The Good Boy (28 page)

“No,” he lies, though she must have overheard his conversation.

“Well,” she says, “you can’t hide here. This is my house.”

“You live here?”

“You don’t ask me,” she says, shifty steps toward them in her huge boots. “I ask you. Who’s in trouble?”

Butchie perceives the threat, a growl coming up quick in his throat and coming out a snarl.

“Hey,” the lady says, “don’t talk to me that way.”

“He doesn’t talk.”

“Who’s in trouble?”

Joel can’t think of a lie so he says, “We are.”

She goes over to the tire and squats, picking through the junk, her bug eyes still wide on Butchie. Her fingernails are long and ridged and black underneath. “The police are looking for you, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know, I—”

“Oh sure, me neither. I don’t know nothing.” She picks up one of the crushed soda cans, shaking it to check what’s left, then raises it up to let the backwash drip onto her gray tongue. “But the police,” she says once the can is definitely empty, “they’re here.”

“Where?”

Her googley eyes roll toward the mid-rise buildings on the other side of the fence. “I hear them talking. They try to say I’m hearing things. I see them coming—they act like they’re just passing through. I
know
they put all my furniture out on the street, and they say I’m the one moving out.”

“They’re up there?” Joel doesn’t know if she’s loony or if she’s right; in either case he doesn’t want to hang around talking about the police with this lady. He straps on his pack, swipes his jacket and stands up.

“Wait,” she says, rooting through her stash, “maybe you take this for your hungry dog?” What she holds up is impossible to identify: it’s got fur, but it’s not the shape of any animal. He can’t see legs, or a head. Could be part of an animal—a squirrel’s tail? A raccoon pelt? Whatever it is, if it had ever been edible, Butchie’s nose would be doing something besides searching out an escape. Joel doesn’t need to look any closer, either.

“Thanks, but he just ate.”

“Lots a rats down here,” the lady says. “I hear them, too. All the time.” She stands up and starts toward them, reaching out like she wants a hug—or a boy and a dog to add to her collection.

“Get away!” Joel shouts and he turns and takes off, Butchie in stride, his leash trailing; Joel can only hope it doesn’t catch on something, turn the dog hostage.

“Get away!” he hears her echo, and it sounds like she’s right behind them.

Joel drops his pack off one shoulder and carries it in front of him as they tear around the fence and across the grounds behind a band of boarded-up, green-doored apartment buildings. There are no police, though he’d welcome them at this point.

They climb the rise that meets Diversey Avenue as traffic zips past, up and over the bridge. Joel isn’t going to stop, but then he clears the guardrail and the dog doesn’t. As he goes back to look, to peer over the side, he imagines Butch tackled, the crazy lady gnawing on his hind leg. But what he finds is the dog: just the dog. Going poop.

“You pick the worst times,” he says, and there’s no way Joel’s going back to pick up after him—even though the lady is nowhere to be seen, nowhere is where she was the first time she found them, so “Forget it. Come on!”

When Butchie jumps the rail, Joel takes up his leash and hopes nobody driving by wonders why they’re going like bats out of hell over the bridge.

They slow down after what feels like a mile. Once Joel catches his breath he says, “That lady would’ve liked to have us for lunch, pal.”

Butchie gets a spring in his step, but it’s probably because he keyed in on the word
lunch
.

Past a tree-lined row of duplexes on Logan, Joel can see across the next big intersection, and he realizes they’re coming up on the ’Get, what his mom calls her favorite place to buy cheap stuff. It’s a mall-size discount store with a stadium-size parking lot, and the crowd is Christmastime crazy, no matter the time of day or time of year.

Joel didn’t realize the route he chose went past this place, but it should be easy, because there’s nothing more distracting to a grown-up who’s shopping than a sale. And this whole store
is
a sale; Joel could probably pace the lot naked and nobody’d notice.

He takes Butchie’s leash by the traffic handle, keeping him close as they squeak between bumpers into the lot. Nobody notices.

The only other person there who isn’t headed to get stuff is a lady with her own backpack and a stack of neon-pink flyers, which she is trapping between cars’ windshields and wipers. She gives Joel an idea, because acting natural is smart, but acting like you have a reason to be somewhere is even smarter. He thinks about it, and realizes having Owen Balicki in his back pocket is genius.

Back on the street nearing Western Avenue, Joel spots a homeless veteran who stands between the center lines, a cardboard sign held up to advertise his plight. Joel has seen him before, at this very intersection, but from the backseat of the car. The vet’s presence makes nearly everybody who’s waiting for the signal decide there’s something really important going on inside their car—the phone, the radio, some elusive item in the center console—so that they don’t have to
see
him. Joel knows this because he’s seen it; even his mom has done this, the GPS her distraction. But Joel always looked. He always saw. He liked the man’s blue eyes.

It makes him sad, the way people in cars pretend they can’t see through glass all of a sudden, but now he also feels grateful, because if nobody sees the vet, Joel and Butchie will be just as invisible.

At the corner, they cross under the train bridge and then the Kennedy Expressway lurches overhead, big rigs and Mack trucks rumbling heavy as they barge along, too much stop-and-go to work up any speed. The noise comes in a continuous echo off the enormous bridge piles, and it’s a stress for Butchie; he isn’t sure what to make of the man-made thunder. He strains against the leash, wanting to go back the way they came.

Joel says, “Come on, Butch,” but he can’t hear himself and the dog keeps resisting, so he yells,
“Fuss!”
because a German command always works.

The dog looks like he’s been betrayed, but he follows anyway.

Until a truck engine backfires up on the expressway, the sound like thunder right over their heads, and Butchie stops, and he won’t budge.

“I said
fuss!
” Joel tries again, cars gusting through the pass now, making the din worse and the dirt and trash swirl up around them. Butchie stands down, snout tucked, eyes scrunched shut, legs shaking.

“Butch, come on!” Joel yells, even though he knows that yelling at him is just like barking and it doesn’t work. He puts all his weight into the leash and falls back on his pack. Still, no give.

He feels tears coming, hot on the dust that’s blown into his eyes, and he closes them tight. What can he do? How can he move this dog?

And how many people have seen them by now?

At once the leash goes slack, and Joel opens his eyes, and the veteran is there, hulking, Butchie hoisted in his huge arms. Joel lets go of the leash and gets on his feet and follows behind, the man carrying Butchie out from under the pass.

Butchie arcs his neck and growls and he tries to fight, legs kicking feebly as all four are trapped underneath the man’s powerful arms. The man angles his head away and keeps walking past the expressway entrance and on to the next block. By the time he stops, Butchie has conceded, legs slack, growl reduced to a whimper.

“I don’t like that racket much myself,” the vet says. When he lets Butchie down, the dog shakes from head to tail, frisky after such fright.

“I remember you,” Joel says, feeling small, and exposed somehow, standing beneath the man. Maybe because there’s no glass between them.

“I remember you, too,” the vet says.

Joel takes off his backpack and fishes around the front pocket, certain the man will make good use of his last dollar and one cent.

The vet stops him and says, “You’ve got a wonderful smile,” which is weird because Joel isn’t smiling until after he says so. He adjusts his fingerless gloves and looks up, the sky. “Better get to where you’re going. Storm’s coming, and you don’t want to go back and hole up under there.”

“Thank you for helping us,” Joel says, believing the man’s eyes are reasons for the term
true blue.

“Go on, get home.” The vet smiles, the kindest one Joel’s seen, and then he turns, heading back to the pass, the cardboard Help sign that everyone ignores tucked into his back pocket.

19

“That’s got to be the guy,” Pete says. “Desmond Jenkins.” ICLEAR says he’s a nineteen-year-old with drug and theft convictions who goes by the Hustler moniker Dezz-yo. He lives over in Austin, the city’s wild west.

“His name’s right after Fowler’s,” Rima says. “He probably sat behind Zack in class. Whispered in his ear.”

“Copied his answers.” Pete slugs the end of his coffee, disgusted.

“Should we run the rest of them? There are three more: Juan Avila, Robert Billegas, DeWilliam Carter.”

“DeWilliam?”

“You know him?”

“I don’t know where people come up with a name like that. What’s wrong with plain old William? Or Bill?”

“I like the name.”

“Of course you do. You probably like Ja’Kobe, too.” Pete takes Leroy’s list. Rima helped him run the names—from the bottom up, since she wanted to know about Bernard White first. Turns out Bernard has no relation to Ja’Kobe or any affiliation with the Hustlers. He’s just a seventeen-year-old kid who got arrested for sexual assault in Englewood last year. Sitting on one prior conviction, he’s still in the joint waiting for trial, so even if he had a connection, he’s cut off.

“What do you think?” Ri asks.

Pete rubs his eyes; he can’t think. The clock on the dash says it’s past noon. Joel’s been missing for a little more than twelve hours.

He hates that the minutes have given way to hours; God help him if he starts to count the days.

“I’m going to take a ride over there,” Pete says. “See if Jenkins will whisper in my ear.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No way. I don’t like going anywhere near Austin and I’ve got a gun. You won’t see another white female for miles unless she’s waving a bill from the passenger side of a slow-moving vehicle, looking to score some charlie and hump it back to the suburbs.”

“I’m coming.”

Pete jams his empty coffee cup between the seat and the door. “How do you say
no
in Spanish?”

“Come on, Petey. I’m good with people.”

“These aren’t people.”

“Wow. That’s awful.”

“It’s true. They don’t think like we do. They don’t care. They have a different set of rules.”

“You do recognize that you’re operating under your own set of rules right now.”

Pete starts the car. “I’m taking you home, okay? This isn’t a buddy movie.”

“I’m afraid it’s going to be another headline.”

“At least I’ll have done something to deserve it.” Pete merges onto the Kennedy. “I don’t know why you’re so worried. I just want to talk to the guy.”

“Talk to him? Pete. You think he took Joel. You want to kill him.”

“
You
think he took Joel. I don’t think anything. I just want to find out if Jenkins was at the party. If maybe he got bit by my dog, or he knows who did.”

“You think he’s going to talk to you?”

“I bet he’ll be willing to tell me whatever I want to know if it doesn’t involve his being on parole and allegedly involved in a shooting.”

“What do you think he can tell you about Joel?”

“I don’t know, Ri. But Joel could be anywhere, and that’s not a place I can find.”

“You’re hoping for a map.”

“I already have a map. What I need is a trail. A trail leads somewhere.”

“You’re just going to talk.”

“Jesus, Rima: enough.”

“If you’re just going to talk,” she says, “then you won’t mind if I wait in the car.”

He does mind—it’s illegal, not to mention stupid—but taking her home will add another twenty minutes to the drive. And also, she’s probably the only person he can talk to, if he feels like talking. “What’s Jenkins’ address?”

“It’s 1070 North Mayfield.”

Mayfield is in Austin and it’s also in the Div, where Hustlers and Vice Lords maintain a peaceful coexistence until they don’t. Then shit gets worse. “If I let you come,” Pete says, “you have to wear my vest.”

“As long as it goes with my outfit.” Her blue lips stretch into a grin.

Pete uses the cherry lights to slip through a series of Saturday-busy intersections. The sun hangs at one o’clock, bright over the top of a thick cloud front on the approach, its underbelly dark and heavy.

On the other side of Humboldt Park, the neighbors are out in the hood. The difference between being
out
in this part of town and, say, Lincoln Park is a matter of time: here, a few people find one another—on the corner, in front of a tire shop, outside a convenience store—and there goes the afternoon. In more affluent areas, nobody hangs around; one person is going for a walk while another stops by the post office and someone else picks up lunch. Should they run into one another, they’ve only crossed paths. Nobody has time to stand around and shoot the breeze.

It’s too bad they don’t. Even on their middle-income street, Pete wouldn’t recognize half his neighbors let alone have a clue what to talk to them about. On the other hand, if they lived in this neighborhood and Joel ran away, every single person in a ten-block radius would have some idea where he had gone. Of course, they wouldn’t give that information to the police. Probably not to a dad, either.

“I have that shirt,” Ri says, pointing out a trio of teen girls gathered outside the M & M Food Mart who’ve turned to check out the squad. Among them, Pete notices a girl about McKenna’s age whose top is cut out in the front and stretched tight around an electric-yellow triangle-top bikini.

“She’s wearing it backwards,” Rima tells him.

“She wants people to see her … what? Her intelligence?”