Urban Gothic (8 page)

“No,” Leo said, staring more intently. “It’s an old van. Cruising by real slow, like they’re looking for something or somebody.”

“SWAT,” Perry suggested. “Or maybe some undercover boys.”

“I don’t think so.” Leo shook his head. “It looks pretty beat up. White dude driving it, though. Can’t see him real well, so I can’t be sure, but I don’t think I ever saw him around here before. The van either.”

“Where’s he going?” Perry asked.

“Oh, shit …” Leo turned around and stared at the group. His eyes were wide. “Toward the house.”

Perry sat his beer down. “Well, then it’s
got
to be the cops.”

“Let’s go outside and watch,” Jamal suggested. “Might see some shit go down.”

The boys stood, but Lawanda raised her hand, motioning at them to sit back down again.

“Just hold up,” she said. “We don’t know what’s gonna happen. If there’s shooting or something, then y’all are safer in here.”

Perry jumped to his feet. “Oh, let them go look. Ain’t no harm gonna come to them, long as they don’t go down there.”

And besides,
he thought.
It will get them out of our house that much sooner.

Lawanda scowled at him. Perry scowled back. They stared at each other for a moment, and then Perry’s will broke. He turned away with a sigh.

“Come on, y’all,” Leo said, moving to the door. “We took up too much of your time already, Mrs. Watkins. We should get going. Thanks for letting us use your phone.”

“Boys!” Lawanda leaped up from her chair, flustered. “I really wish you’d stay inside.”

Leo glanced from Perry to his friends to Lawanda, and then shook his head.

“That’s okay. We’ll be alright. Like Mr. Watkins said, ain’t nothing gonna happen as long as we stay up here.”

“Shit,” Markus muttered. “On this block, something can happen no matter where we stand. Motherfuckers be tripping twenty-four seven.”

Lawanda put her hands on her hips, pressed her lips together tightly and nodded at Perry.

“You go out there and wait with them.”

Perry opened his mouth to protest, then thought better of it. He’d seen the expression on his wife’s face before. If he defied her, he’d be sleeping on the couch again. He hated the couch. It fucked with his hip and his arthritis. He was defeated and he knew it. Worse, so did Lawanda. Shoulders slumping, he walked toward the door and followed the teens out onto the stoop. The strange van was just passing by the house at the end of the block. They watched the brake lights flash as it slowed. Then the driver shut off the headlights. A moment later, the vehicle disappeared into the shadows. There were clouds covering the moon, and that end of the street was shrouded in gloom.

“That’s weird,” Leo mumbled. “What the hell’s he doing?”

The street was silent. It made Perry uncomfortable. The street was
never
quiet. He glanced at Leo and his friends and noticed from their stance that the stillness was making them nervous, too.

Then gunshots rang out from a few blocks away, and they all relaxed.

“Think he’s driving around?” Markus asked. “Scoping shit out before he goes up to the door?”

Perry shrugged. The van was still out of sight.

“Whatever he’s doing,” Leo muttered, “he’d better hurry his ass up. They been inside there a long time now.”

The other boys murmured their agreement. Perry nodded, but didn’t respond. Personally, he figured it was already too late for the kids inside the house.

***

With one hand on the steering wheel, Paul Synuria eased the van toward the curb. His other hand clutched a Styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee that he’d bought at a rest stop along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He’d spiked it with a splash of Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey, the half-empty bottle of which was wedged under his seat. With the headlights off, he couldn’t see very well; there were no working streetlights or other homes near this abandoned house, and a bank of thick, slow-moving clouds covered the almost-full moon. His front driver’s side tire bumped up over the curb. The van shook and vibrated, and then slammed back down to the road again, jostling him. Coffee spilled all over his crotch. Cursing, Paul put the van in park. Then he set the coffee in the cup holder and rummaged around until he found a fastfood bag with a napkin inside. He wiped and blotted his pants. It looked like he’d pissed himself. At least the coffee hadn’t been hot.

On the van’s stereo, Slipknot’s “New Abortion” gave way to Jimmy Buffet. Paul liked to tell people that his eclectic musical tastes reflected that he was a man of contradictions. He’d say that he was the only Maggoty Parrothead around. But the truth was that he’d never heard Slipknot until a few months ago, when he found a carrying case full of compact discs at a construction site he’d been sneaking around. All the CDs were heavy metal—or what passed for heavy metal these days. No big hair. Just vocals that sounded as if Cookie Monster were fronting a band. He’d sold the stash at a pawn shop, but had held on to the Slipknot discs. He liked their melodies, and their shtick reminded him of KISS, from back in the day. Their music pumped him up before he scavenged a site.

Like now.

Paul turned off the engine so that the idling motor wouldn’t attract any unwanted attention. Then he blotted at the coffee again and shook his head, wondering, not for the first time, how he’d come to this. He’d once been the site coordinator for a group home that served people who had mental illnesses. He’d loved the job. Sure, it was stressful sometimes, but that tension had evaporated each day when he came home to his family—his wife, Lisa, and their two kids, Evette and Sabastian. But then the group home had been bought out by a bigger corporation, and they brought in their own people to fill many of the positions. After fourteen and a half years, Paul found himself out of work.

When his unemployment ran out, Paul still hadn’t found a job. There were no other group homes in his area, and when he searched beyond his region, he found that many of those facilities were also downsizing. Desperate, he’d taken a job at a metal scrap yard.

And that had led to this.

At first, Paul had been amazed. He’d had no idea that scrap metal recycling was such a big business. It was a booming, sixty-five-billion-dollar industry, thanks to an increasing global economy and the current social movement toward environmental awareness. Scrap metal was America’s largest import to China, after electronic components. Before getting the job at the scrap yard, Paul had always envisioned recycling centers as something out of Sanford and Son reruns. The truth was something different. There was money to be made in junk.

Especially on the black market.

He’d started simply enough. Legally, too. He’d been at the yard for a week. On his first day off, Paul explored his basement and the corners of his garage and toolshed. The assorted, castaway debris of their lives had been tossed into cardboard boxes, plastic milk crates, garbage bags, and footlockers and left forgotten in these places. Paul was pleasantly surprised by the amount of recyclable material he discovered—aluminum soda can tabs (saved for some long-forgotten charity but never turned in), brass fittings from an old cutting torch he no longer owned, bits of copper wire that he’d saved from various home wiring jobs, copper and brass pipe fittings, and other assorted junk. He’d hauled it all to the scrap yard the following Monday and made enough cash to cover one of his and Lisa’s payments on their auto loan.

So Paul went looking for more. Before this, he’d never broken the law. Sure, he had a few unpaid parking tickets, and there was a citation for public drunkenness when he’d been in college, but that was all. He took to blackmarket metal thievery like it had been what he was meant to do all along. Looking back on it, maybe he’d been bitter about how things had turned out—giving most of his adult life to a company only to be tossed aside like so much garbage. He told himself he was doing it for Lisa and the kids—the money he brought in was more than he’d ever made in his life, and although they didn’t know how he was earning it, they were happy with the results. But the truth was, he enjoyed it. After a life behind a desk, a life of board meetings and memos and stress, being a metal thief was exciting. Liberating.

He broke into construction sites, new homes that were not yet occupied, storage areas, foundries, ware houses, abandoned buildings, and even other recycling facilities. He scavenged electrical cables, aluminum siding and gutters, pipes, manhole covers, railway spikes and plates, electrical transformers, bolts and screws—anything he could resell. He even managed to score one hundred and twenty feet of steel and copper from an old abandoned radio tower in a remote section of Adams County.

Paul was smart about it. He didn’t steal near their home, preferring instead to scavenge throughout the rest of the state, and even into Ohio and West Virginia. He used the van, which wasn’t registered to him, and changed the tags each time he made a run. He drove the speed limit and obeyed all the traffic laws so he wouldn’t get pulled over. Since most scrap processors required a driver’s license for each transaction, Paul had obtained two phony licenses. When he sold scrap, he did it under the aliases of Mike Heimbuch or Jeff Lombardo. He’d practiced signing their names on sheets of paper until both signatures looked different from each other—and nothing like his real signature.

Since the economy’s downturn, he’d had to scavenge more metal than ever. Prices for copper, lead, and zinc had plummeted to levels lower than those during the Great Depression. Paul had come to Philadelphia because he’d heard that the pickings were good, and he hoped he could make up for the lower prices with a higher take. He’d never been to the city before, so he’d just driven aimlessly until he found a location that looked promising. The deeper into the city he went, the worse the neighborhoods became. Paul locked the doors and stared straight ahead, not wanting to attract attention.

Now, as he gazed out at the decrepit old Victorian home across from him, he wondered if he should scout around for another location. Surely this place had been picked clean already. It looked positively ancient—older and bigger than any of the row homes located farther up the block. He studied it for a moment longer and decided that he should at least take a closer look.

Paul got out of the van and quietly closed the door behind him. He glanced up and down the street, making sure nobody was watching him. Farther up the block, he saw a group of people gathered on a porch step, but he couldn’t tell if they were looking in his direction or not. Near them, on the other side of the street, a lone hooker leaned against a brick wall, adjusting her skirt. Otherwise, the street was deserted. No cars or pedestrians. Paul turned his gaze skyward. The clouds were still covering the moon. He was pretty sure that even if the group on the porch steps was looking his way, they wouldn’t be able to see him. It was dark.

He made his way to the rear of the van, opened the door, and pulled a large toolbox toward himself. Inside were various items that he used from time to time: flashlights, wire cutters, metal shearers, bolt cutters, crowbars, a tool belt, screwdrivers, wrenches, hammers, chisels, leather gloves, and a small, handheld acetylene torch. He slipped on the gloves and flexed his hands. Then he grabbed a flashlight and a flathead screwdriver. His intention was to quickly check the house. If it looked promising, he’d return to the van and retrieve the tools for the job.

Paul approached the house cautiously, alert for any sign that squatters or other undesirables inhabited it. The structure was silent. He tiptoed up the sagging porch. The boards groaned beneath his feet. He reached out and tried the door. It was locked. He rattled the brass knob, surprised at its resilience, and made a note to pry it off later. While not as in demand as copper, brass still fetched a good market price.

Paul moved around to the side of the house, glancing over his shoulder to make sure the coast was still clear. When he got out of sight of the street, he approached one of the first-floor windows and peered inside. It was pitch black. He turned on the flashlight and shined it into the window. The light reflected back to him. It took Paul a moment to realize that the glass had been painted black. A quick check verified that the rest of the windows on this side of the house had also been painted over. Shaking his head, he listened one more time. The house was still quiet. Paul pulled out the screwdriver and rapped the corner of one pane. The glass cracked, but did not shatter—exactly what he’d hoped would happen. Using the screwdriver, he pried the triangular wedge of glass loose from the window, then shined his light inside, peering into the hole.

He saw nothing but brick.

Somebody bricked over the window?

Now he was intrigued. If someone had taken the trouble to prevent entry in that manner, then there was a possibility that the building had remained free of squatters or looters. There was no telling what he might find inside.

He moved on to a second window and repeated the process. Behind it, he found another brick wall, but the masonry was a different color and texture. Paul assumed that it had been built at a different time than the previous wall.