I gestured to everything around us.
“Yeah, how could I ever leave this? Don’t worry, I’m not that sentimental about most of it. None of it’s mine, anyway.”
I put my hands out.
“Who owns it, you’re asking? Who do you think?”
He pointed to the red pager.
“Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to say good-bye to the ladies.”
I knew who he meant, of course. I left him there in the back lot of West Side Recovery, so he could spend his last few minutes in the Garden of Safes. I rolled my bike out onto the sidewalk, the shoebox tucked under my arm. There was an overflowing garbage can just a few yards away, in front of the dry cleaners. I could just leave this box right on top, I thought. Ride away and never come back.
Instead, I opened up the little storage compartment behind the seat and put the box in. It just barely fit.
As I was standing there on the sidewalk, I saw the car parked across the street. I got one look at the driver’s face, before he picked up a newspaper and hid behind it. It was the man who had come to visit the store that one day, the man who had walked all the way back to the safes. The name came back to me. Harrington Banks. Who his friends call Harry.
Gotta be a cop, I thought. I mean, who else would be doing this? I could go knock on his window, get a pad of paper and write down everything I know, before it goes any further.
I put my helmet on and took off for Amelia’s house.
Amelia’s father was gone. She was upstairs in her room. As soon as I saw her, I knew something was up.
“How was work today?” she said.
I gave her a shrug. It was okay.
“It’s funny, I went by the health club and you weren’t there.”
Uh-oh.
“Nobody had ever even heard of you there.”
I sat down on the bed. She turned around in the chair to face me.
“What are you doing for my father every day?”
This is not good, I thought. What the hell am I supposed to tell her?
“Tell me the truth.”
She picked up a pad of paper and a pen. She brought them over to me and then sat on the bed next to me. She waited for me to start writing.
I’m sorry I lied to you, I wrote.
Then I crossed that out and wrote something different.
I’m sorry I let your father lie to you.
“Just tell me,” she said. “I want to know what he’s making you do.”
He’s not making me do anything.
“Michael… Tell me what you’re doing.”
I thought about it for a few seconds. Finally, I wrote the only words I could think to write.
I can’t tell you.
“Why not?”
I’m trying to protect you.
“Bullshit. Is it illegal?”
I had to think about that one.
Not so far.
“Not so far? What does that mean?”
I’ll tell you someday. As soon as I can. I promise.
“Whatever you’re doing, it’s the reason those men aren’t coming to see my father anymore. Is that true?”
I nodded.
“It’s the reason he let me come back home.”
I nodded again.
She took the pad from me.
“How do I even figure this out? I am so mad at him for what he’s gotten all of us into. I am so mad at you for going along with whatever stupid idea he came up with.”
She got up and put the pad on her desk. Then she stood there, looking down at me.
“And I am so mad at myself for wanting to be with you every single second. No matter what.”
She put her right hand against my left cheek.
“What the hell am I supposed to do?”
One idea came to me. I pulled her down onto the bed with me and showed her.
____________________
My trips down to West Side Recovery… they remained the one secret I kept from her. Even though it felt strange to be there without the Ghost. Just me and the safes. Me and the ladies. Almost like I was cheating on Amelia with these eight mistresses.
I didn’t see Banks again. Either he was no longer watching the store, or else he was getting better at hiding it. I’d look around for him, and then I’d open the door with the key the Ghost had given me, stumble over the junk in the darkness, and spend a couple of hours spinning in the back. All the while I’d keep imagining that I was hearing footsteps.
The last few days of summer went by. Then it was time to go back to school. I was a senior at Milford High now, remember, and Amelia was a senior at Lakeland. Along with good old Zeke. So that first day back at school was tough. Griffin was long gone to Wisconsin, and even my old art teacher was nowhere to be seen. He was out with some sort of chronic fatigue syndrome and wouldn’t be back on the job until God knows when. So we had a long-term substitute art teacher, some sixty-year-old ex-hippie with gray hair down his back. Who was way more into three-dimensional art than “flatlander art,” as he called it.
So it was already looking like a long year.
When I got back home that afternoon, I took my helmet off and put it on the seat. The engine and the wind were both still roaring in my ears. So I almost walked away from the bike without hearing the beeping noise.
I opened the back compartment, took the box out, and lifted the lid. I sorted through them until I found the pager that was going off. It was the red one.
Go to the park, I thought. Go down to the river and throw the whole box in. Watch it float away. That’s the first thing that came into my mind.
I went inside and dialed the number. Someone picked up on the other end. A voice I’d heard before. He didn’t say hello or who is this or how may I help you. Instead, he simply gave me an address on Beaubien Steet, in downtown Detroit, and a time, eleven o’clock sharp. Tonight. Knock on the back door, he said. Then he hung up.
I was with Amelia that evening. We had dinner to mark our first days back at school. For better or worse. She told me she hated being back at Lakeland. Especially now, knowing that I was across town at Milford. I kept checking my watch, because I knew I had somewhere to be at eleven. When I left her house a little after ten… well, she knew something was going on. I could never hide that from her. Not then, not ever. But she let me go.
I road down Grand River, passing the darkened windows of West Side Recovery. All the way down into the heart of Detroit. I swung around the bottom of the big circle where all of the streets come together in Grand Circus Park like the spokes of a wheel. I hit Beaubien Street around ten fifty.
The address turned out to be a steak house in Greektown. This was the first year for the big casinos in Detroit, and the place looked like it was doing a good business. I rolled into the lot and parked the bike. I went around to the back door, past the garbage cans and the empty produce crates. It was a heavy metal door, just like at the liquor store. I knocked on it.
A few seconds passed before the door opened. The bright light from the kitchen spilled out into the night, casting two shadows. Mine and the man who stood there looking at me. He was a big man, and he was wearing a big white apron with the belt tied tight around his waist.
“Come on in.” He led me through the kitchen, where another man in an identical apron was hard at work at the grill. The first man opened the door to the pantry and stood aside for me to enter. I saw three men standing inside the room, which was otherwise filled floor to ceiling with canned tomatoes and olives and peppers, jugs of vinegar and cooking oil, and every other nonperishable thing you’d ever need to run a restaurant. When I stepped into the room, I recognized the three men immediately, and my first impulse was to turn and run out the back door.
“You’re early,” Fishing Hat said. He was cutting slices from a big stick of pepperoni and passing them to the other two men.