‘Watch where you’re going, asshole!’
He’d strayed over the yellow line that separated the bike lane from traffic, and was only inches from the sleek black finish of a late-model Mercedes. He turned his head slowly, put his light eyes on the red-faced man glaring at him from behind the wheel, and left them there. He kept pedaling to keep adjacent to the sedan, just looking at the man and nowhere else while bike and car moved side by side at twenty miles an hour down Washington Avenue.
A wave of uncertainty rippled across the anger in the man’s face, moving the little pockets of flesh under his eyes. He jerked his head front, then back at Roadrunner, then front again. ‘Crazy son of a bitch,’ he muttered, powering up the passenger window and increasing his speed, trying to pull away.
Roadrunner pumped harder and came abreast, kept his eyes on the man, his face empty as they sailed through the green light at Portland Avenue. He down-shifted to first gear to make it harder, almost smiled when he felt the burn in his thighs brighten and saw the uncertainty in the man’s face turn to fear.
Quit staring at me, you skinny freak, you hear me? Quit staring or by God I’ll make you sorry . . .
The voice in his head was so loud, so clear, it erased the years between then and now and slammed Roadrunner’s eyes shut so he wouldn’t see the hammer coming down, over and over.
When he opened them again the Mercedes was long gone and he was stopped at a red light, straddling his bike, breathing hard, staring down at the crooked, lumpy fingers of a hand that looked like a bunch of carelessly tossed Pick-Up Sticks. ‘It’s all right.’ His whisper was lost in the noise of cars and whistles and the grinding gears of a city bus. ‘It’s all right now.’
He turned right and headed down toward the Hennepin Avenue bridge, saw the sluggish, autumn flow of the Mississippi slipping beneath the concrete and steel on its journey south. The water looked gray here, which seemed odd to Roadrunner because it had been so blue earlier. Of course that had been downriver at the paddleboat landing, and maybe the clouds hadn’t rolled in yet – he couldn’t remember.
It was almost six o’clock by the time Grace pulled into her short driveway and butted the Range Rover’s nose up to the garage door. Less than an hour of daylight left; no time to take Charlie for his daily run down to the park on the next block. She wondered how she was going to explain it to him.
She keyed a code into a pad on her visor and watched the steel-clad door rise in front of her. Inside the small garage a bank of overhead floods turned on automatically and filled the space with light. There were no shadows, and there were no hiding places.
‘Be a lot cheaper if you just let me put the track for these lights on one of those crossbeams, miss. Hanging them up in the peak is going to be a bitch.’
Stupid man. He’d never thought that if you hung the lights below the crossbeams, the space above would be dark, and that someone could hide up there, crouched on a two-by-six, ready to pounce.
She’d been very restrained, and hadn’t told him what an idiot he was; she’d just smiled and asked him very politely to hurry with the garage; she had a lot of other electrical work for him to do before she could move in.
Once the Range Rover was safely in the garage with the door closed behind her, she pushed another button on the visor and turned off the floodlights. There was only one window in the small building – a narrow one by the side door that admitted a slice of the fading light from outside. Other than that, the darkness was almost absolute.
Drawing her weapon before she got out of the car was so much a part of her routine that Grace never thought about it. In the five years she had lived in this house, she had never once stepped out of the garage without the 9mm in her right hand, held close to her side in a rare gesture of consideration for neighbors who might not understand.
She made her way to the side door, looked out the narrow window at the patch of yard between the garage and her house, then pressed six numbers on a keypad next to the door and heard the heavy clunk of a releasing latch. She stepped outside and stopped for a moment, holding her breath, listening, watching, every sense alert for something out of place. She heard the swoosh of a passing car stirring up dry leaves on the street; the bass throb of a sound system somewhere down the block; the muted chitter of sparrows settling for the night. Nothing unusual. Nothing wrong.
Finally satisfied, she pulled the small door closed behind her and heard the soft beep of the alarm system signaling activation. Nineteen quick steps on a strip of concrete that led from the garage to the front door, eyes busy, palm sweating on the textured grip of the 9mm, and then she was there, slipping the red card into the slot, opening the heavy front door, stepping inside and closing it quickly behind her. She released the breath she’d been holding as Charlie came to her on his belly, head down in submission, the stub that remembered a tail trying to sweep the floor.
‘My man.’ She smiled, holstering the gun before she went down on her knees to hug the wire-coated wonder. ‘Sorry I’m late.’
The dog punished her with a spate of furious face-licking, then bounded away down the short central hall back to the kitchen. There were a few seconds of toenails scrabbling for purchase on linoleum, then Charlie returned at a dangerous gallop, leash in his mouth.
‘Sorry, fella. There isn’t enough time.’
Charlie looked at her for a moment, then slowly opened his mouth and let the leash fall to the floor.
‘It’ll be dark soon,’ she explained.
The dog gave her his best crestfallen expression.
Grace sucked in air through her teeth. ‘No walks after dark. We made a deal, remember?’
The scruffy, gnawed-off tail wiggled.
‘Nope. Can’t do it. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’
He never begged. Never whined. Never questioned, because whatever life Charlie had had before her had beaten those things out of him. He simply collapsed on the Oriental runner and put his head on his paws, nose nudging the discarded leash. Grace couldn’t stand it.
‘You are a disgraceful manipulator.’
The stub moved, just a little.
‘We’d have to run all the way down there.’
The dog sat up quickly.
‘And we couldn’t stay long.’
Charlie opened his mouth in a wonderful smile and his tongue fell out.
Grace bent to hook the leash to his heavy collar, feeling the excited quiver beneath her fingers and, stranger still, the seldom-used muscles at the corners of her mouth turning up. ‘We make each other smile, don’t we, boy?’
And what a wondrous thing that was for them both.
They literally ran the short block to the little park, Grace’s duster flapping in time with Charlie’s ears, her boots clicking hard on the concrete sidewalk.
The last feeble light of a cold sun flickered between the closely set houses as they ran, flashing in Grace’s peripheral vision with the distracting jerkiness of an old silent movie.
The neighborhood was quieting with the onset of cold and the dinner hour. Only two cars passed them on the way: a ’93 teal Ford Tempo with a young girl at the wheel, license number 907 Michael-David-Charlie; and a ’99 red Chevy Blazer, two occupants, license number 415 Tango-Foxtrot-Zulu.
They’re just people, Grace told herself. Just normal, average people heading home after a workday, and if they slowed a little when they saw her, if they looked a little too long out their windows, it was only because they weren’t used to seeing someone walk their dog at a dead run.