I left the new knife in the car. Cash folded small in the front pocket, a rectangle that could be explained as lunch. Trunk lined again, vinyl that still smelled like the store and like the last failure I had tried to wipe off with paper towels. Turtleneck itching at the throat. Khaki whispering at the knees when I walked. Hands visible at my sides, the costume of a man who wants to look like he wandered into the wrong block by accident and is already sorry about it.
A hundred yards is longer on foot. Leftover heat lived in the asphalt and came up through the soles as if the day had not agreed to end. A dog behind a fence watched without barking. Its eyes tracked me the way a camera tracks, without opinion. I could still have turned around. The car was a dark shape under a tree that did not care what I did. I did not turn around. Turning around would have been the park again, the joke again, the review I had already written for an empty windshield.
He came off the lamp to meet me. Younger than the hoodie had promised. Suspicion worn until it fit, a face that had practiced this greeting on better customers than me. Gold light made his cheekbones cheap. Moths hammered the glass above him like they had a complaint.
“What?” His voice was not loud. It did not need to be. The street had already decided we were the only scene.
“I have twenty. What can I get?”
He laughed once, not kindly. The laugh had a job. It was supposed to make me feel like a tourist.
“Walk away, khaki.”
We did the dance of not being police. I kept my hands open. He kept his chin high. He stepped in close enough that I could smell smoke and something sweet that did not belong to a street. He patted pockets. Ribs. Arms. The khaki made a sound like paper. He found the cash and left it, which was either confidence or contempt. I asked, mild as a jammed printer, if I could do the same.
He stared. He laughed. He let me.
My palms went over his jacket the way I had seen in movies, except movies do not tell you how cheap the fabric feels or how your own pulse tries to climb out of your wrists. No gun I could feel. A hard little shape at the hip that turned out to be a phone. A sad packet of pills in an inner pocket, crinkle of plastic, a prop already. I bought them because stories need props. I would throw them away. I have never liked pills. They promise a change they cannot finish. They make a night look like a decision when it is only chemistry wearing a costume.