Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [33]
“I like your hair.”
She shook her head and threw away her cigarette. “It’s just hair.”
“If you could go anywhere, where would you go?” He figured he had about a second before she went inside.
“Go? I can’t go anywhere.”
“I see you watching the cars. Do you wish you could get away somewhere?”
She looked at him again, and her eyes were tired. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The next two days he didn’t leave to steal anything. He sat around the apartment smoking weed and waiting on the end of the day so he could go downstairs and watch. At about six the first night he went down the stairs quietly with his notebook and crossed the street. He sat with his back to a tree in the tiny park next to the fire station across the street and watched the front of the restaurant. The tree was one of those with the leaves that he thought looked tropical, like a fern or something, and it was as if he was on an island, only the island was between Ridge Avenue and Kelly Drive and instead of circling sharks there were cars running up and down the river.
He had on three cheap watches he’d stolen, two of them with the same time. When the big kid, Luis, walked out of the back with the bag and put it on the table, he wrote down the time from each of the three watches and then waited. He could see Grace inside, but she was at the counter and didn’t come out. After six minutes by the top watch (a girl’s watch with a lavender band and fake gemstones around the face), the Chevy pulled up and the Asian kid with the cap and the chains got out and grabbed the bag. He said something to Grace that made her face go tight and then walked out again and the car pulled away.
Jimmy wrote down the time again and then got up and walked the long way around the block.
No money. That was how Jimmy knew there was something going on. Luis came out and dropped the plastic bag, and not on the counter where all the other bags went, but on a table near the door. It looked like any other bag, full of food, but it wasn’t. The Asian kid came in and took it, and didn’t pay anybody. Didn’t talk to anyone except Luis, and sometimes Grace, who wouldn’t talk back, but kept her eyes down.
The next afternoon Porter came over to buy more of the stuff Jimmy had piled up around the apartment. Jimmy liked Porter because he was older, a grown-up, and still out of control, and because he had red hair that stood up on his head. Most of the adults he ran across seemed like someone had let the air out of them or something, or like they were all nearsighted and not being able to see anything made them cautious and slow. Porter charged in and threw shit around the room, did lines of coke he never thought to offer anyone else, would spend fifteen minutes beating Jimmy’s price down only to hand him more money than he’d promised. Jimmy asked Porter’s opinion about the Imperial Garden.
“Oh, that’s a fucked life, kid. They bring a hundred people at a time sealed in containers, then they owe so much money they gotta work shit jobs for years to pay off.”
“Containers?” Jimmy picturing Grace Lei in a giant shrink-wrapped plastic package, like the headphones from Best Buy he could never get open and had to saw at with a steak knife.
Most of the stuff piled up in the apartment was worthless crap. Porter never got tired of pointing this out to Jimmy, but he also went through everything meticulously; holding up and identifying each baseball, coffee mug, book, candlestick, decorative plate, and teapot Jimmy had stacked up around the apartment, and then guessing what it was worth.
“What the fuck is this?” he’d say, holding up a collectible action figure from a comic book store. “A doll?”
“It’s Wolverine. From the comic book. It’s worth like a hundred and fifty bucks.”
“To little kids. Or retards, maybe. I’ll give you ten. This?”
“It’s a fork. I think.