Read CONCOURSE (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin) for Free Online Page A

about the gun, when I’d first gotten back to work. “Then she gonna call Mr. Moran an’
he
gonna get on you ass.”
    “La Gringa?” I stood up off the desk, tucked the cigarette back in the pack.
    “Lady runs the place. Mrs. Wyckoff. She got hair sorta like this.” He made round gestures at the top of his head.
    “I thought Dr. Reynolds ran the Home.”
    “Well, yeah, Dr. Reynolds, he’s the boss, but she’s his boss. You look out for her, man. She think everyone born was born to cheat her. You know?”
    “Thanks.” I checked my watch. “I’ll be back in half an hour, relieve you for lunch.”
    He grinned again. “That’s good, ’cause by then I’m gonna have to pee real bad.”
    I turned to go, turned back. “Fuentes—”
    “Pablo,” he said. “You call me Fuentes, I think I’m my
papi
.”
    “Pablo,” I acknowledged. “How long have you been working here?”
    “Maybe about a year.”
    “Ever had any trouble before the other night?”
    “Never had the kinda trouble you just had.”
    “Have you had any, at all?”
    He smoothed the ends of his mustache. “Not me. I mean, there’s trouble round here all the time, but usually it don’t make no difference here. Even all that equipment stuff, that don’t happen here.”
    “What do you mean, equipment stuff?”
    “Oh, man, you don’t know about that? Big problem over here,” he said, but he was grinning. “They steal equipment you got outside your buildin’. Air-conditionin’ stuff, and ducts, and you got copper pipin’ from your roof, they steal that too. Sometimes they go right in your basement. Like in the summertime, they stole the burner out from a boiler they got down the street. Super didn’t knownothing about it until he goes to turn it on in the winter, give the people some heat.”
    “He never checked before that?”
    “Hey, you go down in the cellar every week, make sure your boiler still got a burner in it?”
    I had to admit I didn’t.
    “An’ those faces,” he went on. “Like they got on churches?”
    “Gargoyles, you mean?”
    “
Gargola, sí
. Monster faces on the roof. Some of the fancy buildins around here, they got them.”
    “They steal those?”
    “Man,” he grinned, “they steal them faces right off the buildins. They steal them faces right from under you nose.”
    I grinned back, rubbed my nose. “But no one tries that here?” I asked. “Because there are guards?”
    He shook his head. “I don’t think just that. It’s like we got a ‘Off Limits’ sign. That guy who was beat up, that was about the only thing. Until, you know, Mike.”
    “The guy who was beat up. You mean the trucker?”
    “
Sí
. Makin’ a night delivery. You heard about it? Got the shit kicked outta him. Right down here.” He gestured to the lot, the wall, Chester Avenue below. “Still in the hospital. Been six weeks. Over at Samaritan.”
    “He didn’t work for the Home, did he?”
    “No, man. Just some trucker deliverin’ here. What I’m sayin’, usually no one here gets trouble. Like there’s some kinda truce. We keep outta the neighborhood, you know, just come and go from here, and nobody bothers nobody. Like it’s a island, you know? Like a different world.”
    I did the doors again, while Fuentes and then Dayton had lunch. Dayton brought me a roast pork sandwich from the bodega on the corner. I badly wanted a beer, too, but I’d given Dayton enough to worry about for a while.
    “You can eat downstairs. There’s a room the maintenance staff uses,” he told me. I went on down, found the place he meant. It was on the east side, the buried side. Green-and-gray linoleum tiles, fluorescent lights, vinyl-covered chairs taped where the stuffing had tried to escape. I sat in one of them, ate, drank thick Latin coffee. Ilistened to the lights buzz and tried to pretend I didn’t ache.
    When I was done I went and found the lockers, in an alcove near the boiler room. There were two dozen of them, dented, green, and