Free Onion Street by Reed Farrel Coleman Page A

out there … Now, you’ve got to understand this about Bobby: he had the potential for violence. Although he was generally a gentle, happy soul, he wasn’t a weak one. He was a tough bastard, thick through his chest and arms. His union-organizer dad wasn’t big on hugging his son, but he had taught him all the tricks of the trade. Bobby was a sight to behold when peace demonstrations turned unpeaceful. I’d seen him knock more than one cop and a few construction workers flat on their asses.
    So yeah, Bobby had violence in him. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine him talking his way into the apartment and then taking a piece of pipe to Mindy’s attacker. But why come back? Maybe to see if he had actually killed the guy, or to make sure he hadn’t left any evidence behind. Bobby was tough, not stupid. Then there was another possibility, one I really didn’t want to think about. What if Bobby was sheltering the man who’d attacked Mindy, and was going there to check on him? The keys — in some ways, it was all about the keys. Maybe Bobby’d taken them from the guy after killing him. If not, that meant Bobby already had keys to the place. And if he did, I was back to square one: What was he doing there, and why did he have keys? Were they Bobby’s or the dead man’s?
    There was only one way to find out.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    I drove back to the fix-it shop, but made sure to park blocks away and out of sight of anyone who might know me or my brother’s car. As I walked, I tried very hard to focus on the cold, on the passing traffic, or just about anything I could other than what I had in mind to do. Did the idea of going back into that apartment and patting down a corpse scare the shit out of me? Yeah, it did, but the thought that Mindy might never wake up scared me more. It scared me more to think that my best friend might’ve murdered someone. And what scared me most of all was the opposite, that rather than killing the man who had nearly beaten my girlfriend to death, Bobby had a connection to him or had tried to save him.
    Again, as I’d done earlier from the safety of Aaron’s car, I watched and waited. This time, from the shadows of a doorway directly across the street. A light went on, not from the third floor bedroom where the body was, but from the storage area on the second floor where the sign on the black door had threatened OR ELSE. Frayed and puckered shades covered the windows. They allowed light to leak out their sides, but did not give up anything more than that. I checked the Bulova watch on my wrist that my Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Lenny had given me for my high school graduation. Suddenly, standing out there alone in the biting cold, high school felt like a chapter from someone else’s book.
    It was a little after eight. Only two hours or so had passed from when I’d first pulled up across the street. Two hours, the same amount of time that had elapsed between my conversation with Mindy and when I found her smoking and drinking outside Burgundy House on the evening this nightmare had begun. I’d been confused by her mood swing that night. What, I’d wondered since, could possibly have happened in two hours to make her change so dramatically? I was no longer as confused. If the events of my evening had taught me anything, it was that a lot more than moods could change in two hours — a lot more.
    At 8:16, an old, shit-brown Dugan’s Bakery truck, the company logo sloppily painted over, parked in front of the fix-it shop. Two guys about my age, dressed alike in woolen watch caps, army surplus jackets, and gloves, got out of the truck. The back door of the van swung open. When I felt it was safe, I moved four doorways to my right so I could get a better angle on what there was to see. I noticed that the white door to the upstairs apartments had been wedged open and that the two guys, neither of whom were familiar to me, were disappearing up the creaky stairs I’d navigated less than an hour before.