The Latch: Or How Helen Broke The World by Christopher Coleman

The Latch: Or How Helen Broke The World by Christopher Coleman

Author:Christopher Coleman [Coleman, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Christopher Coleman
Published: 2024-10-30T00:00:00+00:00


Chapter 20

The gun was a Glock 19 Gen 3 9mm, a weapon with which Lionel was reasonably familiar, though he’d never owned one of his own, at least not in the time from which he’d jaunted a day earlier. In 2003, however, the year in which he stood currently, he was, in fact, the proud owner of the aforementioned firearm, the illegal purchase occurring in the kitchen of a small pupuseria less than three blocks from the body shop. And for the price of $350, Lionel received the stolen gun, a pair of magazines, and a bag of pork and cheese pupusas that included a side of fried plantains, for which he added a twenty-dollar tip. And like that, he was loaded to bear, ready for the Quarry if and when she arrived in Baltimore, which he prayed would be within the next twenty-four hours. And if that didn’t happen, he would commandeer Natalie’s car and head south by tomorrow night, at which point it might be too late. The volume of the Din had remained constant, but the intervals had shortened, and each minute that passed now felt like the world was closer to unravelling. It would be a bit of a wild-goose chase to abandon the Baltimore lead, but he couldn’t simply sit and wait forever, or even another couple of days.

For another twenty-four hours, however, Lionel would keep with his strategy of patience and ambush, and he stashed the Glock in the Accord’s glove box and drove to a park a few blocks from the Inner Harbor, where he parked and ate his lunch on a bench near a playground, listening to the screams and mirth of children, trying to cleanse himself of the ugliness of the past day and those which still loomed ahead.

He devoured the food in minutes, relishing the Salvadoran delicacy—a cuisine which simply didn’t exist in South Dakota—and then, estimating sundown was still at least an hour away, he made the decision to end the afternoon by casing the street from Gretchen’s article, the scene of the crime, as it were. So, Lionel fired up the Accord once more and drove east toward Kodiak Terrace, following 10th Street, one of the main east-west arteries that ran through the city. And within minutes, he was out of the bustle of the harbor and cruising in a more residential area of Baltimore proper. But as he drew closer to his destination, Lionel noticed the thoroughfare begin to commercialize again, this time with an incongruous mix of stores and restaurants: seedy strip clubs adjacent to high-end martini bars, tattoo parlors beside swanky brasseries. It was a strange mix of establishments, but the trajectory of the area was obvious: gentrification was providing a certain renaissance to the block, and in another decade or two, the restoration would be in full swing, drawing the Helen Lewisons of the world from their suburban enclaves to the heart of the city, especially on a warm spring night. Here was the



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