Dead Certain

Cheryl had put it smack in the middle of the doorway so that I would be sure to not forget it. I rubbed my shins and cursed her efficiency.
    I hoisted the box of files and made my way through the darkened reception room and out into the world. Wearily, I leaned against the back wall of the elevator as it carried me down to the basement. In the polished brass of the doors I contemplated my reflection, a pale face offset by dark hair, disheveled by the day and slowly working its way down from its usual French twist. It occurred to me that while I might be nearly two decades younger than my mother, it was I who looked older. I wondered what the female equivalent of the firm’s balding and shriveled senior partners would look like and whether in thirty years’ time that was going to be me.
    The doors opened as the elevator deposited me on the lowest level of the parking garage—deserted this time of night. As my heels clicked across the smooth concrete I pushed the key-chain remote and heard the reassuring chirp of my car alarm being deactivated. I still hadn’t quite gotten used to seeing the sleek bottle-green Jaguar in the place that had been for so long occupied by my recently totaled Volvo, but I was working on it. It helped that over the past few months the new-car smell had gradually given way to the more familiar scent of old running shoes and empty Starbucks containers. I’d also managed to accumulate enough Diet Coke cans on the floor of the backseat to replicate the Volvo’s trademark rattle whenever I hit a pothole.
    Of course, having an expensive new car wasn’t easy in Hyde Park. The neighborhood that has been my home for the last half-dozen years isn’t exactly a yuppie paradise, but rather the kind of neighborhood you get when you drop a world-class university in the middle of the ghetto, then allow it to be reshaped by every social tide of the last fifty years. White flight, the Jewish exodus to the suburbs, race riots, urban renewal, and the vicissitudes of the drug trade had all come and gone, leaving their scars behind. Through it all the essential nature of the place had remained remarkably unchanged. Hyde Park was a real-life social laboratory, a place where the affluent and the educated lived side by side with immigrants, criminals, and families where three generations had lived from welfare check to welfare check. Needless to say, it was a less than ideal environment for a luxury car. That’s where Leo came in.
    Leo was an urban entrepreneur, one of those fringe artists of economic survival that most people in their leafy suburban neighborhoods haven’t a clue even exist. Nineteen years old, by day he was almost certainly employed as a numbers runner for Carmine Mustafa. Parking cars was a sideline, a way to pick up extra money to help support his girlfriend, Angel, and their three children.
    It was a straightforward and strictly cash business. For a flat monthly fee Leo met me at my door when I came home at night, and parked my car behind the electric gates of Carmine Mustafa’s compound in Kenwood— right next door to Louis Farrakhan’s house. There, under the double protection of a drug lord and a black supremacist, my British luxury sedan safely passed the night until Leo delivered it to me the following morning in time for me to drive downtown to work.
    As I pulled off Lake Shore Drive at Fifty-third Street I called Leo’s beeper number. By the time I pulled up to the curb in front of my building, he was already waiting, his baseball cap pulled down low over his face and his spotless Nikes iridescent under the soft streetlights.
    “How do you ever expect to find yourself a new boyfriend, working as late as you do?” demanded Leo with a smile as he held open the door for me.
    “I think I’ve had enough of boyfriends for a while,” I replied, shivering from a combination of the cold and my own fatigue. Even though it was April, in my world it still felt like winter. There was frost on the ground when I left for work in the morning, and by the time I came home at night, it was dark and I could see my breath. “I’ve been thinking it over and I’ve decided it’d be easier to just get a dog.”
    “I tell you what, until they catch the guy that’s been breakin’ into apartments around here, it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Angel thinks maybe I should let you take Mona for a while.” Mona was Leo and Angel’s dog, an embarrassingly affectionate Doberman that sometimes came