“Now what?” I said.
Rafael pulled out his cell phone. “Now we send these guys home,” he said.
He tapped the phone keypad. When someone answered, he said, “Okay?”
The person he was talking to must have said yes.
We flew past South Throop Street. “Here we go,” Rafael said.
Ahead of us, a burgundy sedan nosed into the street from an alley between a real estate firm with a blue awning and an accountant’s office called La Oficina.
When we were about forty feet from the alley, Rafael said, “Now!”
The sedan rolled from the alley into the middle of the street. Half a dozen guys were pushing it. No one was in the driver’s seat.
We swerved around the sedan, just missing an oncoming delivery truck.
Finley’s SUV didn’t swerve. There was no time. There was no place to go.
It buried its front end in the side of the sedan.
Rafael took his foot off the accelerator and checked the rearview mirror. The Sedan horn, shorted by the crash, blew mournfully.
Rafael shook his head. “Fucking clowns,” he said.
We drove another quarter mile, turned left onto Ashland, and turned again on 19th Street. The town houses were two and three stories high, maybe eighty years old, fronted with brick or vinyl siding and concrete steps to sit on in the warm months, built so close together that the roofs almost touched. We rode a half block in, and Rafael pulled to the curb and cut the engine.
He sighed and stretched his arms toward the car roof. “We’re home,” he said.
I looked out the window at a two-story yellow brick town house. “Yours?”
“Hell, no. Yours for now.”
We got out and Rafael walked to the back of the car. He rubbed a finger on the hole that Finley had shot into the trunk. He shook his head. “Now that pisses me off,” he said.
I looked up and down the street. Three lots away from the yellow two-story, a church was squeezed between houses. Its brown brick walls rose above the surrounding roofs. The side wall that faced us had a mural, lit by a spotlight mounted on the roof of the neighboring house. The mural showed a naked woman standing in a canoe. A man stood on the water next to the canoe. Four red roses surrounded the man and the woman and the canoe.
“What’s that mean?” I said.
Rafael glanced at the mural and started up the path to the yellow house. “Hell if I know. What’s anything mean?”
TWENTY-SEVEN
A SMALL, HEAVY WOMAN with a long black braid opened the door. I put her in her early thirties, though she could’ve been younger. She flashed a nervous smile at Rafael and stared at me with dark suspicious eyes.
Rafael talked with her in Spanish and she opened the door and said, “Come.”
We stepped inside.
“This is Sanchia,” Rafael said. “She’ll take care of you.”
I reached my hand to shake hers. “I’m Joe.”
She left my hand hanging in the air. “I know.”
The light in the front hall was dim. A Spanish-language video with a laugh track played on the television in the living room. A boy who looked about seven was stretched on the floor watching. Another boy, a couple of years older, was on a couch. The house smelled of cooking-low-simmering meat and sweet-sour vegetables, smells I knew from Mom’s house if you added spice.
“Come on,” Rafael said and he led me down the hall into the kitchen.
We sat at the kitchen table and Sanchia spooned rice from a pot and ladled pieces of pork shoulder and tomatillos into bowls. A picture of the Virgin Mary watched from above the stove. Sanchia put the bowls in front of us and got us two beers from the refrigerator. After she warmed some tortillas for us, she left the room.
“Who is she?” I said.
Rafael looked like he was deciding how much to tell me. “My brother’s wife,” he said.
“Yeah? Where’s your brother?”
“In jail. Johnson put him there. I’m taking care of Sanchia right now.”
I took a bite of pork and rice. It warmed me like nothing else had in weeks, maybe months. “Seems like she’s taking care of you too.”
He lifted his beer bottle and toasted it against an imaginary bottle. “Family,” he said.
I lifted my bottle, the same. “Can’t live without them.”
We ate then without talking, like we hadn’t eaten in days and wouldn’t eat again for a week. Sanchia came in again twice, refilled our bowls, and gave us more beer.
When I was full, I watched as Rafael helped himself to a fourth bowl. When he finished, he wiped his chin and looked me in the eyes, aware that I’d been watching him. “What?” he said.
“You didn’t rescue me and bring me here for dinner because you’re my friend. What do you get for helping me out?”
Rafael looked insulted, but not very. “It is a favor. Friends do favors.”
“Uh-huh. What kind of favor do you want from me in return?”
He shrugged. “First, let’s see if we keep you alive. If we do, we can talk about favors later.”
“You know, I’ve got a bad record of filling obligations.”
He smiled big. “That don’t surprise me. Anyway, you already give me something. You help me fuck with Earl Johnson.”
He stood and went into the hall, came back a minute later with a bag. He pulled out a thin black disposable cell phone and gave it to me. “If you need to call me, use this. Don’t use Sanchia’s phone. We keep her clean-she’s got enough trouble already.”
I took the phone. “You keep extras lying around?”
“Sure. You never know when you need one.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You got four hours of talk time. Throw it out when you’re done.”
I said I would.
“Now stand up,” he said.
“Why?”
“Just stand the fuck up,” he said.
I did.
He looked me up and down, measuring me. “I’ll bring you clothes in the morning.”
“Thanks,” I said again.
“Give me the phone.” I gave it to him and he punched in his own number. “Day or night, you call me if there’s trouble.”
“You’re a saint,” I said.
He smiled again. “I’ll shoot anyone who doesn’t say so.” He walked back into the hall, saying, “Be a good boy tonight.”
A minute later, the front door opened and closed, and I was alone with Rafael’s sister-in-law and her two boys. The Virgin Mary watched me from above the stove. A wooden kitchen clock, shaped like a horse, ticked loudly. Up the hall, the television laugh track heard something hysterical.
I thought about slipping out the back door into the cold night. I could call a cab on the phone Rafael gave me, and it would take me anywhere I wanted to go. But I didn’t know where that would be. Lucinda needed rescuing but going back to The Spa Club alone and without a gun seemed like a bad idea. Going to Corrine’s house or Mom’s would bring my trouble to them.
I dialed Bill Gubman’s home phone number. His wife picked up.
“Hi, Eileen,” I said.
She recognized my voice. “Joe-” She said. She didn’t need to say anything else to let me know she’d heard about my problems and whatever else the TV news had made up about me.
“Is Bill there?”
“No,” she said. “He’s working late-”
“Thanks, Eileen. I’ll try him at the station.”
“Joe?”
“Yeah?” I said, bracing myself for another friend telling me I should turn myself in.
“Take care of yourself,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said and hung up.
I called the department and asked to talk to Bill. The desk operator said he was out of his office. “It’s important that I talk to him. Can you give me a number where I can reach him?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She didn’t sound sorry.
“Put me through to his voice mail?”
She did.
I left a frantic message. “Johnson has Lucinda at The Spa Club,” I said. “I don’t know what they’re going to do with her but it won’t be good. It’s time to end this. You need to break up Johnson’s crew now, you understand?” I left the number of the disposable cell phone and said, “Call me as soon as you get this.”