A broad deserved a nap before her show.
I took my leave from the pub while everyone was laughing, hoisting my bag of negative net worth over my shoulder one last time. With a nod toward the tables near the stage, I took the service hallway past the johns and Alex’s office, past the storeroom, and hipped open the fire door to the alcove. I passed the storage locker under the stairs and hooked past the security door to the alley on my way up the open stairway to the landing, a sort of Juliet’s balcony outside Oona’s apartment that I had definitely performed from. Great acoustics.
Lately, you couldn’t count on the acoustics around here—only unpredictable construction noise from the other half of the building. Alex owned the whole shebang, but he’d used a management service to get the empty half rented after a long vacancy. We’d had real activity over there since the deal went through, hammering and drilling, doors banging shut as people came and went at odd hours. But the company name on the paperwork was vague. Anything could be going in and, so far, no intel, no signage. No construction crew stopping by the pub on break. The parlor game among the Jims was: What might the place turn into?
I was hoping for a coffee shop at the moment, because Alex’scoffee was an endorsement forbeer. Someone had suggested the place might become a dispensary—they were popping up all over—and I’d watched Alex go quiet, considering the possibility. He was twenty-five years out of addiction and somehow the conservator of the family business, serving drunks.
It couldn’t be adispensary, right?
When I opened the apartment door, Oona’s dogs met me, tails wagging.
I dropped the bag of my stuff inside the door and scratched each dog behind an ear. These two knuckleheads reminded me that, actually, I didn’t get a vote on what went in next door. I was just the latest stray Oona had allowed in, and I wasn’t sure how long it would last. She’d lived here on her own for years and didn’t need the break on the rent she was getting for doing Alex this favor. If I was her, I’d be wondering when I could kick me out.
I’d been getting avibealready, you know?
So I’d been trying to make myself useful, walking the dogs for her all week, taking care of them a couple of evenings when she’d stayed out for a work thing, then dinner out. She had a cousin visiting the city.
I didn’t mind walking the dogs, even at night. Bear was sixty pounds of brown mutt, shepherd forward, as Oona liked to say. Lemon, eighty-five pounds of black and fawn mastiff muscle, was what Oona called “dainty for her breed” and everyone else called apony. Letting them drag me through the neighborhood, I imagined myself a priestess lashing at the horses who drew her war chariot, or as a demon sorceress urging her hellhounds forward. Shifty dudes lurking in doorways understood we were fire and ice, destroyers of worlds, moving through.
“Is your mom not home?” I asked them. Even if you were the sort of person who didn’t talk to dogs, when you lived with dogs, you did. They ruined your rep, first thing.
“Oona?” I called into the apartment.
Lemon tilted her head, ears lifting. Bear’s worried old-man face perked up, hopeful.
“All right,fine,” I said. “Hypothermia is one of those things you can’t get twice in one day, right?”
I snapped them into their harnesses, grabbed the double leash, and opened the door. Their nails clattered wildly down the stairs ahead of me. At the alley, I hooked them up, begged them to take it easy on me, and bumped open the door.
The alley was choked with fumes. A trashy white delivery truck that hadn’t been there a half hour ago was now parked up against the garbage bin. The dogs were already barking. They didn’t like surprises. I caught a bit of movement at the rear entrance of the place next door, and then that door banged shut. “Hey,” I yelled. “Hey, you can’t park back here.”
The door stayed closed. The dogs went quiet and looked up at me.
“Was it something you said? Come on.”
The sun had dropped behind the building and the shadows were deep. The wind rushed through, lifting and thumping lids on the city recycling bins and making the old phone lines overhead whip and whistle.
As we squeezed past the truck, I noticed something was off. The front of the truck was canted at an angle that didn’t make any sense until I saw that one of the front tires was a doughnut spare, probably for a much smaller vehicle.
Been there. Well, not really. I didn’t have a car, or a license. But if there was a better metaphor for my life, I’d never seen it. We were all just limping along. Is this the best we could do?
The dogs tugged impatiently, and I was reminded I’d never brought out anything for the guy with the Dominick’s cart. But the cart was gone, and its owner, too.
We skated over the slick spot I’d polished with my ass earlier, and around the corner. As we cleared the alley, a crash sounded behind me, a door slamming closed, or open. I turned my head but the dogs were charging, eyes forward. We were on themove.
Bear and Lemon led me up the block and across the street, pokingtheir noses into the vilest patches of snow. After a few minutes and a few deposits and plastic bags, we returned by the same route, the dogs giving suspicious sniffs to the trunk of a tree they had watered themselves. Overhead, the tree branches were heavy with ice, creaking.
As we approached McPhee’s alley and home, the dogs dug in for a last good snuffle. I wrapped their leash around my wrist and shoved my hands into my jacket pockets. When I was casing our apartment earlier, I should have looked for a pair ofgloves.
“Is that Patsy Cline?” a guy said, a head popping from the opening of the alley.
The dogs lurched for him.
“Bear, no!” I scolded. “Down! Lemon,down!”
The guy took a disaffected step back, puffing at his cigarette as I was almost lifted off my feet. They were sweet dogs, really, but Oona had trained them up for security. If she needed to disperse a crowd, she could do it. When she offered a Wufers biscuit, even whispered the name, you didn’t want to stand in their way. These mutts were brand loyal, in the most vicious way.
I finally got the dogs dialed down to a low-boil growl. “Dude,” I said, a little breathless. “You just walked up on a buck-forty of startled pack animal.”
