The City - Dean Koontz

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much older. I guess if I hadn’t been so crazy afraid, I might have gone to church and lit a candle for him and said a few prayers. Instead I thought that I should play the piano for him, one of his favorite songs that he listened to on his stereo.

      The community center stayed open until 10:30 on Monday because it was bingo night. As one paramedic closed the rear doors of the ambulance and the other started the engine, I turned away and headed toward the Abigail Louise Thomas Room.

      Perhaps in my peripheral vision, I saw him moving, paralleling me. But as long as I live, I will credit luck and the feather pendant in my pocket, because I was in a distraught emotional state that made it unlikely that I would have picked up on clues glimpsed from the corner of my eye. My father must have been among the crowd across the street, because now he paced me. When he realized that I had seen him, he didn’t call out to me or wave, which would have been much less creepy. He only walked faster when I did and broke into a run when I ran.

      If I made it to the community center, he might come in after me. No one there knew that my mother had thrown him out or that divorce was imminent. Sylvia didn’t wash her dirty laundry in public. They knew me at the center, and they didn’t know him, and if I caused enough of an uproar, they would surely call my mom.

      But then I saw that he was glancing both ways along the street as he ran, checking on the traffic, looking for an opening, ready to dash across all three lanes at the first opportunity. The center was still more than a block away. His legs were longer than mine. I’d never make it there before he caught me. He wouldn’t hurt me. I was his son. Grandpa Teddy said Tilton wouldn’t harm me. Might snatch me and take me away. But wouldn’t harm me. To snatch me, he needed a car, surely a car. You didn’t absolutely need a car in the city; and Tilton hadn’t owned one. Maybe he owned one now, but he would have to drag me to it, and I’d fight all the way, and he wouldn’t want that. So maybe he meant to hurt me, after all.

      At the corner, one-third of the way to the community center, I turned left, heading for the alleyway behind our building. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Tilton crossing the street, dodging cars as the drivers pounded their horns and brakes squealed. He looked wild. I wouldn’t make it into the back street and half a block to the rear entrance of our building before he overtook me.

      Twilight slanted through the streets, fiery in the windows and painting emberglow across tenement walls, purple shadows swelling, but night already claimed the narrow alley. Not all the buildings had back entrances; some had switchback fire escapes, and where there was rear access, the security lamps above the doors were often broken. On both sides, Dumpsters rose, hulking shapes in the gloom, some lids up, some down, some stuck halfway. I climbed the side of a Dumpster where the lids were open and dropped inside, landing on slippery piles of plastic garbage bags, in a stink of rotting vegetables and God knew what else.

      I knelt with my back pressed to the metal wall, trying to be still, cupping both hands over my nose and mouth, not because of the stench but to soften the sound of my breathing. His shoes slapped loud on the blacktop and on the bricks where the blacktop had worn off, and as he passed me, he was panting louder than I was. He came to a halt about where I figured the back door to our building must have been, and I listened to him muttering in frustration and making small noises for which I couldn’t account.

      I began to wonder if I had done the right thing by fleeing from him. He was my father, after all, not a good one but my father nonetheless. Maybe I’d misjudged his mood and was mistaken about his intentions.

      When he began to curse and when my name proved to be part of it, I stopped worrying that I’d been unfair. He rattled the knob and kicked the door hard. I didn’t understand what had foiled him. The superintendent had cut new keys to our apartment; but Tilton still possessed the other key, the one to the back stairs, which unlike the front entrance was kept locked. He became increasingly agitated, cursing explosively, and when he repeatedly kicked a Dumpster—not mine but one nearby—I figured he’d been drinking. The big trash bin gave off hollow drumlike beats that echoed along the alleyway—boom, boom, boom. A man shouted from a high window, “Knock it off!” Tilton shouted back at him, cursed him out, and the man said as if he meant it, “I’m comin’ down there, you bastard.” My father hurried away then, but no one came down to look for him. Comparative quiet settled over the alleyway, disturbed only by the muffled sounds of traffic out on the main street and by music and voices from a TV channeled through an open window overhead.

      Suspicious, I waited a few minutes. But I couldn’t spend the night in the Dumpster, and finally I climbed out. I half expected a shadowy figure to break from cover and rush at me, but if there were rats in the alley, they were genuine rodents, nothing more.

      Above the rear door to our building, the lamp protected by a wire cage had not been broken, and by its light I saw the bent key protruding from the deadbolt lock. In his eagerness to nab me before I got back to the apartment, my father evidently had inserted the wrong key, and when it wouldn’t turn, he forced it, nearly breaking it off in the lock. I wiggled it, trying to extract it from the keyway. The key was bent not just at the shoulder, but also along the blade, and its serrations were wedged in the pin tumblers. In the morning, the superintendent would need to take the lock apart to remedy the situation. In the meantime, I could return to the building only by the front entrance.

      The blush of twilight had faded to maroon, but the streetlamps hadn’t yet brightened. Shadows filled doorways. The headlights of passing vehicles flared off the parked cars, revealing or conjuring sinister figures inside them; it was impossible to tell which. I expected my father to throw open a car door and scramble after me or to rise up from between cars, but I made it to our building and pelted up the steps and into the foyer, almost knocking down Mr. Yoshioka.

      He said, “Is it true, is the poor man dead? It cannot be true, so young.”

      For a moment, I thought he was referring to my father, but then I remembered, and I assured him that Mr. Lorenzo had died.

      “I am so entirely sorry. He was a nice man. Thank you very much.”

      I said he was welcome, although I didn’t know what he might be thanking me for, and I ascended six flights to the fourth floor. I didn’t dare to race up because maybe my father was waiting for me around one turn or another, but neither did I proceed slowly, because maybe he would suddenly appear on the stairs behind me.

       14

      When I let myself into the apartment and closed the door and engaged both deadbolts, I’d been gone no more than ten minutes. Mrs. Lorenzo still sat at the kitchen table with my mother, and she still wept, though the wrenching sobs had passed for now. Neither of them knew that I’d gone out.

      At one of the living-room windows, I peered down at the swarming street as light bloomed in the frosted glass of the lamps, and they seemed to float like aligned and miniature moons in the early dark. Every pedestrian interested me, every driver of every vehicle, and though none of them proved to be my father, I didn’t grow bored with sentry duty. If he had come back once, he would come back again, as though a bad-juju penny rattled within the hollow space inside him, a penny with two heads and both of them my face, by its every clink and spin reminding him of me and of how my mother would be devastated if she lost me.

      After a while, my mom came to me and put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Are you all right, Jonah?”

      That didn’t seem to be the best time to tell her about Tilton. Mrs. Lorenzo needed her.

      “Yeah, I’m okay. It’s awful, though. How’s Mrs. Lorenzo?”

      “Not good. Tony was an immigrant. He has no family in America. Donata’s father died when she was young, and she has no brothers or sisters, and I gather her mother’s … well, difficult. There’s nowhere she can go but back to their apartment, and she can’t face that right now. Maybe tomorrow. I’ve asked her to stay the night with us. She can have your bed, and you can sleep in mine.”

      I looked out at the

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