“I thought I was,” Joe said, as the sales clerk gestured to him asking if he wanted the watch wrapped. He nodded yes.
“No,” Marybeth said, “you’re the one who is going to save her skinny old ass despite herself.”
Joe thought about the forty-five miles over the mountains to Laramie from Cheyenne and looked at his watch. He didn’t know Sheridan’s class schedule, but he found himself driving south down Lincolnway toward an exit ramp to I-80 West. As he merged onto the highway he speed-dialed her cell phone.
“Dad?” She was clearly surprised. He could hear wind and other voices in the background, like she was walking along in a pack of students.
“Hi, honey.”
“Dad, is everything all right?”
“Fine. You sound frantic.”
“You never call me, okay?”
He started to argue but had to concede she was right. “I’m in Cheyenne. What’s going on?”
He heard her tell someone, “Just a minute, I’ll be right there.” Then to him: “Ah, nothing. I’m still trying to figure out my way around. It’s all a little confusing and I’m tired all the time.”
“Are you getting enough sleep?”
She laughed, “What do you think?”
He dropped it. “What’s your afternoon look like?”
The hesitation made him think for a moment the call had been dropped. “I’ve got class and then I’m meeting some friends for coffee. Why? Were you thinking of coming over?”
Joe said, “You drink coffee?”
“Daaad.” She lengthened the word out.
“Of course you do,” he said. His ears felt hot. He said, “No, I just had some time to kill so I thought I’d check on you. See how you were doing.”
Another hesitation. When her voice came back it was soft, as if she was trying not to be overheard. “It’s not like I wouldn’t love to see you, Dad, but . . . it’s hard. I’m just starting to feel like I’m really at college and not at home. It would kind of be tough right now to change plans and see you. It would set me back.”
“I understand,” he said. “Really.”
“Remember what the orientation lady said. Six weeks. Try to go six weeks before seeing your parents and it will be easier.”
“I remember.”
“Are you on the way over?” she asked.
“Not at all,” he said, pulling over to the side of the highway. He cleared his throat, and said, “So you’re doing okay? Eating well? Getting along with folks?”
“Yes, yes, and yes,” she said. She sounded relieved.
“You know what’s going on with your grandmother?”
“Mom keeps me well briefed.”
“We miss you,” he said.
“I miss you guys.”
“Remember,” he said. “Keep in touch with your mother.”
“I will, Dad. And thanks for calling.”
He squinted and dropped his phone into his pocket, then drove slowly along the shoulder for a place to turn around to go back to Cheyenne. In his mind’s eye he pictured her drinking coffee with students her own age.
His heart wasn’t broken, he thought, but it was certainly cracked.
After steaks and three beers with Chuck Coon and his family, Joe sat at the desk in his hotel room and sketched out a time line from the murder of Earl Alden to the present time, bulleting each fact as he knew them. He hoped that by writing everything down, something would jump out at him.
He was wrong.
For the fiftieth time that day, he checked his cell phone to see if he’d missed a call from Coon or Orin Smith’s lawyer. He hadn’t.
As he was once again punching in the number for Nate’s satellite phone, just in case, he had an incoming call.
Coon said, “Surprise, surprise. Orin Smith will talk to you first thing in the morning.”
30
Nate Romanowski drove slowly down South State Street in a rental car on the South Side of Chicago with his windows down and his carry-on within reach on the passenger seat. The air was a warm stew of humidity: gasoline fumes, cooking food, and ripe garbage from Dumpsters. The sun had sunk and the last of it danced on the waves of Lake Michigan, igniting the sky and the west-facing sides of the downtown buildings, and now it was dark enough that the lights came on.
Simple things, he thought. Simple things that were so different. For one, it wasn’t cooling down just because night had come. It was still as warm and sticky as it had been when he landed at O’Hare. And he’d lived so long in the awesome and immense quiet of Hole in the Wall canyon that the cacophony of pure urban white noise dulled his senses and pummeled his ears. There were still canyons, but these were walled by brick and steel and the sidewalks teemed with people. That, and when he looked up, the sky was muddy and soapy with city lights and he couldn’t see through it to the stars.
Simple things. Like grabbing today’s Chicago Tribune as he walked through the terminal and sitting down inside a crowded bar and flipping through the pages until he found:
Two Killed, Two Wounded in Drive-by Shooting at South Side Party
SEPTEMBER 6, 2010 7:13 P.M.
Two men were killed—one of them an expectant father—and two others wounded early Monday morning in a drive-by shooting in the South Side’s Stony Island Park neighborhood, according to police and a family member of one of the deceased victims.
One person was being questioned in connection with the shooting, but no charges have been filed.
About 2:40 a.m., four men were near a party at East 84th Street and South State Street when they were shot from a passing vehicle.
J. D. Farr, 22, of the 9000 block of South Evans Avenue was hit and later pronounced dead at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office . . .
So that’s where he was headed.
And he was starting to get some looks. He could see them from the shadows behind buildings and grouped up in alleyways. As it got darker, they came out under the overhead streetlights, and there were knots of gangbangers gathered in certain places: twenty-four-hour convenience stores, eateries, bars. The sharp-dressed businesspeople in a hurry down on Michigan Avenue had been replaced by the people of the night in oversized shirts and coats and trousers on Nate’s southern journey, and he wondered if they ever even encountered each other day-to-day.
Here he was, he thought, a white guy wearing Jackson Hole outdoor sports clothes driving a new rental very slowly, looking off to the side instead of through the windshield, windows down. He was sending a signal and some of them were picking it up.
The intersection of South State Street and 71st had the right feel to him, he thought. There was a well-lit BP station there, lights so bright and blazing in the dark neighborhood that it was hard to see anything else. Nate noted the young clientele inside the BP convenience store, and the high counters and Plexiglas that had been installed inside to act as a barrier between the clerks and their customers. He backed in on the side of the station, out of the harsh light. He couldn’t see inside the station, and the employees couldn’t see him. Nate scanned the light poles and roofs of adjacent buildings for security cameras. They were there, all right, but he knew as long as he stayed in the rental in the low light, he couldn’t be identified.
It was a noisy intersection. Vehicles streamed below the State Street overpass, and he heard snatches of heavy bass from open windows. But on top it was a different level of darkness and mood.
Low-slung retail shops lined 71st: tattoo parlors, pawnshops, dollar stores, hair salons. Accordion-style security gates were up across the doors, and every window he could see was barred. Lights from inside the closed shops were dull and soft.