I’d meant what I had promised in my car at Oakleigh’s. On the days he came to work with me, I took him for meals, asked him questions, got used to his spastic tendency to dart at me and hug me every time we said hello or good-bye. I hugged him back now, trying to let him be my brother in a realer way than updating the How do you know Julian field on Facebook. But I also thought that it would do the kid some good to visit Birdwine’s sketchy neighborhood.
The neighbors were a mix: black and white and brown, young and old, some squatting briefly on their way up, others scrabbling for a hold on their way down. Across the street from Birdwine’s shabby craftsman, a taquería that smelled like horse meat and roach spray shared a building with a run-down barber shop. Two doors down, a thriving drug house did a busy trade. The whole street had an unstable danger vibe I knew well from most chapters of my childhood. Hana would know it, too.
As we turned onto Birdwine’s block, I saw that the front door of his house was hanging open. Looper sat in the middle of the patchy front lawn, looking worried and long-suffering.
“Shit! He’s home,” I said, and pulled over to park. I hadn’t expected to see him until tomorrow, at the earliest.
Julian had barely registered the ratty streets as we wound through them, but he sat up very straight when he realized we were stopping.
“This is where he lives?” Julian asked.
“Yep,” I said.
As we got out of the car, I could hear a terrible crashing sound coming from inside. Looper ran to me and thrust his giant, square head into my hand. I patted him, and he immediately turned and ran a few steps toward the door, pausing to peer back, his eyebrows set to anxious.
“I know, buddy. Timmy’s in the well,” I told him.
Julian paused, half out of the car. “Is that—the big guy? In there?” He sounded nervous. I’d forgotten—the first time he met Birdwine was in my office. I’d had a panic attack and Birdwine had stepped to him, violence limned in the angles of his body.
“Yep.” We heard a whomping crash from inside. Birdwine wasn’t making a great second impression. “If a stranger was wrecking the house, Looper would be in there scrapping,” I said. Looper’s tail wagged when he heard his name, and he took another step toward the door, trying to get me to follow. I leaned against the car. “Not yet, buddy.”
“How are you so calm?” Julian asked. He still had the passenger door open, and his head swiveled back and forth, peering up and down the street. I reminded myself that at dinner the other night, this kid had gotten in a lather because a Marietta neighbor let the dandelions take over his lawn. Baby steps.
“He’s never killed anybody yet,” I said. I’d seen Birdwine on the back end of his cycle before. I had no girlish notions, either fearful or romantic, about what was in the house. “It may not be pretty in there, but it isn’t dangerous.”
“I feel like we’re being watched,” Julian said, looking around uneasily, but he shut the door and came to stand beside me. “Do you feel that?”
“No,” I said, but after he mentioned it, I realized that I did. I’d felt so watched at the office recently, I’d gotten used to the faint electric crawl across my skin. “It’s probably the one-stop pill shop two doors down. The dealer keeps a close eye on the street.” Not only for cops—sometimes ancient Mrs. Carpenter, who owned the house between them, went wandering down the sidewalk in her bra. Birdwine and the dealer both looked out for her.
My explanation did nothing to set Julian at ease, but at least it had gone quiet inside. I waited another minute, then decided to go in. I didn’t want to give Birdwine time to pass out.
“You can wait here, if you like.” I boosted off the car and held my car keys out. “I’ll let you play the radio.”
Julian paused and swallowed. The sun was almost down. “No. Let’s go.”
Inside, the living room looked like a bear had gone crashing through it. A wooden chair was reduced to kindling, and the coffee table was overturned and shoved half into the fireplace. There were gaping holes and shatter-spots in the drywall. It looked like the whole room had pissed him off, and he’d taught it better with a baseball bat. The bat itself was cracked and lying in the middle of the floor.
I could hear humming, loud and tuneless, coming from the kitchen. He seemed to be done breaking things, but he was still conscious. Good.
Looper jumped up on the wide plaid sofa and flopped down in a sprinkle of wall plaster, the flakes catching like snow in his dense fur. He put his shoe-box head on his paws and gazed back and forth from me to Julian and back again, eyebrows twitching. Whatever was happening at the back of the house was clearly a human problem. He would wait right here.
“Coward,” I told him, and he thumped his tail. So be it.