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  Tony faced me. “Why did you break into our job site?”

  “Why is taking a few pictures such a big deal?” I switched into offensive mode, venom oozing into my words before I could staunch the flow. “Are you guys hiding something?”

  “No, we’re repurposing the building.”

  I laughed. “Repurposing? That’s tidy.” I held my hand parallel to the floor and flipped it over. “You’re simply shifting from one purpose to another. No damage in that.” I singled out the next banner: You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. — Christopher Columbus. “Finally, a quote that belongs in this place. Columbus brought smallpox to the New World and killed millions of people.”

  Tony folded his arms across his chest. “This is bullshit. Some people have work to do. Last chance. What do you want?”

  I hadn’t expected the question. “Look, maybe I’m a guy who can’t bear the thought of a Spencer Gifts selling whoopee cushions and fake vomit in a historic—”

  “City Council approved the decision to rezone that property for retail. If you got a problem, complain to the Mayor.”

  “Or maybe we were there to get back at the people who destroyed my family.”

  Tony rummaged in his mind and found what he was looking for. “We were all devastated by the accident that led to your father’s death.”

  “Spare me the canned speech from your PR department. The point is, if our little adventure goes public, either the press will find me or I’ll find them, and I’ll talk about the outrage of bulldozing half a cultural landmark to create parking spaces.” Tony opened his mouth to speak but I held up a hand. “But then I’ll keep talking. About my father. And I’ll use language like wrongful death and grave injustice and wound that never heals.”

  “Your dad was a tier two subcontractor, not an employee. It’s all in the official court record.”

  I waved him off. “That’s a technicality cooked up by your lawyers, and you know it. But the public saw a company that doesn’t give a shit about people. That’s why your dad wants my family to go away. We won’t.”

  “Then what do you want, Tremaine?”

  I felt a fresh wave of heat in my cheeks. “My gear and a ride home.”

  “Sorry to break it to you, but we’ll keep your camera bag. And if you need a ride, call a friend.” He pointed to a wall-mounted office phone. “Press nine for an outside line.”

  There he was—the Tony Drax I knew. Hairstyle and dress of a respectable businessman, maybe, but a seventeen-year-old bully underneath.

  He flashed me a smartass grin. “So you still like crawling around underground?” He sniffed the air. “I’m surprised you don’t smell like a sewer.”

  I said nothing.

  “What’s the attraction?”

  Defending urban exploration to Tony Drax would be like explaining a Picasso to a housecat.

  Tony shook his head slowly as if marveling. “And you break into places with your buddy, Reuben Klein.” A raised eyebrow, a realization. “We used to call him Ruby Jew, remember?”

  My face burned red hot. I was done with this pointless back-and-forth. I wanted out.

  But Tony wasn’t done. He scooted a chair aside and stepped too close for comfort. I smelled his contempt like sour milk. “I don’t get it, Lucas. You’re a dirt-poor river rat. Always have been, always will be.”

  For a moment, I became a forgettable kid in cracked sneakers, squeaking down a high school hallway, stepping aside for the Princes of the Seven Hills. Something torqued into a hard ball just below my rib cage.

  Tony cocked his head, play-acting deep contemplation. “And since you don’t have any money, what do you need a Jew for?”

  It’s funny the way the brain works. Or maybe it’s my brain, with halves that never stop fighting each other. In a millisecond, a comeback popped into one half, the diplomatic half, something about Reuben getting to be anything he damn well wants to be.

  But while the diplomatic half of my brain cycled, trying to figure out what words should enter the inches of airspace between Tony and me, the other half—the impulsive half—grew tired of waiting. It issued a terse command, and the fist of my right hand obeyed.

  A long second later, the man-boy who’d pummeled so many victims in the halls of Queen City High School lay on the ground, both hands pressed to the sides of his nose as if trying to hold the pieces of his face together.

  CHAPTER 5

  Later that morning, my one permitted phone call woke my mom. I explained what had happened. “I’m sorry, Mom. Something came over me.”

  “I understand,” she said, her voice empty. “I’ll try to get you out.” She hung up, clearly in no shape to dissect my story. Her symptoms often were bad in the morning, now made worse with my troubles caked on top like volcanic ash. I realized something. I’d been cruel, like a pet owner who stays out late while his dog, bladder near bursting, must relieve herself shamefully on the rug.

  Mom had been picking up part-time gigs for Cincinnati Bell whenever the switchboard jockeys went on strike. That and subbing for sick regulars.

  Working 411 directory assistance suited Mom, at least now. The job was simple: incoming beep, request for a person or a pizzeria, quick look-up, disconnect, and repeat. No forethought. According to the doctors, she couldn’t tackle anything more challenging for six to twelve months, maybe longer.

  I spent the day behind bars sitting on an immovable steel bench that seemed inches from the opposite wall. The air smelled of wet concrete and bleach.

  Unlike in the movies, I didn’t share my cell with a shark-eyed, tattooed beast. I was alone, but would’ve preferred a bunkie to take my mind off the incessant you’re an idiot droning between my ears. I’d verbally assaulted a security guard doing his job, and I’d physically assaulted a powerful businessman with the means to make my life hell.

  By midafternoon, the jail guard shouted from down the hall, “Tremaine! Bail posted.” The cell door opened automatically with a clack and metallic grind.

  Bail? With whose money? Mom was broke like me.

  I entered the jail’s receiving area. Mom wavered next to Reuben, her eyes red and rimmed with shadow, her shoulders slumped.

  “We can tell you about the bail money,” Reuben said, “but in the car. We’re late.” We started walking.

  “Good news, honey.” Mom’s eyes defied her cheerful words. “I picked up the four o’clock shift. We’re just two blocks away. You can drop me off and I’ll take the bus home.”

  She’d be on duty until midnight. “You good for an entire shift?” I doubted.

  “If you tell them no, they don’t call again.” Temp workers were as expendable as coat hangers.

  We piled into Reuben’s ’66 Ford Falcon, with me in the back and leaning forward between the bucket seats. Reuben pulled onto Lincoln Avenue and stepped on the gas.

  Mom began. “Honey, you’re not gonna like it, but we couldn’t leave you in that jail. I don’t know what I’d do if you got hurt.” She patted her thigh, keeping a beat, a symptom.

  I shifted position to catch Reuben in the rearview mirror. “Who coughed up the bail money?”

  “Your boss,” Mom replied. “Mr. Blumenfeld can be a very sweet man.”

  Reuben threw me a look of pity.

  I felt a throb of pressure behind my forehead. “No, Mom, Alfred’s not a very sweet man. He can be a real pain in the… how much?”

  “Five thousand dollars,” she said, gripping her thigh to control her hand movements.

  “Oh God.” I squeezed my eyes shut and reopened. “Does he know I took the Leica?”
/>   “Even if he doesn’t, I bet Tricia does,” Reuben said. “She read it in her witches’ brew.”

  Reuben and I graduated from Queen City High with Alfred’s granddaughter. She called herself Trix back then. She’d stroll into class with a cigarette behind her ear, exuding the tired boredom of a cop directing traffic. Today, a decade later, she went by Tricia and worked the retail camera shop next to the photo lab where I worked, all part of Alfred’s little empire.

  Reuben gazed at me like a priest consoling a death-row inmate. “I’m afraid to ask what happened to the camera.”

  “Tony Drax kept it,” I said.

  Mom tried to turn in her seat to see me. “Kept what?”

  I pointed through the front window at the Cincinnati Bell building looming before us. “Here we are. Let’s talk later tonight. I’ll wait up.”

  She gave my hand a squeeze, labored from the car, and shuffled away, the result of another withdrawal symptom, tar-like leg muscles.

  I scrambled into the front seat. Reuben shoved the gearshift forward. I touched his forearm. “Wait until she gets inside. Sometimes they hassle her about her temps pass.”

  But they didn’t and Reuben pulled away, his words also accelerating. “What if they had hassled her? Would you run over there and smash somebody in the face?”

  And thus began Reuben’s tirade. I had it coming. I’d almost dragged him down with me. He tossed in all the greatest hits from our more contentious exchanges:

  “Have you completely lost your mind?”

  “Do you ever think before you do something?”

  “You were expecting Tony to blot the blood from his Brooks Brothers’ shirt and say sorry, you’re right, and here’s your stuff?”

  “Don’t you think your mom has enough to worry about?”

  “Focus on the mission! Focus on the mission! Bullshit.”

  “You didn’t elevate yourself above the petty defiance of the diffident, now did you?”

  Reuben must’ve liked the sound of that last one because he continued twisting more of Chapel’s advice. “We neither vandalize nor pilfer—but we do randomly beat up people!”

  Red-faced, Reuben stopped, now breathing hard.

  “Are you finished?” I asked.

  “No.” He sounded exhausted suddenly, the insistence stripped from his voice. “I was rid of that asshole, but now he’s back in my life. Thanks a lot.”

  “Tony’s mad at me, not you,” I said.

  “Like that ever worked. I was always guilty by association.”

  I stifled a smile. We were in this mess together.

  Reuben took his frustration out on the Ford, turning northbound onto Colerain Avenue too fast, the tires squealing.

  I gripped the dashboard. “Where are we going?”

  “Your work. Blumenfeld told your mom he needed to speak with you the minute you got sprung.”

  I checked my watch. Four in the afternoon. “Maybe he’s already noticed the Leica’s missing. Good. He’ll murder me now and I won’t have to appear in court.”

  In all the hubbub of regaining my freedom, I’d temporarily forgotten my biggest problem: a potential felonious assault conviction. Fear pulsed in my chest.

  We parked in front of Blumenfeld Photography, an off-white, single-story building with a flat roof, powder blue trim and minimal windows to keep stray light from polluting the portrait studio and darkroom. Concrete planters held well-tended petunias in purples and pinks, chosen by Alfred.

  Blumenfeld had owned the building for decades, expanding every few years by knocking down a wall and adding workspace. One expansion tripled the size of the portrait studio. Another made room for new developing equipment after the invention of color photography. A third tacked on the retail shop, now run by Blumenfeld’s granddaughter, Tricia, bringing the total number of employees to eight, at last count.

  I tried to brace myself for an ugly reckoning with Alfred, but my thoughts drifted back. “I should’ve kept Mom out of this,” I said and reached for the car’s door handle. Reuben touched my shoulder, his face a question mark behind pop-bottle optics. “Lucas, it’s none of my business, but I’ve never seen her so bad.”

  Reuben knew she struggled, and that sometimes I’d drop everything because of some vague trouble at home. But he didn’t know about tapering off the medications. “She made me promise to keep a secret,” I said, “but her symptoms are so obvious.” I paused to recheck my thinking. “Just between you and me, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  I took a deep breath. “Dad’s death pushed her over the edge. Depression, as you know, but anxiety too—I swear she’s been drenched in sweat so many times, afraid to leave the house. The doctors put her on Valium.”

  A pause to consider. “Mother’s little helper.”

  I nodded. “And why not? There’s a Stones song about it. Couldn’t be so bad.”

  Reuben pushed up his glasses with his thumb, waiting for the punch line.

  “But those little yellow pills were designed for short-term use, a week or two max. She’s been taking them for years.”

  “Damn.”

  “Six months ago, she hit bottom again. A different doctor said the pills were making her worse.”

  “That happened to my dad after his foot surgery. It was Dilaudid, and he had to get off it fast.”

  “But with Valium, you can’t stop cold turkey. You’ll go insane.”

  Reuben squinted, doubting. Movement caught my eye. Beyond the front window of Alfred’s business, the receptionist set a coffee mug on her desk.

  I explained. “If you go cold turkey, whatever you’re most afraid of—snakes, crowds, small spaces, death—attacks you like you’re trapped in a haunted house, but the ghosts and monsters aren’t people in costumes. They’re real and trying to kill you. You shiver and sweat and dread every waking moment until you take more pills. Or, you wash down the whole bottle with a tumbler of vodka and escape the monsters permanently.”

  Reuben’s Adam’s apple jumped as he swallowed. “I’m so sorry for her.”

  A magpie landed on the building’s gutter, teetered for balance, and swooped down to chase off a couple of sparrows.

  “She’s tapering,” I said. “Gradual decreases, really gradual, only a few percent every couple of weeks. And even with those tiny reductions, the monsters pound on her door.” I recalled a bad night: Mom curled up on the shower floor in her work clothes, whimpering, hot water scalding her skin, the pain a kind of relief. “Some days I worry she’ll give up.”

  “Would she?”

  “A few weeks ago, she said her life felt optional. That’s the word she used. I told her it’s the withdrawal, but in her mind, the hopelessness can’t be explained by tiny pills. Life scares her.”

  “What’s she scared of most?” Reuben asked, scratching his chin.

  The magpie landed in a trimmed bed of evergreen shrubs, checked for predators, and pecked at the topsoil.

  “Losing me too, I suppose.” I glanced back at my friend and endured a wave of guilt. “I chose a terrible time to clobber Tony Drax.”

  The magpie hopped to the rim of a planter and surveyed his domain. “What did Tony say right before you punched him?” Reuben asked.

  The question caught me off-guard. “Oh, you know, the usual crap, same as in high school. Me being a scumbag river rat, him being royalty. Got under my skin, I guess.”

  I wasn’t ready to share what Tony said about Reuben. “Let’s get this done.” I yanked the door handle.

  . . . . .

  We entered through the retail shop, a tidy op
eration about half the size of a 7-Eleven. Center displays stocked darkroom supplies and photo accessories like tripods and floodlights. Cameras and lenses remained in a glass case tended by Tricia Blumenfeld, the store’s manager and sole clerk.

  Given the way she perched on her high stool, straight-backed and attentive, a customer had to be nearby. Sure enough, there he was, reading the fine print on a bright yellow box of Kodak enlarging paper. Without a customer in the house, Tricia might’ve been slouched in a chair in the corner, the front door always in sight. She’d have a notebook on her lap where she’d scribble pictures or words we’d never see. I imagined sketches of vengeful she-warriors or poems about life after an apocalypse.

  She watched us approach as if we were delivering a virus.

  “I have a customer,” she muttered and tipped her head toward the displays. She’d never admit it, but Alfred’s decision to put his granddaughter in charge of the shop was brilliant. Unlike the Tricia I knew in high school, she now cared about something. The store was her baby, and she’d raised it right.

  “Got it,” I said. Reuben took up a cautious position behind me. He’d always coexisted with Tricia like a barnyard chicken around the farmer’s dog—willing to peck but never with its back turned. “How’s business?”

  “What do you need?” Tricia said.

  Let’s see… a good lawyer, safe asylum, a ride to Tijuana. “We didn’t see Alfred’s car outside.”

  She creased her brow. “That’s because he’s not here.”

  Okay, it was going to be one of those conversations. Reuben sidestepped, pretending to be interested in the merchandise.

  “Would you be willing to tell me where he is?” I asked.

  “Sure, and after I tell you, you two should get back in your Cadillac and drive away.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “That bad.”

  “Come on, Trish. I’m trying to get through one shitty day, okay?” I wondered how much she knew. “What’s Alfred pissed about?”