He heard the sound of a car start up and pull out, just a few houses away. Odd in this neighborhood at this time of night. He lifted a Dora the Explorer blanket up over Nikki’s shoulders, then walked to the window and looked through the curtains. Nothing. Probably a neighbor putting his car in the garage.
Two decades of regular dealings with lowlifes or worse had made him a bit jumpy, and maybe a little paranoid. His bizarre conversation with Warren Chakowski hadn’t helped, and maybe Jim’s sudden death hadn’t either. He was also feeling more guarded with Nikki in the house. Chapa thought about how long it had been since he’d felt that way as he leaned across and gave her a soft kiss on the side of her forehead. The child responded by shrugging, curling her nose, and disappearing under the blanket.
Chapa took one last look before closing the door to her room, then heading downstairs to make sure all the doors were locked.
Chapter 16
The man has been sitting in his car, parked under the crooked shadows of bare trees. He watched the reporter enter his house with his child. He saw that a few lights had been left on, though they had not been home for some time, and he was certain no one else lived there. He followed the path of movement through the house as the living room went dark, then a light went on in an upstairs window, but not for long. The girl’s room. Then, finally, the reporter’s bedroom. The man made a mental note of all this.
As he drives away, the man begins to wonder if he’s made a mistake, if perhaps the reporter isn’t a danger to his child. The man doesn’t tolerate mistakes, especially his own. His hands tighten on the steering wheel until pain creeps up both of his arms. Releasing his grip, the man realizes he is speeding down dark, quiet neighborhood streets, and yanks his foot off the accelerator, then gently presses the brakes.
Wouldn’t be good to get pulled over for speeding. A bad play anywhere, at any time, but even worse here and now. Sure, he could talk his way out of it. Was there a member of the force that he was not on good terms with? None that he can think of. But the man has a feeling he’ll be back in this area, back at that house. Wouldn’t be a good idea to let a cop remember seeing him there. Late at night. Driving too fast. Sweating. Anxious. Wouldn’t be a good idea.
Besides, he has other, more important concerns. Nervous people to deal with, voices to silence.
But the more he thinks about it, and the longer his mind lingers on the image of that reporter carelessly letting his child wander around a crime scene, the more his frustration swells. It begins to fill him up again, pushing against the man’s rib cage, crawling up his spine with sharp boney fingers. And soon he can feel the pressure behind his eyes threatening to break through, ready at any moment to expose him and destroy everything he’s worked to create.
Once more, the man clutches the steering wheel in a death grip, though he fights and wins the battle to avoid accelerating again. He has business to attend to. People to bring into line and plans to carry out. The target he’s pursued for so long is now within reach, and he has to get all of it right, every detail, no matter how small. No room for mistakes. This is too important. First things first.
But now, as the man leaves the west side of Oakton in his rearview, he knows—in fact he is certain—that he will come back to the reporter’s house. And the next time, he will come prepared to do a great deal more than watch.
Chapter 17
St. Louis, Missouri, 1975
The child sits in a cheap chair that lost its padding a long time ago. Its narrow, chipped legs are uneven, and the chair creaks beneath his frail body each time he moves.
He leans over a desk in the narrow room he sleeps in. Disgusted by the stains on the carpet beneath him, he tucks his feet up under his legs. The air is pungent with the smell of body odor and rotting food. The only other piece of furniture in the room is a thin mattress pressed against a paint-chipped wall that’s been badly cracked by time and violence.
The child spends hours at that desk, filling page after page of a dime store drawing pad with stick figures. He draws the figures into stories and makes them do terrible things to each other. Then, once he’s covered every page with drawings, he slips the pad under the mattress, alongside all the others, and waits for his mother to bring home a new one. That can take weeks, sometimes. But the child doesn’t mind. He spends the time thinking of all the things the people in his next set of drawings will do to one another.
But on this night, he still has more than half the pad to fill, and that brings as much joy to the child as he’s capable of feeling. He has so many good ideas tonight. So many important things that his stick figures must do to each other.
The pimp and drug dealer who lives with him and his mother and likes to be called Gilley, wanders in to see what the boy is doing. The child can hear his mother in the other room going at it with tonight’s second customer.
The child looks up for just a moment, then instinctively looks down at Gilley’s hands. He feels only a slight sense of relief when he sees they’re empty and unclenched. It’s a survival tactic the boy has learned without realizing he was learning it.
Gilley is not the child’s father, and he’s not the first man in his life. Just the latest, and the meanest, at least as far as the boy can remember. The child looks up at Gilley’s face, not always a good idea, and notices that his stringy blond hair is shorter than usual. He’s made an attempt to shave, apparently cutting himself in the process, a fact that pleases the boy.
“Hey little punk, those are some freaky people you drew there. Cool, though.”
Gilley smells like he’s been swimming in stale aftershave, and for a moment his odor threatens to overwhelm the general stench of the two-bedroom shanty in one of the city’s forgotten neighborhoods.
“Hey, maybe you’re an artist,” Gilley says and smacks the child on the arm, maybe a little harder than he meant to. Or maybe exactly as he wanted to.
The child says nothing, but his thoughts are running zigzag sprints through his mind. And the child wonders what this man, a stranger to him by any decent person’s standards, would say if he understood that he was the subject of the drawings.
Chapter 18
When Chapa opened his eyes he saw Nikki staring back at him. She smiled, and her face captured every ounce of sunlight that was pouring into his bedroom.
“I woke up more than an hour ago, Daddy.”
“Of course you did.” Chapa sat up slowly. Most days he felt his age, forty-two, sometimes older. But not today, and not while Nikki was with him. “I need to get you some breakfast.”
She nodded, then spoke in measured tones. “Yeah, I looked around in the kitchen, but I didn’t find much to eat.”
Now Chapa remembered. He hadn’t planned on bringing his daughter home when he left for Boston a week earlier. There hadn’t been a clearly defined purpose to his visit beyond wanting to see his child. Something that had become increasingly more difficult for him to do as Carla had done all she could to force Chapa out of Nikki’s life. So the best he’d hoped for was a smile, a hug, some precious time together, and for his ex to understand that the rules of the game had changed. But then his attorney went to work.
Chapa hadn’t thought about stocking the fridge or pantry, or even picking up a loaf of bread.
“We’ll find something,” he said, feigning optimism.
As he walked toward the stairs, Chapa glanced into Nikki’s room and noticed that her bed had been made. He turned to compliment her, and found that she was already smiling back at him.
“Thank you for noticing,” Nikki said.
He walked ahead of her down the stairs and into the living room, then started toward the kitchen, but stopped when he noticed that Nikki wasn’t following him anymore. She stood in the middle of the floor, carefully