After a few seconds, Raj yelled, “Can’t.”
I leaned out the window. Raj’s clothes were tangled in the barbed wire. The German shepherds were running back and forth, whining, looking for a way to get to him. The cars on the road slowed as they reached the open gate. One of them pulled onto the driveway so its headlights shined on the scene.
I tried opening the driver-side door but a German shepherd came at me. I slammed the door, then squeezed myself through the driver-side window and pulled myself onto the roof. Raj was watching the dogs like they might climb the fence and eat him there. I crawled toward him. “Give me your hand,” I said and he reached toward me, his eyes still on the dogs. I cleared his sleeve from the barbs, cleared one of his pant legs.
“Get me down,” he said.
A voice yelled from the open window of the car that had pulled onto the lot. A woman’s voice. “I’ve called for help,” the woman said.
Help of the kind she would have called was the last thing we needed. “Thanks!” I yelled back.
I helped Raj free his other leg and then his arm, and he inched onto the roof of the SUV. “Can you slide into the window?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Then hold tight.”
I slid into the window and drove away from the fence. As we passed the car that had pulled onto the construction lot, a woman in her sixties watched the SUV with the bloodied man on top as though it was a strange, horrible animal that had gotten loose in southern Wisconsin. I waved to her. Her window went up.
A man about the same age sat in the car outside the gate, speaking into a cell phone. Probably to the cops.
A quarter mile later, I pulled to the shoulder. Raj crawled across the roof, slid down the windshield onto the hood, climbed down, and tried his feet on the ground. They held him.
“Jesus!” he whispered more to himself than to me. “I should be dead.”
The SUV headlights showed blood on his face and right leg, deep scratches on his arms, but, unless he had worse cuts under his clothes, nothing that would make him bleed to death, maybe nothing that even needed stitches.
“Are you all right?” I asked anyway.
He looked at me long, like it took an effort for him to remember who I was. Then he nodded and said again, “I should be dead.”
He stepped away from the SUV toward a ditch that separated the road from a farm field. He looked up at the clouded sky. If the woman and the man at the construction lot had given the 911 operator the kind of information I figured they’d given, two or three police cars were headed our way. Probably an ambulance and a fire truck too.
“Get in the car,” I said.
“I should be dead,” Raj said and got into the passenger seat.
I got in too and punched the accelerator.
The dark stubble fields gave way to the factories with empty, brightly lighted parking lots. As I turned from the county highway toward the road back to Chicago, red emergency lights flashed in the distance. I hit the accelerator again and kept it down until we reached the on-ramp.
We drove south for awhile without talking. When I glanced at Raj, he was staring out the window at the sky, like he did at the side of the highway. I wondered what he was looking at, what he saw, but I didn’t ask.
A couple of minutes after we crossed the Illinois state line, he said, “That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.”
“Yeah? Which part of it?”
For awhile he said nothing. Then, “I hate dogs. Ever since I was a kid.”
“Who would’ve known they were there?” I said. “They didn’t bark.”
“They didn’t fucking breathe! But the sign-I could’ve believed the sign.”
“Do you need a doctor?”
He felt his face and head with his fingers, looking at the blood that came away on his hands, then felt the rest of his body, arms, and legs. “No,” he said. “I’m good.”
Good was an exaggeration. “You want me to stop at a gas station? You can clean up.”
He shook his head. “I’ll do it when we get back.”
For the next half hour we were quiet again. The headlights shined on the gray asphalt, and, except for the occasional lighted signs in front of roadside businesses, we drove through a tunnel of darkness. The car smelled like the salt of blood and sweat and the sweet plastic of the new electronics we’d stolen.
When the orange glow of Chicago sharpened in front of us, I felt the tension of the night ease. I looked at Raj again. He was staring at the road now. He felt my eyes on him and he turned and his bloodied lips gave me a half smile.
“Thanks,” he said.
“No problem,” I said.
“You saved me.”
I shrugged. “What was I going to do? Leave you there?”
He shrugged too. “Thanks anyway.” What neither of us said was that his friends in Johnson’s crew had left him there.
SEVENTEEN
AS WE DROVE INTO the city, Raj’s cell phone rang. The dashboard clock said the time was 2:11 A.M. From his end of the conversation, I figured he was talking to Johnson. Johnson was telling him what to do and when to do it.
Raj listened to it all, never telling him what had happened after the rest of them left. Then he said, “I need a half hour, maybe forty minutes.” His voice was calm but I heard an edge of anger in it.
Johnson must not have liked what he heard.
“Because that’s what I need,” Raj insisted.
Johnson apparently backed down.
“All right,” Raj added and hung up. He shook his head, disgusted.
“What now?” I asked.
He told me to get off the highway on the Northside, then directed me through the dark streets to a little house on Oakley Avenue. I pulled to the curb.
“Come inside,” he said.
The place was a beige single story with an air-conditioning unit in a dormer window in front and a half dozen concrete steps to the front porch. A light fixture, mounted next to the door, shined on the sidewalk. Another light was on behind the shades in the front room.
“Your house?” I asked as he unlocked the door.
He nodded.
The inside was comfortable, but no more than. The fabric on the living room sofa showed wear. So did the fabric on the easy chair. A coffee table had stacks of magazines on top and needed dusting. A plastic bin of Legos stood next to the sofa. A carpeted stairway led to an attic room. Nothing in the place said a dishonest cop was living there.
Raj went into an adjoining kitchen, came back with two cans of beer, and handed me one. He popped the tab and raised the can in a toast. I raised mine too. “To dogs,” I said.
He almost laughed. “Not unless they’re stuffed and mounted.”
A bedroom door that connected to the living room opened, and a woman stepped in. She looked no older than twenty-five and wore a little blue nightgown. She had a tattoo of a snake on her upper thigh. Another, of a star, dipped into the nightgown from her breast. She had blond hair and full lips, and her eyes said she hadn’t been sleeping.
“Where the hell-” she started, then saw the blood on Raj and noticed me. She stopped and her anger melted. “What-” she tried again, but that was all that came out.
Raj went to her. “Ellen, this is Joe. Joe, this is Ellen.”
“Glad to meet you,” she said. Her eyes stayed on her husband. She didn’t sound glad to meet me.
She reached to Raj’s face and touched where the dog had bitten him.
He flinched, took her hand, and removed it from him. “I’m okay,” he said. “I just need to clean up.”
He went into the bedroom she’d come out of. She turned and gave me a long look like she was sure I’d injured Raj myself, then followed him in.
For awhile, the house was quiet except for the murmur of voices from the bedroom. I looked at the pictures on the walclass="underline" framed photos of an olive-skinned woman I figured was Raj’s mother, another woman who could have been a sister, a guy who definitely was a brother, a young kid who either was Raj’s son or a nephew. I looked at a glass-fronted china cabinet. The plates and coffee cups were cheap, but you display what you’ve got.