Spenard

He stayed on the east side of the road, where the storefronts gave him glass to check behind him. He wore a dark work jacket, faded jeans, and boots still carrying white dust from a construction site. Nothing memorable. That was the idea. His face had been forgettable most of his life, and tonight he needed the gift.

At the next corner, two men stood beside a dumpster. One had a backpack pressed against his thigh. The other kept scanning the traffic.

“Not here,” the backpack man said.

“It’s here or nothing.”

“Then nothing.”

Kellen crossed the street before he reached them. A bus hissed at the curb, blocking his view. When it pulled away, the men were gone, but a woman in a silver blouse had stepped into his path.

“Hey, handsome.”

Kellen angled around her.

“Don’t be rude.”

“I’m not buying.”

“I didn’t say what I was selling.”

Her perfume followed him for half a block, sharp and sweet over gasoline and hot pavement. Behind him, she called to another passerby. A car door slammed. Somebody laughed too loudly.

He passed a liquor store with bars over the windows. A man came out holding a bottle in a brown paper bag. Two teenagers followed him, close enough to be friends and close enough to be trouble. One bumped his shoulder.

“Watch it,” the man said.

The taller teenager grabbed the bag.

The bottle hit the sidewalk and burst. The man cursed. The shorter kid drove a fist into his ribs. Kellen kept moving, but the sound of shoes scraping behind him made him glance back.

The man had gone down on one knee. The teenagers ran toward an alley.

“Help me,” the man called.

Kellen stopped.

The man looked at him through one watering eye. Blood ran from his mouth. His hand was clamped around a small black pouch that had fallen from inside his jacket.

Kellen knew that pouch.

Not the leather. Not the broken zipper. The weight of it, even from six feet away. The trouble attached to it.

The man saw recognition cross Kellen’s face.

“You,” he said.

Kellen turned and walked.

“Hey! Rourke!”

The name struck harder than the shout.

A bus roared between them. Kellen went through the first open doorway he saw, into a laundromat bright with fluorescent tubes. Washers turned in rows. A little boy slept across three plastic chairs while his mother stared at a phone.

Kellen moved to the back, past the detergent machines, and looked through the front glass.

The robbed man had disappeared. So had the teenagers.

Across the road, a thin man in a baseball cap stood beneath a dead motel sign. He wasn’t looking at the broken bottle. He was looking at the laundromat.

Kellen waited until the man turned his head, then slipped through a rear door into an alley.

The alley smelled of wet cardboard and old fryer grease. A dumpster blocked the far end. He climbed onto a milk crate, caught the top of the fence, and hauled himself over. His palm tore on the wire. He landed behind a row of parked cars and crouched until the pain settled into something useful.

A woman’s voice came from the other side of the fence.

“You lose somebody?”

Kellen looked through the links. The red-haired woman from the bus shelter stood in the alley mouth, smoking.

“Maybe.”

“Man with the black pouch?”

Kellen said nothing.

She exhaled smoke toward the bright sky. “That’s not yours.”

“I know.”

“Funny. He thought you owed him.”

“Who?”

“Depends who’s asking.”

A siren wailed somewhere south. The woman glanced toward it, then flicked ash onto the pavement.

“Name’s Tessa,” she said.

“I didn’t ask.”

“No. You look like a man who waits until asking gets expensive.”

Kellen stepped away from the fence. “What was in the pouch?”

“Something small enough to steal and valuable enough to kill over.”

“That narrows it down.”

“Not around here.”

She studied him, weighing his clothes, his hands, the way he kept his back to the wall.

“Your friend got robbed because he was careless,” she said. “You’re going to get robbed because you’re pretending you don’t know him.”

“He’s not my friend.”

“That’s worse.”

Kellen heard footsteps at the alley entrance. Tessa heard them too. Her cigarette vanished beneath her boot.

“Go,” she said.

“Why help me?”

“I’m not helping. I’m protecting my corner.”

She moved toward the street, hips loose, face bored. Kellen went the other way, through a gap between a motel and a tire shop. He came out behind a row of dumpsters and found himself beside a pay phone with its cord ripped out.

A black sedan rolled slowly past the alley.

The man in the baseball cap sat in the passenger seat.

Kellen lowered his head and walked south instead of north, back toward the road he had just left. The car continued, brake lights glowing at the next intersection.

He needed to cross the strip, but the strip had begun crossing him.

At every corner, somebody seemed to recognize the shape of him. A woman stood outside a bar, watching him in the reflection of the window. A pair of men traded a packet beneath a newspaper near a bus bench. A kid with a shaved head followed Kellen for half a block, then peeled away when a patrol car passed.

The patrol car crawled through the intersection. Kellen kept his hands visible and his pace ordinary.

He had spent enough nights learning what police noticed. Panic. Sudden turns. Hands buried in pockets. A man trying too hard to look innocent.

He passed a pawnshop where a sign promised CASH TODAY. Inside, a clerk examined a gold chain while a customer watched the door. On the sidewalk, a woman screamed that somebody had stolen her purse. Nobody stopped. A man in a green hoodie jogged away with it swinging from his fist.

Robberies and almost everything else imaginable moved along Spenard with the traffic.

Kellen cut behind a closed restaurant and came out at a corner where three men stood around a parked sedan. The trunk was open. One man held a small glass pipe. Another had a folded bill pinched between two fingers.

Drug deals on most every corner. Sometimes the merchandise changed. The posture didn’t.

Kellen saw the only open route: a narrow strip between the sedan and a chain-link fence.

The man with the folded bill saw him.

“Rourke,” he said.

Kellen stopped.

The street noise pressed around him - engines, tires, a bus kneeling at the curb, music leaking from a bar. The man with the pipe smiled.

“Thought you were gone.”

“Wrong guy.”

“You always say that?”

“Only when it’s true.”

The man nearest the trunk shut it. His hand disappeared beneath his shirt.

Kellen looked past them at the traffic light. Twelve seconds until the walk signal. Too long.

The lookout stood on the far side of the sedan, young, narrow-faced, with a tattoo climbing his neck. He watched Kellen as if trying to place a debt.

“What did he take?” Kellen asked.

The man with the bill frowned. “What?”

“The guy you robbed.”

Nobody moved.

Kellen took one step backward.

The lookout’s eyes sharpened. “You know about the pouch?”

There it was. Not a guess anymore.

Kellen turned and ran.

He crossed against traffic as a horn blasted inches from his hip. A taxi swerved and clipped a trash bin. Metal crashed across the sidewalk. Kellen ducked behind a city bus, feeling the heat of its exhaust against his face.

Someone shouted after him.

He pushed through the bus’s rear doors just as they began to close. The driver hit the brakes.

“Hey!”

Kellen stumbled down the aisle. Passengers turned, irritated and curious. He moved to the back and crouched behind a seat as the bus pulled away.

Through the window, the tattooed lookout stood in the intersection. He wasn’t chasing. He didn’t need to. He had seen Kellen’s direction.

The bus carried Kellen three blocks north, then stopped beside a motel with a vacancy sign burning red in the daylight. He got off with the other passengers and walked through the lobby.

The clerk looked up. “Room?”

“Just passing through.”

“Everybody is.”

Kellen went out the rear exit.

A service lane ran behind the motel, opening onto another stretch of Spenard. He waited beside a stack of broken pallets, listening.

No footsteps.

No shouting.

He crossed the lane and came out near a corner store. The road ahead ran clear for half a block. He could make the next bus stop, catch a ride, and disappear into the movement.

Then he saw the black sedan parked beneath the store’s faded awning.

The passenger door opened.

Kellen stepped back.

The tattooed lookout got out alone. He checked the traffic, then looked directly at Kellen.

Not searching now. Watching.

Kellen turned toward the airport, toward the long strip of daylight and the four miles still between him and open ground. He walked fast enough to gain distance and slow enough not to run.

Behind him, a car door shut.

The lookout followed.

Kellen had crossed the corner deal without getting touched. He had kept out of the hospital, at least for the moment, and the cops hadn’t taken him in.

But the road had stopped treating him like a passerby.

Under the white summer sky, somebody had put a price on his back.

End of chapter one. 32 more chapters in the full book.