One word. No emotion.
I stepped past him, unlocked my door—the real lock, the padlock I'd installed myself with a drill borrowed from Victor and a YouTube video that was significantly less calming than the boxing one—and closed it behind me. The click of the padlock engaging was the most satisfying sound in my day. I stood in the dark for a moment, breathing. Then I turned on the overhead bulb, which buzzed and flickered and threw a yellowish light across everything I owned.
Which wasn't much.
Mattress on the floor—a twin, dragged up from the curb on Sacramento Avenue, covered in sheets I'd bought from the dollar store and washed three times before using. Hotplate on an overturned milk crate, plugged into the only outlet that worked reliably. A plastic storage bin with Midge's food—a bag of the decent kind, not the cheapest, because she'd been eating garbage for God knows how long before I found her and she deserved chicken and rice in small bites, even if it meant I ate nothing but ramen.
Come to think of it, me eating nothing but ramen was a bonus.
My clothes hung on a tension rod I'd wedged between the plasterboard wall and the real wall. Four shirts, two pairs of jeans, one hoodie, one jacket. Boots by the door. Everything I owned fit in a duffel bag because I'd learned a long time ago that you should be able to leave any place in under three minutes. Not because I expected to. Because expecting things was how you got caught standing still when the floor gave out.
I sat on the mattress. Unzipped my jacket and let Midge climb out. She turned three circles on the blanket and settled against my thigh, her one ear twitching, her body a warm parenthesis against mine. I put my hand on her back. Felt her ribs. Felt the too-fast heartbeat that was just how chihuahuas were built. Everything at twice the speed, twice the intensity, burning through the world like they knew it was temporary.
I stared at the wall.
The plasterboard was scuffed and pockmarked and someone had writtenFUCK THISin pencil near the baseboard, which I appreciated for its directness. Through it, faintly, I could hear Victor coughing. Morning cough. The wet, rattling one that sounded like it had been there for years and planned to stay.
I gave myself thirty seconds.
That was the rule. Thirty seconds to feel it—the weight, the sadness, the slow constriction of a life that kept getting smaller no matter how hard I worked to hold it open.
Thirty seconds. I counted them.
Then I closed it. Boxed it up the way I boxed everything up, shoved into the space behind my sternum where I kept the things I couldn't afford to carry and couldn't figure out how to put down. The space was getting crowded in there. Had been for years.
"Okay," I said out loud. To Midge. To the room. To the penciled profanity on the wall. "Okay. Think."
Five hundred dollars by Friday. Eighty-three in the bank. No job, no prospects, no one to call. The math hadn't changed. The math never changed. Which meant I needed to change the math.
Midge yawned, showing every one of her tiny teeth.
I started thinking about solutions.
Thetextcameateleven. Unknown number, which was the only kind of number Toni ever used—new phone every week, each one lasting just long enough to arrange the next thing that needed arranging.
Giardino. 2pm. Bring the mutt if you want.
I read it twice through the cracked screen. The spiderweb fracture split the message right down the middle so I had to tilt the phone sideways to make sure I wasn't misreading, which felt about right. Everything in my life required a tilt to come into focus.
Midge was asleep against my hip, twitching through a dream that probably involved the squirrel she'd tried to fight in Humboldt Park last week. I didn't wake her. I stared at the message and let the calculation run.
Toni.
I was fairly sure that wasn't his real name, the same way I was fairly sure the accent—vaguely East Coast, vaguely Italian, vaguely something else entirely—was a costume he put on with his too-expensive jacket every morning. I'd been listening to it for a year and never once caught it slipping, which meant either he was committed to the bit or I was wrong about it being a bit, and I didn't like either option.
He was a middleman. A fixer. The kind of person who occupied the space between people who wanted things taken and people willing to take them. Not a thief—Toni didn'tsteal. Toni connected. He was the hyphen between supply and demand, the handshake between a need and a pair of hands, and he took his cut from both sides and slept fine at night. I knew this because he'd told me once, unprompted, that he slept like a baby, and the way he said it made me want to scrub my skin.
He'd given me work three times in the past year.
The first was a laptop from a car in Lincoln Park. Easy—a Lexus parked on Armitage with the windows down because the owner was the kind of person who believed North Side zip codes came with an immunity to consequences. I was in and out in forty seconds. Toni paid me three hundred in twenties and didn't ask how I'd done it and didn't explain who wanted it. I didn't ask either. The laptop was worth two months of Midge's food, and that was all the context I required.
The second was a set of documents from an unlocked office in the Loop—some law firm on LaSalle, fourteenth floor, a filing cabinet that wasn't even locked. I went in at lunch when the receptionist was away and walked out with a manila envelope that meant nothing to me and apparently meant a great deal to whoever Toni was delivering it to. Five hundred for that one. I paid rent and bought myself a pair of boots that didn't leak.
The third was a wallet lift on the Red Line.
I'm not going to dress it up. A man on the northbound platform at Roosevelt, distracted by his phone, jacket pocket unzipped. I was close enough to smell his cologne. I took the wallet, walked to the opposite end of the platform, and was on the next train south before he checked his pocket. Three credit cards, two hundred in cash, a photo of a kid in a soccer uniform.
I kept the cash. Dropped the wallet in a mailbox so he'd get the rest back. The photo of the kid stayed with me for weeks.
