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towered over the runt, making him physically uncomfortable just by standing next to him. But Griff knew now that it was more than his size putting the guy off. He could tell by the way he studied Griff when he thought Griff’s attention was elsewhere, like when he was getting his mail from his box in the lobby and the super was polishing the floor. Or when Griff was waiting on the sidewalk for a cab and the super was Windexing the glass in the entry. He could always feel the guy’s eyes on him, like he was trying to peer inside Griff’s head, trying to work out his story.
    On the lease he’d signed, Griff had put down his employer as Southside Developers, a construction company owned by Morozov. Griff guessed the super was surprised by the hours he appeared to work—or, more to the point,
not
work. For a guy in construction, Griff spent a lot of time in his apartment. More than once during the middle of the day, he’d walked under the lobby’s surveillance camera and imagined the super on the other end of that electronic feed recording the date and time in a notebook. Paranoid? Probably, but in Griff’s line of work, paranoia wasn’t a bad thing.
    Stretching, Griff got up and walked to the sliding door leading to his balcony and stepped outside. As usual, that christly wind off Lake Michigan pummelled him, making his shirt flap like a flag. Ads for apartments in his building always played up their water views, but that wasn’t what had drawn him to rent there—it was the five-minute walk to the CTA’s Green Line, which made it easy getting to Garfield Park, where he often spent his days when he wasn’t in the middle of a job for Morozov.Sometimes he went early in the morning and returned home late in the afternoon to imitate a workday routine, although that obviously hadn’t convinced the super. Mostly, though, he went because he loved the place. Located on the West Side, Garfield Park was 184 acres of some of the most beautiful flower gardens in the Midwest.
    Griff’s fondness for flowers certainly hadn’t come from his mother—her interest in plants had been limited to those she could smoke. Nor had it come from the many “uncles” who’d drifted into and out of their lives. Griff had found his way to flowers via Clovis Lafayette, a retired hardware salesman originally from Louisiana who owned an Airstream a few lanes over from the leaky double-wide his mother rented in Camelot Trailer Park out on Sweet Home Cutoff.
    When Griff was in ninth grade, he’d been suspended for bullying and fighting so many times that, by spring, the school’s administration recommended he stay home for the rest of the year. Griff’s mother had been livid, screaming at him that no good-for-nothing asshole son of hers was going to freeload off her all day, and she made him go door-to-door asking neighbours if they had any chores they wanted help with. He and his mom had been living in their trailer on Lancelot Way for only a few weeks, having been evicted from their last place in Little Rock (his mother always seemed genuinely surprised when landlords expected to be paid their rent on time), and during those weeks Griff hadn’t done more than nod to their neighbours. Most of them were a lot older than his mother and, judging from the condition of their trailers, no better off than Marsha and Griff Barnett.
    Clovis Lafayette, however, seemed the exception. Yeah, he wasold, but his lot on Guinevere Lane was way nicer than most of the others in Camelot. Clovis was forever washing the dust off the exterior of his aging Land Yacht, and he’d covered almost every available square inch of his property with flowers. And not just your standard petunias and impatiens; Clovis’s flowers looked like the kinds Griff had seen in the pages of the old
National Geographic
s he’d flipped through while he sat in his school’s detention room.
    During his trek through Camelot half-heartedly looking for work, Griff wasn’t surprised to come