Angels of Detroit (7 page)

Darius pushed the straw wrapper deeper down into his pocket. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll be more careful.”

Michael Boni turned away, his eyes falling once again upon the old man with the cane. He seemed serious about the dangers the blind man represented. But more than that, Michael Boni seemed pleased by what the blind man had done.

§

In the five months since he’d been assigned the night shift at HSI, Darius had never faced a security breach more serious than a drunk setting up camp in the doorway. After six o’clock, there was never more than a handful of people left. Every night, from the booth in the lobby, he watched the stragglers trickle out, a few each hour until, by eight or nine—ten at the latest—the last of them had gone. It was always the same people.

That night, like almost every night, the last to leave was Mrs. Freeman, from the third floor. Even before he knew her title, Darius could tell she was someone important. She was in her late sixties, and she had a leisurely way of crossing the lobby from the bank of elevators, as if she had nothing to prove, no reason to hurry. Maybe no one was waiting for her at home. It made him sad to think so.

“It’s all yours, Darius,” she said, pausing at the booth, tossing him an imaginary set of keys.

He caught them midair, as always. “We’ll get it spic ’n’ span,” he said. “A fresh coat of wax.”

She raised her eyes toward the high ceiling. “I don’t know how you can stand all this quiet.”

“The girls get here,” Darius said, “and I drive them crazy, talking their ears off.”

“You’re a bad influence.”

He smiled.

“Well,” Mrs. Freeman said, giving him a wave. “Goodnight.”

Outside in the plaza, she opened her umbrella. Darius hadn’t realized it had started to rain.

At eight, his partner, Carl, arrived, toting sixty-four ounces of radioactive pop. Darius poured himself a cup of lukewarm coffee. Carl flipped through a magazine, page after glossy page of sports cars, posed like centerfolds.

“Did I ever tell you my uncle used to build Vettes?” Carl said, holding up the magazine for Darius to see.

The thing in the photo looked more like a flying saucer than a car.

“Ever drive one?” Darius said.

“So fast, bugs vaporize on the windshield.”

“Is that something you need?”

“What’s need got to do with it?” Carl turned the page and did a double take at a little red convertible. “Get your boy one of these,” he said. “Zero to pussy in three point one seconds.”

Darius’s coffee had grown cold. “Carjacked in three point two.”

At nine, Darius had his first break. He walked to the far side of the lobby, where he could have some privacy. He called Sylvia. She was already in bed.

“Thanks for doing the shopping,” she said. “Did you wash the sheets, too?”

“I spilled coffee,” he said. “Sorry.”

“They feel nice.”

Darius asked about the kids, about her day at work, about everything that crossed his mind, but none of it helped to distract him from what he’d done that morning, what he’d promised himself he’d never do again.

His voice nearly failed him when it was time to say goodbye. “I love you.”

She said, “I love you, too.”

Why wasn’t that enough?

By the time his break was over, the cleaning women had settled in on their floors and commenced their work. Darius began his rounds. It was exercise of sorts, and talking to the women while they cleaned made the time go a little faster. But then at midnight, when it was time for Carl’s break, Darius had to return to the booth and the quiet tedium of the security monitors.

By midnight, Darius knew, Sylvia was long asleep. Shawn and Nina, too. And then there was Michael Boni. What would he be doing? He probably never slept. Darius didn’t know where he lived, but he imagined him in a narrow room, on a bare mattress, a pile of books on an unsteady side table. There’d be no carpet or rugs. The paint would be yellowed and peeling. Windows? Maybe a small one. Michael Boni would be sitting on the bed with his back to the wall. No television. No radio. He’d be smoking. Did he smoke? Darius had never seen him smoke, but it seemed likely. Michael Boni would be staring at the peeling walls and plotting.

Some of the facts of Michael Boni’s life might still have been hazy, but what Darius knew for sure was that his new partner was a man of absolutes. Their chance meeting in the post office, their rendezvous
downtown, their trip to the bookstore to see what they could learn—all of it confirmed his first impression, that once Michael Boni made up his mind, there was no going back. For Darius, there was something irresistible in Michael Boni’s clarity, and it pleased him that it had been his own idea that Michael Boni had latched on to. A clean slate. They could start over, fresh.

It was midnight, and Violet would be getting into bed. She slept in the nude, he imagined. Darius had no way of knowing for sure. They’d never spent a night together. Was there a good reason for sleeping with a girl just three years older than his daughter? There was not, though there were plenty of bad ones. Did Sylvia deserve better? She did. So who was he to be sitting here supervising the cleaning women, dusting and vacuuming and polishing, making sure they didn’t try to sneak home with a roll of stolen toilet paper?

He’d made a mess of things. With Sylvia, with Violet. He’d known this for months, since the first time he’d let Violet into his bed. And yet still the affair continued, because he’d been too weak to make it stop. But now he had Michael Boni to show him how to follow through.

No more weakness.

A clean slate.

Start over.

In his dream, gray slippery smoke in the shape of a lamprey slid under the door of the bookstore. There were five people in the basement. The smoke asphyxiated them in their sleep. After its work was done, the smoke came home and curled up at Dobbs’s feet.

He awoke on the floor, bathed in sweat. He got up and went outside. The street was a well of darkness. To the north and east, there was more of the same. But to the west and south, the trees wore faint halos of light. He buttoned up his coat and bolted the door behind him.

After a couple of blocks, Dobbs had left the residential streets behind. The road led to a small bridge crossing over a grassy canal. Down the center of the canal ran parallel depressions that must once have held train tracks. On the other side of the bridge loomed a pair of water towers dipped in rust, held up by spider legs. The factory underneath looked as though it were being consumed from within by some sort of cancer.

He reached an intersection. There was no traffic, but across the street he saw a faintly illuminated shadow, tinted as the signal flashed from green to yellow to red. An elderly woman, slightly stooped. In her arms she held a small wooden crate she seemed to be struggling to keep from tipping over. In a moment, she reached the curb, stepping down into the crosswalk.

From somewhere up the street thundered a low, steady rumble. A boxy sedan emerged from the dark, trailing a bloom of incandescent smoke. As the car sped closer, the rumble doubled down, saturating the pavement with sound. The vibrations quivered their way up Dobbs’s legs and into his intestines, clenching hold of his chest. There was no way the old woman could have missed the noise herself, and yet she kept coming. As she crossed the double yellow line, Dobbs could see her and the car converging. He meant to yell, but there was no time. He got only as far as filling his lungs with air.

The tires squealed. Dobbs’s entire body flinched.

He opened his eyes just in time to see the car swerve into the other lane. The old woman looked up briefly, as if she thought she’d heard someone call her name.

“Are you okay?” Dobbs said when she reached the sidewalk. She looked startled by the sound of his voice.

“Fine,” she said. “How are you?” The old woman wore a purple floral housedress with nothing over it, but she seemed not to feel the cold. She was dark-skinned and even older than he’d thought, well into her seventies. There was a mole on her right lobe that looked like an earring, a black pearl. She was so calm, it seemed pointless to mention what had almost happened.

The crate in her arms was filled with what looked like tools, garden implements. Trowels, pruners, weeders, claws—the metal corroded with dirt and rust. “What are those for?” he said.

“What do you think?”

In their condition, they could have passed for weapons, slow death by tetanus. “Are you a gardener?”

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “It’s late.”

“I’m looking for a place to eat.”

The old woman looked up and down the street. “You find it,” she said, “you let me know.”

She resumed walking, heading north, disappearing into the shadows of an old stone church.

Dobbs kept going, farther than he’d been before. Every once in a while there was a house, but more often there wasn’t anything at all. The streetlights worked in unpredictable patterns. Entire blocks might be completely dark, followed by blocks that hummed and glowed.

Without meaning to, he found himself circling back to the bookstore. Like everything else at this hour, it was closed.

He was getting nowhere, and he was wasting too much time.

He needed a car.

He remembered loading docks, fleets of paneled delivery trucks. Back where he’d started, the wholesalers and produce distributors.

But when he got there, he realized he’d forgotten the fortifications, the trucks corralled within razor-wire fences.

It took him two more nights to find what he needed.

It was a low, nondescript building of earth-colored block. Peering through one of the small, dirty windows around back, he saw the enormous garage inside.

The building belonged to the department of water and sewerage. Administrative offices, by the look of it. At least it had been. But now it seemed to be the dumping ground for their unneeded junk. No one appeared to have been inside in ages.

In the garage he found four trucks: a tanker, a dump truck, and two utility vans. The keys to all of them hung in a flimsily padlocked cabinet in a wood-paneled office.

One of the vans wouldn’t start at all. The other took a few moments to consider what it would do before grudgingly coughing itself to life.

What pleased Dobbs maybe even more than the van was the locker room. They were the water department, after all, and they hadn’t bothered to shut off their own supply. The water was brown and cold, and there was no soap, but it had been at least a week since he’d taken a shower.

He stayed in the spray until his feet went numb, then dried himself off with a new blue jumpsuit, fresh from the plastic package, a water and sewerage department patch stitched to the chest.

He spent the next couple of days working on the van. He changed the oil and the plugs. He drained the old gas and bought a new battery and filled the tires. There was rust on the rotors but not enough to make him worry. At a dead stop, the van vibrated like a washing machine. Dobbs guessed the timing belt had jumped a notch. Maybe two. So he cleared away the other belts and pulleys and removed the covers and tried to remember where to go from there. It had been years since he’d done anything like this. And he’d only ever been barely competent in the first place.

He’d been in high school when he’d decided to learn about engines. At the time, he didn’t have a car of his own. He had to borrow his parents’ when he needed to. Jess was away at college then, out east. At least he didn’t have to share with her, too.

Both his parents’ cars were leases. Every couple of years they got something new, swapping out before anything needed to be fixed. They were smart people, both of them professors. His father’s specialty was nineteenth-century German literature. His mother taught political science. They didn’t know the first thing about machines.

During the summer months, his parents rarely left their offices. They each had one at the house, a personal cocoon of monographs and scholarly journals. They had articles and book proposals to keep
them distracted. Dobbs liked that about them, the way they threw themselves into projects, little worlds of their own.

But one afternoon Dobbs’s father emerged into the sunlight to run an errand of some kind. He was in his new Volvo, stopped at a traffic light. At the opposite corner of the intersection was a gas station with a repair shop. He happened to look over, and there was his son, bent over a Chevy in an open garage bay, smeared with grease.

That night when he got home from work, his parents called him into the living room. They sat him down on the sofa, while they settled stiffly into armchairs on either side of the fireplace. The scene felt like an inquisition.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Even though it was July, his father was wearing a sweater. He liked to use the air-conditioning to regulate the seasons at a steady seventy degrees.

“Are you interested in
cars
?” His mother smiled as if the word hurt her teeth.

“Not really.”

“Then why?” his father said.

It was as if they’d caught him with a bag of weed. Although he couldn’t help suspecting they’d be more laid back about drugs—at least the suburban, recreational kind.

“Curiosity, I guess.”

The lines softened across his father’s brow. Turning to Dobbs’s mother, placing a reassuring hand on her knee, he said, “We’d talked about how maybe engineering might be a good—”

Dobbs shot up from his chair. “Not this again.”

“What?” his father said.

During a science lesson one day when Dobbs was seven, in second grade, he’d learned about the ozone layer, about the hole leaking UV rays, about Freon and aerosols and cataracts and carcinoma. That evening, over pork chops, he’d been sullen and silent. His mother spent an hour trying to get him to explain what was wrong.

“Everyone’s going to die!” he’d finally shouted, smashing his fork into a mound of cold mashed potatoes.

“It’s going to be okay,” his mother had said, guiding him into her lap, humming the same aimless tune she had when he was little.

“I’m not a baby,” he said, wriggling loose, stomping off to his room.