His work done back here, he wandered up front again. The store owner was now downright evangelical about the pluses of the Zenith home entertainment center. If Christ were alive today, this was no doubt the one He’d choose for His own condo.
Gabe didn’t notice the camera till last. It was partially hidden, for one thing, behind a much larger and more formidable camera, one that looked as if it would do everything except maybe wash your car for you.
The little black camera, the tiny one that looked as if it would sit comfortably right in Gabe’s hand, was exactly what he’d been hunting for.
Not that he made a move toward it.
Not that he even let his eyes linger very long on it.
For now, it was enough to know that he’d found what he was looking for. And that it was sitting right there.
Waiting for him.
He walked to the front of the shop. Only when he put his hand on the doorknob did the owner seem to notice that Gabe was leaving. “Didn’t find anything, huh?”
Gabe shrugged. “Maybe I’ll stop back.”
“Sure, kid,” the owner said. He winked at Gabe. “You have a happy birthday.”
Then he was caught up again in the ecstasy of selling the big Zenith rig.
On the bus home, Gabe stared out the window as the good neighborhoods of venerable brick apartment buildings and fashionable glass-and-steel high rises gave way to his own neighborhood, the drab and crumbling inner city outpost that was the last bastion against the onslaught of not only blacks, but now Vietnamese and Central American refugees as well. Most the cars parked along the curb resembled hulking animals dying out rusty deaths. Most of the old people and junkies and winos and garden variety crazies shambling along the streets also resembled dying animals. This was his neighborhood. His mom was up to three deadbolts on the apartment door at night and she kept talking about getting a gun. Ever since Karen had died, his mom had become a trembling old lady.
When he stepped off the bus, he caught a glimpse of the silver Mercedes just darting down an alley.
Gabe checked his watch. Almost five.
The silver Mercedes would just now be starting its nightly rounds.
The bastard.
“Honey?”
“Uh-huh.” Gabe knew what was going to come next: You mind if I don’t feel like cooking tonight, if I just heat like a TV-dinner in the microwave?
“You mind if I don’t feel like cooking tonight, if I just heat like a TV-dinner in the microwave?”
“That’s fine, Ma.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
She stuck her head out of the bathroom. White vampire toothpaste foamed around her mouth. She was in her white slip. She was very pretty in a fragile way. She was only thirty-four. She should date. Gabe always told her that, how the neighborhood kids always told him what a fox he had for an old lady, and what a waste it was that she didn’t date. She always said she’d think about it.
“You sure?” she said again with the toothpaste foaming around her mouth.
He smiled at her. She was cute just the way Karen had been cute.
He thought of the silver Mercedes again.
The bastard.
He did his homework. That was one thing about Gabe. He was determined to someday get out of this neighborhood. Karen had always been so proud of him. She didn’t care that some of her friends thought her little brother was kind of a geek, so lonely and unto himself and always poring over science fiction paperbacks and being real tongue-tied and embarrassed whenever they teased him about taking them out and things like that. When he was nine, he’d told her that he would someday be a writer and make a lot of money like Stephen King and then he’d buy Mom and her this huge big mansion to live in. They’d have a swimming pool and neat cars and Karen would no longer be ashamed to have her friends over. Even by neighborhood standards, their apartment was a pit.
He did his homework.
He sat in the living room with the TV on low playing some old black and white sitcom, and studying about how General Lee in the Civil War had marched 10,000 of his men across the Potomac River, and how the average age of the soldiers had been twelve and how most of them had to fight without shoes or blankets to keep them warm at night, and how many of them died from disease and starvation rather than wounds.
He tried to imagine what it would be like to be a twelve-year-old soldier, fighting and dying.
At first, it was unimaginable, almost a silly concept when you thought about it.
But then he thought of the silver Mercedes.
Maybe being a twelve-year-old soldier was hard to imagine.
But being a fifteen-year-old soldier wasn’t.
In the bathroom, he washed up and put on clean clothes — a black shirt and jeans — and then he went into his mother’s room.
She whimpered. Every night. That was the only word for it. Whimpering. Ever since Karen had died. She dragged through her waitress job every day and then came home and was in bed within an hour or so. Sleeping. Whimpering.
Now she lay somewhere between sleep and waking, some troubled purgatory in which her loss of Karen was worse than ever.
Over and over she said Karen’s name, dark whispers in the dark room that smelled of cheap perfume and cigarette smoke.
He went over to her and sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand and held it.
The older he got, the more she was his daughter than his mother.
He leaned over and kissed her damp forehead. She stirred slightly, starting to come awake and then falling with a childlike sigh deeper into sleep once more.
No point in waking her.
He let himself out, leaving a vague note about where he was going, careful to lock the front door behind him.
Ghosts and phantoms rode the city bus, the urban old and the urban poor with night jobs and desperate meaningless errands. In the weary yellow bus light, eye sockets were blank and reaching hands seemed to be bone with no flesh, and mouths that yawned emitted screams that only other ghosts and phantoms could hear, like those whistles only dogs are attuned to. If you looked closely at the faces of the passengers, you could see evidence of diseases, leprosy perhaps. Or so it seemed to Gabe.
The driver listened to a scratchy portable radio that bass-thumped rock and roll on a golden oldie station. He had Elvis Presley sideburns so no wonder he didn’t want to hear Heart or Prince or any of the singers Gabe liked.
Gabe got off a block from the TV store where he’d been this afternoon.
Five minutes later, he was in the alley behind the TV shop, using a burglary tool he’d fashioned himself in shop at school.
Seven minutes later, he opened the back door. The stench of burning solder was still in the air.
Moonlight through the front window created deep shadows.
He stood in the doorframe. He would not move inside yet. He had to defeat the photo cell system.
He located the transmitter and then the receiver. Both were hung at angles on opposite walls. A stupid thief would barge right in, walk straight through the invisible beam, and have the police nailing his ass to the wall inside of ten minutes.