“I don’t think this is going to work,” Amy said.

“Nonsense. Trust.” I repositioned the glass on her stomach, pressed my ear against it and closed my eyes to sharpen my hearing. My hand rested on her chest.

“Can you hear it?” Her voice floated like moon light.

The ocean thrummed in my ear, Amy’s breathing a soft breeze blowing tall grasses along the dunes. She stroked the back of my hand, fingertips tracing tributary veins. My body seeped into hers, cell by cell, like water through sand. The streetlight filtered through our curtains, casting the room in a lunar glow.

“Can you hear their heart beat?” she reverberated, muted and infinite.

“Not yet.”

She took away the glass and laid my head on her stomach.

“Keep listening.”

‘What if he’s trying to talk to me and I just can’t hear him?”

She smoothed my hair, tucked it behind my ear.

“What if he thinks I’m ignoring him?”

“How do you know it’s a him?”

I shrugged, “Has to be.”

She cocked her head, face shaded like a Picasso painting.

“I can’t raise a girl. I’ll kill anyone who says anything to her, and I don’t think the universe would want our un-daughter to grow up with a father in jail.”

She only laughed and patted my head like a puppy. I took a marker from
the milk crate she used as a night-table.

“If you keep twitching, the lines won’t come out right.”

“It tickles.”

I told her to hold her breath then. Without looking, I could feel her eyes, her slight, bemused smile. After a minute, I told she could move again. She twisted her head side to side, as if she was at a gallery.

“Why did you draw a sea monkey on my stomach?”

“It’s our baby. Now we’ll always know where to find him and he’ll never feel abandoned.”

Her lips were warm against my forehead. “Cole, I don’t want our fetus carrying a light saber while in my womb.”

“Don’t worry. It’s red marker, but he’s still Jedi.”

She shook her head. “Keep trying.”

I bit my lip, raised an eyebrow. “What if another fetus tries to fuck with him?”

A breathless laugh and she laid my head back on her stomach, told me to keep listening.

The apartment hummed in silence, our breathing the metronome for the night. Outside the window, bats squeaked in the alleyway. Cats tiptoed across fences, mewling to the others. Someone in the city was dying at
that moment, someone coming home for the first time. Someone was
screaming in orgasm and someone was shooting tar into their arm. The earth spun around its axis but my world existed only within these walls. Soon the rise and fall of Amy’s stomach became rhythmic and I knew snores would soon follow. I kept my head as close to my child as possible.

She convinced me to go to a doctor soon after the wedding. It’d been
fifteen years since I’d seen one. I was excessively tired and she worried about one disease or another. During the physical, he asked about my scar, which led to X-rays, which led to consulting a fertility doctor because Chance’s fuckwit friend had nicked off one my tubes when he stabbed me. The doctor told me how lucky I was that I didn’t have further complications, that rebar could be some nasty stuff. Amy squeezed my leg and I could only purse my lips and nod. Cue her post-coital workout routine and ovulation sex, and as the sun began to sear darkness from the sky, I couldn’t help but feel we were
nestled inside of a miracle.

I slipped out of bed without waking Amy and started coffee for us. Her
yoga bag covered half of an envelope, addressed to our landlord, who
was probably wondering where the money for this shithole apartment
was. We had to squeeze our showers in between everyone else in the
building because there wasn’t enough hot water to go around. Our toilet rocked in place and was about the fall through the floor. Half of the place should’ve been condemned or demolished. How could we bring a child into this mess? Better yet, how could we afford anything else?

“I will not go back to him.” I repeated it like a mantra.

The air outside had rows of metal teeth and my breath looked like a
smokestack. I hurried to the mailbox. A car door slammed. I was half-
tempted to wrap Amy in blankets and huddle us on the next bus to
Mexico. At least our money would’ve lasted longer. Rapid clicks to my
side. My fists tightened, the way a dog’s mouth waters at the sight
of meat.

“Cole.”

“Why are you waiting outside my apartment?” I said. Chance squeezed
my arm. “Even the hoppers aren’t out yet.”

“Yeah, that’s great. You’re a riot.” He sipped from his Dunkin Donuts cup. “Someone fucked up. Get changed. We need to go. Now.”

“Chance, it’s seven in the morning. I’m not going anywhere.”

“They ran into a problem with Customs in Philly and moved the drop-point down here. Shipment will arrive in an hour.”

“Look.” I took a deep breath, nervous to speak. “Amy’s pregnant. I’m staying with her.”

His face slackened, eyes turning slightly downward. I wondered if he
was about to have a stroke when he wrapped his arms around me, repeating congratulations in my ear and thumping my back. He pulled away, held my arms and said how happy he was for us.

“Okay,” he said and my body felt ready to melt into a tropic pool. “Then I’ll see you in twenty.”

#

A torrent of whispered curses as my hands led me around the room,
finding clothes without waking Amy. I saw a story once, about how
mothers in dire circumstances follow their subconscious’s lead, lifting cars and other superhuman things. I wondered if this situation applied, at least maybe in my extraordinary ability to make the wrong decision. Amy shifted in bed, letting go a long exhale I thought to be her unconscious objection.

I leaned down and kissed her stomach. Her lips curved into a slight smile, made a few sleepy noises.

“I love you,” I said. “And I will be back. I promise.”

I kissed her hand, left a note explaining work had called early and
went outside.

The lunar light that had made Amy so beautifully foreign gave Chance the complexion of a corpse.

“This is stupid. This is so fucking stupid. I shouldn’t even be
here,” I kept saying, as I hoisted myself into the passenger van.
Delilah squeezed between the two of us like we were on some grotesque
road trip. Tinted window left the back in permanent midnight, the slight texture of carpet on the floor. No seats, no belts. In the movies, this van would be a pedophile’s pride and glory. The whole thing felt very conspicuous for only picking up a few bricks.

“If it makes you feel any better, I can tell you I would’ve shot you and your wife if you hadn’t come.”

“Are you fucking serious?”

He reached over to me. “Coffee?”

We cut past the early-morning joggers tracing the perimeter of Patterson Park, people in suits and mackintosh jackets walking dogs, a few people in club clothes stumbling home. The sky slowly turned the color of watery blood. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning. Chance headed down Eastern Avenue, turning right on a one-way street. It struck me as familiar, then disconcerting when I realized this was the same place I saw Del for the first time in two years. That was three days ago or it was five months. The concepts of time did nothing for me anymore. Every minute with Chance was a moment lost with Amy and the baby. He pulled over and Del was climbing over me and out of
the van before it stopped.

I pointed at the house she ran into, and said, “What’s this?”

He grinned and I could see where gum took over teeth. “You haven’t been out of the game for that long, have you?”

Normally, I would’ve advised them to have the foundation repaired. Stress cracks from settling webbed the corners. The concrete around the edge of the porch pulled away from its base, leaving a quarter-inch of air between it and the formstone exterior the color of dirty sand. The windows were single-pane and would triple the electric bill. That aside, though, a pretty typical Baltimore rowhome, and I hoped they’d contracted asbestos poisoning.

The interior was drawn from stills of a post-apocalyptic horror. Dust motes thick as napalm, with wooden crates for seats and industrial cable spools for tables. Some type of large rodent had gnawed a hole through the back rest of the recliner in the corner. Initially I was rather shocked. Back in Boston. Chance would never have settled for a place like this. After considering it, though, he was as conniving as ever.

I picked up a newspaper. The headline read Braves clinch World Series. The bottom corner disintegrated with my touch.

“So,” I said. “Now what?”

Chance settled himself onto a box, nodded behind me. “Now we get
dressed.”

I turned around. Delilah held a pile of black in her arms. It looked like an exotic bug. Parts were shiny, others dull and textured like fabric. Hard angles and flowing lines. She kneeled next to the cable spool. The objects fell with a clatter.

Shotgun. Revolver. Black vest. Hunting knife and sheath. A circle of something like garrote wire. Hundreds of glimmering pieces of metal. Two bullets rolled off the edge, the ting reverberating like a church bell across a graveyard.

“You’ve got to be fucking joking.”

Delilah held up two vests, weighing them with her hands. “If I gave you this one—” it looked like a child’s life jacket “—then I’d be joking.”

Chance grunted his approval.

Hundreds of thousands of silverfish poured from the recesses of my skull in a cascading stream of pinchers and chitinous exoskeletons. They filled my body and I was afraid to look at my arm and see skin molt and slough away like old paper.

“Chance,” I said. He whistled as he tightened Deliliah’s vest.

“Chance,” I said, louder, my voice wobbling like a warped record.

She let go a quick gasp, said, “Too tight.”

“Chance!”

“What?” He spun and faced me, jaw moving, teeth grinding.

I measured my breaths, fought to keep my voice from cracking. “I’m
not doing this.”

He patted my shoulder. “Sure you are.”

‘No, Chance. No, I have a child. And a wife. I can’t do this.” I dropped the vest and it crushed my toe.

He only shrugged. “Too late, brother. It’s already done.”

“I have a family. I can’t abandon them.”

Delilah snickered as she wrapped her hair into a bun, slid a gun into her belt.

“You’re doing it with family, Cole.” He cupped my chin with his hand, face two inches from mine, staring into my eyes as if trying to consume my soul. “I know you won’t abandon us.”

“Not you, you asshole. You know what I’m—”

My last words choked into the air. His hand against my throat against
the wall. I felt a dent behind me. Bitter coffee on his ragged breath.
His face contorted, blister red. Something in his cheeks, by the
corner of his eyes. I imagined I heard subcutaneous tears pooling.
Maybe it was oxygen deprivation.

He dropped me and turned away. I crouched against the wall, faintly
trying to appear unfazed.

‘You’ll be fine,’ he said.

“But why guns?” I slumped down to the ground, moving the vest away
with my foot.

He whirled around and before I could move there was the barrel of a
revolver three inches from my right eye. The hollow click of the hammer cocking.

“Because,” he whispered. “When there is a gun in your face, you tend to listen better.”

I swallowed and it shattered my eardrums. “When have we ever used
guns for a pick-up? You bring guns to drugs and people die.”

The hammer uncocked. He smiled, licked his teeth.”Drugs are old
news, brother. Get with the times.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Delilah sauntered over, picked up my vest and laid it over my knees
like a blanket. Whispered, “Might want to wear this.”

“Chance?”

“Cole, hey,” he said. “The easiest way to get busted is to move drugs.”

“Then what the fuck is this?” As soon as the words left my mouth, as soon as they were tangible and in the open, I knew that I didn’t want to hear his answer.

“People are our business now, Cole.”

Flak jacket zipped, revolver in waistband, skinning knife lashed to his thigh, Dunkin Donuts cup in hand, he nodded and said, “We deal in people, now.”