Faustino fought the urge to look at the front of the apartment building and instead kept his eyes on his paperback. He caught the wordsThere's nothing in the sea this fish would fear. Other fish run from bigger things. That's their instinct. But this fish doesn't run from anything. He doesn't fear.
Beside him, Horton peered at the newspaper. More accurately, peeredthroughthe newspaper. He hadn’t noticed the small hole in the fold when Horton first pretended to read. Horton spoke softly. “This guy showed up right after Thatch ran off. Doesn’t live in the building, and we haven’t seen him around the neighborhood.”
“Somebody new on Crocket’s crew?”
“Maybe.”
Without averting his gaze, Faustino watched the man push through the apartment building door and out onto the sidewalk. He pulled a pair of mirrored sunglasses from his breast pocket and slipped them on, drew a deep breath, and smiled, before turning left and starting down the sidewalk.
Before Horton could object, Faustino stood and started after the man, following about ten feet behind on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.
8
The cobblestone path weaved through the most beautiful garden I had ever seen.
Stella somehow managed to stay a few steps ahead of me. Her vanilla scent drifted through the air. She hummed a tune I didn’t recognize as she strolled along, something familiar, but like her, the name remained just out of reach. The heels of her shoes clicked along on the stone, and when I caught myself staring at the back of her legs below the hem of her black dress, I had to look away. To watch her was maddening. All rational thought left me with my eyes on her. This girl, this unbelievably beautiful girl. When she turned the corner a few paces ahead of me and disappeared from view, I should have welcomed the reprieve. I didn’t though. Instead, I sped up, that vanilla scent tugging me along.
On either side of me, two others dressed in white coats rolled around the trunks of a pair of sycamores, keeping the trees between us.
9
Tall and Lanky had dirty blond hair, slightly ruffled, probably a month or so from its last cut. He wore brown loafers, dark denim jeans, and a pea-green jacket even though it was warm enough to go without. Although still across the street, Faustino recognized the slight bulge under the left shoulder and knew the man carried a gun. Something in the swing of the arms always gave it away. Faustino figured him to be a little under six feet tall. Probably in his mid-forties, tough to gauge. He only caught glimpses of the man’s face.
Tall and Lanky was careful—he stopped about every other block to peer into random shop windows and study those walking both ahead and behind—a skilled behavior, willing to take time, patient. When the man turned right on Willock Road and disappeared from sight, Faustino cursed, quickened his pace, and darted across Brownsville amid the slow-moving traffic, narrowly avoiding a kid in a suped-up Mustang lost to his own blaring music.
Willock Road crossed Brownsville at a steep hill, and it wasn’t until Faustino reached the peak at the corner that he picked up the man again, just in time to see him drop into the driver’s seat of a black Pontiac GTO parked on the west side of the road. The door swung shut with a defiant thud, followed by the guttural roar of the engine.
No longer worried about being seen, Faustino quickened his pace. He pushed past a man in his thirties walking a Siberian Husky along the sidewalk and managed to catch the license plate of the GTO as the car jutted out into traffic and disappeared over the next hill, leaving nothing but the haze of exhaust behind.
10
“Hurry now, Pip. You mustn’t keep a girl waiting!”
I followed the cobblestone path through the thickening trees, this growing forest hidden away on a property larger than my entire block. At some point, I noticed that we lost the sun and my way was lit by tiny white twinkle lights strung through the heavy branches above, artificial stars set in the night sky.
The cobblestone path came to an abrupt end at the edge of a flagstone patio, at the center of which was a dark blue pool. The lights from the path continued over the water—long strands twisting together in seemingly random patterns from one edge of the patio to the next, creating a canopy of light. The water shimmered beneath, rippling and shuddering at the touch of a thin breeze. The pool itself didn’t look like a pool at all but appeared to be carved from the stone, more of a natural accident than a man-made wonder.
A pool house occupied the opposite side, a single lamp burning from somewhere within, the windows glowing with the light.
A man and a woman in white stood motionless at the pool house. I counted four others in the trees.
Stella stood at the water’s edge, her back to me, her skin pale in the artificial moonlight. “You smell atrocious, my dear Pip. Wash yourself.”
“What?”
She shifted her weight from her left foot to her right and let out a sigh. “Bathe. Clean. Scrub. Do whatever you must to rid yourself of that godawful odor.”
Stella crouched down, removed her right glove, and slipped her fingers into the water, rolling them through it. “It’s quite warm.”
“I’m not gonna—”
“Are you bashful, Pip? Have you never been naked in front of a girl?”
The truth was, I hadn’t. There was a girl about a year ago at a party out at the old steel mill on Church Road, Missy Wiedeman. I knew her from school, but we hadn’t really talked much. The two of us somehow got paired up in a dark closet during a game of Sixty-Seconds while Dunk was trying to hook up with Carla Bieder, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Dunk stole from his father flowing between the four of us. This particular game was one of Dunk’s favorites because it usually took all of five minutes for everyone to get drunk enough to head on off into the dark. I would describe the experience asintensely awkward. I tried to find her mouth, but instead my lips landed on her nose. We tumbled out of the closet having gotten nowhere, and both opted to drink rather than revisit the dark room for the rest of the night. The spectacular hangover on Sunday morning was a fitting underscore to my own, well, under-score.
I saw Missy in school the following week. We nodded an awkward hello. She moved to Philly with her family about a month after that.
Stella tilted her head, a thin smile playing at her lips. “Not even your friend, Gerdy?”
