The previously associated address was available provided he endure a fifteen-second car commercial. His fingers drummed the desktop as he waited through a jingle promising 0-percent APR for seventy-two months.

That gnawing feeling made some more headway, chewing through his assumptions.

He glanced nervously over at the RoamZone plugged into the outlet by the mouse pad. No lights, no bars, no indication that it was charging. Slowly, he reached across, picked up the shattered case. He unplugged the charger, plugged it in again.

Nothing happened.

The phone wasn’t just out of juice. It was completely smashed, an untenable mess of broken glass, fragmented circuit board, and obliterated SIM card.

It had never worked.

Not since René had crushed it underfoot that first morning Evan had woken up in the chalet.

In the harsh light of the Baltimore day, it seemed painfully obvious. A phone that withstood a Godzilla stomping, that never ran out of juice, that magically got reception in a far-flung valley under a snow-thickened sky. Evan thought about how the gas had poured through the heating vent, tipping him into a drugged stupor. The blood-loss hallucinations he’d experienced at the end as he staggered for the summit.

The unconscious pulling strings, opening trapdoors, spinning its webs.

Of course.

A sheen of sweat covered Evan’s body.

On the computer the car commercial ended, the link to the address springing up. Dazed, he dropped the ruined RoamZone into the blue recycle bucket under the desk and swung his attention back to the monitor. He felt drunk with disbelief. His hand reached for the mouse, clicked the link.

An instant before the fresh screen came up, the truth dawned on him, setting his skin tingling. He knew what it would show even before it loaded.

An East Baltimore address.

He knew it well.

63. The People No One Wants

63

The People No One Wants

The battered row house leaned against its neighbors, the whole lot of them tall and narrow and crooked, drunkards staggering arm in arm from a bar. The flaking paint was a different shade of green now. Same front window that the pack of kids used to peer through when the Mystery Man made his mysterious appearances. Same basketball courts across with the same chain-link fence surrounding the same cracked asphalt. Same handball walls layered with new graffiti.

The Lafayette Courts projects that used to loom in the background were long gone, replaced with a health clinic. Satellite dishes perched pigeonlike on balconies and rooftops. A licensed marijuana dispensary now squatted on the plot that once housed the apartment building that had gone up in smoke when Jalilah’s nana dozed off smoking a blunt.

Evan turned back to the dilapidated row house. Bumblebee hazard tape crisscrossed the front door, orange cones lining the sidewalk in front. Bulldozers and backhoes lingered in the wings, construction workers chewing sandwiches, shooting the shit. Flyers fluttered from telephone poles, announcing that the building was slated for demolition.