Fear the Night

was near the edge of the park, and Bobby thought it would be easy to create some kind of diversion, or simply walk past and scoop up the phone while her attention was elsewhere. If he did happen to be noticed, he’d simply hand the phone over to the woman with a smile and pretend she’d knocked it on the ground and he was retrieving it for her. Even if she didn’t believe him, she probably wouldn’t raise much of a fuss. Something about her made him think she wasn’t the type. And it was almost as if she wanted to have the phone stolen. She even made it easier for him by pulling an envelope from her purse, opening it, and becoming engrossed in a letter.

Bobby nonchalantly rose to his feet and shuffled at an oblique angle toward the bench. None of the park’s other occupants seemed to be paying much attention to him. He wasn’t the sort whose gaze anyone wanted to meet.

Within a few seconds he was only about ten feet from the bench. The woman continued to sit hunched over her letter, gnawing on a sandwich now, the black and purple cell phone resting near her right hip like a bright piece of fruit ready to be plucked.

The trouble was, Bobby wasn’t a thief.

He walked slowly past the bench, unable to act.

He couldn’t reach for the phone. He thought he’d reasoned it out and decided the end justified the means. But there was still a part of him that he held sacred and protected, that the city in its cruelty and hardships hadn’t claimed, and wasn’t up for compromise.

He hadn’t backslid that far. He hadn’t gone over to the other side. Not Bobby Mays.

Try as he might, he goddamn well wasn’t a thief!

Bobby kept walking, past the unsuspecting woman on the bench, out of the small, narrow park, and into the throngs of people passing on the sunny sidewalk.

Half a block down, he stood off to the side and with his fingertips counted the change in his pocket. A couple of dollars. If he set up with his sign and cup on a busy corner, like the one across the street, he could raise more.

Maybe enough for what he had in mind.

Within a few hours he had a total of fourteen dollars and thirty-five cents. It would have to be enough. After a subway pay-for-ride MetroCard bought from a machine, he was down to slightly over ten dollars. But he was soon uptown, in the 140s near Broadway.

There was a guy Bobby had come to see, a black man going by the name of Meander. Sometimes, when Bobby couldn’t afford his prescription medicine, Meander sold him pain pills. Only last week Bobby had bought some Darvocet from him, a few weeks before that some cherry cough medicine heavy with codeine that had not only relieved pain but given Bobby a bit of a buzz. Once he’d simply purchased Tylenol that Meander had probably stolen that morning from some retailer’s shelf.

Meander didn’t only specialize in medicinal aid to the hapless and homeless; he also dealt in stolen cell phones. These phones had a shelf life before they were noticed missing and the provider was alerted. They depreciated accordingly. Some of the phones had been bought cheap by Meander from desperate thieves laying them off for a few dollars for food, booze, or drug money. Others Meander, an accomplished pickpocket, stole himself. Pure profit, those.

Meander had an assortment of chargers and kept the phones’ batteries up. Usually the buyer could count on a few days of use, sometimes longer. Longer was always riskier. It didn’t take much time to run up astoundingly high phone bills, never to be paid by the illicit user.

Bobby wandered the neighborhood for about half an hour, then spotted Meander at one of his usual places of business, the doorway of a blackened brick building that had been damaged by fire a few years ago and remained unrepaired. The building had housed a small auto supply shop that had been a front for drug dealers. The oil and other petroleum products had made for quite a fire.

Meander was a short, thin man with heavy-lidded, lazy eyes and a goatee that lent his narrow face a bored yet satanic expression. He was about forty, wearing jeans so baggy they were almost like the gangsta pants worn by the younger thieves and thugs of the neighborhood. He also had on a black T-shirt three sizes too large, and a gray baseball cap worn sideways on his head so that the bill was cocked low over his right ear. The cap wasn’t precisely a baseball cap; it bore the words Shit Kicker instead of a team logo. Bobby couldn’t imagine the mentally active but physically lazy Meander kicking anyone who might kick back, or playing any game that required exertion, unless it was Run From the Cops. A few feet behind him, in the shadow of the deep doorway, was a tattered cardboard box Meander would disavow any connection to if he happened to be rousted by the law. In this box were his wares-phones on one side of a cardboard divider, medicinals on the other.

Standing slouched against the building near the doorway as if he were glued to it, Meander watched Bobby approach. His heavy-lidded eyes didn’t blink.

“You hurtin’ agin, my man?” he asked, when Bobby was about twenty feet away and obviously had come to see him.

“Came for something else,” Bobby said.

“I axed was you hurtin’?”

“So you did. I’m always hurting.”

“Not if you take the medicine I sell you.”

“That’s some bullshit,” Bobby said.

Meander grinned. “Tha’s to say, if the expiration dates on the bottles ain’t more’n ten years old.”

“Which they are sometimes.”

“Which they are,” Meander agreed. “What you need, Bobby, you po homeless fucker?”

“I need what you sell. A phone.”

Meander looked surprised-for him. His eyelids raised to the three-quarter-open position, then dropped back to half. “Who the fuck you be callin’ on the phone, walkin’ bundle of rags like you?”

“My broker?”

“You broke, all right. You can’t afford no phone.”

“I got ten dollars.”

“That be different, but it still ain’t enough.”

“It’s all I’ve got.”

Meander remained slouched, but he crossed his arms over his bony chest. “It still ain’t enough.”

“Look in your box and I bet you’ll find something in my price range. Do it as a favor.”

“Mean you gonna owe me a favor?”

“That’s the idea,” Bobby said. “How the world is greased.”

“You ain’t a cop or nothin’, so what the fuck good’s a favor you owe? You jus’ a po fool like I used to be ’fore I became a businessman.”

“I used to be a cop.”

“Like I used to be police commissioner. ’Sides, you a cop once, you always a cop.”

“Whatever. Let’s trade favors. I’ll owe you one in return for a ten-dollar phone.”

“Ain’t no such thing as a ten-dollar phone, Bobby. Ain’t you kept pace with technology?”

“I’m trying to gain ground. That’s why I wanna trade favors. Your favor’d be a discount on the phone, and mine’d be something you need in the future.”

“Trade favors, my ass. Cops don’t do that kinda deal.”

“Sure they do. Anyway, like you said, once a cop. .” Bobby glanced meaningfully at the incriminating box full of stolen wares.

Meander straightened up from the wall, somehow still slouching. “You fuckin’ threatenin’ me?”

“Just pointing out about how favors work between friends.” Bobby was threatening him and both men knew it. Bobby twisting an arm, working the street again. Bobby back on the Job. It felt good, throwing a scare into a booster like Meander. It felt right.

“Now, that the kinda deal a cop makes,” Meander said. “Do the favor or fuckin’ else. That what you’re sayin’, Bobby, my man? That what I’m hearin’?”

Bobby merely stared at him. Fixed him with the dead-eyed look that might mean anything, including explosive danger.

“Maybe I got a spare phone at that,” Meander said, squinting slightly as if for the first time bringing Bobby into focus. “Be an Amickson clamshell, ob-tained yesterday.”