No Good Deeds Part 5

"I have a gun. That's the best form of self-defense."

""Can I see it?"

"No." But Lloyd's question reminded Tess that she needed to lock the Beretta in the safe next to her bed. She didn't always remember, but with a young guest in the house, she had to be at her most conscientious.

She came back and watched Lloyd clear the table, which had more than its share of suspenseful moments. Her everyday dishes were also her only dishes, a mismatched collection of state commemoratives culled from flea markets and yard sales. They would be impossible to replace, except via eBay, which always struck her as cheating. The quest should be as important as the object when one was a collector. But Tess was trying not to be a person who prized things too highly, so she clenched her jaw and let Lloyd go, reasoning that his agreeable helpfulness was more important than keeping North Dakota in one piece.

After dinner they watched Minority Report on DVD, which Lloyd seemed to like once he got used to the idea that it was supposed to be the future. "Parts of Baltimore look worse 'n that," he said dismissively of Philip K. d.i.c.k's Washington as imagined by Spielberg and his designers. The movie over, they left him to his own devices, telling him to feel free to use the television or Tess's laptop. "You can also read anything you like," Crow said, gesturing to the shelves in Tess's office.

"You got any comics?" Lloyd asked.

"No, but I've got some books about comics," said Crow, ever game. He brought down Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Jay Cantor's Krazy Kat, then grabbed an omnibus volume of d.i.c.k. "And this is the book that inspired the film we saw tonight."

Tess stifled a laugh, but not the surge of affection behind it. Where some might have seen an almost woeful ignorance in Crow's suggestions, she understood that he loved these books. And whatever Crow loved, he wanted to share. Besides, Lloyd might like Philip K. d.i.c.k, although she would have been inclined to start him on Richard Stark or Jim Thompson, something hard-boiled and brutal.

Curled up in bed with her own book, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Tess finally had a chance to tell Crow what had been bothering her all evening.

"He didn't recognize Youssef's face. But the name-the name seems to bother him. He changes the subject whenever it comes up."

"So?"

"How do you know the name but not the face? Sure, certain beat cops are known on the street. But I'd be surprised if the average street kid could name the Baltimore state's attorney, much less an a.s.sistant U.S. attorney. If you've heard of Gregory Youssef, it's because he was murdered. But Lloyd hadn't made that connection. He knew that a prosecutor had been murdered, he knew the name Gregory Youssef. But in his mind the two had nothing to do with each other."

"Hmmmmmm." Crow was lost in the world of Bernard Cornwell.

"Hey. Hey. I'm just as interesting as the Napoleonic era," Tess said.

"Prove it."

In her opinion she proceeded to make her case quite persuasively.

6.

Barry Jenkins was the type of guy who always found a way to turn his weaknesses into strengths. Slow, stocky, and patient, he had learned early to make the choices that rewarded his build and temperament. In high school he crouched behind home plate as a catcher, blocked on the football team, then dated the girls who were impressed by such achievements. Work with what you've got, he told the guys he had mentored over the years, and you'll always get ahead. And for most of his time in the FBI, that advice had proved golden.

The bar at the Days Inn on Security Boulevard also fell squarely into the category of working with what you were given. While the other federal agencies were downtown, the FBI was tucked away in this b.u.t.t-ugly bit of suburbia near the Social Security complex in Woodlawn. This physical distance from the DEA, ATF, and IRS guys was supposed to emphasize the Bureau's superiority. At least that had been the rationale once upon a time, and that att.i.tude still prevailed. So let those other guys sip imported beer and c.o.c.ktails in those desperate-to-be-chic downtown bars. And never mind that most of his coworkers went to an old-fashioned tavern in the heart of old Woodlawn. Barry preferred the bar at the Days Inn, a straight-up, honest place. Back in the day, it had been a family-owned motel with pretensions and a fancy restaurant, Meushaw's. That is, Barry's family, which really didn't have anything to compare it to, had thought it ritzy. His folks had brought him here for supper after his first communion, and Barry had considered himself pretty worldly, ordering the chicken Kiev. In fact, it was at the moment that his fork pierced the breaded crust and b.u.t.ter oozed forth that he had vowed to have a life where he would see Kiev, or whatever it was called now, see the whole wide world. And he had. He could honestly say he had done what he dreamed of doing when he was a kid, and how many people could make that claim?

Sure, the younger agents considered Jenkins washed up, one of those doddering types just marking time until he hit mandatory retirement. But that a.s.sessment, like Meushaw's demotion to the Days Inn bar, was all about appearances, wasn't it? Jameson's was Jameson's no matter where you drank it, or in whose company. Barry was still Barry-shrewd beneath his good-boy exterior, a.n.a.lytical, easygoing with people. It just depended on how you looked at things, and Jenkins was an expert at considering situations from every angle. He could always see the whole where others saw parts, hold the whole playing field in his head. "Court vision," they called it in basketball, but that was one game Jenkins had never played. No speed, no jump. Again, it was all about knowing what he could do and what he couldn't, and the latter knowledge mattered just as much, if not more. If Barry were one of the fabled blind men locked up with the elephant, he would feel it from tail to trunk, bottom to top, and when he left the room and removed his blindfold, he would know it was a G.o.dd.a.m.n elephant.

Mike Collins arrived at 10:00 P.M. sharp, on-the-dot punctual as always, which accounted for his nickname-"Bully," short for Bulova, or so the official story went. It had proved to be an unfortunate nickname for a while there, but Collins had ridden out that mess like the soldier he was. Big and handsome, he could have stepped off a recruiting poster-if the DEA had recruiting posters. But what made Collins remarkable, in Jenkins's opinion, was that he actually had all the qualities that people projected onto this kind of masculine attractiveness. Nerves of steel, b.a.l.l.s of bra.s.s, heart of gold. All those metals.

"I can't believe you wanted to meet in this s.h.i.thole," Collins said after ordering a bottle of Heineken and bringing it to Barry's table, one of several along the bank of windows that overlooked this unlovely stretch of Security Boulevard. But the table was isolated, and the reflection made it easy to see if anyone was in earshot.

"I like it out here," Jenkins said, thinking, I don't drive to you. You drive to me. "Why'd you want to meet anyway?"

"This kid prosecutor tried to chat me up on the smoking pad today, make conversation about Youssef."

"So? That's bound to happen from time to time. A person's coworker gets killed, it's natural to gossip about it."

"He noticed something about the E-ZPa.s.s. Youssef used it on the way into town, when he was coming up 95 from his house. But on the way out, he went through a pay lane."

"We've been over that. The pa.s.s works whatever lane you choose."

"Sure, which makes sense when the killer is heading north afterward. But this prosecutor pointed out that traffic was backed up that night, said it wasn't logical to sit there in a long line when a guy's trying to get out, get some satisfaction, get home again."

Jenkins took a drink, which burned a little. Reflux. Even his own body was turning on him. "He's right, but what's it to him?"

"My opinion? He's sniffing around, looking for a way to insert himself."

"So what did you say?" He tried to keep his tone super casual, although Jenkins always worried a little about Collins on the verbal front. Their extremely unofficial task was to gather information, not disseminate it. Jurisdictional proprieties may have placed the case under the Howard County police, but that didn't mean the federal agencies weren't going to keep tabs on it. Headquarters had technical oversight, but the locals wanted their own eyes and ears. Of course, it was a sign of how queasy the case made everyone that they let Jenkins be the liaison. If they really cared what had happened to Youssef, they would have wanted someone in better standing to play monitor.

"I said"-Collins paused, clearly proud of himself-"I said, "Do you spend a lot of time thinking about what goes on in the mind of a guy about to get his d.i.c.k smoked by another guy?""

"Good answer." In his relief Jenkins bellowed a bit, sounding like the guy on the old quiz show with the families. The original emcee, the c.o.c.ky Brit from Hogan's Heroes, not the nondescript guy who had the hosting duties now. "That'll keep him away from it."

"For now," Collins said. "But I think he might keep poking."

"Who is this guy?"

"One of the newer hires, been relegated to second chair so far. Booted a come-up or two, but all the young ones do that."

"Have I-"

"No, he's too new. And too gung ho. What do you want to bet he'll try to take anything to court when his time finally comes?"

"Sounds too stupid to be trouble," Jenkins said, knowing that stupid people could be extraordinary trouble, the very worst kind of trouble. Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son. What movie was that? Animal House. Jenkins had been just a little too old to get that when it was released-out of college, already at the Bureau, already a father-but his older nieces and nephews repeated lines from that movie as if they were the Baltimore catechism. Fact was, Jenkins had felt a pang of sympathy for the would-be keepers of order-Marmalard, Neidermeyer, and most of all, Dean Wormer. Well, the world had learned its lesson, hadn't it? You sacrifice order at a price. Learned it late, but learned it at last. Jenkins had been one of the voices screaming in the wilderness along with John O'Neill, another FBI agent, another guy they screwed over just because they didn't like his personal style. O'Neill had tried to tell them about the impending threat from Osama, but no one wanted to hear. They busted his b.a.l.l.s over a briefcase, forced him out. September 11 was O'Neill's first month on the job as head of security for the World Trade Towers, and the one man who had been screaming about bin Laden since the bombing of the USS Cole ended up dead. You want to keep planes from crashing into buildings, you need a few more Dean Wormers in the mix.

"He's ambitious," Collins said. "You can almost smell it on him."

"Ambitious and stupid? Now, that's something we can work with. If it comes to that. For now, stay still. Can you do that for me, Bully? Stay still, stay quiet."

"Absolutely."

Collins tipped the lip of his bottle against Jenkins's shot gla.s.s, and they both drank. Jenkins studied the amber legs running down the inside of his gla.s.s. He had watched the bartender pour it straight from the Jameson bottle, but he was suddenly dubious that he had gotten what he paid for. Would the bartender have dared to pull such a trick on him? Yeah, he would have. Because the only thing you got for being a regular in the Days Inn bar on Security Boulevard was loser status, even in the eyes of the losers who took your generous tips and smiled to your face, pretending fealty. No one had a nose for weakness like the bowed and bloodied.

That's why Jenkins liked Collins. Loyal as a dog. Loyal as the lion was to the guy who pulled the thorn from his paw. Collins would die for him, literally. The kid loved him more than his own kids did.

Then again, Jenkins hadn't divorced Collins's mom and taken up with a c.o.c.ktail waitress who ended up being Miss Ballbuster of the new millennium. f.u.c.kin' Betty. Jenkins had learned the hard way that a guy didn't have to have much money to attract a gold digger. Betty had seen the way he lived in New York-the restaurants, the clubs-and never made the distinction that it was because of his status in the Bureau, not his salary. And when the status was gone, along with those paltry perks-poof, so was Betty. Neatest little magic trick he had ever seen, a 120-pound woman disappearing into thin air. He tried to tell her that they would live better in Baltimore, that most agents preferred it over New York or Washington. Betty didn't buy it.

But then, Betty knew her strengths, too. She claimed she was thirty-five when they met, but she was most certainly on speaking terms with forty. She was one of those natural hard-bodies, a freak gift from the G.o.ds, because the most strenuous thing Betty ever did was lift a gla.s.s to her mouth. The face-the face had been hard, too, and not in a good way. She had required a good thirty minutes at the dressing table each morning to get it to live up to the body, to mask the lines she'd gotten from squinching up her features and thinking about how she was going to separate this guy or that guy from whatever he had. The way Betty saw it, she had maybe one more husband left in her, and she couldn't afford for it to be Jenkins, not once he was all but demoted.

He glanced at his own reflection in the window. Eighteen months. Eighteen months to the mandatory retirement age. He could walk now with a decent enough pension, but he wouldn't give them the satisfaction. He'd do his time, get to the end, then set up the sweetest little security gig he could find. In the meantime he would pretend he gave a s.h.i.t about solving the Youssef case. A loser, even his enemies would concede that. It wouldn't be his fault if an arrest were never made. All anyone really wanted was for it to recede in the public imagination, an easy enough trick. The average joe couldn't hold a thought for twenty minutes, which is why all the world's problems kept being trumped by the missing-white-woman-of-the-week.

He caught a vision of his retirement party, sad and empty. In fact, it would probably look a lot like this-him and Collins, huddled at a table together, two pariahs. In a fair world, a true meritocracy, they would be known for the heroes they were. But Jenkins knew that nothing was more unfair than the bureaucracies allegedly devoted to justice.

7.

Lloyd had to wait until almost midnight before the house was quiet and he was sure that everyone was asleep. It had freaked him out a little, the sounds of s.e.x coming from the other bedroom, not that he hadn't heard those noises before. Made them, too, but that was different. These people were old. Well, not old-old, but old enough. And weird. It was like the Brady Bunch parents rocking the bed, like his mama and Murray, and who wanted to think about that s.h.i.t?

The woman did have a nice shape, though. Solid, not that skinny, flat-a.s.s body that so many white women prized. But she had to be his mama's age, or close to.

Lloyd Jupiter's mother, Berneice, had been sixteen when he was born, and she hadn't done so bad by him. Not great, but not particularly bad, all things considered. She had pretty good judgment about the men she brought home, if you didn't include Lloyd's father in the mix. He was locked up or dead. At any rate, he hadn't been around for years. Her latest man, father to Lloyd's youngest brother and sister, was downright reliable, sticking with her two years now. Which was good for his mama, but not so good for Lloyd, "cause Murray was one of those Jamaican tight-a.s.ses who had some definite ideas about what Lloyd should be doing, like school, and not doing, like just about everything else.

Given the tension between Murray and him, Lloyd hadn't been around to see his mama for a while. She was beginning to ride him, too, which wasn't like her. Before Murray, Lloyd had always been able to charm her, get his way, shake a few dollars loose from her billfold. After all, he was her firstborn, and she felt guilty about so much-his useless father, how her attention got stretched with the addition of each new kid. In her way, she loved him best.

But the last time Lloyd had dropped by, she'd been out-and-out p.i.s.sed at him-furious over the rumor that he'd been working for Bennie Tep, even more furious at the news that he'd been let go. The truth was somewhere in between. Lloyd didn't work for Bennie, but some of his buddies did, and they let him hang. Bennie liked Lloyd. People always liked Lloyd, if he wanted them to. But he wasn't allowed any role in the main business, not after a few disastrous attempts at playing tout. He could do the math, but those fiends were fierce, rushing him so that he lost his place in the count. Which was fine with Lloyd. He hated all work, hated anything with a boss-jobs, school, family. He needed to find a way where he could be the man in charge, but he wasn't sure what that was. Dr. Ben Carson had come to his grade school when he was a kid, and that had seemed kind of cool, a black man opening up little children's hearts and fixing them, but it meant so much school, and Lloyd was through with school the moment he turned sixteen last fall.

"I heard about you," his mother had said, her voice shrill, her finger in his face. "Getting high and shorting the count. You incompetent, a fiend, or just a thief?"

He had shrugged, refusing to align himself with any of those p.i.s.s-poor choices.

"You know, you can't even work at McDonald's if your cash register is light at the end of ev'ry shift."

"I ain't gonna work at no f.u.c.kin' McDonald's."

"Honey, that's what I'm saying. You ain't gonna work anywhere, you don't get your act together."

It was a lot of s.h.i.t to put up with, just for five or ten dollars. He could panhandle that much in a good afternoon.

He hadn't been getting high anyway, not really. He smoked a blunt now and then, nothing more. What was wrong with that? Look at these two, guzzling all that wine with dinner. Well, okay, they didn't guzzle exactly. It wasn't like they were tipping Thunderbird from a paper bag. But that stuff f.u.c.ked up all different parts of your insides, while weed just messed with your lungs a little, and you had to smoke a lot to do real damage. He had learned all that back in school, the various dangers of drugs and alcohol and cigarettes, and while they tried to say that weed was bad, Lloyd knew it wasn't. Sick people got to smoke it in some states, so how bad could it be?

He crept out of the half-a.s.s room they had stuck him in and paused in the hallway, listening. The dogs were his main concern, especially the Doberman. The big, rat-looking dog didn't seem so much a threat, not unless it got close enough to breathe on you. Dog's breath was nasty. He waited, his lies ready-just going to the bathroom, needed a drink of water-but nothing happened. No boards creaking, no long toenails clattering on the wooden floors, no lights coming on.

Time to go.

Part of his brain warned him to do just that, only that. Go. Just get away from these people, put some distance between him and them, and hope he never saw them again. In the most paranoid part of his brain, he had almost persuaded himself that he'd been set up, that the woman had sent her whipped boyfriend to go looking for him and drag him back here, knowing what he'd done. But naw, that couldn't be. It was just his usual s.h.i.tty-a.s.s luck, the life of Lloyd. Try to make a buck, nothing more, end up with this gungho dude and his detective girlfriend, who seemed to know something that n.o.body was supposed to know. Why wouldn't she stop saying that name? Youssef. Youuuuuuuuuuuuussefffffffff. Like she could read his mind. No, the smart thing was to get out.

Thing was, he had come over the threshold with plans, and Lloyd always fell in love with his own plans. If he pictured himself doing something or having something, no matter how small, he had to try to follow through. There had been a poem in school about how bad that was, putting off a dream. Lloyd had allowed this guy to bring him here because he thought there would be something in it for him, and he had been clocking stuff from the moment he got inside the house, calculating what he could carry, what he could sell. In his head he had already made fifty, a hundred dollars easy.

He retreated into the study and surveyed the portable goods available to him. It was some trifling s.h.i.t. The jewelry would be in the bedroom, obviously off-limits now. He should have sneaked back there earlier. No, never mind, the woman didn't look like someone who went in for good stuff, judging by her watch and the small gold hoops in her ears. But there was the laptop and a digital camera. Also some DVDs, although they didn't look like the kind that would generate much cash. They all had the same t.i.tle. He sounded it out silently: Cri-ter-ion Collection. Wasn't that the guy who wrote the book about the dinosaurs? Lloyd had liked that book, even better than the movie, because the book didn't let anyone off the hook. The mad-scientist dude was pecked to death by his own little monsters, while the movie made out that he was some white-bearded Santa Claus guy. Villains needed to be punished proper, in Lloyd's opinion, although he didn't always agree with the movies on who the villains were. Like, Spider-Man 2. That octopus dude had a right to be p.i.s.sed.

No, wait: "Criterion Collection" must be the company that made these DVDs. The real t.i.tles were for sure bizarre. Yojimbo. Rash.o.m.on. Ran. Ran from what? They were in black and white, too, which meant they weren't worth carrying out of here. Too bad, because they looked kind of interesting, like old-fashioned kung fu movies. Throne of Blood. That one he had to take, even if he didn't have a DVD player his own self. Dub did.

There was a big jar of change, but it was too large to carry, and fishing out the quarters would make too much noise. The other electronics were all too big, too, and not at all up-to-date. No flat screen, no plasma, just a s.h.i.tty-a.s.s Sony no more than nineteen inches, although it would still bring a little something. Then again, he was taking the Lexus, so he could carry more. But he had to travel part of the way on foot, at the end. So this was all he was going to get, one armful's worth.

At the last minute, he opened up a little box he had spied on her desk, a blue oval with a horned horse painted on it, to see if jewelry might be hidden in it. Unicorn, that was what you called it. Not horned horse, unicorn, and this unicorn was hiding a stash of weed. They had weed. f.u.c.kin' hypocrites, like all grown-ups. Okay, not exactly, it wasn't as if they had been in his face, wagging fingers, saying no-no-no like his mama, who used to say yes an awful lot, pre-Murray. She was clean now, which should have been good, but it wasn't somehow. Man, it p.i.s.sed Lloyd off for reasons he couldn't quite explain even to himself, this stash tucked away in a painted box. He pocketed the box, then headed out into the hall, laptop under his arm.

The big dog, the scary one, had nosed its way out of the couple's bedroom and was now staring at him. Lloyd froze in place, petrified. He hated dogs. He expected this one to start barking and growling, giving him up. He began working on a story. But the dog just regarded him with sad, judging eyes, not unlike his mama's. Oh, Lloyd, the dog seemed to say. Stupid Lloyd. Bad Lloyd.

The dog didn't try to keep him from going, though. Again, just like his mama.

The alarm system in the house was no problem. He had made it a point to watch that Crow dude disarm it when they came in, so he punched in the code now, taking it off instant, then grabbed a set of keys from the hooks by the door and sailed into the cold night. It was creepy here, almost like country, super silent and darker than any night he had ever seen, even when he was out at Hickey, not that you were given a lot of chances to stare at the night sky when you were locked up.

s.h.i.t. Another car, a real piece-of-s.h.i.t thing, was blocking the Lexus. He hadn't counted on that, another car being in back of the one he wanted, but yeah, she had to drive something home. Worse, it was a stick, which was weak, unless it was a Maserati or something like that. Lloyd didn't know how to drive stick. He'd just have to make it out on foot.

Still, again-it was so hard to abandon his beautiful plan, having already spent the money he planned to make five times over. The house was on a little rise. Maybe he could roll the hooptie out into the street by releasing the parking brake, then come back for the Lexus and head out the other end. What did he care if the Volvo blocked the bottom part? It was a weird-a.s.s street, narrow as an alley. The houses on the opposite side, the ones whose backyards came up to the edge, were big and fancy, but the houses on this side were nothing great. Where the f.u.c.k was he anyway? He hoped he could find his way home from here. He had tried to pick out landmarks on the drive here, and he was pretty sure he could work his way back to Cold Spring Lane, which meant he could find Green-mount and then home, but he couldn't swear which direction he needed to go. The dude had all but kidnapped him, forced him to come here. All he was doing was freeing himself, like a slave escaping the plantation.

He opened the door of the Lexus to stash the goods, and it shrieked. f.u.c.k, that was alarmed, too, and the piercing sound filled the night. He had forgotten about the car alarm. He'd have to take the Volvo now, make a quick getaway. He'd driven stick on a video game at ESPN Zone. How different could it be? But while he managed to get the engine to turn over, release the parking brake, and roll back, the car stalled out as soon as he tried to put it in a forward gear. As he struggled with the gears, gravity took over, and he found himself rolling backward, faster and faster. At first he continued trying to start the car, then realized he might be better off applying the brake. But nothing happened, no matter how hard he pressed-s.h.i.t, that wasn't the brake. The brake was in the middle. He slammed both feet down on it hard and triumphantly brought the car to a stop in the middle of the cross street at the foot of the drive.

He sat there no more than a second, breathing hard from the rush of it all, trying to gather his thoughts, which weren't at their sharpest. Go back? No. What, then? Get away. Go. Run. But even as he fumbled with the Volvo's door, a huge old boat of a car appeared out of nowhere, bearing down on him. It was enormous, the biggest car-car that Lloyd had ever seen, almost as long as a limo, and strangely noiseless, but maybe his hearing was off-or stunned from the alarm on the Lexus. No, he could hear his own breath, he just couldn't hear the approaching car's engine. It was like a ghost car, drifting toward him, showing no sign of stopping. Slowly, gracefully, it rolled, rolled, rolled-and struck the Volvo smack in the side.

Lloyd hit the steering wheel with a jolt, but the Volvo was an older model, with no airbag to slow him down. Ribs smarting, he jumped from the car, even as an old man-a very real red-faced, flesh-and-blood old man-emerged from the ghost car and began yelling at him.

Lloyd didn't wait to hear what the man was screaming or to offer the opinion that it was the old man's fault for not braking to avoid the stalled Volvo, or at least trying to steer around it. The guy clearly had had time to avoid the collision, but Lloyd had no intention of pursuing that argument. No, Lloyd ran, heading up the hill beyond the ghost car, although he had a vague feeling that Cold Spring Lane and the city he knew was the other way. He ran through the midnight-quiet streets of this strange neighborhood, wondering how long a black man could run here without being noticed and, inevitably, arrested.

He reached what appeared to be a main street, slowing down to a fast walk, his lungs on fire. He would still be regarded with suspicion here, but he wasn't quite as out of place. There were bus stops and s.h.i.t, so he could always say that's where he was headed if anyone pulled him over.

It was a long and miserable walk in the night air, with slippery patches of ice underfoot. The sounds of sirens in the distance made him jumpy. By luck, and luck alone, he managed to find his way back to Cold Spring, which took him to the Light Rail station. Here, at least, he wouldn't look out of place.

Stomping his feet in the cold, waiting for the train to come, he couldn't help feeling...well, angry. It p.i.s.sed him off, having to leave that laptop and digital camera behind. He wanted someone to blame for his troubles, and he decided it was all that woman's fault. She would probably make a big stink, too, even though he had left her stuff behind and it wasn't his fault that old car had rammed him. The dude-the dude, he would want to let it go, but the woman was tougher. She had a mean streak. He'd been stupid. No, he'd been greedy, which was worse. Can't ever leave well enough alone, was the way his mother put it, and maybe she was right. But at the time Lloyd had just thought of it as getting a little bonus, of making up for the bad luck that seemed to dog him everywhere. He had the worst f.u.c.king luck.

Gregory Youssef. It had been a name to him, a name and four numbers, nothing more. He hadn't thought about that caper for months. Favor done, opportunity lost, just another day in the life of Lloyd Jupiter, the can't-win-for-losingest loser to ever come out of East Baltimore. s.h.i.t. s.h.i.t.

He hadn't known until tonight that the killed lawyer had been that guy, that the name he had buried in his memory was of any concern to anyone other than the guy himself. Did that make him an accessory? No, but it meant he had been played.

He was so f.u.c.ked.

The train hissed into the station. He didn't have a ticket, but he was counting on getting a few stops down before the conductor caught up to him and threw him off. As it turned out, he made it to Howard Street before anyone approached him, and he was able to run, avoiding the citation.

It was so cold he didn't even try to get back to the East Side, just went to the downtown parking garage where the homeless men slept on the steam grates. He hadn't been there for a while, but he remembered that it was around the corner from that weird-a.s.s orange, blue, and yellow statue.

He was too late for the sandwich run, which some church group did about 10:00 P.M., and the best spots were taken, but he still found himself a manhole cover with some hot air coming up. You got kind of damp sleeping that way, but it was warm and safe. Relatively. He took his coat off and bunched it under his head to make a pillow, and his body's exhaustion overwhelmed his mind's jumpy agitation, pulling him into sleep almost immediately. He dreamed about horses, Corvettes, and pork chops.

When he woke up at dawn, his jacket looked as if he had chewed on it, just a little bit. He went out into the day, blinking, almost expecting to find some cops just outside the garage.

But there was no one waiting for him, absolutely no one at all.

TUESDAY.