There was a parting of cars for an instant and two cars were coming at each other, the same two cars that had collided down the street with me in the middle. In the middle of reality. In the middle in my dream.
I stood frozen. It wasn’t fear. It was more like resignation. The cars missed me by inches, plowed into each other, spraying my back with tiny shards of glass from a broken window.
On the sidewalk were the two girls at the Dairy Queen and Dorothy Cgnozic with her arms around them. Together they yelled, “Bingo,” and I woke up.
I dressed in my clean second pair of jeans and a short-sleeved denim shirt and picked up a clean towel, soap and razor and headed barefoot for the door. When I opened it, Darrell Caton was standing there, or rather he was leaning against the metal railing five feet from my door. I didn’t trust the railing. I didn’t trust Darrell either. His arms were folded. The last time I had seen him, his mother, whom he resembled, was standing in the same pose in Sally’s cubicle.
Darrell was thirteen, thin, black and angry. He had been given a choice. Shape up or go into the system, juvenile detention, maybe a series of foster homes. His mother was twenty-eight years old and reluctantly ready to give up on him.
He was wearing an unwrinkled pair of dark pants and a clean, dark blue T-shirt.
Darrell, who for all I knew was still a lookout for a crack dealer in Newtown, said nothing.
Sally had conned me into being Darrell’s Big Brother. It was difficult to tell if the idea appealed less to Darrell or to me. Our lack of enthusiasm for the experiment was the one bond we had.
“Darrell,” I said.
“Well, you got that right,” he said.
“What…?”
“Saturday,” Darrell said. “It’s Saturday. Nine in the morning.”
“Saturday,” I repeated, shaking my head knowingly.
“You forgot,” said Darrell flatly.
“That it was Saturday or that you were supposed to be here?” I asked.
Darrell said nothing, just waited.
“I forgot both,” I said, realizing that there was no point in going out to Manatee Community College. There probably wouldn’t be anyone there on the weekend.
“Want me to go back home?” he asked.
“How did you get here?”
“Walked,” he said.
He lived just off Martin Luther King Drive in Newtown, about two miles away.
“No, give me a minute. I’ve got to clean up.”
He looked puzzled.
“Bathroom, down there,” I said.
“You sleep in your office last night?”
“I live in my office,” I said. “Just go in and wait. I’ll be right back.”
He unfolded his arms, pushed away from the railing and stepped past me without a hint of energy or enthusiasm. I closed the door behind him and moved down to the bathroom shared by the tenants of the building and, until recently, by Digger, who had frequently spent nights there stretched out, head on a folded jacket or sweater.
The building had no name, just an address. I had nodded or avoided nodding at a few of the other tenants over the past four years as we passed each other. This was not upscale Sarasota property, but it wasn’t ready just yet to be knocked down and trucked away to make room for a bank. Not yet.
There was a level above mine with offices probably just like mine. I’d never been up there, though I had seen a few people go up the stairs and come down them, leading me to believe there was something resembling life up there.
The office next to mine, toward the stairs, was almost always dark. A white plastic sign on the door with black chipped letters claimed the office was that of Walters Estate Planning amp; Investments. If the Walters people couldn’t do better than this location, I wondered how anyone would have any faith in their financial advice.
On the first of each month, I dropped a rent check in an envelope through the mail slot of Walters Estate Planning amp; Investments. The check was made out to Marciniak Properties, Inc. for $320. When I rented the office, I had called the number on the FOR RENT sign.
The person, a man with an accent I couldn’t place, told me the office door was open; the key was on the windowsill inside. All I had to do was drop a check for the first month’s rent made out to Marciniak Properties through the Walters slot and the place was mine. No lease. No conditions.
“You pay on the first of each month,” the man on the phone had said. “You don’t pay, the lock is changed and you are out. You understand?”
“Yes,” I had said.
“You’ve got any problems, make a note, stick it through the mail slot. Don’t call me. You understand?”
“Yes.”
He hung up. I never saw him, never saw anyone going in or out of Walters Estate Planning.
I washed and shaved. I was hurrying, nicked my chin with the twice-used disposable Bic and spent a couple of minutes stopping the dot of blood. While I administered to my wound, I tried to think of what I would do with Darrell Caton.
I had the bearded philosopher to find and the person who had murdered the still-unidentified and unlocated Seaside Assisted Living victim and whoever had tried to run me down a few hundred feet from where I was now standing. More important, who might take another shot at me. If Darrell was with me when I got killed, the mourning period for both of us would probably be very brief.
When I got back to the room behind my office, Darrell was looking through my videos.
“Never heard of any of this shit,” he said.
“A gap in your education,” I said.
“This stuff all black-and-white?” he asked, holding up the box for Beat the Devil.
“Most of it,” I said as I put towel, soap and shaving things on a shelf.
Darrell was shaking his head.
“And you live here?” he said, looking around.
“Yes,” I said, sitting on the cot and putting on my socks and shoes.
“My mom and I are shit poor and we got more room than you. We got our own bathroom too.”
“Sounds nice,” I said.
“It’s shit nothing,” said Darrell emotionlessly.
“Man.”
“What?”
“How you supposed to help me? White guy who lives like this?”
“You want me to help you?”
I was dressed now. I picked up my Cubs hat and fitted it on my head.
“You gonna wear that?”
“I’m already wearing it,” I said.
“Anybody I know see me with you and they gonna laugh at me right out on the street or kick my ass when they get me alone,” he said.
“You want me to help you?” I repeated.
“No,” he said. “I want you to keep my ass out of the system is what I want. You want to help me?”
“I like your mother,” I said.
Darrell pointed a finger at me.
“Man, you don’t know my mother.”
“Saw her at Sally’s office,” I said. “All I needed to see. She endures.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Anything you want to do today?”
“You got money?”
“Some.”
“Eat something, go see a movie,” he said. “That’s what Sally said we might be doing.”
“Fine. You like DQ?”
“It’s okay.”
“What kind of movie you like?”
He shrugged and said, “Ones where people get shot and stuff.”
“A concise and well-defined aesthetic,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I was being a smart-ass.”
“Whatever. You’re bleeding.”
I had folded DQ napkins in my pocket. I took one out and dabbed it on my shaving wound. There wasn’t much blood.
I sat on the cot. Darrell put the tape down and turned to me. There was a knock at the door. It was probably the first time since I had moved into these two small rooms that I welcomed a knock at the door.
I got up and let Ames in. He was wearing his yellow slicker, no hat. The slicker suggested that he was hiding a weapon with considerably more kick than the derringer he had given me.