Nick Saint: Chapter One

I stood in the shadows at the edge of the silent alleyway, enfolded in early morning darkness. Across the street, the neon bar sign flashed “Mel’s Brewery” once every three seconds. Beneath the name, on an alternating three seconds, it flashed the question, “Ready for a beer?” and the correct time on the hands of a neon clock, now one-forty-six. Five more minutes.

My hands sought warmth deeper into my Navy surplus pea coat I now pulled tighter against the cool wet draft slithering around the bottoms of my pants. I grimaced as the air nipped at my exposed ankles. There was a 24-hour laundromat beneath my apartment, but I needed a couple of bucks to feed the washing machine, so until then my socks lay in the hamper, fermenting. Yeah, I could wash them in the sink and hang them over the shower curtain to dry, but at twenty-seven years old, I feared it would shatter the illusion I was on target with my life goals.

Pulling out my pocket watch, I pressed the winding knob. Light from the street lamp sparked in the darkness as the well-worn cover flipped open. For a moment, the words etched in the silver flashed visible, “Thaddeus Nicholas Saint.” I smiled, knowing Grandmother Saint had no idea when she bought the watch for her fiancé all those years ago, they would have a grandson by the same name. Grandfather used Nicholas, I went by Nick, Nick Saint.

A breeze, the norm in the Windy City, hit my ankles again, reminding me of the dirty clothes back in my apartment. I smiled, feeling confident I would be doing laundry today, as well as paying my overdue rent. Thank God for Mrs. Hemersfeld’s kind heart. She let me slide on my due dates because I helped her with the care and maintenance of the washers and dryers in the heretofore-mentioned laundromat.

The sign flashed again, one-forty-seven, almost time. I let last night’s dream replay mentally, ensuring my plan synced with it. I pictured the late model Oldsmobile pulling up across the street and a cute woman in her thirties getting out the driver’s side. She ran around and opened the passenger side door, then quickly crossed the sidewalk and entered the bar. A few minutes later, the woman helped a stumbling guy from the bar to the old sedan. On her way to the car, she bumped into a man in a trench coat, carrying a large brown paper bag. The bag fell, spilling money, lots of money onto the sidewalk. Trench coat man pulled a gun from beneath his coat and smashed it into the woman’s pretty face. She fell to the cement in a bloody, unconscious heap. The sign over the bar read “Mel’s Brewery” and flashed one-fifty-one, just like the one across the street would flash in two minutes.

At one-fifty, I moved from my position in the alley, approached the curb and stopped as the car pulled up in front of Mel’s and the woman quickly moved from it to the bar. “Hotel California” was playing as she opened the door and entered, a slap of pool balls echoed from somewhere deeper inside. A cheer rose up but cut short by the slamming door. I guessed several of the patrons were watching a Laker’s game.

I had been having these dreams for the last six months, different ones, and thought nothing of them until a week ago. Last Sunday I stood in an alley I had seen in a dream, much like this one. I was waiting for a pimp, who showed up as predicted, but when he started beating one of his women, the dream and reality split. I jumped from behind a dumpster and clocked him with a coffee table leg I had scrounged from alley trash. I took five hundred dollars from the unconscious pimp, gave the hooker two hundred, and told her it would be best if she found another job, or at least to find another area to ply her trade. I ran off thinking of the easy $300 and a possible change of employment.

Back in reality and half way across the street, the bar door banged open and the woman in my dream stepped out with an older man hanging onto her causing her to move back and forth across the sidewalk in an effort to keep them both upright. The man looked old enough to be her father or maybe her grandfather. He wore the wrinkled shirt of a Chicago Transit Authority bus driver, now un-tucked and flapping freely in the back as he caused them both to stumble toward the car.

To my left, a man in a black, full-length leather trench coat carrying a brown paper bag, ascended the stairs of a darkened basement office space and walked quickly toward the bar. A classic rock tune drifted from the open door as the woman struggled to help the old man to the open car door. He scuffed along, half dragging his feet, and still attempting to wave goodbye to his friends in the dimly lit bar.

A woman’s raspy voice drifted from the building, “Happy Retirement you old son of a …” Her voice was cut-off as a gust slammed the door shut.

Trench coat strode toward the couple carrying his bag, passed the old geezer just as he missed a step and sagged, causing the woman to stumble and knock into him. The bag dropped, the money spilled and the man reached into his coat for his gun, ignoring the bills on the pavement. His first swing didn’t fully connect, blocked by the woman’s raised hand, though several beads of red surfaced on her cheek.

“Bitch,” he yelled, pulling back for another strike. His arm jerked forward but failed to connect, having been grabbed by me. He spun around growling but before he could do anything, I drove a fist into his jaw. His head jerked back, eyes rolling up as his legs buckled and he fell to the sidewalk.

I quickly pulled the brass knuckles off my hand and placed them in my pocket. The thug’s back had been toward the woman, blocking her view of my weapon, and I figured why muddy the waters. If I was caught, I needed an “assault with a deadly weapon” charge like I needed a pair of brass knuckles.

Smirking at my own lame humor, I grabbed the bag, scooped all but one bundle of bills back into the bag. The woman had not changed her wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression since the man hit the sidewalk.

I tossed her the lonely bundle of money. “Leave now,” I said, and with a tight-lipped smile, I saluted and walked off.

Turning the next corner, I hailed a passing cab and took it to the nearest train station. I could have taken the taxi all the way home but I figured when the cops, or whomever the money belonged to, began asking around, I didn’t want a cab driver leading them right to my apartment. I got the idea of splitting my travel between taxi and riding the “L” from watching an episode of a TV show about Chicago cops. In fact, they shot the whole series just a few blocks from my apartment.

A few people stood on the platform as the train pulled in. I hesitated and almost turned around then remembered platoon sergeant, Calvin Smith. “Make a plan and stick to it. Improvisation is for comedians,” he drilled into us. The doors slid open and I stepped through, quickly taking a seat a couple rows behind and across the aisle from a guy in a chef’s coat. An ear bud cord dangled from his head as he nodded to a silent beat.

From my pocket, I pulled a green nylon bag, the kind with the drawstring around the top. Setting the paper sack on the seat next to me, I emptied the contents into the cloth bag. In all, twelve packets of bills dropped into the bag. I rolled the paper sack tight and dropped it beneath the seat in front of me. A quick scan of the area showed no one was paying any attention to me.

The plastic seat’s contour drew me in as I leaned back and exhaled slowly, then jerked straight up remembering that trains had cameras. My stomach twisted when I saw there were two, one several feet away in the front of the car, and the other very near me in the back. However, the one nearest me was hanging from the ceiling, wires exposed and cut, letting me know it would keep my secret safely from Big Brother. I sat back in the seat again, though this time feeling less cocky.

At my stop, I stepped off the train and quickly left the platform. Heading down the stairs and onto the sidewalk, I walked purposefully, trying not to look suspicious. I smiled as a weird thought inserted itself–what is a suspicious look? One could discern very little about someone’s soul simply by how they looked and dressed. I’ve known some kind and humble people who loved to dress in black. On the other hand, several of the most heinous serial killers looked and dressed like everyone’s next-door neighbor. Evil is in the heart of man, a poet somewhere must have said.

It took me only fifteen minutes to make it back to my old brick building, snuggled between a deli and a boarded up electronic repair shop. My building, as with the neighborhood, was circa 1930s. Mrs. Hemersfeld told me the area was once thriving and home to an odd collection of artists and intellectuals, some well-known, most not.

As I passed the laundromat, the banks of fluorescent lights inside lit the sidewalk, while two twenty-something’s swapped spit against the dryers, undisturbed by their laundry tumbling behind them. By their scrubs, I figured them for night-shift housekeeping staff at either Northwestern or Rush Memorial, though they could have been medical students. See what I mean about judging looks?

I took the elevator to the third floor and when the doors opened, with a soft rumble and squeak, I exited, turned left and ascended a small stairway to a landing and the door to my little apartment. Overall, the apartment suited my wallet and me. My three small rooms were carved from what I guessed was an attic area. It must have been only a small portion of the total attic area since the building was much larger than my little space. I benefitted in the winter since the central chimney came through the floor in the middle of my living room and the radiant heat warmed the small space at no cost to me. The down side was the main laundromat dryer exhaust duct tied into the chimney on the first floor making my apartment quite warm.

In the winter, it was nice because it kept my heating costs down, but in the summer, it made living there uncomfortable. I thought about getting one of those stand-alone A/C units, the kind you role in and it catches the condensate in a pan, but the cost was extreme, especially for a guy who had trouble finding a couple bucks to wash his socks.

It did not bother me much, because all that “free energy” drove me to the roof. I discovered the roof access after liberating a locked door in my bedroom. One of the keys on the ring I was given fit the lock but the door had been painted shut. A butter knife and crowbar later, the door opened into a narrow stairwell leading up a short flight to another door, which opened onto the roof.

Hurrying into my apartment, I glanced at the wall clock, which read two-thirty. Shutting the door, I threw the two dead bolts. Crime was relatively low since average working class people with average working class problems filled both the building and the neighborhood. Sure, the guy down in 1B got his TV stolen, but the fool set the packing box in the hallway all day, and left his alley-side window unlocked. As far as I am concerned, his stupidity was rewarded.

I tossed the bag on the couch and threw my coat over the hook of an old-fashioned coat hanger. Stepping into the kitchenette, I set the teapot on to boil. I’m not much of a coffee drinker, the acids hurt my stomach, but give me a cup of Earl Grey, and some acoustic guitar and I’m in relaxation mode. More than one lady-friend has commented that my tea drinking and intellectual conversation did not mirror my clothing choices, which stereotyped me as a dockworker and not the college graduated, highly skilled mini-mart attendant I actually was. I assumed they were looking for the rough and tumble bad-boy type because they never stayed around long.

Walking back to my couch smiling, I picked up the bag of loot, opened it, and removed the bundles of bills. I laid all twelve on the table but pulled off the worn rubber band from one stack and counted the money. The stack was made of twenty-five, twenty dollar bills. I reached back into my average public school math skill-set and calculated $500 per stack, and if each stack was the same, I was looking at six thousand dollars.

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