by Mark Wheaton
“You were saying?” Garza asked, his face painted in resignation.
• • •
Becca Baldwin was nobody’s fool and anyone would tell you that, or so she was fond of saying. With an agile intelligence, quick to backhand those who would question it with a taste of her biting wit, everyone knew Becca was going places. She was a favorite of the building and knew it. The grandmas loved her, the parents hoped their kids grew up to be like her, and those her own age accorded her the deference she felt she had earned and was deserved.
She lived with her one half-brother and her one brother-brother. The full brother was Kenny, aged twenty-four, who worked nights at a distribution warehouse for a grocery store chain. The half-brother was Trey. He ran with a small time drug-slinging crew that seemed bonded less by entrepreneurial spirit and more by the desire to spend the whole day fucked up. Becca had no interest in working at a warehouse or selling drugs. No, she was going to go to college on a scholarship and be a lady scientist and never look back. She would get married, move to Chicago or San Francisco or Seattle or Minneapolis-St. Paul, and never look back. All she had to do was bide her time and get the right grades. That’s what Mrs. Drucker told her, and she believed it.
She didn’t remember her mom, a crack head now deceased, and when she saw her dad on the streets, he didn’t remember her. She didn’t care, though. They were weak. She was strong and determined. She had brains, and she read all the time. She read books by and about Frederick Douglass, the poetry of Umar Bin Hassan, and the theater of Amiri Baraka. She listened to classical CDs she’d borrowed from her music teacher and didn’t get anything out of them but kept listening anyway.
Of the many other things Becca was, she was also twelve years old.
When the shooting started, she did what Kenny had always told her to do and hid in the hall bathtub. She pressed herself flat against the base, her nose touching the drain. The gunfire sounded far away, but she knew it was right outside the door. It alternated between machine gun fire and single shots, the singles sounding much louder than the others, echoing like thunder. She tried to focus on something else, finally settling on singing a song to herself. She tried to remember more than a couple of lines of this song or that and simply couldn’t do it.
Finally, she settled on Tupac Shakur’s “Keep Ya Head Up” and discovered that she could recite it from beginning to end. She did this four times.
By her final time through the song, the gunfire had stopped for a few minutes and she thought it safe to clamber out of the tub. She eased her way through the apartment to the front door. She could barely look through the peephole without standing on a chair but had no intention to do so. Instead, she was just looking for a better vantage point from which to hear the proceedings. She knew a stray bullet could still punch through the wall at any moment, but didn’t think it likely.
The silence was broken by the sound of someone moving down the hall. Becca went to the door to try to figure out if it was a police officer or one of the bad guys. She paid attention to the goings-on in the building so far as she needed to avoid them. The people moving in and out of 638 didn’t speak English, and she seldom saw any of them more than once. That is, except for Chiedozie and a couple of his crew. He’d glared at her a couple of times when she came up the steps, interrupting whatever conversation he was having with a “tenant.” But she’d just glared back until, unable to get a read on the situation, Chiedozie had gone back to his chat.
When Becca cracked the door, it was his face that she saw first. Illuminated in dim light trickling in from his apartment windows, the Nigerian gangster was flat on his back, staring at the ceiling through dead eyes. Surrounding him were the dead bodies of several people, police officers and folks she took for Chiedozie’s men alike.
That’s when she saw movement at her feet. Looking down, she saw a large dog peering up at her, his snout black with blood.
“Oh, my God!” she cried.
Bones glanced up at her, took a couple of sniffs to register her heightened levels of fear, and resumed sniffing the gun that had landed on her doorstep.
When Becca saw that the dog wasn’t particularly fazed by the goings-on, she bent down and offered him her hand to smell. Bones did so and followed it up with a quick couple of licks.
“It’s not safe out there, boy,” Becca whispered.
Bones looked up at her as she held the door open. The shepherd peeked in, took a couple more sniffs, and entered. Becca’s gaze returned to the gun at her feet. When she suddenly heard voices on the stairs, she bent down, picked up the gun, and closed the door, locking it behind her.
She hadn’t seen the pair of eyes at the end of the hall that had watched Bones’s egress from the scene. In fact, no one had seen it, but this wasn’t surprising, given the darkness.
But Bones hadn’t seen the lurker, either. Hadn’t smelled him, hadn’t heard him, and hadn’t detected him in any of the myriad ways his handlers over the years had used to support a claim that the shepherd had a sixth sense.
The lurker moved down the hall towards the fallen body of Mrs. Fowler, eyed it for a quick moment, but then disappeared just as the second wave of tactical responders appeared at the top of the stairs.
III
The lights were back on fifteen minutes later.
When the police came by knocking on doors to reassure residents that everything was “in hand” but to “stay in their apartments and let the paramedics do their jobs,” Becca kept the door locked and didn’t respond.
The knocker hadn’t tried that hard anyway, giving up after two rounds of knocking and one shout of, “Police! Is anyone inside the apartment?”
The little girl had taken the shepherd into the bathroom and washed the blood off his snout in the bathtub. She’d gone to get a bowl from the kitchen to fill with water, only to come back and find Bones thirstily lapping up the bloody water draining out of the tub. Making a command decision, she opened the toilet lid and urged the dog to drink. He did until the bowl was empty, so she flushed, and he drank that dry as well.
She eyed the apparatus on his back but wasn’t sure how to remove it. In her search, she discovered his plastic name strip attached to his harness.
“Your name is Bones?”
Bones responded with a questioning glance and Becca nodded. “Bones it is. Are you hungry?”
Bones licked his chops.
Becca smiled. “Let me see what we’ve got.”
Becca went back to the kitchen. The German shepherd followed.
The refrigerator was stocked with the same thing it was always stocked with: fruit and lunch meat, items Kenny brought home from the warehouse. For a long time, Becca worried that he stole it. But then, she’d learned to read the expiration dates and saw that the meats were almost always a couple of days past due and the fruit never less than ripe.
“They throw it away, can you believe that?” Kenny said every time he brought the stuff home. “Boxes and boxes and ‘returns.’ It would just go to a landfill somewhere. The night manager says anybody who wants it can take it so long as you don’t call in sick after.”
Becca sorted through the meat drawer. She found several packages of cold cuts now too rancid to eat, some having gone gray, others green. She finally came across a package of hard salami ringed with pepper that had only expired the previous Monday. She opened it, took out a couple of slices, and tossed them to Bones. He devoured them in one bite, so she simply placed the package on the floor and let the shepherd eat the whole thing.
When he finished it, he stared up at her expectantly, clearly wanting more. She went back to the meat drawer and selected the next most recently expired package.
“I really hope you don’t throw up after this.”
• • •
When the police rolled up to Neville Houses, Trey was smoking out with his friends Alvis and Pluto outside Building 3.
“5-0!” somebody cried out, half-ironically, but already hightailing it away.
“If they’re after us, they’re gonna be pretty disappointed we ain’t holding,” Alvis cried, hopping to his feet and tossing his joint away. “Still, locker room?”
“Locker room,” Trey nodded.
Trey pushed the joint through a storm grate and followed. He was high as a kite and knew it, having been drinking since the afternoon. But he’d run in a fog before and knew to push all thoughts aside that didn’t involve placing one foot in front of the other.
There was a maintenance locker room in the basement of four of the sixteen buildings that made up Neville Houses. The lockers served a dual purpose, giving the workers somewhere to change and keep their personal belongings, but also a place to lock up tools and equipment. Everything got stolen in Neville Houses, this much was understood, but no one stole from the lockers. If Granny on the ninth floor of Building 12 started flooding the place after clogging her sink, the right tool better be there or the neighbor downstairs was going to beat in some heads the next day. That’s why the locker room itself was never locked: a reminder to would-be thieves to think before getting grabby.
The other thing about the locker room, the thing that appealed to Trey and his friends, was that there were four different ways to get in and out of it. One door that opened into the building, one that opened out into the courtyard, a service hatch that followed along the trash chute and let you out on any floor, and then a second hatch that took you under the building into the warren of water and gas pipes that connected the buildings. These service tunnels then had access points to the sewers for access by city workers. This made it possible to walk down the tenth-floor hallway, get into the trash chute service hatch, and slip down through and under the building unseen by anyone before popping up four blocks away.
Did this routinely make life that much easier for Trey and his crew?
In a word, yes.
The three teens were already in the locker room of Building 3 when the shooting started. It didn’t sound like much, just a distant knocking as if someone, somewhere was doing construction work or hanging a picture upstairs. But then a burst of automatic fire came along to sober Trey.
“What building is that coming from?” he barked.
“Dunno,” shrugged Alvis.
“Shit.”
Though they’d come in via the outer door, Trey hurried through the storage area and bounded up the inside stairs to the lobby of Building 3. Gathered by the front door were a number of residents staring out at Building 7.
“What’s going on?”
“Police raid. Think it’s them Nigerians in 7. Squatters.”
As Trey prayed it was anything but that, he counted up the windows to the floor where the muzzle flash was coming from.
Please don’t be six, please don’t be six, please don’t be six…
“Sixth floor,” one of the old-timers said, as if reading his mind. “You got people up there, son?”
“What do you know about it?” Trey scoffed, trying to scotch the worry from his voice.
• • •
Ken took off running the second word came over the radio. The warehouse was in the Bronx, usually about a twenty-minute ride on the 4 train.
Only tonight, he didn’t have twenty minutes.
Normally, a black man running hell-bent for leather through the South Bronx was exactly the kind of thing that would get him stopped by a cop or tripped by some asshole, but maybe this night they saw his face and gave him a break. This was a man trying to stop time with the soles of his feet.
He finally spotted a cab at Morris and East 138th and beat on the driver’s-side window.
“East Harlem, 111th,” he cried.
Fearing the driver would wave him off, Ken was relieved when the fellow, wearing a bright orange turban, simply nodded and indicated the back seat.
The cab arrived at 115th and 2nd a few minutes later, but could advance no further. Police had cordoned off the block.
“Sorry for your troubles,” the driver said to Ken as he paid him.
“Nothing’s happened, man,” Ken stated adamantly. “And that’s just the way it has to be.”
The driver nodded gravely and drove off.
• • •
Even with all the noise out in the hall, Becca still managed to fall asleep. She’d locked Bones in the hall bathroom first, figuring it would be easiest to clean up in there if he had to pee or puke. What she didn’t count was the shepherd taking a quick nap, then getting up and opening the simple bathroom door with his teeth a few minutes later.
Bones walked around the apartment and got a clear aromatic sense of the place. He smelled Ken and the food he dragged in. He smelled Trey and Trey’s friends and their drugs. He also picked up Becca’s scent, figuring out pretty quickly which part of the living room she sat in to eat while watching television, what side of the couch she preferred, and which window she’d sit at to watch the neighborhood go by.
The floor was fairly crumb-free, so Bones headed for the couch. There he found broken chips, candy, chunks of bread, and pieces of cereal all buried between the cushions. He went after these with gusto.
But when that task was complete, Bones plopped down with his head on the armrest and stared at the noise coming from the hall.
It was a full hour before the voices neared the front door and stopped there.
“We’d ask that you stay indoors until we give you an all-clear, is that understood?” bellowed an authoritarian voice.
“’Understood?’” grunted Ken. “Shouldn’t that be more like ‘is that acceptable’? This is my house, man! My little sister’s in there!”
“We sent officers door to door. No one answered here.”
“Yeah, because she was probably scared shitless. Then you’ve got us waiting down there…”
“You couldn’t call?”
There was a silence before Ken’s voice replied, “Phone’s disconnected.”
“Well, that’s too bad, then,” said the cop, sounding triumphant. “You have a good night now.”
Keys jangled in the door. A second later, it swung open, light pouring in from the hall as Trey and Ken entered quickly.
“Man, fuck that guy,” Trey snarled. “He doesn’t know I know he lives over there off Lenox.”
“Oh, and what’re you going to do about it?” Ken scoffed. “Go over and pretend you don’t smell like a beer can with thirty roaches stuffed in it? He’d run you in so fast, you’d be crying.”
Trey straightened up a little before rolling his eyes. “Better than smelling like a grocery store dumpster. Rotten cabbage, rotten carrots, sour milk…”
That’s when Trey’s gaze traveled over to the couch and met Bones’s.
“Oh, shit!” Trey shrieked.
He grabbed the front doorknob, but Ken had already set the door chain.
“Fuck, man!” he shouted.
Ken stared at the dog and realized there wasn’t something right about it. He figured any other dog would leap to its feet and confront Trey. Dogs reacted to fear, right? But this one only sat there looking at Trey like he was just the latest attraction.
“Hold up, Trey. I don’t think he’s dangerous.”
As if looking for the perfect way to punctuate Ken’s assessment, Bones farted. Trey stared at the shepherd with incredulity before turning to Ken.
“I’m still way high, right?”
“What’s going on?” Becca said in a too-sleepy-to-be-fully-awake voice as she walked into the living room.
“Becca! There’s a dog!”
Becca eyed Bones, giving him a quick pat on the snout. “How’d you get out of the bathroom, Bones?”
Bones seemed to know exactly what she was referring to and glanced backward at the bathroom without comment. Becca turned back to her brothers.
“Cops shot up the whole hallway going after Mister what’s-his-name who’s always having ‘relatives’ stay with him,” she explained matter-of-factly. “Got a couple of the neighbors, too.”
; “Yeah, we saw. They took the cops down with him.”
“No, that wasn’t them,” Becca claimed. “I heard the bullets. The cops came in, there was shooting, lots of noise, lots of machine guns, but then there was just that one coming up from behind them—bang, bang, bang, bang.”
Ken saw the look in Becca’s eyes and shook his head. “No way. You’re not going down that road again, are you? Please say you’re not. When are you going to stop this?”
“When are you going to believe me?” Becca countered. “You saw Mrs. Fowler’s apartment door open?”
“Yeah,” Ken replied, realizing he had.
“He was in there with her this time,” Becca explained. “You know how she’s always saying she got this gun. Well, here it is.”
Becca went over and plucked the gun from its hiding place in the silverware drawer.
“Where’d you get that?” Trey said, grabbing it away from her.
“Bounced up to our doorstep after she got done killing all the police,” Becca intoned. “Smell it.”
Ken took the gun from Trey. Even without inhaling, he could tell from the heft that those were spent cartridges in the cylinder.
“Jesus,” Ken said. “Why the hell did you pick it up?”
Becca shrugged, even though she knew the answer. “I was scared. I knew he was out there in the hall somewhere just looking at me. Then this dog showed up and I figured it was going to be okay.”
“Fuck, you stole a gun and a police dog?” Trey scoffed, checking out Bones’s harness. “They’re going to put you away for this!”
Becca walked over until she was only a few inches from Trey’s face. “You can laugh at me all you want, but first it was Mr. Preston, then Devaris the other night. Now it’s a whole bunch of dead cops and Mrs. Fowler. It’s that dog, Trey. That evil frickin’ dog. And we gotta be ready for it because no one else is.”
IV
Ken didn’t bother going back to work that night, but he couldn’t sleep, either. Sure, there’d been a string of bad luck in the buildings lately. But that was East Harlem. He’d worked night after night, week after week, month after month to get them out of there. He wasn’t stupid. He knew that it was probably too late for Trey and one day he’d get a call that he was dead or in custody for something terrible.
