“I, gosh, sure, yeah, I guess, but she should take Toby’s if she can handle it. He left it here when he went to Rochester.”
We went back into the kitchen through the garage. I introduced Voss, whose eyes widened when he saw Alison: he hadn’t expected Martin to have such a cool-looking girlfriend. He became both shy and aggressive. He’d show her how to handle Toby’s bike, he’d ride over as far as the Hubbard Woods bike path to make sure she didn’t get lost.
Alison was as used to youthful adoration as she was to avuncular elderly men. She thanked Voss with suitable flattery, telling him she’d love the escort since she didn’t know Skokie. I shooed them both out of the garage. When Alison turned to thank me I told her it could wait until we were all home free, just to get going.
As soon as she and Voss disappeared across the alley, I started to look for the Subaru’s keys. For once, I was lucky on the first pass: Martin had left the car keys in the garage, on a hook by the garage bay door. I didn’t see much point in leaving surreptitiously. With Voss’s arrival and departure, anyone on the block who was watching would know we’d been in the house. I made sure I had everything I’d arrived with: gun, picklocks, flashlight, toothbrush and Boom-Boom’s jersey.
The Subaru had that musty, moldy smell that unused cars get, but the engine turned over immediately. I needed to drive to my office, to see what havoc Homeland Security had wrought there, but I stopped at home first. Mr. Contreras deserved an update; besides, I’d left my laptop and iPad with him last night.
I parked the Subaru six blocks from my apartment and walked home by a zigzag route that let me check for tails. After telling Mr. Contreras about our night, and Alison’s decision to go home—with his predictable criticism of my letting her bicycle off with a neighbor kid—couldn’t I have driven her to Lake Forest? What was wrong with taking extra time to give the girl the support she needed?—and getting the dogs a much-needed workout, I headed down to my office in the Subaru.
My leasemate, who wrestles gigantic sculptures out of steel and railway ties and any other really big piece of material, was in Cape Cod with her parents this week. Usually when I come in, there’s some kind of blowtorch or bandsaw going, along with her music mix. The quiet in the warehouse we share was unnerving, as if monsters were lurking in the shadows.
I flipped on all the lights, got Natalie Maines to sing “Not Ready to Make Nice” for me at top volume, and set to work. Homeland Security hadn’t been as destructive in my office as they’d been in my home. I guess because they’d taken the drives from my Mac Pro, they didn’t think they had to dump all my documents onto the floor. They’d left my cabinet drawers open, with enough disarray in the files to let me know they’d been in them, but they hadn’t strewn paper about, for which I was grateful: my tax dollars at work.
I shut the drawers without trying to reorganize them. I’ve always thought of housework as a spectator sport, not a participatory one, and I’d done more cleaning in the last week than I usually do in a year: scoured out a meth pit, cleaned up a major crime scene at Kitty Binder’s, and started putting my own apartment back in order. Enough.
Without my big computer I was somewhat hamstrung, but I still had all my reports backed up in the Cloud, assuming some zealous federal official hadn’t erased them. I managed to return client calls and get a respectable amount of work done. I saved all my work to thumb drives to keep it out of the Cloud.
As I returned calls and filled in the blanks on some of my reports, I kept wondering if I should tell my clients that their confidential files had been broached. Yes, they had a right to know. No, they’d never trust me with their work again.
My mother’s voice rang in my head the summer I was ten. I’d gone to Wrigley Field with my cousin Boom-Boom, traveling our usual route: scrambling up on the platform of the commuter train so we could board without paying the fare downtown; climbing the girders to the L at Roosevelt Road, hoisting ourselves over the back wall into the bleachers. And we’d been caught. Boom-Boom shrugged it off, but I was grounded for two weeks. When I tried to lay the blame on my cousin my mother was angry and contemptuous: “Don’t add viltà—cowardice—to your other problems.”