Chasing China White by Allan Leverone (best time to read books TXT) 📗

and exited the alley, feeling as crappy as he could ever recall. Or at least as crappy as he could recall since the last time he’d not gotten a fix when he needed one.

He reached the street corner and paused, trying to decide which direction would yield the best crop of potential vehicles. Early risers were already moving briskly along the sidewalk, and the crowds parted as they approached the dirty, disheveled homeless guy, pedestrians doing their damnedest to ignore Derek while also making sure they didn’t touch him lest they become infected with his disease.

Derek ignored them. He was accustomed to being treated like a leper.

Eventually he decided to turn right and move north. For one thing, it should take him farther from Crowder, and for another, he thought there were a few busy parking lots in that direction where an inexperienced car thief might get lucky and score a vehicle without getting arrested or beaten to death by an angry motorist.

His stomach rumbled from hunger. It was ironic, because he doubted very much he could keep food down right now even if he were able to eat. He needed to smooth things out, and the only way he could do that was with a fix, and the only way he was going to stand a chance of getting one was to follow his plan.

Which meant he had to get moving.

He got moving.

A collection of rundown stores lined the sidewalk a quarter-mile or so to the north, and that was Derek’s goal. It took longer than he would have liked to walk even that short distance because he had to stop every few dozen feet to catch his breath. He was walking hunched over, like an old man, because he just didn’t have the strength to stand erect. His body ached and his stomach cramped and his head pounded.

Eventually he made it. He would have lost a race with a crippled ninety-year-old pushing a walker, but eventually he made it.

The row of stores fronted the street, of course, but they weren’t Derek’s destination. There were far too many people around and far too much activity on the sidewalk, even early in the morning, for someone who didn’t know what he was doing to steal a car here.

He passed the stores, some already open, others with the iron bars still in place over their windows and entrances. At the cross street on the far side he turned right and walked one block. Then he turned right again and began walking in the direction from which he’d just come, except now he found himself behind the cluster of shops.

A series of parking lots lined the street. Some were for the shops’ use, others for the residents of the apartments above the stores and the tenements across the street. Rickety chain-link fencing surrounded a surprisingly large number of the lots, standing side by side like a battalion of soldiers, critically wounded and helplessly awaiting the kill shot that would put them out of their misery.

A few of the lots were unprotected. Whether because the property owners hadn’t felt there was anything to gain by spending what it would cost to erect fencing or because it had once been there and had rusted through and fallen down over the decades Derek didn’t know. Didn’t care, either.

But whether protected or not, one thing all the lots had in common was that all were crumbling, pockmarked with potholes, badly in need of maintenance that was not going to come.

Derek gazed down the street and tried to select the lot that seemed the most secluded and also offered easy access. It wasn’t like he was going to be able to climb one of the fences and vault over the top to the other side; it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other. He needed to be able to simply cross the narrow strip of dead brown grass from the sidewalk to the pavement and grab a car.

There weren’t many lots that fit his needs, and for a few horrible moments he thought he was going to have to trudge another couple of blocks to the next set of shitty mom-and-pops that were awaiting elimination by a franchise and start over.

But after rejecting almost all the lots, Derek decided to give the second-to-last one a shot. It was accessible, it looked to be more than half filled with cars—most of them a decade or more old—and best of all, nobody seemed to be around. There would be no way to know whether anyone might be looking out a tenement window, but what the hell: he could waste another twelve hours looking and never come up with a better alternative than this.

He told himself not to draw unnecessary attention by glancing at the tenements behind him but couldn’t help himself. He looked back—just for a second—as he was entering the parking lot and saw nothing that would help him determine whether he was being watched. It was daytime, and every window reflected the steel gray cityscape back at him.

Then he disappeared—he hoped—from view into the rows of cars. He hadn’t given much thought to which model might be the best to steal, but the first little Toyota he encountered looked like every other goddamned car in the city, so he figured it was as good a place to start as any.

The car was dented and dinged, and rust peeked through the paint job along rivets and seams, a whole strip of it running along the driver’s side rocker panel like a dull brown, oddly-placed racing stripe. The left front fender had been damaged and reinforced with Bondo—badly—and whoever had done the repair had never found the time to repaint.

In short, the Toyota would be invisible in a city the size of Boston, assuming for a moment Derek was even able to get the damned thing out of the lot. For that to be the case, he would need three things