11
Steven
Colleen stared out the tinted window at the rain-slicked Philly streets and said nothing as the car crawled into the Point Breeze neighborhood.
Bringing her here was a risk, but it was a risk I had to take. She stared as I crawled along the block, her eyes staring at the brick fronted buildings, her hands folded in her lap, her fingers making nervous claws against her palms.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“Not much,” she said. “Run down homes. Garbage on the curb.”
I smiled. “No, I mean—”
“I know what you meant,” she said. “I’m thinking, okay?”
I let out a little breath but let her think. I kept driving, circling around the block before moving on to the next one. She stared, didn’t move, didn’t blink, and the only way I knew she was alive and thinking was the breaths pulling into her chest. She wore a black tank top and dark blue jeans. Her hair was up in a bun, and she had a gray plain hat pulled down low over her face. I thought she was trying to hide, but I didn’t bother asking about it.
“There,” she said after I circled the next block twice.
I slowed, despite the taxi driving too close behind me. The guy honked and I ignored him, though the noise made Colleen flinch.
“Which one?” I asked.
“The one without flowers in its box,” she said. “Red door. Black railing.”
I nodded and looked at the number. “2244 Earp,” I said. “Write it down.”
She gave me a look then grudgingly opened the glove box. She took out a plain white notepad and a pen then scratched the number and the street down. She clicked the pen a few times and held it between her teeth as the taxi got impatient and honked again. I drove on and made a right at the stop sign onto 22nd as the cab blew past me, throwing his middle finger out the window.
“That’s one,” I said. “What’s next?”
“Keep going. Left on Latona.”
I followed her directions. There weren’t many people out in the rain, though I caught a few guys sitting out on small porches under overhangs. There were few trees in the Point Breeze neighborhood. The city had forgotten all about it a long time ago and left it for the gangs to run. Some houses were nice and kept up, the outsides clean and modern, though some were ramshackle and possibly abandoned. There were cars along the curbs, but it wasn’t packed like the nicer parts of the city.
I rolled along Latona, past what looked like it might have been some kind of church or maybe a factory with a CCTV camera outside. Colleen stopped me midway along the block.
“There,” she said. “Red door, gold handle. Looks new.”
“2224,” I read. “Write it down.”
She grunted, wrote it down, and I kept driving.
We moved through the neighborhood like that for a while. I drove, she gave directions, and occasionally had me stop. She’d point out a house, write down the address, then we’d move on.
She started adding businesses to her list. There was a drycleaner, a laundromat. There was a little bar and a beer distributor. At one point, she stopped outside of a daycare.
“This too?” I asked.
She shrugged. “People need help with their kids,” she said.
I grunted in reply. We rolled up next to a park after two hours of combing through the streets, and she handed over her little list. Twenty addresses were written down in no particular order.
“There’s more,” she said, leaning back and closing her eyes. She crossed her arms over her chest as the rain pattered against the windshield. I looked out at the empty park, at the quiet, dead playground, and wondered how many kids went there on a normal day.
“How many more?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Ten maybe, another twenty. I don’t remember them all.”
“That’s okay. This is a lot.” I stared down at the list. “This is a lot more than most of us get.”
She made a face. “You say that like what you’re doing is normal.”
“In my line of work, it is.” I folded the paper up and slipped it into my jacket pocket. I patted it flat and leaned back against the headrest.
“Your line of work,” she said. “Can you really call it work?”
I made a face and shrugged. “I think so,” I said. “It’s a job, even if it’s not a normal job. I have people that depend on me, and I have to pay them. And I have to make a profit for myself.”
“You steal. You kill.”
“Sure. So do big corporations. I just do my stealing and killing out on the streets.”
“How noble.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re so above it all then, aren’t you?”
“I don’t think I am,” I said.
I watched as a woman hurried down the sidewalk, the hood of her brown sweatshirt up over her head. She had on black slacks and a bit of red was poking out from underneath the brown sweatshirt, so I figured she was on her way home from work. A cigarette glowed in her mouth.
“But you’re acting like coming in here and killing the Club soldiers is no big deal.”
“They know what they signed up for.”
“You’re still killing them.” She unfolded her arms and leaned forward to run a hand down the leather along the dashboard.
“Sure, I’m killing them,” I said. “Like they killed some of the Russians, who killed some of the Irish, who killed some other gangs who knows how long ago. When you join a mafia, little Colleen, you accept some of the risk.”
“Not all of them do,” she said, her voice low and quiet.
I tilted my head. “What do you mean by that?”
“Some of these guys are just stupid kids,” she said. “They don’t know any better life. I mean, to some of these Club guys, it’s either construction, dock work, or selling drugs. What do you think they choose?”
“Construction,” I said with a smile.
She gave me a
