The Frequency — Friday, 7 December 1990, 4:25 PM

Kendrick’s Auto / Greer’s Office, Ridge Road / Payphone, Broadway & 11th Gary, Indiana

She woke and the hunger was patient and the dark was familiar and the heater was clicking its three-second rhythm the way it had clicked every night since August when she first dragged the propane unit through the bay door and set it on the concrete and learned that heat in a cinderblock room is not comfort but arithmetic – BTUs against surface area against the particular quality of cold that enters through every joint and seam of a building that was built to store engines, not bodies.

DeShawn was on the folding chair with a copy of Jet. The cover was half torn off. He looked up when she moved and said, without preface, that the van came back. Same time. Five nights.

She told him about the man in the van.

Not everything. Not the part about the aura that burned or the channel that went dark or the thing that looked back through the frequency she used to read the weather inside people’s chests. She told him the man’s name was Sullivan Dane. That he was ex-military and possibly ex-clergy and that he carried a Bible and believed what was in it. That he was looking for people like her.

DeShawn received this information the way he received all information – without performance, without the theater of alarm that lesser men would have produced to demonstrate they understood the gravity. He folded the magazine. Set it on the toolbox. Asked what she wanted him to do.

She told him: watch. Don’t approach. Don’t follow. Don’t be seen. The Olds on Sixteenth, east of Grant. Engine off, heater off, windows cracked. If the man looks at the car, leave.

Pete she moved to the studio on Fifth. A property check – pipes, heater, the kind of errand that would not occur to a nineteen-year-old as unusual because nineteen-year-olds who have been ghouled and bonded do not question the errands of the woman who feeds them. The purpose was distance. Four blocks between Pete and the van. Four blocks between a boy who didn’t know what he was guarding and a man who knew exactly what he was hunting.

Spoon would go home at ten. Coop was at his daughter’s Christmas choir – a gymnasium on the south side, folding chairs, a nine-year-old singing “Silent Night” with the certainty of a child who has not yet learned that faith is a bet you place without knowing the odds.

The pantry tables at Greater Friendship Baptist were still out. She could see them through the frost on the bay window – folding tables, metal legs, empty. Somebody didn’t have the strength or the reason to bring them in. Three blocks east, a family was walking with a plastic bag that wasn’t heavy enough. December in Gary was a month that took more than it gave and filed the difference under a category that had no name because nobody in the budget office had ever bothered to name it.

She drove to Ridge Road.

Greer’s office smelled like radiator dust and old paper. He was at the desk under fluorescent light with the bifocals on his nose and the look of a man who had been making phone calls since nine in the morning and had found what the phone calls were supposed to find. The yellow legal pad had a name on it.

Margaret Halloran. Halloran Investigative Services. North Dearborn, suite 412, Chicago. Licensed since 1984. Bonded, insured, no complaints. Domestic work. Custody. Infidelity. The kind of PI who took cases from people who had money and a problem they wanted solved without touching it themselves.

“I can tell you who she is,” Greer said. “I can’t tell you who’s paying her.”

The deeper trace would take three days. Courthouse records. Phone company contacts. The archaeology of a payment that someone had made to find a girl who was supposed to be dead, or at least gone, or at least unreachable by the methods available to people who hire professionals on North Dearborn to do what they could not do with a phonebook and a photograph.

She took the yellow page. Folded it once. Put it in her coat pocket next to the napkin it had come from.

The gap between eight-thirty and eleven was three hours of nothing, and she spent it the way she had learned to spend empty time – inside it, without moving, without light, without the need to fill it with activity that would only serve to confirm she was awake and functional. The propane heater clicked. The chest freezer hummed its one note. Broadway sent its sounds through the cinderblock: trucks, a city bus, a car with a loose heat shield, a siren going east on Fifth at nine-fifteen (ambulance, not police – she’d learned the difference the way Gary taught everything, by repetition and the weight of proximity).

At nine-forty she heard children singing. Faint, south, carrying in the cold air the way children’s voices do – thin and certain and ignorant of the distance they travel. Carolers, or a choir rehearsal, or Janelle in a gymnasium singing “Silent Night” while her father sat in a folding chair and believed every word because the blood in his veins told him to believe and the woman who put it there would never see the inside of that gymnasium.

The payphone on Broadway and Eleventh smelled like cold metal. She fed two quarters and dialed and the line connected on the second ring and Darius’s voice came through flat and clean, the composure already in place before the handle turned.

She led with the party. The thing she hadn’t said to anyone because the shape of it was still forming – a room inside a room at a party hosted by a prince who saw everything, and inside that room a woman who had been owned for fifty-two years and a stranger from Milwaukee who could look at the chain and say whether it could be cut.

Darius listened. He built. He measured the shape of the problem the way he always measured – who benefits, who’s exposed, what’s the cost – and then he gave her the signal system. Three levels. Cufflinks. Collarbone. The weather’s turning. The third one only if it’s real.

She told him about the van. Five nights. The walking pattern. The look north toward Kendrick’s from the corner of Nineteenth and Adams. He told her about the pamphlet on the Cutlass. They were quiet for a moment – the particular silence of two people who have just realized that the same man is sitting between both of them and neither of them can make him leave.

She told him about Halloran. Chicago money. A dead girl’s name spoken in a bar where nobody speaks names. He said: that’s personal. She said: I know.

“Tuesday,” she said.

“Tuesday.”

The receiver went back on the hook and the dial tone leaked into the December air and Broadway was empty except for a cab and a man walking a dog that didn’t want to be outside. Eleven-fourteen. The van would be on Seventeenth by now. DeShawn in the Olds on Sixteenth, watching with the patience she had taught him, which was really her own patience, which was really the patience of a woman who had survived the Robert Taylor Homes and the clubs and the VIP and the Embrace and fourteen months in a dying city by understanding one thing that most people never learn and Kindred forget first:

The nights you don’t spend anything are the nights that keep you alive.

She drove back to Kendrick’s. Locked the bay door. Sat on the cot in the cinderblock dark with the propane heater clicking and the freezer humming and the two pieces of paper in her coat pocket – one with a name and one leading to whoever paid for that name – and the signal system in her head (cufflinks, collarbone, the weather’s turning) and the party twenty-four days away and the van two blocks north and the choir over and the mother in the kitchen with the light on and the phone that would never ring.

She closed her eyes. The city settled around her the way Gary always settled – not into peace but into the particular quiet of a place that has stopped pretending anyone is coming to help and has started the longer, harder work of surviving without pretending.