A curl of smoke was coming up out of my car. I could see it from across two lanes of 12th Street, between the spreading leafless arms of an elm tree and the bent trunk of a streetlamp. A tendril of smoke, rising from somewhere in the hood, rising and spreading and dissipating into the wan daylight like an exorcised spirit. I hustled across the street, thinking for one crazy second that something had happened inside the engine of the sweet little Altima—it had given out and burst into flames and now was sitting there smoldering.
But no, of course not. Halfway across the potholed street I slowed up. Cigarette smoke. That’s all. Of course. Someone was leaning against the car on the opposite side, smoking a butt, waiting on me.
Had to be Maris. He’d done some digging, or Barton had; they’d pushed through my backstops and figured out that there was no Gentle in Carolina, no Dirkson at all. I looked up and down the street—was it too late to run? I looked for witnesses and hiding places. I was in the middle of the street. I willed myself some courage, willed myself a gun, imagined the heavy loose weight of a Colt in the front pocket of my overcoat, jostling against my hip like a deck of cards.
It was the girl, the white girl. Martha. She had a chopstick in her hair, holding it together. She looked hesitant, half hopeful.
I was so relieved I almost laughed. It was almost good to see her—and the kid, too, Lionel in a tracksuit a size or two too big, athletic stripes on top and bottom, plugged into his music, grooving his head back and forth like a snake, bouncing on his heels beside the car. He didn’t see me coming, but Martha did, and she gave me a funny self-knowing wave and a cringing sort of smile. She was smoking one of those ugly little hand-rolled hipster cigarettes, “sourced” free-labor tobacco and all that.
“My goodness,” I said. “How are you?”
“This is crazy,” she said. “I know. I know this is crazy.”
“What’s crazy?”
“Well. Okay. So—I need to ask you a favor.”
What could I say? What would Dirkson say? What did I want to say? I said sure. She pulled out a booster seat from the backseat of her boxy pink SA hatchback, which we left parked on Meridian Street. Away we went, Lionel settled in the backseat and Martha up front beside me, her fingers laced in her lap.
“Where are we headed?”
“Uh, this way, I guess,” said Martha softly, and I went the way she pointed, straight south down Meridian Street.
“So,” I said, and she smiled, bright but quick.
“So,” she said, as if this was all perfectly normal, as if we did this every day. “You had a doctor’s appointment?”
“Yes,” I said. “I did.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Oh, yes, thank you. Just fine.” I was Dirkson. I had my glasses on. I held my hands at ten and two on the wheel. “Just a little thing. Slipped is all. Out last night working, and I just plumb slipped on the sidewalk and twisted my ankle. Not a big deal, but the folks in Jakarta, you know, any little thing…insurance and all…”
I was talking too much, polishing my stupid lie until it practically glowed. She’d stopped listening anyway. She gazed out the window. She had on cheap sunglasses, cat’s eyes, which went perfectly, somehow, with the plastic chopstick in her hair. A vintage day dress, paisleys against midnight blue. Martha also had on this ring, a cheap little shopping-mall band of fake gold, and while I drove she was twisting it on and off, on and off, moving it restlessly from finger to finger, like she was running a shell game on herself. One thing I was used to seeing from young white people, it was confidence, an easy sense that the world belonged to them. This Martha, she had that, too—even now she was going through my glove compartment, examining my tapes, no big deal—but it was only a thin layer, only on the top. Underneath was all kinds of nervousness and fear.
“Do you mind?” said Martha, the tape already half pushed into the player.
“Not at all.”
The Jackson 5 sang “Who’s Lovin’ You,” MJ out front, his four older brothers doing tight, high harmony in the back.
I glanced at Martha, her head turned to look out the shotgun window, and I saw it again, the black box tatted on her neck, and below it a glimpse of cream-white skin and pale pink bra. I flushed, confused and obscurely angry. Lionel danced his head like a robot in the backseat. Storefronts rushed past the window. Medical supply; Oriental rugs; buildings available for lease.
“Okay,” I said. “I guess at some point I’ll need to know where it is we’re going.”
“Of course,” she said. “Yeah.”
Martha took a quick look at Lionel—tuned out, grooving to Michael, a world of his own—and launched in. “Okay, so what I need,” she said, “is, like, like a—an escort, I guess. Like…just—a friend, I mean. I gotta do this errand, kind of meet this lady…it’s—just this thing I gotta do. I thought she was gonna come up to the hotel, but now she said I need to come down to her.”
Straitlaced Mr. Dirkson frowned a little bit. “Is this in relation to a health-care position?” and Martha said, “No, not exactly,” while my mind clicked through possibilities. Drugs? Guns? Easy to imagine Martha, single mother in thrift-shop clothes, lugging around some wagon of debt she was trying to get shed of.