SIX

It made no sense.

Herbie didn’t call that evening, demanding to hear exactly what I knew about the tagger that witnessed the murder at the Central Works – a tagger who might save his property owner from a negligence lawsuit.

What began to make better sense was the likelihood that the tagger had seen that his work had been scrubbed away – work he’d risked coming to a crime scene to put up just hours after the body had been discovered. Taggers are gamesmen. I was hoping he’d dare to return to repaint his story.

I drove to the Central Works at ten that night. This time, I parked four blocks west and came up along the highway on foot, staying close to the buildings and out of range of the car headlamps speeding by and the bright patches beneath the street lamps. I wore my black jeans, black running shoes speckled even blacker from when I painted the turret’s slit windows, and a brand-new black sweatshirt lightened only by the bright red image of Spiderman that Leo had given me because he said my wardrobe needed flair.

There was but a stingy slice of moon, leaving the Central Works grounds in a milky darkness. I turned and crossed the four-lane side street in line with the railcar, moving low across the bulldozed ground and stepping gingerly to minimize any loud crunches from broken glass. It took ten minutes to creep to the end of the rail spur.

I moved along the side of the boxcar to the end closest to the building. Looking up, I could see nothing in the darkness. The night was quiet; no noise came from the old bricks. I sat down, close to one of the railcar’s big steel wheels, thinking to wait one hour to see if the tagger showed up.

It didn’t take that long. A faint creak sounded thirty minutes later, high up in the old factory. A soft thud, like something had been set down, followed. A piece of the window board-up was being removed. The soft brush of clothing against bricks came next.

I stood carefully to look up past the end of the boxcar. The black shape of someone only faintly darker than the building behind him leaned out of the open third-floor window, holding on tight with his right arm while his left arm was extended out toward the bricks. An aerosol can began hissing paint.

And then the world went bright white, lighting the ground, the boxcar, the building.

And the tagger, hanging out of the window. And me.

Quick as a cat, the tagger dropped into the building and was gone.

I spun around as a huge engine, loud and throaty, rumbled to life down by the highway. An enormous wall of blinding lights – some roof-mounted, others lower, driving lights and headlamps – lurched up onto the grounds, lighting me even brighter, and began charging toward me.

I turned from the glare. A last glance up at the building showed the tagger had left only a faint tangle of lines against the bricks. He’d already be out of a front window by now, running away from the other side of the building.

I ran for the four-lane road to the west, the lights bucking up and dropping behind me, growing brighter as what was surely a massive off-roader bore down, closing the distance between us. It would have a high, hard bumper, that beast. The men inside would have guns.

I wanted to scream, I wanted to yell, to get the attention of the cars passing by in front of me, but they were late-night cars, kids and drunks and workers getting off second shifts, speeding along too noisily to hear.

The engine grew deafening behind me. I could hear its tires crunching broken glass.

I got to the curb and ran into the street, willing the speeding drivers to see me. A horn blared; another car shot past, just inches away, hands reaching out to flip me off.

Brakes squealed from the other direction. I didn’t look; I could only run straight. More horns blared; a pair of headlamps swerved. A mass of metal brushed my arm.

And then I was across.

I chanced a fast look around. The Central Works grounds were dark, but that meant nothing. They could have switched off their massive rows of lights. And the traffic speeding by would mask any rumbling of the big engine.

An auto body shop was closest. I ran between the building and a chain-link fence, back into its storage lot. A dozen wrecked cars were lined up in a row, bleached colorless in the bluish glare of two security lights.

I climbed the six foot fence and dropped into the rear lot of the plumbing supply next door. A driveway was on the other side. I came up along its shadows to the front sidewalk.

The Central Works grounds were still dark. The off-roader might still be there, idling dark, or the driver could have come across the street on foot.

Or he could have driven down the street, to wait.

The plumbing supply was at the corner of a residential block. My best chance was to escape into the blackness of the houses. I sprinted out into the glow of a street lamp, then raced around the corner and into a block of bungalows. I ran through the darkness at the middle, through the light at the next intersection and into the dark past that. At the end of that block I turned and ran south.

The highway was thick with passing cars. I saw no vehicles with roof-mounted lights but that didn’t mean they weren’t there, parked out of sight along the highway.

The Jeep was only fifty feet away. I ran to it, jumped in and sped away. I got back to the turret twenty minutes later. After barring myself safely inside, I violated the very first rule I made when I first moved in. I poured wine.

Ever since I’d moved into the pigeon-infested turret, drunk and broke, I’d kept a gallon of red Gallo on the unfinished floor of my kitchen as both temptation and resolution. Temptation, because I needed to be reminded how far I’d once slid. Resolution, because I’d arrested that skid. The dusty old jug had rarely been opened, and then only to share, sparingly.

That night, I granted myself a waiver, a solitary splash to calm my shaking hands. I poured two inches into my travel mug and took it up to the roof to stand in the cold and watch the lust and the lights sputter along Thompson Avenue. And to try to figure out what I’d just escaped at the old Central Works.

There was no knowing for sure, but as I stood at the balustrade, I first tried out the hope that I’d simply overreacted to kids tooling around in some daddy’s over-lamped off-roader – punks who’d spotted fun in scaring someone skulking along those ruined grounds that would make for good posturing the next day at school.

But that hope depended too much on roaming teens just happening by and choosing those old grounds for some sport. A man had been pitched to his death there, a murder that a tagger had witnessed and had returned to paint, twice. Far more probably, the driver waiting in the monstrous off-roader was watching out for the same tagger I’d come looking for, to make sure that scene never got depicted again.

The agile tagger had gotten away. I almost hadn’t.

The familiar tapping jerked me from these thoughts, sounding down on the river side of the turret much earlier than ever before. I crossed the roof and looked down. Clouds had covered the moon. I could see nothing along the limestone or on the ground.

But the tapping was still coming, hard and sharp, rising up the side of the turret. But something else rustled beneath it, closer to the ground.

I hurried to open the trap door, but it is heavy and it fell closed with a bang behind me as I clambered down the ladder to the fifth floor. I raced down the next ladder and the wrought-iron stairs to the door and ran around to the river.

I was too late. Whatever had come to rustle on the ground and peck at the turret was gone. I stood motionless out in the night for a moment anyway, straining to listen, and thought of Herbie’s forthcoming check for five hundred dollars. I decided I’d spend some of it on those little solar-charged lights people stick in their yards to show nighttime passers-by where their landscape needs weeding. Such little lights wouldn’t deter the occasional wino from staggering down to the Willahock to relieve himself before a night’s slumber on the bench, but they might scare off a crazed bird from disturbing my own rest.

I was tired enough now to sleep. I doubted any more tapping would come; it seemed to happen only once a night. But there would be nagging, whether I was awake or dreaming, about why a man had come to be tossed from the old Central Works, and how a tagger had come to see it, and who had come to chase me away.

And, most of all, why Herbie Sunheim still hadn’t called.