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“What?”
“Looks like … shit!”
“What?” Acadia said again.
“Some asshole’s trying to break into our car,” he said.
“No way,” she said, sitting forward to peer into the shadows of the rail yard. “How would he—”
“He wouldn’t,” Sunday said. “It’s random, or he saw the solar panels.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Only thing we can do,” he replied.
Sixty seconds later, Sunday and Acadia were over the fence. They split up beneath the overpass and hurried in opposite directions, both keeping low behind an earthen berm that ran next to the nearest set of tracks. Sunday carried a tire iron and was seventy yards past the rust-red container car before he stopped. The rail yard was lit, not as well as it was to the north, but he’d be visible until he reached the shadows along the freight train.
He had no choice. Sunday clambered over the berm and angled out into the yard, dancing across the tracks, aware of Acadia doing the same to the north, trying not to make noise until he reached the shadows where he’d seen the black guy slinking. The container with the solar panels was six cars ahead. He stood there until he felt his phone buzz, alerting him to a text.
Sunday started forward quickly, keeping his steps light until he was alongside the rust-red car. Hearing metal scraping metal, the sound of the crowbar working that lock, he slowed to a creep and then stopped at the corner.
He waited until he felt his cell phone buzz again, and he gripped the tire iron like a hammer.
“Just what do you think you’re doing there, mister?” Acadia said.
She was on the opposite side of the train.
“Fuck, bitch” was all the thief got to say before Sunday sprang around and spotted him up on the turnbuckle, facing Acadia and menacing her with the crowbar.
Sunday’s tire iron smashed into the man’s knee. He grunted in pain, fell off on Acadia’s side. Sunday vaulted up and over the buckle and was on the man before he could do a thing to defend himself.
He aimed for the guy’s head this time and connected with a thud that put the thief out cold. The third blow was more considered and caved in his skull.
Breathing hard, Sunday looked at Acadia, whose eyes blazed and whose nostrils flared with the sexual excitement she always displayed after a killing.
“Marcus,” she said. “I’m suddenly—”
“Later,” he said firmly and pointed to the adjacent line of freight cars ten feet away. “Help me get him underneath that train. If we’re lucky, he won’t be found till morning. Maybe later.”
They grabbed the dead guy under the armpits, dragged him and pushed him over and in between the rails, and put him facedown beneath the line of railcars.
A sudden squealing noise startled them both.
The freight train, including the container car with the solar panels, was moving out, heading west.
CHAPTER
3
“CARTER BILLINGS WAS AMAZING!” Ali yelled in the twilight. “His first at bat!”
My seven-year-old ran up the stairs ahead of us onto the front porch of our house and adopted a funny, exaggerated batting pose while holding the little souvenir bat I had bought him earlier in the day. He waved the bat and swung wildly.
He made a cracking noise and did a decent imitation of Billings’s hilarious and passionate run around the bases after the rookie got a pinch-hit, walk-off, grand-slam home run in his very first trip to the plate, winning the opening game for the Nationals.
I had gotten tickets to the game through an old friend, and we’d all seen that miraculous moment along with Ali—my wife, Bree; my older son, Damon; my daughter, Jannie; and my ninety-something grandmother, Nana Mama. As Ali wound down his victory run, we all clapped and crowded through the front door of our home on Fifth in Southeast Washington, DC.
It had been construction time at the Cross household the past few weeks; we were remodeling the kitchen and adding a great room and a new master bedroom suite upstairs. When we left for the game, the project was exactly as the construction crew had left it on Good Friday—exterior walls framed and up, windows in, and the roof on, an empty, dusty shell separated from the main house by plastic sheeting.
