About 150 yards ahead of us, three teenage boys broke from a tunnel on Rollerblades, their feet slashing expertly back and forth in front of one another, bodies low, arms swinging in tandem with their feet. It looked like they were talking shit to one another, laughing, goading one another on.
“Thursday,” Vanessa said, “I got hit with the door. Had to walk back into court with an ice pack on my nose and ask for an emergency continuance until Monday.”
An ice pack, I thought, and gingerly touched my jaw. Wesley should have his own patent on the things.
“This morning,” Vanessa said, “I start receiving phone calls about mail that never arrived at its destination.”
Clarence let out a low growl, his head still cocked, body a single tensed muscle.
“What did you just say?” I looked away from Clarence and hard at Vanessa, my body beginning to tingle with the connection Angie and I had kept missing.
“I said some of my mail never reached its destination. No big deal, unto itself, but piled on top of everything else.”
We stepped to the side of the path as the Rollerbladers approached, their skates hissing off asphalt, and I kept one eye on Vanessa and one on Clarence, because he’s been known to take off without warning after anything moving faster than he can.
“Your mail,” I said, “didn’t get through.”
Clarence barked, but not at the Rollerbladers; his nose pointed up and far off, down toward the tunnel.
“No.”
“Where’d you mail it from?”
“The mailbox in front of my building.”
“Back Bay,” I said, stunned it had taken me this long to see it.
The first two kids whizzed past us, and then I saw the elbow of the third one rise. I reached for Vanessa and pulled her toward me, saw the flash of a grin on the kid’s face as he dropped the elbow and grabbed the strap of Vanessa’s bag.
The kid’s speed, the force of his pull, and the way I’d twisted Vanessa’s body awkwardly toward me combined to create a mess of bad balance and flailing limbs. When the bag was ripped from Vanessa’s shoulder, she instinctively tried to grasp it, her arm going back and twisting up as I put my foot out to trip the kid, all of this happening in less than a second before Vanessa was wrenched back forward again, slamming into me and knocking me over onto my back.
The kid’s skates left the ground and flew over my reaching fingers, and Vanessa dropped the leash as her hip slammed off the pavement and her abdomen slammed into my knee. I heard the air leave her in a burst, cut off a yelp of pain from the impact of her hip, and the kid looked back over his shoulder at me as his skates returned to earth. He laughed.
Vanessa rolled off me.
“You okay?”
“No breath,” she managed.
“Wind got knocked out of you. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
She nodded, gulping for air, and I took off after the kid.
He’d caught up with the group and they had twenty yards on me, easy, by the time I gave chase. Every ten yards I ran, they clocked an extra five. I was running full out, and I’m pretty fast in the first place, but I was losing ground steadily as they reached a straightaway, no curves, no tunnels.
I dipped my hand as I ran, scooped up a rock, and took another four steps as I zeroed in on the back of the kid with Vanessa’s bag. I threw sidearm, putting my whole body into it, my feet leaving the ground like Ripken throwing from third to first.
The rock hit the kid high on the back between the shoulder blades, and he doubled over like he’d been punched in the stomach. His gangly body canted hard to the left, and one skate left the pavement. His arms pinwheeled, with Vanessa’s bag jerking in his left hand, and then he lost it all at once. He pitched forward, with his head surging for the pavement and his hands coming around too late, the bag swinging out and away, falling to the grass to his left as he performed a triple somersault on asphalt.
His friends gave one shocked glance back over their shoulders and then accelerated. They reached a bend and disappeared just as I caught up with the acrobat.
Even with knee and elbow pads, he looked like he’d been thrown from a plane. His arms, legs, and chin were a raw, pink mess of scrapes and contusions. He rolled over on his back and I was grateful to see that he was older than I’d first guessed-twenty, at least.
I picked up Vanessa’s bag, and the kid said, “I’m bleeding all over, motherfucker.”
I spied a compact, a set of keys, and a box of Altoids on the grass, but otherwise the contents of Vanessa’s bag seemed intact. Bills in a silver money clip and credit cards bound by a rubber band sat at the bottom amid cigarettes, lighter, and makeup.
“You’re bleeding?” I said. “Oh. Whoops.”
The kid tried to sit up, then decided against it and flopped back down.
My cell phone rang.
“That would be him,” the kid said through huffing breaths.
Humid as all hell out here, and my spine turned to dry ice.
“What?”
“The guy who gave us a hundred bucks to take you off. He said he’d be calling.” The kid closed his eyes and hissed at the pain.
I pulled the cell phone from the front pocket of my jeans, looked back up at the bend where I’d left Vanessa. Fuck the kid, I thought. He wouldn’t be able to tell me anything.
And I broke into a run as I put the cell phone to my ear.
“Wesley.”
I heard snorts and liquid chewing close to the receiver, Wesley’s voice echoing in the background like he was in a bathroom.
“Aww, who’s a good doggie? Yeah. That’s it, boy. Good boy. Yeah. Mmm. Chow down, fella.”
“Wesley.”
“Don’t they feed you at home?” Wesley said in the background as Clarence’s greedy chewing continued.
I turned the bend, saw Vanessa getting to her feet, her back to the tunnel 150 yards beyond her, where I could see the dark shapes of a short dog and a tall man bending over him, hand below his snout.
“Wesley!” I shouted.
The man in the tunnel straightened, and Vanessa spun and looked toward the tunnel as Wesley’s voice came directly into the phone.
“Gotta love a dog whistle, Pat. We don’t hear a fucking thing, but those pooches go wild.”
“Wesley, listen to-”
“You’re never sure which thing will make a woman crack like a fucking egg, Pat. The fun lies in trying.”
He broke the connection and the man in the tunnel stepped out the far side and disappeared.