But you best bring it back.Ī few miles away, cheeks wet from panicked tears, hands slapping the steering wheel, his mother weaved through rush-hour traffic, stoplights and speed limits be damned.
He had eight bucks in his pocket, and there was no way he was giving up his phone, the one on which he had saved every message from his mother as the darkness had descended. A thousand dollars plus an iPhone had been the ask. The gun had been easy enough to find, even for someone who’d grown up abhorring the destruction that violence had visited on the city he loved.
Dusk loomed a few hours away, but as the young man wandered, vacant eyed, through the back streets of his Chicago boyhood, a different kind of darkness, one that had stalked him for months, settled on him like a fog.