Although this is a crime-racked area, he doesn’t think trouble is inevitable or even likely. For all its dangers, this is not an outpost of Hell. Nevertheless, there is no safe neighborhood these days, and any homeboy with an active imagination might be as interested in a duffel bag as in the flash of a solid-gold Rolex.
This is a residential district where precious illumination is allowed in a time of shortages; however, the lampposts are old and insufficiently bright, and the milky globes atop a number of them have been shot out or broken with stones. The street trees are nearly as old as the city and have not been properly maintained in decades; through the intricate thatchery of branches, the veiled glow of the westering moon is reduced to a stippling of gray light on the otherwise dark sidewalk.
When any vehicle approaching from behind him slows down, he tenses in expectation that it will stop, that a confrontation might occur. They all motor eastward, toward a thin, ashen radiance along the eastern rim of the world that is rising as though the lost continent of Atlantis is slowly surfacing in the sea of night.
The houses are mostly bungalows, stucco or clapboard, on small lots. Some are maintained with pride. An equal number are crumbling toward condemnation, the lawns long neglected. Perhaps 10 percent are abandoned. This is Vig territory, a gang as dangerous as the Bloods or the Crips, their name shortened from vigorous, to imply that they have drive, force, and strength.
Nina Dozier’s stucco bungalow is in good repair, colorless in these last minutes of darkness but, in daylight, pale blue with white trim. Two small bedrooms. One bath. A living room that also serves as a home office. An eat-in kitchen. Maybe seven hundred square feet in all. The house had belonged to her mom and dad. She inherited it, along with a mortgage, when they were run down and killed in a crosswalk as they were coming home from a local market with bags of groceries.
The hit-and-run driver, later caught, was a methamphetamine freak with a long rap sheet, recently released on bail after being charged with carjacking. He was driving a stolen Lincoln Aviator that he totaled later that day, without injury to himself.
Because Nina’s son will be sleeping at this hour, Michael goes around the bungalow to the back, as they arranged. She is sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, slim and fresh-faced, one of those women who seems too small to withstand the storms of this world but who walks through them all unbent, a mahogany Madonna.
He taps softly on one of the four panes in the top half of the door, and she looks up. In spite of the proofs that he provided to her, she is clearly astonished that he has shown up as promised. Her surprise isn’t accompanied with relief; she is accustomed to people and fate disappointing her just when her expectations are highest.
She disengages the two deadbolts and opens the door. Michael steps into this humble home in which lives the hope of the world.
A BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER
Nina fills a heavy, white china mug with coffee for Michael, refreshes her own, and sits across the table from him. She needs the caffeine, for she has slept not at all this night. In fact, since he first approached her the day before yesterday, she’s been in a state of anticipation that has made it difficult to concentrate on her work or on anything else.
At thirty, after putting herself through college, she is in her sixth year of business as a certified public accountant. Her clients own small businesses in the neighborhood. She keeps their books, prepares their taxes, and makes sure they are in compliance with state laws regarding employees. None of them is getting rich, and neither is she, but she counts it an accomplishment, almost a triumph, that she can support herself, provide for her son, and grow her savings such that she might be able eventually to give the boy a chance for a better life than she has shaped for herself. In this hard and darkening world, she is proud of what she has achieved—and grateful that she is wiser than she once was, that she doesn’t need to depend on anyone.
When she was sixteen, she made a profound error of judgment. His name was Aleem Sutter. He was a charmer, charismatic, a liar who could make a young girl believe he was true to the bone. He knocked her up and then walked away. Everyone said she shouldn’t carry the baby to term, but she did. She hoped that when Aleem learned he had a son, he would help support him. Didn’t happen. However, almost from the day the baby was born, though he should have been a burden, he was a joy. Never fussy, always smiling, curious and inquisitive from the start, quick to learn, John became quicker year by year. He is thirteen, good-hearted and reliable and truthful—everything that his father was not and still is not. As any mother should, Nina believes that her boy is special, though she never imagined that a stranger would one day knock on her door to tell her that Shelby Shrewsberry thought a boy like John could be the hope of the world, a stranger who would amaze her with his uncanny powers. But along came Michael. For thirteen years, Nina has lived for her child, now with more love and hope than ever—though there are risks, dangers.
The abilities that Michael has demonstrated seem magical, but Nina understands that his gifts were born from a strange confluence of science and wild luck. The odds that such a wondrous thing would flower from horror and tragedy are beyond calculation. She thinks of it as a miracle, but Michael does not. He insists he is no messiah, no anointed redeemer, nothing more than a guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time when, in the midst of catastrophe, one thing went right. He recognizes the corrupting nature of power and the need for humility to avoid becoming one more monster aligned with those who would consign most of humanity to bondage.
From the duffel bag on the floor beside his chair, he withdraws a wad of hundred-dollar bills fastened with a rubber band and puts it on the table. “As I promised. This is one of forty.”
Although she believes in him, she hesitates to touch what he offers. Because John is sleeping in a front room, she speaks softly, and so does Michael. “Where did you get all this?”
“I took it away from some bad men.”
“How bad?”
“Drugs and human trafficking.”
“Dirty money,” she says.
“The uses they would put it to would’ve only made it dirtier. You’ll use it well. You’ll make it clean again.”
“So much.”
“I might need a year or more to understand how best to use this crazy power, before I dare to do what needs to be done. During that time, for Shelby, I want to know you and John are all right. He was my best friend. I owe him. There’s nothing else I can do for him.”
He wants her to sell this house and move somewhere that drive-by shootings are rare, where gangbangers don’t rule the streets. Where she and John can’t be found, where they’ll be safe.
A month ago, Aleem Sutter came back into her life. He’s now the boss dog of the Vigs in this county. Having a gang-age son who’s living straight is embarrassing to him and suggests to his homeboys that he bends to the will of a woman. He’s sniffing around the edges of their lives, wary of Nina, but he’s rapidly growing bolder.
“I give up my accounting, how do I say I earned this money?”
“Stop using a credit card. When you pay cash, your wealth becomes invisible.”
“Some things can only be paid by check or such.”