by Laura Leone
"Hey! Stop! Someone stop him!"
Ryan disconnected the call, then tossed the cell phone to another pedestrian, who gaped at him in astonishment. "Sorry!"
The kid hadn't taken anything from the woman, and Ryan saw no reason for her to make the cops interfere in his own business with the boy. Who was, Ryan noticed as he pursued him, pretty damn fast for someone his size. Which was good. Being smart was the best way to survive on the streets, but being fast was a good back-up plan.
After a while, though, the kid started wearing out, his fleet-footed run turning into a trot. Knowing what would come next, Ryan soon paused to slip into a doorway, letting the boy create an even bigger distance between them. Sure enough, now that he was going slower, the kid started looking over his shoulder to see if anyone was after him. He didn't spot Ryan, who continued to hang far back at this slower pace. In time, the boy evidently decided he wasn't being pursued, and he slowed down to a walk.
Since it seemed unlikely he'd be noticed now, Ryan closed the distance between them a little, just enough to be sure he wouldn't lose sight of him when they finally reached the kid's home turf. Which was far away, a long walk from where they had started. The hilly streets ensured that it was a tiring walk, too. Ryan wasn't surprised that they were covering a big distance on foot. Unless someone had taken it away from him, the kid still had Ryan's cash; but if his scores were as few and far between as Ryan suspected, then experience had probably taught him to save the cash for food and other necessities rather than to waste it on public transportation. When you had youthful energy and nothing to do with your time except try to stay alive, a long walk didn't exactly cut into your busy day.
They eventually passed through the sleazy area on the southern stretch of Polk Gulch. They went past a lot of bars, liquor stores, leather shops, and "adult entertainment" outlets. Ryan started seeing the familiar stuff of street life: a couple of obvious drug addicts, a probable dealer, a homeless adult, some teen runaways.
They kept on going, Ryan always about a hundred yards behind the kid—who hadn't looked over his shoulder for quite some time. Whereas it had once taken Ryan a long time to lose the habit of looking over his shoulder every few minutes.
"Hey, honey, you lookin' for a good time?"
Ryan shook his head as he passed a couple of working girls.
"We're runnin' a special," the other one said, stepping into his path. "Two for one."
"Thanks, but that much pleasure would kill me." He stepped around her and continued on his way.
The next one he encountered said, "How about a date?"
"No, thanks."
"Come on, man, why not?"
He didn't acknowledge her again. It would just make her think he was opening negotiations, and she'd waste her time pursuing it.
There were only a few hookers hanging out on the street at this time of day. Come sundown, this neighborhood—which Ryan had once known all too well—would be thick with them. They'd spend hours on their feet, and hours on their knees in dark doorways, in alleys, and in cheap rooms that rented by the hour and stank of urine, disinfectant, and fast, graceless sex acts between strangers. Men passing these women in the streets regularly insulted, threatened, and even spit on them. The customers who paid for hookers usually used them hard and contemptuously. Most of these women were raped often—and most of them were back on the street, working again, twenty minutes after being beaten, sodomized, or violated by a john who balked at paying for it and thought nothing of brutalizing a hooker. At the end of the night, if a girl's pimp wasn't happy with her earnings, he'd probably knock her around, too. Many of the women were drug addicts, some had AIDS, and very few of them would live long a time.
On average, women who worked the street were raped and killed far more often than their male counterparts. No one in the life was lower than hookers.
Except for kids.
That never changed. Kids in the life were the lowest of all. They were the weakest and the most naïve. And they were in the most danger from everyone.
The kid whom Ryan was now trailing at a fairly close distance was hugging the buildings, keeping his shoulders hunched and his head low. Trying to disappear, to make himself invisible.
So he's learned that much, at least.
A kid survived on the street by being a ghost, a shadow. It was dangerous to risk crossing anyone, or even annoying them. It was best not to come to anyone's attention. But if they did notice you, then you had to hang tough. You could never back down, no matter what. Nothing would be more dangerous for a kid here than showing weakness or fear.
Even after having been off the streets for ten years, Ryan could still feel the mingled dread and despair start seeping through his blood as he absorbed the sights, sounds, and smells which had comprised his whole world back in the day.
As the kid turned another corner and Ryan followed, he supposed it was a blessing that circumstances had forced him to come here today. Being on these streets reminded him—with the force of a hard kick in the gut—that his life had turned out so much better than it would have done if Catherine hadn't taken him in and made him what he was now. Though he had spent last night choking on his own bitterness after Sara had rejected him, being here now made him made him realize that he had no business feeling sorry for himself just because he couldn't have what he wanted most. In fact, being here forced him to remember he was lucky just to be alive. If Catherine hadn't saved him that night...
Rounding another corner, he paused when he saw a small group of adolescents hanging out there. All street kids—grubby, tough, hungry, lonely, living on nerves and will. Ryan knew the look. He studied them for a moment and realized with some consternation that none of them was the boy he'd been following. Apart from them, there was hardly anyone else on the street. Ryan looked around. Shit. Had he been so absorbed in his own thoughts that he'd lost the kid? Or let the kid spot him?
On the verge of being really annoyed with himself, Ryan leaned one hand against a dilapidated building and looked around, wondering how the kid could have disappeared so fast.
Across the street, there was a dumpster backed up against a high fence surrounding an old warehouse. Ryan went over to it, wondering if the kid could have hidden behind it. As he got closer, he thought it unlikely the kid had hidden in it—the thing stank to high heaven! Was someone throwing out a corpse, for chrissake? Trying not to breathe, Ryan looked behind the dumpster, and—
"Ah."
There was a small space between the dumpster and the fence, and a fairly big hole in the fence, low down.
Broad scuff marks on the sidewalk around the dumpster made Ryan suspect that, each week after it was emptied, someone pushed it back towards the fence again to conceal the hole there. Ryan glanced over his shoulder and saw, sure enough, that a couple of the boys on the street were watching him with obvious suspicion. They knew the hole was here, all right. The camouflage of the dumpster wasn't for hiding the hole from other people on the street; it was for hiding it from strangers—and The Man, of course. No one around here trusted cops any more than Ryan did.
Turning his back on the boys, Ryan removed his sunglasses, squeezed behind the dumpster, and crouched down to see if he could fit through the hole in the fence. No problem, he decided. Directly on the other side of it, though, there was a huge, dirty puddle. He saw no way to avoid winding up in it unless he just didn't go through the hole at all.
"Of course," he said with resignation.
He reached through, grimaced as his hands squelched in God-only-knew-what, and dragged himself through the hole. Then he stood up, shook his hands, wiped them on his sweatshirt, and looked around. There was a small parking lot full of rusted machinery parts and a warehouse with many broken windows.
"Why didn't I know about this place back when it would have come in handy?" he muttered.
Well, it had been ten years, after all. Maybe back in those days, this warehouse had been a going concern instead of a tax write-off inhabi
ted by homeless people. Ryan peered through one of the broken windows and saw evidence of habitation inside. Separate little areas where individuals had set up their personal campsites with blankets, shopping carts, and cardboard boxes.
It was a far cry from his cheerful, cozy apartment in Glen Park, let alone Catherine's comfortable townhouse in Cow Hollow; but it was nonetheless better than most places Ryan had slept when he was living on the streets.
No wonder some care was taken to hide the hole in the fence from outsiders' eyes. The various people who used this flop certainly wouldn't want the cops to discover it and evict them all. Sooner or later, whoever owned this property would find out about its habitants, though, and the end result would be the same. It always was.
Ryan heard a noise around the side of the building. He stepped away from the window and, hugging the wall, peered around the corner.
Coming around the corner the other way, the kid bumped right into him.
The boy let out a startled shout and flinched. Ryan snorted in surprise and took a reflexive step backwards.
"Jesus fucking Christ, mister!"
"Watch your language," Ryan snapped, then realized what a stupid comment that was, under the circumstances.
The kid tried to dodge around him, obviously eager to be on his way. Ryan grabbed his collar. The kid panicked, of course—every kid in the street knew that nothing good came of a stranger putting his hands on you—and started struggling.
Ryan grabbed a handful of his hair, parried the fist which swung at him, then used his free hand to squeeze the boy's right biceps so hard the kid gasped and tears of pain appeared in his eyes.
"Remember me?" Ryan said.
"No!"
"Try."
"No! Let me go! I don't know you!"
He shoved the kid up against the wall. "We met yesterday."
"What? No! You're thinking of someone else! Let me go!"
"I want my wallet back."
"No! I don't know who— who—" Apparently something clicked, because the kid stopped struggling and stared at him. "Your wallet?"
"Uh-huh."
"It ain't your wallet!"
"Ah, so you do have it."
"It ain't yours!" The kid actually sounded a little outraged.
"Yes, it is."
"No! I took it from some rich guy!"
"I'm not rich, I just have great taste in clothes," Ryan said. "And I want my wallet back."
"That wasn't you!"
"That was me." He was amused at the way the kid studied him, as if having the right to demand proof of his identity before returning his wallet. "You've looked at the driver's license, right?"
The kid frowned. "I guess it could be you..."
"Thank you. Now can I have my wallet back?"
Wondering what would happen, Ryan eased up on the boy's biceps. He immediately tried to escape. However, Ryan was still holding his hair. The kid gave a little cry of pain and went still again.
"My wallet?" Ryan prodded.
"How'd you find me?" the boy demanded.
"Well, you're making quite a name for yourself in the neighborhood where you frisked me."
"They don't know my name!"
"Figure of speech."
The kid looked spooked. "They know who I am?"
"You're getting to be a familiar face around there." After today, it wouldn't be smart for the kid to go back there any time soon, so Ryan hoped his words discouraged the boy.
"Fuck." The kid scowled.
"Now about my wallet..."
The boy's glance flickered briefly to the junk-filled parking lot behind Ryan. "I don't got it no more."
"Ah." Ryan made sure he had a good grip on the kid, then pulled him away from the wall and turned so they were both facing the parking lot now. "Of course. You don't keep your stash inside the building. There are always people in there. Someone would see you hiding it. So you hide it somewhere in this mess out here, and you only go to it when no one's around. Much safer."
"I don't keep nothing nowhere! Leave me alone!"
"I'm guessing that you didn't think of it right away, though," Ryan continued. "I'll bet someone cleaned you out at least once before you figured out a good place to hide things."
"I—I sold your wallet!"
Ryan didn't think so. This wasn't a smooth pro. This was a scared kid who had no gift for stealing.
"Get me my wallet right now," he said, "and I'll forget this ever happened."
"I told you, I don't got it."
"You've got thirty seconds. Then I'm calling the cops," Ryan lied smoothly.
"No!" The kid started struggling again. Ryan squeezed his biceps so hard, the boy's back arched with pain.
"Goddamn it! You bastard!"
"Twenty-five seconds." Ryan let go of the kid's hair and pulled his cell phone out of his back pocket to make his point.
"All right! Jesus, man! All right, already!"
Ryan slipped his phone into his pocket and, keeping hold of the boy, said, "Good. Let's go get it."
The kid dragged his feet. "No, wait! You have to wait here."
"Yeah, right, that's going to happen." He tugged on the boy's arm. "Come on."
"No, man. I swear, I'll get your damn wallet! But... you stay right here."
Ryan sighed. "I don't care about whatever else you've got in your hiding place. I just want what's mine."
"Oh, right, you say that now. But as soon as I show you where it is—"
"I don't need your stash, kid. I'm a rich man, remember?"
"Yeah, well, yesterday, maybe. Today you look like a wino."
"I do not look like—"
"What the hell happened to your face?"
"I had this face yesterday." Ryan glanced at the boy, who was shaking his head. "Well, no, maybe not. I guess it took a little time for the bruise to start coming out." He knew his black eye looked pretty scary by now, though it hurt less than it had yesterday.
"And your clothes are all different, too."
"Somehow, I had a feeling yesterday's clothes might stick out in today's neighborhood. Now can we please get my wallet?"
The kid regarded him with mute suspicion and hostility.
"My wallet or the cops," Ryan reminded him.
Clearly convinced Ryan meant to rob him, the kid glowered and, with Ryan still attached to his arm, led the way through a tortuous maze of twisted metal and rusted machinery parts. Just as Ryan began to suspect he was being taken for a ride, the kid stopped, got down on his belly, and reached beneath an unidentifiable object which was so rusted that orange-red flakes fell off it as the boy's shoulder bumped it. He seemed to be reaching as far underneath it as he could, his face contorted as his fingers sought, found, and then grasped what he sought. He pulled it out, frowned, and quickly put it back.
"Wrong thing," he muttered.
The second object he grasped, however, was indeed Ryan's wallet. Ryan took it from him and started examining it. His credit card was still inside it. He held it up. "Did you use it?"
The kid shook his head. When Ryan just stared at him with raised brows, he said, "I figured you'd report it right away. People like you do. And then I'd get caught as soon as I tried to use it."
"Did you learn that from experience, too?"
The boy scowled.
Ryan's driver's license, his membership card to the health club, and various other things it would have been a nuisance to replace were all in there. Of the two hundred dollars which had been in the wallet yesterday, one hundred sixty were left. He extended his hand and said, "Give it to me."
"Give you what?"
"You were back here right before I found you, and you weren't here to visit my wallet. You were getting some cash."
"No, I wasn't!"
"You don't lie any better than you frisk people."
"I frisked you, didn't I?"
Ryan almost grinned, kind of liking the kid's bravado. He saw resentment in the boy's face, and some renewed fear—perhaps not so mu
ch of him as of the future.
Shit.
Now that he had his wallet in hand, he considered what his two hundred dollars had meant to this kid.
After a moment, Ryan said, "Here's the deal. If you tell the truth, I'll just take the missing cash out of your finder's fee. But if you—"
"My what?"
"—keep lying to me and pissing me off, you don't get anything."
The kid glared at him in surly silence.
"Well?" Ryan prodded.
The boy looked away. "You can count. I took a little."
"I guess that's my penalty for being careless enough to let you steal my wallet."
The boy shrugged and continued to avoid his eyes.
After a moment, Ryan said, "And for giving it back to me with everything else in it, you get... Here." He held out sixty dollars.
The kid saw the money and went very still. After a long moment, his eyes met Ryan's and he asked with dark suspicion, "What do want for it?"
Ryan understood the question. "Nothing."
"No one wants nothing."
"That's usually true. But not this time."
The boy continued to stare at him, radiating tension as he looked at the hand extending the money to him. Ryan realized he'd demonstrated that he was faster, stronger, and ruthless, so the kid had some reason to suspect Ryan was toying with him—planning to pounce and take what he wanted when the boy reached for the cash.
Ryan shook his head. "You've already earned it, kid." He put the money down on the ground and backed away from it. "It's yours." He turned and left.
#
Ryan came awake suddenly in the dark, hauling in air on a long, tortured gasp. His throat constricted as a stifled cry of pain and fear rose from his chest, from his belly, from his soul.
He kicked away the damp sheet, sat up, and swung his legs over the side of the bed so his feet could touch the floor. So he could feel it there, solid and real. So he could know that he was here, awake, and safe.
He was shaking. He hunched over, hugging himself, and rocked back and forth for a moment. Then he turned on the bedside lamp and started trying to steady his frantic, shallow breathing.