The big dog, the scary one, had nosed its way out of the couple’s bedroom and was now staring at him. Lloyd froze in place, petrified. He hated dogs. He expected this one to start barking and growling, giving him up. He began working on a story. But the dog just regarded him with sad, judging eyes, not unlike his mama’s. Oh, Lloyd, the dog seemed to say. Stupid Lloyd. Bad Lloyd.
The dog didn’t try to keep him from going, though. Again, just like his mama.
The alarm system in the house was no problem. He had made it a point to watch that Crow dude disarm it when they came in, so he punched in the code now, taking it off instant, then grabbed a set of keys from the hooks by the door and sailed into the cold night. It was creepy here, almost like country, super silent and darker than any night he had ever seen, even when he was out at Hickey, not that you were given a lot of chances to stare at the night sky when you were locked up.
Shit. Another car, a real piece-of-shit thing, was blocking the Lexus. He hadn’t counted on that, another car being in back of the one he wanted, but yeah, she had to drive something home. Worse, it was a stick, which was weak, unless it was a Maserati or something like that. Lloyd didn’t know how to drive stick. He’d just have to make it out on foot.
Still, again-it was so hard to abandon his beautiful plan, having already spent the money he planned to make five times over. The house was on a little rise. Maybe he could roll the hooptie out into the street by releasing the parking brake, then come back for the Lexus and head out the other end. What did he care if the Volvo blocked the bottom part? It was a weird-ass street, narrow as an alley. The houses on the opposite side, the ones whose backyards came up to the edge, were big and fancy, but the houses on this side were nothing great. Where the fuck was he anyway? He hoped he could find his way home from here. He had tried to pick out landmarks on the drive here, and he was pretty sure he could work his way back to Cold Spring Lane, which meant he could find Green-mount and then home, but he couldn’t swear which direction he needed to go. The dude had all but kidnapped him, forced him to come here. All he was doing was freeing himself, like a slave escaping the plantation.
He opened the door of the Lexus to stash the goods, and it shrieked. Fuck, that was alarmed, too, and the piercing sound filled the night. He had forgotten about the car alarm. He’d have to take the Volvo now, make a quick getaway. He’d driven stick on a video game at ESPN Zone. How different could it be? But while he managed to get the engine to turn over, release the parking brake, and roll back, the car stalled out as soon as he tried to put it in a forward gear. As he struggled with the gears, gravity took over, and he found himself rolling backward, faster and faster. At first he continued trying to start the car, then realized he might be better off applying the brake. But nothing happened, no matter how hard he pressed-shit, that wasn’t the brake. The brake was in the middle. He slammed both feet down on it hard and triumphantly brought the car to a stop in the middle of the cross street at the foot of the drive.
He sat there no more than a second, breathing hard from the rush of it all, trying to gather his thoughts, which weren’t at their sharpest. Go back? No. What, then? Get away. Go. Run. But even as he fumbled with the Volvo’s door, a huge old boat of a car appeared out of nowhere, bearing down on him. It was enormous, the biggest car-car that Lloyd had ever seen, almost as long as a limo, and strangely noiseless, but maybe his hearing was off-or stunned from the alarm on the Lexus. No, he could hear his own breath, he just couldn’t hear the approaching car’s engine. It was like a ghost car, drifting toward him, showing no sign of stopping. Slowly, gracefully, it rolled, rolled, rolled-and struck the Volvo smack in the side.
Lloyd hit the steering wheel with a jolt, but the Volvo was an older model, with no airbag to slow him down. Ribs smarting, he jumped from the car, even as an old man-a very real red-faced, flesh-and-blood old man-emerged from the ghost car and began yelling at him.
Lloyd didn’t wait to hear what the man was screaming or to offer the opinion that it was the old man’s fault for not braking to avoid the stalled Volvo, or at least trying to steer around it. The guy clearly had had time to avoid the collision, but Lloyd had no intention of pursuing that argument. No, Lloyd ran, heading up the hill beyond the ghost car, although he had a vague feeling that Cold Spring Lane and the city he knew was the other way. He ran through the midnight-quiet streets of this strange neighborhood, wondering how long a black man could run here without being noticed and, inevitably, arrested.
He reached what appeared to be a main street, slowing down to a fast walk, his lungs on fire. He would still be regarded with suspicion here, but he wasn’t quite as out of place. There were bus stops and shit, so he could always say that’s where he was headed if anyone pulled him over.
It was a long and miserable walk in the night air, with slippery patches of ice underfoot. The sounds of sirens in the distance made him jumpy. By luck, and luck alone, he managed to find his way back to Cold Spring, which took him to the Light Rail station. Here, at least, he wouldn’t look out of place.
Stomping his feet in the cold, waiting for the train to come, he couldn’t help feeling…well, angry. It pissed him off, having to leave that laptop and digital camera behind. He wanted someone to blame for his troubles, and he decided it was all that woman’s fault. She would probably make a big stink, too, even though he had left her stuff behind and it wasn’t his fault that old car had rammed him. The dude-the dude, he would want to let it go, but the woman was tougher. She had a mean streak. He’d been stupid. No, he’d been greedy, which was worse. Can’t ever leave well enough alone, was the way his mother put it, and maybe she was right. But at the time Lloyd had just thought of it as getting a little bonus, of making up for the bad luck that seemed to dog him everywhere. He had the worst fucking luck.
Gregory Youssef. It had been a name to him, a name and four numbers, nothing more. He hadn’t thought about that caper for months. Favor done, opportunity lost, just another day in the life of Lloyd Jupiter, the can’t-win-for-losingest loser to ever come out of East Baltimore. Shit. Shit.
He hadn’t known until tonight that the killed lawyer had been that guy, that the name he had buried in his memory was of any concern to anyone other than the guy himself. Did that make him an accessory? No, but it meant he had been played.
He was so fucked.
The train hissed into the station. He didn’t have a ticket, but he was counting on getting a few stops down before the conductor caught up to him and threw him off. As it turned out, he made it to Howard Street before anyone approached him, and he was able to run, avoiding the citation.
It was so cold he didn’t even try to get back to the East Side, just went to the downtown parking garage where the homeless men slept on the steam grates. He hadn’t been there for a while, but he remembered that it was around the corner from that weird-ass orange, blue, and yellow statue.
He was too late for the sandwich run, which some church group did about 10:00 P.M., and the best spots were taken, but he still found himself a manhole cover with some hot air coming up. You got kind of damp sleeping that way, but it was warm and safe. Relatively. He took his coat off and bunched it under his head to make a pillow, and his body’s exhaustion overwhelmed his mind’s jumpy agitation, pulling him into sleep almost immediately. He dreamed about horses, Corvettes, and pork chops.