New Year's Eve — Sunday, 31 December 1989, 11:47 PM

The Docks, Gary Exports Co. Gary, Indiana

The last night of the year smelled like sulfur and frozen lake water.

Darius Cole killed the engine and sat in the Cutlass for a full minute, listening. The heater ticked as it cooled. Somewhere south — the projects, probably — a string of firecrackers went off in a ragged chain, each pop a half-second late, like applause from people who’d forgotten what they were clapping for. Then nothing. The deep industrial nothing that was Gary’s native sound: wind through chain-link, the groan of sheet metal nobody had come to repair, and under everything the low hum of Lake Michigan doing what Lake Michigan does, which is wait.

He got out. The cold hit him the way it always did now — not as pain but as information. Twenty-two degrees. Wind from the north-northwest. No exhaust smell, which meant no running engines, which meant no one sitting in a vehicle watching the gates. The dock security camera on its pole was a dead glass eye. Frost on the lens. Cable running to a guard shack with no light behind its window.

The docks were his.

He walked the perimeter first. That was habit — mortal habit, from the years of casing pawnshops and loading docks on the South Side, but the blood had sharpened it into something closer to ritual. Two gates. The main one padlocked, the south service gate hanging on chain-link that somebody’s truck had bent at the bottom corner. He could fit through it without touching the metal. He filed that.

The Gary Exports Co. office was unlocked. He stood in the doorway and breathed — not because he needed to, but because the air in a room told you things. Diesel. Coffee gone stale in a pot nobody had washed since Thursday. Paper. The particular staleness of a building where men work hard and nobody cleans.

The clipboard was on the dispatch desk, half-buried under a manifest for scrap steel. January shipping schedule. He read it standing up, not touching the chair, not leaning on the desk. Most of the entries were mundane — scrap, industrial salvage, the legitimate carcass-picking that kept what was left of Gary’s waterfront economy twitching. But three lines on the fourteenth had no origin port. No listed contents. Just a dock number and two initials in ballpoint, pressed hard enough to dent the paper: L.C.

Lucian’s containers.

Darius took out the pocket notepad he’d carried since he was sixteen — the same brand, always the same brand, a Field Notes memo book from the art supply store on Broadway that somehow hadn’t closed yet — and copied everything. The date, the dock number, the code. He put the clipboard back exactly where he’d found it, angled the same way, the manifest on top. Then he walked to Dock 7.

It was the last berth on the east end, tucked behind a corrugated warehouse whose loading door hadn’t opened in years. Out of sightline from the main office. Out of sightline from the road. Someone had chosen this spot the way Darius would have chosen it — not for convenience but for privacy.

He stood there for a moment, looking at the empty concrete where three unmarked containers would sit in two weeks, and thought about the architecture of it. The structure underneath. Chuc Luc wanted a pipeline through these docks, and the docks belonged to a Gangrel who had served under Julius Caesar. You didn’t build a pipeline through a man like that. You built it around him, through the cracks in what he controlled, through the men he didn’t bother to watch because they were too small to matter.

Men like the stevedores. Men with debts they couldn’t pay.

Darius closed his notepad and walked back to the Cutlass.

Broadway and Fifth Avenue was the kind of block that looked the same at midnight as it did at noon — the same burnt-out streetlight on the corner, the same plywood over the window of what had been a shoe store, the same group of men who were always there and never going anywhere. But tonight the men were louder. Someone had a boombox playing Kool Moe Dee. Someone else had a bottle of Hennessy in a paper bag. New Year’s Eve in the part of Gary that the part of Gary people talked about when they said things were bad.

Darius found his prey the way he always did — by the smell. Not blood-smell. That came later. What he smelled first was the particular sourness of a man whose body was producing cortisol and adrenaline in the specific cocktail of financial desperation. It was chemical. The blood knew it before the mind did. His mouth watered and his pupils dilated and the Cutlass was already pulling to the curb before he consciously decided to stop.

The man was leaning against the side of Ebenezer Baptist Church — not praying, just using the wall to stay upright. Late fifties. Steelworker’s hands, thick and scarred. Three months behind on rent — Darius could see it in the way he held himself, the shoulders that had given up pretending they could carry what was on them. He’d been at a card game. He’d lost.

Darius got out of the car and walked over with twenty dollars in his hand, because you always started with the gift. That was the rule. Generosity before the thumbscrew.

“Happy New Year, brother. You need a ride somewhere?”

The man looked at the twenty the way a dog looks at a hand that might hit or might feed. Then he took it. Then Darius was close enough, and the alley beside the church was dark enough, and the man’s blood was singing — all that cortisol and shame and the specific flavor of a debt that would never be repaid — and Darius fed.

It was clean. Quick. The man would wake up against the church wall with a headache he’d blame on the bourbon and a twenty-dollar bill in his pocket he wouldn’t remember receiving. Darius leaned back against the brick and let the blood settle in him. Warm. Alive. The best he’d felt all night.

The man was mumbling as he faded. Half-conscious, the way they always were in the last few seconds — the mind dropping its filters, the mouth saying what the sober brain would never permit.

“…everybody owes Sal. Sal owes the Italian. The Italian owes somebody nobody sees.”

Darius wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The man’s eyes fluttered closed.

Sal.

He said the name to himself twice, quietly, the way you test the weight of a new tool in your hand. Then he got back in the Cutlass and drove east.

The Polish bar on Michigan Avenue didn’t have a name on the outside — just a Budweiser sign in the window and a screen door that didn’t close all the way. Ray Pulaski’s truck was in the lot, parked across two spaces in the way that announced its driver had arrived sober and would not be leaving that way.

Inside was warm and loud and smelled like kielbasa and spilled beer. A television above the bar was showing Dick Clark’s countdown from Times Square, the sound turned down so low that the crowd on screen appeared to be miming their enthusiasm. A dozen stevedores and former steelworkers were arranged along the bar and in the booths, drinking with the methodical focus of men who understood that this was the last hour of a bad year and the first hour of one that would probably be worse.

Ray was at the bar. Red-faced, loud, waving a hand at the bartender for another round. Buying drinks he couldn’t afford. Darius had known men like Ray his entire life — men whose generosity was a symptom of their terror, who spent money they didn’t have because spending was the only language they knew for saying I’m still here, I still matter, don’t forget me.

Darius slid onto the stool beside him and put a folded twenty on the bar.

“My round, big guy. No use drinking alone on New Year’s Eve.”

Ray flinched at the cold that came off Darius’s body — they always did, the mortals, a little shiver they couldn’t explain, the hindbrain registering something the forebrain refused to name — and then his face opened up like a door nobody had knocked on in months.

“Birch! Hey — hey, happy New Year, man. Sit down. You want a Schlitz? Eddie, get this man a Schlitz.”

Darius didn’t want a Schlitz. Darius wanted what was behind Ray’s eyes, which he could read the way a jeweler reads a setting: wife gone since October, kid stopped calling, crew drinking near him but not with him. The debts were the symptom. The loneliness was the disease. Ray Pulaski didn’t need money. Ray Pulaski needed someone to need him.

Darius listened for eleven minutes. He knew because he counted. Ray talked about the holidays, about shift cuts in January, about the weather, about the Steelers. Darius nodded and didn’t drink the Schlitz and waited for the seam in the conversation — the place where the casual became the vulnerable, where the talking-to-talk became the talking-because-you-can’t-stop.

When it came, he was ready.

“Well you know me, Ray,” Darius said. “I like to keep my roosters full. Not too full, not enough to not stay mean. But enough to not get stupid. What if I cut your guys a few Christmas checks? Maybe make things a little less tight?”

Ray leaned in. The seam had opened and now Darius was inside it, in the warm dark space where desperate men keep the things they don’t tell anyone.

“Christmas checks? Man, you don’t even know. Half the guys are into Sal for—” He stopped. Glanced sideways. Lowered his voice to the register that meant this is real, this is the thing under the thing. “There’s a guy, Sal Petrocelli. Runs book out of the dispatch office — football, horses, numbers, whatever. Most of the crew owes him. I owe him.”

He took a drink. When he put the glass down his hand was not entirely steady.

“Thing is, Sal ain’t independent. He answers to somebody in Chicago Heights. Italian money. They front Sal, Sal fronts the guys, the guys pay back with interest or they work off the vig doing side jobs — moving containers off-manifest, losing paperwork, that kind of thing.”

Ray looked at Darius. The look was half-shrewd and half-drowning.

“You serious about spreading some money around? Because if you could buy out a few of those markers from Sal… those guys would owe you instead. And Sal wouldn’t care as long as he gets his cut upstream.”

There it was. The whole machine, laid out in one drunken paragraph. Sal Petrocelli was the gearbox. Chicago Heights was the drive shaft. The stevedores were the wheels. And somewhere above it all — above the Italian money, above Chicago Heights, above the entire grinding apparatus of the Gary waterfront — sat someone nobody saw.

He bought Ray one more round. He memorized the name. He shook Ray’s hand at midnight when the television showed the ball dropping in Times Square and the bar erupted in the kind of hollow cheering that passes for celebration in a city that has forgotten what it’s celebrating.

Then he drove home.

The haven was a ground-floor apartment on the west side — blackout curtains, steel door, a phone line Chuc Luc had set up and Darius suspected Chuc Luc could tap whenever he wanted. He sat at the kitchen table with his notepad and a cup of coffee he wouldn’t drink and wrote down everything.

January 14. Dock 7. Three unmarked containers, initials L.C. Two gates — south service gate the best entry. Guard shack manned on normal nights, unmanned on holidays. Camera on the main gate, fogged lens, dead cable. Sal Petrocelli, bookie, dispatch office, fronted by Chicago Heights. Stevedores in debt — leverage available for purchase.

He closed the notepad and looked at the clock. Three-fourteen in the morning, the first day of 1990.

He had a date. He had a dock. He had a name. He had a strategy.

The year was fourteen minutes old and Darius Cole already knew exactly what shape it was going to take. Not all of it — not yet — but the architecture was visible now, the way a building’s skeleton is visible before the walls go up. You see the steel and you know what the rooms will be. You see the structure and you know where the weight will fall.

He pulled a book from the shelf above the sink — The Economics of Urban Decline, a library discard he’d picked up at Marlene’s pawnshop for fifty cents — and read until the sky outside the blackout curtains began to lighten. Then he locked the door, checked the curtains twice, and went to sleep in the narrow bed that smelled like concrete and nothing else.

Outside, Gary entered the new decade the way it had left the old one: quietly, emptily, with the patience of a city that had been dying for so long it had forgotten it was ever alive.

But underneath — underneath the rust and the silence and the frozen lake — something was moving. A wheel had begun to turn. And as long as every wheel turned in the right direction, everybody would make money.

Darius slept. The blood settled in him like an answer to a question nobody had asked yet.