Death Sentence

7

It was a cool day oppressed by a hydrocarbon haze. Sea gulls from the lake flew inland reconnaissance over the city. It was four o’clock; soon it would be dusk. Paul walked into the shop: Tax Returns Prepared — CHECKS CASHED — Xerox While-U-Wait. He went to the check-cashing counter and engaged in twenty seconds’ conversation with the cashier: he asked direction to the nearest El station, the location of which he knew already but for anyone watching him it established that he’d gone to the check-cashing window. He took his wallet out of his pocket and fiddled with it before he turned away from the window; he was still counting the money in it when he emerged onto the street.

He had performed the ritual several times and it hadn’t tempted anyone yet but he kept at it because he needed at least one more immediate target to convince the press of his existence.

When he reached the street a police cruiser was prowling by with its roof-bar of siren and lights and its lettered decals on the door. Paul counted his money again and then put the wallet in his coat pocket and turned the corner into a street lined with old frame houses streaked with watermarks.

Halfway down the block he stopped and patted his pockets as if he’d lost something. It gave him an excuse to turn a circle on his heels and search the sidewalk behind him. Down at the corner a thin jittery figure in a threadbare jacket stood restlessly: a youth bouncing on his arches like an athlete waiting to compete. Behind him a woman went across the street jerking a small wailing child by the hand.

A second youth appeared and joined the first.

Paul reached down and picked up an invisible object and put it in his pocket and walked on.

To his right a windowless clapboard wall had been decorated with spray-gun artwork. The houses beyond were dreary and lifeless. Chicago’s slums were spacious and airy by comparison with New York’s crowded high tenement buildings; the streets were wide, the buildings low. But the desolation had the same smell.

He kept the wallet in the same pocket as the gun for two reasons. If a mugger demanded his wallet he could produce the gun instead. But if a policeman went into that pocket Paul wanted him to find the $250 cash in the wallet.

The two kids watched him from the corner behind him: he saw their reflections in the rear window of a panel truck as he walked by it. They were all jerks and jitters: wired as if they’d been plugged into a wall outlet. Addicts? He had no way of diagnosing; maybe they were only natural mannerisms. But when he reached the end of the block and continued along the second block he had a chance, when looking both ways for traffic before crossing the street, to see the two kids out of the corner of his eye and they were following him at a discreet distance. His hands began to sweat: the familiar telltale.

He slowed the pace imperceptibly. His car was near the end of the block. A block farther along the empty street a traffic light blinked red, on and off. Daylight was draining out of the sky. He tasted the brass of fear on his tongue.

The two kids were running now. He heard them come.