Chapter 3
A broad deserved a nap before her show.
I took my leave from the pub while everyone was laughing, hoisting my bag of negative net worth over my shoulder one last time.
With a nod toward the tables near the stage, I took the service hallway past the johns and Alex’s office, past the storeroom, and hipped open the fire door to the alcove.
I passed the storage locker under the stairs and hooked past the security door to the alley on my way up the open stairway to the landing, a sort of Juliet’s balcony outside Oona’s apartment that I had definitely performed from. Great acoustics.
Lately, you couldn’t count on the acoustics around here—only unpredictable construction noise from the other half of the building.
Alex owned the whole shebang, but he’d used a management service to get the empty half rented after a long vacancy.
We’d had real activity over there since the deal went through, hammering and drilling, doors banging shut as people came and went at odd hours.
But the company name on the paperwork was vague.
Anything could be going in and, so far, no intel, no signage.
No construction crew stopping by the pub on break.
The parlor game among the Jims was: What might the place turn into?
I was hoping for a coffee shop at the moment, because Alex’s coffee was an endorsement for beer.
Someone had suggested the place might become a dispensary—they were popping up all over—and I’d watched Alex go quiet, considering the possibility.
He was twenty-five years out of addiction and somehow the conservator of the family business, serving drunks.
It couldn’t be a dispensary, right?
When I opened the apartment door, Oona’s dogs met me, tails wagging.
I dropped the bag of my stuff inside the door and scratched each dog behind an ear.
These two knuckleheads reminded me that, actually, I didn’t get a vote on what went in next door.
I was just the latest stray Oona had allowed in, and I wasn’t sure how long it would last. She’d lived here on her own for years and didn’t need the break on the rent she was getting for doing Alex this favor.
If I was her, I’d be wondering when I could kick me out.
I’d been getting a vibe already, you know?
So I’d been trying to make myself useful, walking the dogs for her all week, taking care of them a couple of evenings when she’d stayed out for a work thing, then dinner out. She had a cousin visiting the city.
I didn’t mind walking the dogs, even at night.
Bear was sixty pounds of brown mutt, shepherd forward, as Oona liked to say.
Lemon, eighty-five pounds of black and fawn mastiff muscle, was what Oona called “dainty for her breed” and everyone else called a pony.
Letting them drag me through the neighborhood, I imagined myself a priestess lashing at the horses who drew her war chariot, or as a demon sorceress urging her hellhounds forward.
Shifty dudes lurking in doorways understood we were fire and ice, destroyers of worlds, moving through.
“Is your mom not home?” I asked them. Even if you were the sort of person who didn’t talk to dogs, when you lived with dogs, you did. They ruined your rep, first thing.
“Oona?” I called into the apartment.
Lemon tilted her head, ears lifting. Bear’s worried old-man face perked up, hopeful.
“All right, fine,” I said. “Hypothermia is one of those things you can’t get twice in one day, right?”
I snapped them into their harnesses, grabbed the double leash, and opened the door. Their nails clattered wildly down the stairs ahead of me. At the alley, I hooked them up, begged them to take it easy on me, and bumped open the door.
The alley was choked with fumes. A trashy white delivery truck that hadn’t been there a half hour ago was now parked up against the garbage bin.
The dogs were already barking. They didn’t like surprises.
I caught a bit of movement at the rear entrance of the place next door, and then that door banged shut.
“Hey,” I yelled. “Hey, you can’t park back here. ”
The door stayed closed. The dogs went quiet and looked up at me.
“Was it something you said? Come on.”
The sun had dropped behind the building and the shadows were deep. The wind rushed through, lifting and thumping lids on the city recycling bins and making the old phone lines overhead whip and whistle.
As we squeezed past the truck, I noticed something was off. The front of the truck was canted at an angle that didn’t make any sense until I saw that one of the front tires was a doughnut spare, probably for a much smaller vehicle.
Been there. Well, not really. I didn’t have a car, or a license. But if there was a better metaphor for my life, I’d never seen it. We were all just limping along. Is this the best we could do?
The dogs tugged impatiently, and I was reminded I’d never brought out anything for the guy with the Dominick’s cart. But the cart was gone, and its owner, too.
We skated over the slick spot I’d polished with my ass earlier, and around the corner. As we cleared the alley, a crash sounded behind me, a door slamming closed, or open. I turned my head but the dogs were charging, eyes forward. We were on the move.
Bear and Lemon led me up the block and across the street, poking their noses into the vilest patches of snow.
After a few minutes and a few deposits and plastic bags, we returned by the same route, the dogs giving suspicious sniffs to the trunk of a tree they had watered themselves.
Overhead, the tree branches were heavy with ice, creaking.
As we approached McPhee’s alley and home, the dogs dug in for a last good snuffle. I wrapped their leash around my wrist and shoved my hands into my jacket pockets. When I was casing our apartment earlier, I should have looked for a pair of gloves.
“Is that Patsy Cline?” a guy said, a head popping from the opening of the alley.
The dogs lurched for him.
“Bear, no!” I scolded. “Down! Lemon, down!”
The guy took a disaffected step back, puffing at his cigarette as I was almost lifted off my feet.
They were sweet dogs, really, but Oona had trained them up for security.
If she needed to disperse a crowd, she could do it.
When she offered a Wufers biscuit, even whispered the name, you didn’t want to stand in their way.
These mutts were brand loyal, in the most vicious way.
I finally got the dogs dialed down to a low-boil growl. “Dude,” I said, a little breathless. “You just walked up on a buck-forty of startled pack animal.”
“It was ‘Walkin’ After Midnight,’ I thought,” the guy said. “What you were singing just now. And I didn’t walk up on you. You walked up on me.”
He took another drag, lighting up his face enough that I thought I might know him—but not precisely. I went around half-recognizing people from the scene, from our audiences. If you saw a lot of faces week in and week out, everyone you met looked a little bit like someone you might know.
A little bit like someone you know—hmm, not bad.
I untangled the leash from my left arm and shook it out. I’d broken it badly as a kid—had it broken for me—and sometimes it still ached. “Well, thanks a lot,” I said. “That’s my fretting side.”
“Excuse not to start on time, like last week?”
That was low. We’d started a few minutes late, so what?
This guy had no idea what I was up against. He was just some hanger-on who came to our shows, a friend of a friend, someone I’d met, maybe, at Fitzgerald’s or Carol’s.
Or he might play for another band and was only hanging around to grub for our slot.
Little did he know. One word to Alex and this guy’s band wouldn’t even get served a drink.
“Okay, kids,” I said to the dogs, my teeth banging together from the cold. “Let’s let him live to insult me another day. Come on.”
In the alley, the truck was gone, at least. The dogs huffed and snorted along the pavement, going quickly, smelling something interesting—
I pulled up short, not understanding what I was seeing. A fresh gale roared through the alley like a train.
In the spot where the truck had been, a box of light lay on the ice, and the back door to McPhee’s hung open.
But I was sure I had—
No, the door wasn’t just open. It was loose on its hinges, all but ripped from the wall. Maybe the door hadn’t latched and the wind had caught it?
The dogs whined and pulled at the leash.
Or maybe there was someone waiting inside. I shaded my eyes from the light and peered into the shadows.
“Okay, you mongrels,” I muttered to the dogs. “Time to earn your kibble.”
I unhooked the dogs’ gear, and stood back as they tore through the door, into the alcove, and up the stairs, snuffling happily, as though someone had left behind a biscuit trail.
At the bottom of the stairs, I reached for the softball bat Oona kept there and climbed behind the dogs.
I couldn’t quite take in that I was holding the bat as intended.
This was my hand on the grip. These were my tats twisting out from under the edge of my jacket cuff and curling around the handle.
This was happening? McPhee’s didn’t really get much trouble here, despite what people thought about Chicago.
We had locks. We took precautions. We’d had a little more than our fair share of vandalism lately, to be fair.
Some graffiti, the vestibule canvas slashed.
The security camera in the alley had taken a good smashing, and Alex hadn’t yet had it replaced. Just kid stuff.
But then it could always turn out to be our turn, right?
Time slowed. I could hear the inner workings of my own body, breath and blood.
On the landing, the dogs were tapping with anticipation. When I opened the door, they bolted inside, Lemon already yodeling for the peaks. But was it alarm? Or excitement?
I paused at the butcher block on the kitchen counter to trade the bat for the largest of Oona’s dull knives. A light burned, somewhere. The dogs had gone quiet.
I could hear the jangle of the tags on the dogs’ collars coming from—
My room. The light was on inside.
Primary Jim, asking—
Was I worried?
“Joey?” I hated the hope in my voice, couldn’t decide what I hoped for, why.
On the corner of my unmade bed sat a woman, a stranger. The dogs flanked her, either side, letting her scratch at their necks and whisper sweet nothings into their ears.
A string of expletives fell out of my mouth. “Who—
But I already knew.
“Language, Dahlia,” the woman said. She looked me up and down, her eyes catching on the knife. “Surely you weren’t raised that way.”
“You’d know for sure,” I said. “If you’d stayed around to do the job yourself.”