But not yet. Instead, he would eat his hot dog and force himself to turn away. Then he'd take an hour to get back to the truck, making sure no one followed him-which was the other reason he had not yet stepped across the street into the Jim-Jack. He was being followed. Definitely. Not all the time, not even regularly, and not by the same person. Somebody a block behind him, matching his stride. You turn around and they're looking into a window. A man staring at a drugstore window. What's in a fucking drugstore window? You turn around and it's a woman messing in her purse. Women in New York don't look through their purses on the street. Or a taxi repainted green passing too slowly. He felt presences, disturbances in the field, just as he'd felt them five years ago, one time on Crosby Street below Houston, when he'd gotten a bad feeling, kicked the van into reverse, flown against traffic a block, hit the avenue, then abandoned the van and its full load of CD players next to the Grand Street subway stop, where he'd cooled a D train to Brooklyn and from there hopped one of the casino buses to Atlantic City. Won money there, too.
He'd left the truck in the new garage the whole time, keeping it locked, wedging matches in the cracks of the doors. The cops could open any kind of vehicle if they felt like it, especially an old truck, and Tony Verducci had a guy who did that, too. Regular job as a mechanic, but ran a twenty-four-hour beeper service, would open any car anytime so long as the money smiled. When Rick returned to the truck after the gym, he'd circle it, seeing if any of the matches had fallen out. He needed every advantage. Patterns, Paul had warned. He was trying to get inside a pattern that protected him. What was he waiting for? A good question. He was killing time, waiting for the bell to go off, waiting to know.
Then, on the third day, a windy and warm afternoon that fluttered the shoe-sale fliers out of the overflowing Broadway trash cans, he noticed Christina step out of the Jim-Jack. She slipped on a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap. Even across the traffic he could feel her attitude. Oh, baby, kill me now, he told himself, get it over with. You didn't score a smile too often from Christina, but when you did and she held your gaze, then all manner of indecencies were proposed, approved, and scheduled. Her eyes said, It's just a matter of time, boy. Until then, why don't you keep your hand out of your pants? She carried a paper shopping bag from one of the big bookstore chains. Head down, she crossed at the light on the other side of the street and stalked past him in her jeans and thick-heeled boots. He remembered the bite of hot dog in his mouth and swallowed. Did she always move her butt like that? He watched the other men notice her. But he could also tell she didn't want to be bothered. She'd been on her feet for hours, drunk too much coffee, smoked too many cigarettes, wanted to get at her books. He eased out to the street, began to follow her. Now is the time, he told himself, now.
She walked briskly, cutting north on the Bowery two blocks, then east again on East Fourth Street. He followed from half a block away, his neck and armpits getting sweaty, darting in and out of the shadowed awnings of the bodegas and hardware shops and other marginal businesses along the avenues, then up and down and behind the stoops on the streets. A couple of junkies enjoying the sun inquired as to his propensity to invest in a shopping cart full of copper cable stolen from the subways. He waved them off. Nice neighborhood she lived in. Half the buildings looked ready to collapse. He glanced back anxiously and saw no one following. No cars easing down the street, no one trailing down the block behind him on either side. He continued after her. He considered running up to her, surprising her. Christina, it's me, Rick. He could almost do it. But she was thinking about good things. It was in her shoulders, her neck, the way she was making the hot wind catch her hair. Maybe Paul's wife is right, maybe she met somebody already, some guy giving her beef injections. Don't get mad about it, he told himself, be cool. Do the cool thing. She stopped and fished into her bag, went inside a blue apartment building. She's doing okay, he thought, she's got a place. He eased up the other side of the block, staying at an acute angle to the building so that if she had windows onto the street she couldn't see him.
He'd check the mailboxes. He stepped up to the building and cupped his hand against the glass of the front door. Not much: a long tiled hallway, dim, littered with giveaway newspapers and takeout restaurant menus, the lip of a stairwell protruding past the plane of the hallway. On the intercom, the apartments were tagged 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, 2A, 2B, 2C, and so on. He inspected the name tags. Christina's was not there. But five of the apartments had no identification on them; although it was possible that she was living under someone else's name, hers was probably one of these unknown ones: 3A, 4C, 5D, 6C, 6D. And, he noticed, these were generally higher apartments, perhaps toward the rear, if the front apartments were A and B. He stepped back across the street and examined the building. Six floors, four windows across each floor. From the differences in curtains and window plants, he guessed that the four windows were split between two apartments. Two apartments front, two back. The front apartments were the more desirable, which meant that it was less likely that Christina was in one of them. The pattern of the absence of name tags corroborated this. The less desirable apartments would have a higher turnover rate, and therefore be more likely to be either unoccupied or so recently occupied that no one had put a name on the intercom yet or, last, occupied by the type of people who did not want their presence announced on the front of the building. Perhaps.
Or perhaps he was full of shit for trying to have X-ray vision.
He waited long enough that anyone climbing to the top floor would have reached it. No one came to any of the windows. He waited longer. The angle of the sun changed. He noticed that the apartments had various makes of air conditioner. Fucking air conditioners, the whole reason Christina went to prison in the first place. My fault, he told himself, it was my fault she got arrested. A trailer full of lousy air conditioners and she spends four years in prison.
He returned his attention to the building. The difference in the makes of the air conditioners probably meant the landlord hadn't provided them. Bought by the tenants. This, in turn, suggested that each apartment had its own electric meter, since no landlord in his right mind would provide air conditioners for apartments that were not metered. A big air conditioner pulled more juice than a washing machine. Both front apartments on the third floor had air conditioners in the window, nice ones, which, again assuming that the A and B apartments were the front ones, meant that Christina did not live in 3A, the sole untagged apartment on the third floor. That left the four untagged apartments on the top three floors. He could ring the untagged ones and see if she answered. This he did: 4C offered no response; 5D was answered by a little girl saying, "Mom, Dad also wants cigarettes"; 6C provoked a bout of godawful coughing and then one word, "?Si?"; with 6D there was no answer at all.