“What girl?”
“He said you’d probably say that. He told me to tell you,thegirl. Your girl.”
“How’d you find me?”
Reid nodded at a boy in a Steelers sweatshirt and cap riding a bike in circles where Brownsville met Kirkland. “We’ve got eyes.”
“Is he dealing?”
He didn’t look much older than twelve or thirteen.
Reid didn’t answer. Instead, he climbed back into the Escalade. “Get in. I’ll give you a ride. You’ve got shotgun.”
“What about my Jeep?”
“Our boy will watch it for you. It’s safe here.”
The other two got into the back.
I stood there for a moment, swore under my breath, and got in behind them.
Tess watched us from the small window in Matteo’s reception area.
I half expected them to put a hood over my head like the first time I went to see Stella at her house, but they didn’t. A Pirates game played softly on the radio—four to one, Pittsburgh—nobody spoke. We took Brownsville to Beck’s Run, then made a right on Carson, following the river with the city shrinking behind us. We passed Homestead, Ravine Street, and crossed the Monongahela River right before Whitaker. We came over a hill, and a giant monstrosity of metal loomed over us. There are several abandoned steel mills in and around Pittsburgh. The one in front of us was known as Carrie Furnace, shuttered in 1978. At the entrance, another black Escalade blocked half the road with two men leaning against the hood. Reid nodded at them as we turned and drove past toward the towering, rust-covered complex.
“Is this where he works now?”
“This is where he meets you,” Reid said.
We came to a stop at a crumbling brick building with several round metal stacks rising from behind, surrounded by catwalks and smaller structures. A maze of metal. The waist-high grass and weeds climbed over everything, slowly reclaiming the land. A small, crooked sign hung above the brick building’s door, reading Blast Furnace #7.
Reid shifted into park and killed the engine. “Come on.”
I followed him into the building, with the other two trailing about ten feet behind us.
There was no door. As we stepped inside, the temperature dropped at least ten degrees, and the light waited outside—a patch at the door and nothing else. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. I sneezed. The air was heavy with dust, smelling of damp corrosion.
Someone set up a card table in the center of the room. Three men stood behind it, four others further back in the shadows. None of them made any attempt to conceal the guns tucked into their waistbands.
There were two chairs at the table; one empty, the other occupied by Duncan Bellino.
The last time I saw Dunk was on television, five years earlier. Several men were loading him and his wheelchair into a Dodge Durango after making bail on multiple drug trafficking charges he would later beat. He had been thin, horribly so, a shadow of the person I once knew. He filled out since then. His arms looked like tree trunks. He wore a Mötley Crüe tee-shirt. A black tattoo inched out at the base of his neck. I couldn’t tell what it was.
“Remember when we came here? You, me, and Willy? We were what, ten or eleven?”
We had been twelve. About three months before the great chase down Nobles Lane. Willy slipped on one of the catwalks and got a nice scrape down his right arm. He spent the next month hiding it from his mom while Dunk and I tried to convince him the tetanus shot he got the previous summer was only good for two weeks and he’d have lockjaw soon.
As Dunk looked up at me from the table, I heard Gerdy’s laugh in my head, I heard Krendal shouting for me to bus table twelve. I thought about all the people who died the day of the diner fire, and I thought about the one who didn’t. I wanted to jump over the table, wrap my hands around his neck, and choke every ounce of life out of him. Squeeze until his eyes bulged and went cloudy. He shouldn’t be here, and I was the reason he was.
He stood, a little wobbly, but he stood. I hadn’t noticed the cane leaning against his chair. He gripped the handle in his right fist, supporting himself, favoring his left leg. Even through his jeans, I could tell the left leg was thinner than the right, perched at an odd angle.
Dunk slammed the palm of his hand down on the table. The smack echoed off the metal walls. “Look at you, my hero! He who cannot die! I told my boys all about you—shot at by robbers when you were what—eight, nine? Run over by your girlfriend’s SUV couple years after that, hell, you’ve even walked through fire. Every time, not a scratch! You can’t even drink yourself to death, and from what I’ve heard, you’ve been working hard at it. I can see that one in your eyes. Funny, after all you’ve been through, it’s the booze that leaves a mark. Can always tell a drunk by their eyes.” He shrugged. “We’ve all got our demons, I suppose. Turns out, I ain’t got so much luck, not like you. I’m a damn bullet magnet. That day at the diner, Alonzo plugged me five times—shoulder, chest, gut…the two to my leg did the most damage, though. One of ’em is still in there. The docs couldn’t fish the damn thing out, said removing it could increase my nerve damage, limit muscle mobility.” He waved a hand around. “They told me I’d never walk on this leg again. I told ’em they were wrong about that. Then I had to show ’em ’cause nobody believed me. Took a couple years, but no wheelchair anymore,” he said behind a grin. “We had a little party and pushed that thing over the side of Hot Metal Bridge.”
“Good for you.”
“Guess we’re both a little hard to kill, bounce back from adversity, and all that.” He dropped back down into the chair and lowered the cane to the floor. “Take a seat, Jack.”
“I’m fine right here.”
