But usually they stayed in Astoria. They got a bottle of Hennessy and a bucket of fried chicken and lay in bed watching cable TV late into the morning. They smoked cigarettes on the balcony and flicked the butts into the water and watched the gulls fight over them. They went to a bar on the main drag that was underneath the bridge. The boy marveled, running back and forth, gawking overhead like a rube in the big city. A massive three-storied slab of concrete anchored the trussed roadway above, and he pressed himself against it and peered along its vertical surface up into the crossbeams and struts as if drawing a bead on the secret of bridges. Then he ran into the bar to report to Costas, who was playing liar’s dice with the barkeep. Outside, then in again, tugging on Costas’s sleeve like a child, nattering about smallness and bigness, and vastness and scale. “Bolts the size of your fist!” And then mile-by-mile replays of bridges he’d crossed — Pontchartrain in Louisiana, the Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys, and one in the Chesapeake Bay that he swore to God dipped underwater and became a tunnel, then rose out to become a bridge again. And then in movies — the rope bridge quivering over a sheer ravine with a warlord hacking at one end of it, a bridge in Europe strapped with dynamite as Nazis swarmed across it, bridges that rattled apart in awesome earthquakes or got bent and twisted under the magnetic power of alien forces. He was jacked on coke and speed, wound tight and motormouthing, and so in and out, in and out, in and out, until the barkeep begged Costas — whom he knew from prison in Vacaville many years before — to please shut the boy up. “Put a leash on your pup, Costas!” And it was a good laugh for everybody, even the boy joining in with gulping, ratcheting hiccups of laughter. But back at the motel he wanted the gun so he could go shoot that fat fuck bartender in the mouth. Costas was rolling around in a tight ball on the carpet with his gun pocket underneath him, the boy kicking at his head and ribs. Then he tried for the car keys, but Costas got to them first, and the boy jumped up and down on Costas’s fisted hand until the bones broke. Costas was tenacious. There was nothing you could do to him that had not been done to him before. And even as cranked as the boy was, he relented, heaving and exhausted, and settled for the wallet on the nightstand. He took all the cash and left. He turned up in Bellingham two weeks later, grimy and red-eyed. “Happy to see me?” the boy said, pushing past Costas into the apartment, glancing at the cast on his hand. He pulled off his clothes and headed for the bathroom, reeking of the street and of whatever he’d gotten into. “What, you gonna cry?” he said, watching Costas watch him, standing naked in the steam and letting the hot water run, then stepping into the shower stall.
Inconstant moon. Costas didn’t remember where he’d heard that, but that’s what the boy was. One day, he would not come back. So the boy showers, and grateful for his return, Costas cries. He is enthralled, and he knows it. Would he do anything for this boy? Well, no. Not anything. But okay, he might. All right. Yes. He would.
Shoot him.
So Costas shot him. The gun was small and didn’t make much noise, two benign pops, like the rap of a knuckle on window glass or the click-crack of a walnut being opened. Costas hated the gangbangers with their huge pieces and all their stopping-power bullshit. Up close, a.22 stopped you just fine. He shot him twice in the belly and put the gun away, and they both eased him onto the ground. The man was watching them go through his pockets. Then he said a woman’s name and closed his eyes. They got around sixty dollars, plus ATM and credit cards. The cash would cover them tonight, and they knew somebody who’d pay a hundred dollars for each card.
They took two steps out of the hedge and another step over a grassy strip and stood on the sidewalk nose to nose with a woman staring at them. She was a chubby, moonfaced girl, all big-eyed and O-mouthed. She dropped a small paper bag that hit the pavement with a tiny thud, then rolled in a half circle and began to wigwag down the hill. The kid retrieved it before it got away. He opened the bag and peered inside. He pulled off his hoodie and looked into the woman’s face and smiled. “Chunky Monkey!”
“C’mon,” Costas said. “Shake a leg.”
The kid rewrapped the bag carefully and held it out to her. She took it. “Thank you,” she whispered. He flipped his hoodie back up, and they walked past her and loped down the hill.
“What’s the matter with you?” Costas said, and the kid only grinned. She had gotten a good look at his face, and he didn’t even care. Costas thought a moment: if, when he turned around, she was still standing up there goggling at them, then he would trot back and pop her. But when he looked, she was gone. All the better. They needed to get to Astoria. Their buy was going down and they could not dillydally.
* * *
When she got home, she dumped the ice cream down the sink and crawled into bed in the clothes she was wearing. She lay there listening to sirens in the night, to jets passing over on approach to the airport, to the drunks stumbling home from the bars on Capitol Hill. She heard the birds at sunrise and the garbage trucks wheezing up the streets. When it was light, she got up and used the phone. She left a message at work, then changed her clothes and went outside. It was a clear and cold fall morning, and she had her down jacket on. She could see her breath in the air. She walked three blocks and spotted a patrol car parked across an intersection just ahead. The street behind it was cluttered with more cars — blue-and-whites and unmarked sedans and a gray, windowless van up on the sidewalk. She asked the policeman sitting on his car what happened. He said nothing happened and told her to go on to work. “I called in sick,” she said. “I’m not going to work today.” The cop stared at her until she walked away. She tended to be overly thorough in conversation in a way that made her seem insolent or flip. She tried too hard, believing that being as precise as possible about what you thought and felt was how you connected with people.
That afternoon she read in the paper that somebody had been shot and killed. She sat at a small dining table in the kitchenette, drinking a medicinal tea. Because she had called in sick, she now felt sick. She lived in a basement apartment, and feet went by in the slot window above her dining nook — people coming home from work, footsteps and voices approaching and receding, approaching and receding. The man had let her get a good look at him. He had pulled back his hood and smiled into her face. He held her ice cream out to her. She took it. She thanked him. I should be dead. This is what she was thinking when she ran home last night and as she lay in her bed until the sun came up. This is what she was thinking now, running her hand across the newspaper spread on the table, smoothing it out. She believed she would never forget his face. She believed it would be sliced into her memory forever.
I should be dead. But I’m not.
She called in sick the next day, and the day after that. Maybe he was out there, looking for her. She stayed home and indulged in fearful fantasy. She peeked out her window at the steps that led down to her door. She jumped when the mail dropped through her mail slot. She gazed anxiously at the phone, which did not ring. She drank tea and dozed fitfully through the day, awaking at dusk to her darkened apartment. She kept the radio turned off. She did not need to hear about what had happened. A man was dead, and his killer was out there. She imagined staying in her apartment forever — the Woman Downstairs. But the romance of her fear soon dissipated, and she grew restless and bored and ran out of tea, and after three days she went back to work.