him.
He takes also a dark-blue knitted toboggan cap. He pulls it low over his forehead, over the tops of his ears.
Perhaps a nine-year-old boy alone will only call attention to himself by such an effort at disguise. He suspects that the simple cap is, on him, flamboyant. He feels clownish. But he does not strip it off and toss it away.
He has walked so many alleys and serviceways, has darted across so many avenues into so many shadowed backstreets, that he has become not merely lost but also disoriented. The walls of buildings appear to tilt toward or away from him at precarious angles. The cobblestone pavement under his feet resembles large reptilian scales, as though he is walking on the armored back of a sleeping dragon.
The city, always large, seems to have become an entire world, as immense as it is hostile.
With the disorientation comes a quiet desperation that compels Crispin at times to run when he knows full well that no one is in immediate pursuit of him.
Shortly before dusk, in a wide alleyway that serves ancient brick warehouses with stained-concrete loading docks, he encounters the dog. Golden, it approaches along the east side of the passage, in a slant of light from the declining sun.
The dog stops before Crispin, gazing up at him, head cocked. In the last bright light of day, the animal’s eyes are as golden as its coat, pupils small and irises glowing.
The boy senses no threat. He holds out one hand, and the dog nuzzles it for a moment.
When the dog walks past, the boy hesitates but shuffles after him. Unlike his follower, the animal seems to know where he is going, and why.
Cracked concrete steps lead up to a loading dock. The big bay roll-downs are shut, but a man-size door proves to be unlocked and ever-so-slightly ajar.
The dog nudges the door open. With a swish of his white tail, he disappears inside.
Crossing the threshold into darkness, Crispin withdraws a small LED flashlight from a pocket of his jeans. The flash was once in his nightstand drawer. He took it when he fled his home in the first minutes after midnight.
As sharp as a stropped razor, the white beam cuts through the gloom, revealing a long-abandoned, windowless space large enough to serve as a hangar for jet airliners. High overhead are storage lofts and catwalks.
Everything is shrouded in gray dust. Rust as layered as pastry dough flakes and peels from metal surfaces.
Scattered across the concrete floor are rat bones and the shells of dead beetles. Old playing cards spotted with mold. Here a one-eyed jack, there a queen of hearts and a king of clubs, and there four sixes laid out side by side. Cigarette butts. Broken beer bottles.
The flashlight finds a spider crawling on a low-hanging loop of cable, projecting its enlarged shadow on a wall, where it creeps like a creature in one of those old movies about insects made enormous by atomic radiation.
Without need of the flashlight, the dog finds his way around the sprays of glass. In such an odorous place, most dogs would weave from smell to smell, their noses to the floor. But this one carries his head high, alert.
At the north end of the great room are three doors leading to three offices, each with a window looking out upon the warehouse. Two doors are closed, the other ajar.
Beyond the gap between the third door and the jamb, an amber light pulses.
Crispin halts, but the dog does not. After a hesitation, the boy follows the animal into the illumined chamber.
Between two groups of fat candles — three to his left, three to his right — a man in his late twenties sits with his back against a wall, his legs straight out in front of him.
His glassy blue eyes stare but do not see. His mouth hangs open, but he has used all the words that he was born to speak.
Beside one trio of candles lies a sooty spoon. Next to the spoon is a plastic packet from which spills a white powder. In his lap lies a hypodermic syringe emptied of its contents.
The right sleeve of his checkered shirt is rolled up past the crook of his elbow, where blood earlier trickled from a puncture. Evidently he had some difficulty finding the vein.
Crispin is not afraid in the presence of a dead man. He has recently witnessed much worse than this.
With a keen intention more human than canine, the dog goes to a backpack lying beyond the candles, takes one of its straps between his teeth, and drags it away from the corpse.
The boy supposes that the bag must contain dog treats. On his knees, searching the various compartments, however, he finds no evidence that the dead man ever provided for the animal.
A quick scan of the dust-covered floor and the few paw prints suggests that the dog has never been here before, that he was led here by scent, not by experience. Yet …
Among the greasy, mostly worthless possessions of the deceased, Crispin discovers two stuffsacks full of currency rolled into tight bundles and held together by rubber bands. There are wads of five-, ten-, and twenty- dollar bills.
The money is most likely stolen or otherwise dirty. But no one, not even the police, will be likely to discover from whom the dead man has swiped this fortune or by what illegal activity he might have earned it.
Taking money from the body of a homeless loner surely can’t be theft. The man has no need of it anymore.
Nevertheless, the boy hesitates.
After a while, he feels that he is being watched. He looks up, half expecting that the corpse’s gaze has shifted toward him.
Eyes bright with candlelight, the dog studies him, panting softly as if in expectation.
Crispin has nowhere to go. And if he thinks of somewhere to go, he currently has only four dollars to get there.
The dog seems not to have belonged to the dead man. Whatever his provenance, however, Crispin will need to feed him.
He returns the wads of cash to the stuffsacks and pulls tight the drawstring tops. The backpack is too big for him. He will take only the money.
At the threshold, Crispin glances back. Candlelight creates an illusion of life in dead eyes. With reflections of flame throbbing across the slack face, the drug addict seems to be a man of glass, a lamp aglow from within.
As they retrace their steps through the enormous warehouse, the dog halts to sniff one of the moldy playing cards lying on the floor. It is the six of diamonds.
When Crispin passed this way earlier, four sixes had lain at this spot, one in every suit.
He surveys the immense dark room, probing this way and that with the flashlight. No one appears. No voice threatens. He and the dog seem to be alone.
The LED beam, arcing across the littered floor, cannot locate the missing sixes.
Outside, in the alleyway, the western sky is crimson, but the twilight is overall purple. The very air seems violet.
In a pet shop on Monroe Avenue, he buys a collar and leash. From now on, the dog will wear the collar at all times, so that he will not appear to be a stray. Crispin will use the leash only on public streets, where there is a risk of attracting the attention of an animal-control officer.
He also buys a bag of carob biscuits, a metal-toothed grooming comb, and a collapsible water dish.
At a sporting-goods store, he ties the dog to a lamppost and leaves him long enough to go inside and buy a backpack of the size that kids need to carry books to and from school. He puts the stuffsacks of money and his pet- store purchases in the pack.
Their dinner is hot dogs from a street vendor. Coke for the boy, bottled water for the dog.
At a novelty store specializing in magic tricks and games of all kinds, Crispin window-shops for a minute or two. He decides to buy a deck of cards, though he’s not sure why.
As Crispin is tying the dog to a rack designed for securing bicycles against theft, the owner of the novelty store opens the door, causing a silvery ringing from an annunciating bell. He says, “Come, lad. Dogs are welcome here.”
The owner is elderly, with white hair and bushy white eyebrows. His eyes are green, and they sparkle like
