I wanted to make it to the switches and light up the floor. I couldn’t see shit. I thought maybe I was just tired, dreaming of ghosts the same way I did when I was hunting old blues singers. Robert Johnson at the foot of my bed.
But there was a different smell to my room. It smelled of fish oil and mothballs and tattered winter clothes left too long in storage. A musty basement odor.
I held the gun strong in my hand.
Annie kept growling.
Then she yelped.
Hard.
I fired off a round in the direction where I’d seen the apparition. High above the range of my dog.
She trotted back to me and I felt her stand at my side. Her back was wet and sticky.
My eyes adjusting in the darkness and then lit up again with lightning.
The sliding door rolled back. I heard it. I saw a flash of brown coat and then it disappeared into my stairwell.
I ran to the door and flicked on the lights. I stooped down to Annie and looked at her bloody flank. She’s been scratched hard but not deep, like another animal had clawed her.
I left her and ran down the steps with my gun. The door to the street was wide open and I saw a sweeping mist of rain hitting the asphalt outside in the dull glow of the city’s crime lights.
I carefully peered out, making sure I didn’t get my head blown off.
A block away and across the road, I saw the darkened shape of a man in a long tattered coat, his face hidden into the lapels. He seemed to be made of nothing but shadows. His weight did not shift. He did not move.
I squinted into the rain as I walked to him, half in a dream, half expecting his shape to dissolve into my hands when I touched him.
He turned and walked into the hole of another warehouse covered in plywood. The wood over the lower windows ripped away by the homeless. I guess I needed to know if this was one of Cash’s boys back for more or some crack addict from the Hummingbird ready to make a score.
I held the gun in my hands.
On the lower floor, the vacant building shined silver from the crime light. My feet were still bare. I felt discarded pieces of wood and wet cardboard on my toes. The air smelled the way it had in my warehouse and I tried to slow down my breathing, already growing nauseous.
The silver light leaked through like vapor.
I could not see the man.
No shadow. No ghosts.
I found stairs leading to the level above me. But I did not follow.
The light had ended. My heart beat in my chest so fast.
I could not think. The smell overpowering.
I walked back through the wind and rain to my stoop.
At the base of my stairs, there was a gold pocket watch hanging from a tarnished chain.
When I flicked open the cover, the old blues song “Love in Vain” played. I could not breathe. I felt someone had entered my head.
I snapped shut the cover, walked back upstairs, and bolted my door three times before calling the police.
THE GIRL’S HAIR smelled of cigarettes early that morning. Her breath like Jack Daniel’s and old cherries. Trey moved out from under her and grabbed the suit pants that he’d kicked out of last night and carefully counted out the money in his wallet. His AmEx and ATM cards were where he’d left them. He slipped into his pants, the white sunlight crawling through the girl’s Pottery Barn curtains. The checked ones from page fifty-eight. Painful light that hurt his head a lot. He couldn’t remember when he’d lost count.
Thirteen dirty martinis. Some bar owned by retired surfers down in the Warehouse District. Not far from his loft. There was blurry stuff in his head. A round of drinks for some girls from Loyola. Some dancing in the middle of a crowded bar. Some rap. ALIAS’s song. White girls singing along. Two more martinis. Three. The nineteen-year-old snuggled into his neck. Her grabbing his crotch by the cigarette machine. A cab ride to somebody’s house by Audubon Park. A pass-out, more drinks, some beer this time. The girl’s roommate’s boyfriend putting an X tablet into his hand. All that good feeling. That alertness. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head, not even fucking moving last night.
He pulled on the linen shirt, the good one from Brooks Brothers that his girlfriend Molly liked. Molly was always mothering him. She bought his food, did his laundry, made sure he was working out when she came in from Atlanta.
He found the latch of the door, never taking another look at the girl in the bed.
He took a cab back to the bar, found his BMW, and made his Saturday-morning calls. He called Molly, told her he had a cold. Made sure she hadn’t called last night. She had. He’d been too sick to pick up the phone. Poor baby, she said. She’d make him feel better next week. She talked about cooking for him or something. He wasn’t listening. He just wanted to make sure she was lined up. Her father was so damned close to investing in his company. All that old Atlanta money, lunch at the Cherokee, Buckhead parties where he could get even more. More contacts.
