Free Blow the House Down by Robert Baer

turning red. On Columbia Road, I slipped the bike under a tin outcropping on the building across the street from my first-floor apartment and secured the front wheel to the frame with a Kryptonite lock, implacable enemy of the inexhaustible bike thieves of Adams Morgan. The fat El Salvadoran kid who sat watching the space waited for me to dig a buck out of my jeans.
    â€œBuenas tardes. Comó está?”
    â€œNot so bad,” the kid said with a yawn. He had a twelve-inch Quiznos sub in one hand, a Negro Modello in the other. Just another night’s work.
    The kid’s mother and father and eight siblings lived in the basement apartment just below me. Next door to me was two-thirds of a wanna-be Krautrock band. In the floors above, where the apartments got bigger, were a gay ménage à trois, two straight couples with little kids, three full floors of daddy’s girls and mama’s boys. I didn’t exactly fit into Adams Morgan, but I didn’t want to live anywhere else. The dim entries, the smell of rancid grease, the ambient din all reminded me of Lima.
    I flipped on the television and flipped it off again. Brain poison. Took out a bottle of Johnny Walker and put it back again. Liver poison. Thought about the clubs all along the street and gave up on that as well. Too early. Too late. Too depressing. From the bottom drawer of the dresser I pulled out five years’ worth of Riggs bank statements and settled down at the circular table stuck into the little bay at the front of the apartment. Outside, under the sodium streetlight the canary-yellow Norton gleamed through a halo of a steady drizzle.
    When I looked up again, the drizzle had turned to rain. An RV blocked the view. 1-800- RV -4- RENT read the sign on the side. Below it, a fiery sunset lit a landscape of mesas and prong-horn antelope. Funny, you never see RVs in Adams Morgan. I went back to the statements: nothing, no surprises, not a thing out of the ordinary I could spot. My check was automatically deposited every two weeks. My savings account never seemed to go up or down. If there was a bubble anywhere, I couldn’t see it.
    I got the whiskey out again, got a glass—this time I meant it—and was just beginning to pour when I heard a punishing sound from outside: metal ground up and dragged along the macadam. The RV was just pulling away as I hit the street. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the El Salvadoran kid was gone. Just down the way, a Metrobus driver was cursing, trying to yank the wreck of a canary-yellow Norton Commando out from his undercarriage.
    â€œFuckin’ just came out of nowhere!” he was yelling. “Right into the fuckin’ middle of the fuckin’ road. Nobody fuckin’ gives a fuck about fuckin’ nothin’ no fuckin’ more!”
    I helped him drag the tangle of steel off to the side of the street, then waited while the gawkers drifted away. It didn’t take long: These remains were artificial, not human.
    I was standing by myself, toeing the crushed gas tank, wishing I had at least thrown on foul-weather gear, and thinking that even Superman didn’t mess with Kryptonite, when I felt more than saw someone coming down the sidewalk, walking fast, straight at me. White, black, Hispanic? I couldn’t tell. It was too dark to see anything other than that he was wearing a forest-green poncho, hood up, and a pair of basketball shoes the size of canoes. His arms were under the poncho—with or without a weapon, I had no way to know, but I hadn’t stayed alive by assuming the best about human nature. I was just about to take a step sideways and kick in his right knee when whoever it was took a sharp right turn and set off across the street.
    â€œSilly, paranoid fool,” he said as he passed me, in a voice as void of accent as any human voice could be.
    Was he talking to himself? Nuts? Talking to me? I watched him turn left on the other side of the street