31. Becker

The bolt cutters bit easily through the plastic. It took two more snips to break a link of the chain.

Becker didn't look at what he was doing any more than he had to. His head whipped shoulder to shoulder, watching for cars and pedestrians and faces in windows. There weren't any nearby. A city bus rolled through an intersection two blocks up, Becker snapped to attention at the sound, then it was gone. The night was dead.

Pumping his elbows, he brought the cutter's jaws together and the chain fell away. The tall blue fixie was free. With a rattle of the frame, the combination lock clattered to the sidewalk, and Becker teetered onto the bike's high seat.


Whoever used to own this bike was a lot taller than Becker; his feet lost the pedals two-thirds of the way along the downstroke. With one foot dangling in midair and one hand clutching the bolt cutters, he had the bike halfway under his control, weaving down the empty street in a low-velocity careen. The wind wasn't enough to push his hood down, but it found the holes in his sweatshirt, and he was a little cold.

"Why not to lower the seat? Quick release is there, switch." The deep Eastern-European voice startled Becker as he struggled to lean enough to plant his feet on the ground. He slid off the seat and straddled the frame.
"Don't matter now, eh? Have a look at this one." Becker squinted at the ember which hovered in a cloud of smoke by the doorway.
"Is third one tonight. I am not eating them, hunh? You give me some time to make space."
Stepping off, Becker let the bike fall. "Piss off, Vlad, just gimme the damn money!"
"Yah, yah." He lumbered over to the curb, his eyes flitting over the angles of the frame. After a long draw on a plastic-tipped cigar, he nodded, black beard crumpling against his chest. "Ten."
"You're a crook, you know? Ten. Go back to your country."
"I am crook, ha. You are thief. In my country, they take those big scissors you carry and they snip away the ends of your fingers. I pay for my daughter taking doctor's school, one day she sew your fingers back on maybe. All comes back to start." Vlad chomped the cigar and wrapped a meaty hand around the bike frame, hoisting it to his shoulder as he walked down the alley to the garage.
"Ten for this one?" Becker anxiously scampered after him, unable to see anything except the large man's back.
"Yah, yah." Smoke buffeted around his head like clouds atop a mountain.
"What about the other two?"
"Did I not pay you for other two?"
"You drink too much."
"Then I pay you. Forty for all, why not."
As they came to the garage, Becker murmured a weak, unintelligible "thank you."

The money Becker got from Vlad was always smeared with the black grease of bike work. A set of gears from one machine might wind up on a different frame, with pedals from another, and other such changes. By morning, even the original owners wouldn't be able to point to any of the bikes and say "that one's mine." The bikes would be new, and Vlad would sluggishly soap up his hands. Becker wished he would have done that before handing over the money. The smudgy black grime irritated him in a strange way. It never seemed to rub off.

It didn't seem to bother Griggs, though. "My man."
Becker had some money in his hand. Griggs took it fast. "Can I get a...?"
"Yeah, you can. Don't even say it."
"Okay." Becker shuffled uneasily. The two men probably weighed the same, but Griggs was half a foot taller. He was jumpy because it was morning; Becker knew his patterns, knew it was best to talk to him when he was jumpy instead of paranoid.
"You know who says it?"
"No." Maybe he'd timed it wrong.
"Cops, man. So it's on tape. They say, exactly. Then they all in a hurry."
"Okay."
"You been to the movies lately?"
"No." Becker wanted to tell Griggs to get to the point, but he knew it wouldn't help. Griggs would just ignore it, or he wouldn't and he'd spend ten minutes defending his inane questions.
"Me either. But I saw this old movie on TV the other night, had this real fine bitch in black and white, you know they used to look all different back then, all classy and shit."
Becker nodded, and waited for Griggs to stop talking.
When he finally got it, it was light. "Sometimes it's like that," Griggs said, "I got mouths to feed."

He bought a lighter and didn't have enough for smokes. He wanted to save enough to have a hamburger or a hotdog later. Ducking into a cafe, he didn't order anything, just went straight to the bathroom and began to wash his hands.