Free The Wolves of Fairmount Park by Dennis Tafoya Page A

ear.
    â€œGo.”
    He looked up while he listened, then hauled himself up out of his chair. He went to the front door, parted the curtains, and looked out at the street.
    â€œYeah, I see him.” There was more talk from the other end that registered as a buzzing noise for Orlando. “Yeah, he has the look. Shit.” He closed the phone.
    Orlando raised his eyebrows.
    Bob threw the cell phone onto the seat. “That was Arthur, there’s a cop outside. Maybe a cop. He looks the part, but I don’t know.”
    Orlando went to the window, hanging back but angled to see the street between the parted curtains. He tracked slowly parallel to the glass, seeing the street in little slices until he came to a battered Volvo station wagon with a wide swatch of duct tape over the rear bumper. In the driver’s seat was a big man with short hair, sipping coffee. He was too far away to see much, but Orlando got the vibe off him and shook his head.
    â€œShit.”
    â€œYeah,” said Bob. “Well, discretion is the better part of not getting sent to the can.”
    â€œOkay, you got warrants out?”
    â€œLaDonna?”
    She leaned her head in from the kitchen. “No, hon. No paper out on you now.”
    Orlando looked philosophical. He squinted an eye at the floor. “Okay, I’ll go down and cut up Ridge, you come out and go back, hook around Montgomery. He’ll follow one of us if this is anything.”
    â€œThat’s it? One of us gets picked up?”
    â€œYou don’t want him coming in here.” Orlando swept a hand around the apartment. A long row of radios sealed in cartons, boxes of sneakers, three televisions taken from a motel in Pennsauken, the cables still hanging where they had been cut.
    â€œNo.”
    Orlando raised his eyebrows.
    â€œLaDonna?” Bob waited by the door, got a reversible jacket from a peg on the wall. “Hon, you got my bail money?”
    â€œAlways.”
    â€œOkay, I get picked up, I’ll call you.” She came out, gave him a peck on the cheek. “And call Tricia, tell her she’ll have to pick up Patrice at day care.”
    â€œShe’ll love that.”
    â€œWell, she is the boy’s mother. If I’m under charge it will be every woman for herself.”
    Orlando went out first, watching the guy in the Volvo for any sign that he was interested in them. When he hit the street he heard the door open again behind him, and Bob moved fast to his right. Orlando took his time, meandering along past the shops, looking in the windows.
    Orlando hummed to himself as he made his way past the parked cars. “Transatlanticism,” by Death Cab for Cutie. It gave him a cadence, let him borrow the measured pace of the music to keep himself from running. He tried to see the car with the cop in the reflections of windows, but he couldn’t get the angle, and he just paced off the steps until he thought he must be even withthe car and turned away from the buildings on his left and set out off the curb, as if he were just heading east across the street.
    He had time to take in that the Volvo was there, parked at the curb in front of a record store he’d been in a few times, and that the guy wasn’t in the front seat anymore. He slowed and crossed the street, stepping up onto the curb and trying to look back down the block toward Bob’s, and when he snapped his head forward there was the guy.
    He was big, wide across the shoulders and with a paunch and loose skin around his jowls, crazy red hair that was wires and spikes, and that was as much as he got before the guy clocked him, hard, with an elbow that caught him across the windpipe and doubled him over with no air in his lungs and a bright pain across his neck and chest so intense he felt like he must be giving off sparks.
    He went over hard and opened his mouth, trying to drag air into his throat, but it was like dredging mud and nothing would come. He