled back.
I helped Raj free his other leg and then his arm, and he inched onto the roof of the SUV. “Can you slide into the window?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Then hold tight.”
I slid into the window and drove away from the fence. As we passed the car that had pulled onto the construction lot, a woman in her sixties watched the SUV with the bloodied man on top as though it was a strange, horrible animal that had gotten loose in southern Wisconsin. I waved to her. Her window went up.
A man about the same age sat in the car outside the gate, speaking into a cell phone. Probably to the cops.
A quarter mile later, I pulled to the shoulder. Raj crawled across the roof, slid down the windshield onto the hood, climbed down, and tried his feet on the ground. They held him.
“Jesus!” he whispered more to himself than to me. “I should be dead.”
The SUV headlights showed blood on his face and right leg, deep scratches on his arms, but, unless he had worse cuts under his clothes, nothing that would make him bleed to death, maybe nothing that even needed stitches.
“Are you all right?” I asked anyway.
He looked at me long, like it took an effort for him to remember who I was. Then he nodded and said again, “I should be dead.”
He stepped away from the SUV toward a ditch that separated the road from a farm field. He looked up at the clouded sky. If the woman and the man at the construction lot had given the 911 operator the kind of information I figured they’d given, two or three police cars were headed our way. Probably an ambulance and a fire truck too.
“Get in the car,” I said.
“I should be dead,” Raj said and got into the passenger seat.
I got in too and punched the accelerator.
The dark stubble fields gave way to the factories with empty, brightly lighted parking lots. As I turned from the county highway toward the road back to Chicago, red emergency lights flashed in the distance. I hit the accelerator again and kept it down until we reached the on-ramp.
We drove south for awhile without talking. When I glanced at Raj, he was staring out the window at the sky, like he did at the side of the highway. I wondered what he was looking at, what he saw, but I didn’t ask.
A couple of minutes after we crossed the Illinois state line, he said, “That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.”
“Yeah? Which part of it?”
For awhile he said nothing. Then, “I hate dogs. Ever since I was a kid.”
“Who would’ve known they were there?” I said. “They didn’t bark.”
“They didn’t fucking breathe! But the sign—I could’ve believed the sign.”
“Do you need a doctor?”
He felt his face and head with his fingers, looking at the blood that came away on his hands, then felt the rest of his body, arms, and legs. “No,” he said. “I’m good.”
Good was an exaggeration. “You want me to stop at a gas station? You can clean up.”
He shook his head. “I’ll do it when we get back.”
For the next half hour we were quiet again. The headlights shined on the gray asphalt, and, except for the occasional lighted signs in front of roadside businesses, we drove through a tunnel of darkness. The car smelled like the salt of blood and sweat and the sweet plastic of the new electronics we’d stolen.
When the orange glow of Chicago sharpened in front of us, I felt the tension of the night ease. I looked at Raj again. He was staring at the road now. He felt my eyes on him and he turned and his bloodied lips gave me a half smile.
“Thanks,” he said.
“No problem,” I said.
“You saved me.”
I shrugged. “What was I going to do? Leave you there?”
He shrugged too. “Thanks anyway.” What neither of us said was that his friends in Johnson’s crew had left him there.
SEVENTEEN
AS WE DROVE INTO the city, Raj’s cell phone rang. The dashboard clock said the time was 2:11 A.M. From his end of the conversation, I figured he was talking to Johnson. Johnson was telling him what to do and when to do it.
Raj listened to it all, never telling him what had happened after the rest of them left. Then he said, “I need a half hour, maybe forty minutes.” His voice was calm but I heard an edge of anger in it.
Johnson must not have liked what he heard.
“Be
cause that’s what I need,” Raj insisted.
Johnson apparently backed down.
“All right,” Raj added and hung up. He shook his head, disgusted.
“What now?” I asked.
He told me to get off the highway on the Northside, then directed me through the dark streets to a little house on Oakley Avenue. I pulled to the curb.
“Come inside,” he said.
The place was a beige single story with an air-conditioning unit in a dormer window in front and a half dozen concrete steps to the front porch. A light fixture, mounted next to the door, shined on the sidewalk. Another light was on behind the shades in the front room.
“Your house?” I asked as he unlocked the door.
He nodded.
The inside was comfortable, but no more than. The fabric on the living room sofa showed wear. So did the fabric on the easy chair. A coffee table had stacks of magazines on top and needed dusting. A plastic bin of Legos stood next to the sofa. A carpeted stairway led to an attic room. Nothing in the place said a dishonest cop was living there.
Raj went into an adjoining kitchen, came back with two cans of beer, and handed me one. He popped the tab and raised the can in a toast. I raised mine too. “To dogs,” I said.
He almost laughed. “Not unless they’re stuffed and mounted.”
A bedroom door that connected to the living room opened, and a woman stepped in. She looked no older than twenty-five and wore a little blue nightgown. She had a tattoo of a snake on her upper thigh. Another, of a star, dipped into the nightgown from her breast. She had blond hair and full lips, and her eyes said she hadn’t been sleeping.
“Where the hell—” she started, then saw the blood on Raj and noticed me. She stopped and her anger melted. “What—” she tried again, but that was all that came out.
Raj went to her. “Ellen, this is Joe. Joe, this is Ellen.”
“Glad to meet you,” she said. Her eyes stayed on her husband. She didn’t sound glad to meet me.
She reached to Raj’s face and touched where the dog had bitten him.
He flinched, took her hand, and removed it from him. “I’m okay,” he said. “I just need to clean up.”
He went into the bedroom she’d come out of. She turned and gave me a long look like she was sure I’d injured Raj myself, then followed him in.
For awhile, the house was quiet except for the murmur of voices from the bedroom. I looked at the pictures on the wall: framed photos of an olive-skinned woman I figured was Raj’s mother, another woman who could have been a sister, a guy who definitely was a brother, a young kid who either was Raj’s son or a nephew. I looked at a glass-fronted china cabinet. The plates and coffee cups were cheap, but you display what you’ve got.
The voices in the bedroom got louder.
Raj’s wife said, “He killed a cop.”
“He’s—”
The voices fell to angry whispers.
A boy about seven years old wandered down the stairs from the attic bedroom. He wore red pajama pants that looked like long underwear and a matching shirt. He had sleep in his eyes. He gave me a shy smile and disappeared back up the stairs.
A minute later, he came back down a couple steps.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he said.
“It’s late. You should be in bed.”
“Where’s my dad?” he asked.
I nodded toward the bedroom. “In there.”
He came down the stairs, stopped on the bottom step, looked at me like I was a danger he didn’t want to face on his way across the room. I stepped away to clear the path. “What’s your name?” I said.
He eyed me. “Farid.” Then he darted across the room.
“Like your dad.”
He nodded and knocked on the door.
“I have a boy named Jason,” I tried, but he just stared at the door.
His mother opened it and, when she saw him, scooped him into her arms and whisked him upstairs like I was a disease she needed to protect him from.
As they disappeared, Raj wandered in. He’d cleaned himself and slicked his hair down with water. He limped a little and his pant leg bulged over his left ankle where he’d wrapped it with gauze. He’d taped a butterfly bandage over the skin above his lips. He had a Band-Aid on his left hand. Other than that, his sleeves and jeans covered his wounds.
He tried a smile. “You ready?”
* * *
FOR FIVE MILES NORTHWEST out of the Loop, brick warehouses line both sides of the Chicago River. They were built at a time when men on the docks unloaded cargo that had come in through the locks from Lake Michigan or loaded it for the reverse trip. Here and there in the past couple of years, a condo development or a restaurant had shouldered in with promises of a water view, but mostly the brick buildings stood empty or half used. On a cold November night, even the bums who’d found a spot on the floor in the buildings during the spring, summer, and fall had cleared out for shelters with central heating.
Raj and I drove to a warehouse built on a spot where the river swings to the west. The lights were off outside the building. Leaves and garbage had clumped on the parking lot like no one had parked or driven there in years.
“The quicker we get rid of this stuff, the less chance we have of getting caught,” Raj said.
I backed the SUV to an aluminum garage door and Raj got out, pushed a button on an intercom, and spoke into it. The garage door rattled up, metal clashing against metal.
Johnson’s crew stood inside with three tall black men, one in a pin-striped suit and tie, the others in zippered nylon warm-up suits. One of them yelled at me to back the car between the SUVs and vans already in the warehouse. Before I cleared the threshold, the aluminum garage door started down.
Ceiling lamps high in the steel rafters lighted the front end of the building. The back end disappeared in shadows. Steel shelves made neat aisles, rising from the concrete floor high toward the ceiling. Wooden pallets on the shelves held electronics, tools, and building supplies.
One of the guys in warm-up suits opened the back of the SUV and brought a transformer that we’d stolen to the man in pinstripes. The man looked it over and offered Johnson ninety dollars. Johnson said a hundred fifty. They agreed on a hundred ten. The guys in warm-ups unloaded the rest of the transformers onto a pallet set on a forklift.
Raj and I joined the other men. Monroe looked Raj over. “What the hell happened to you?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Raj said.
A grin spread across Monroe’s face. “Come on, let’s see the battle wounds.”
Raj shrugged and hoisted his pant leg, exposing his ankle. Blood had soaked through the gauze.
Finley gave a low whistle.
“What else?” said Monroe.
Raj lied. “That’s it.”
Finley stepped toward him, grinning too, and reached toward his cheek. “Such a pretty face too—”
Raj grabbed Finley’s wrist.
The grin fell from Finley’s face. For a few seconds, it seemed that they would fight.
Then Finley said, “All right.” He shook his wrist free.
Monroe turned to the other men. “Who’s hungry?” he said. “I’m buying breakfast.”
* * *
THE GOLDEN NUGGET FAMILY Restaurant on North Clark Street is in a dirty brown brick building with a faded yellow sign. At four in the morning, the clientele includes hookers done with their final customers, insomniac transvestites, and men living on the street who can’t take any more of the night and the cold so they scrape together enough quarters and dimes to buy a cup of coffee and an egg. But day or night, the Golden Nugget serves the best pancakes on the Northside.
We pulled four tables together in a back room usually reserved for birthday parties. The waitresses knew Johnson’s crew well enough to joke with them and exchange hugs. They also knew them well enough to leave us alone once we’d ordered.
We’d tossed our jackets over empty chairs. A couple of g
uys had kicked their feet up on the vinyl seat cushions. Finley rested his chin on his hands, yawned, and closed his eyes. We could’ve been a group of undercover cops relaxing at the end of a tough shift. Except Johnson had a stack of cash in front of him and he was dividing it into smaller stacks, one for each of us.
“How much did we make?” Monroe asked.
Johnson kept dealing bills into piles. “Eighteen thousand, four hundred.”
Finley opened his eyes. “For four and a half minutes of work. What’s that per hour?”
Monroe said to Johnson, “You could’ve gotten more for the transformers.”
Johnson looked annoyed. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying we’re not in business to make the buyer happy.”
“If the buyer is unhappy, we’re out of business.”
Monroe mumbled, “Plus you wouldn’t pick up a little extra on the side.”
Johnson snapped. “Don’t ever fucking say that!”
“Okay, maybe not. I’m just saying—”
“Never,” Johnson said, standing up at the table, leaning over Monroe. “Don’t say it unless you’re ready to prove it, not if you want to work with me.”
Monroe didn’t look worried. “I’m just saying we’ve got only one buyer and you brought him in. He gets the price he wants to pay, more or less. I’d like to have more than one buyer. We’d make more money.”
Johnson shook his head like he couldn’t believe Monroe’s stupidity. “Do you know another buyer?”
Monroe admitted he didn’t.
“Until you do, shut the fuck up, okay?” Johnson sat down and continued dealing out the bills.
A minute or two after we’d stuffed our stacks of bills into our pockets, the waitresses came in with trays of steaming pancakes, eggs, bacon, and toast. A large-breasted gray-haired waitress in her late fifties leaned over me and filled my cup with coffee, as hot as the night was cold. For a moment I lost my appetite. Then I tore into my food like I’d spent my night burning energy with gang members, vicious dogs, and thieves.
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