2024 Northeast Baltimore, Monday, September 23, 10:30 AM

Danny had been so thrilled about him fixing up the house, keeping the “youths” out of her yard who used to hang out there and sell drugs, and the fact that her house would be the last one to be home invaded by way of the second story back porch with no staircase. The kitchen windows and doors that let onto these 12 foot high porches with the green metal awning were of old, shoddy construction. Hoodrats, had been climbing up off the heat pump units and breaking into the back door, robbing, raping and assaulting, even shooting. The police had declined to investigate and were even reporting these home invasions as “destruction of property!”

Banjo had used bailing wire and zip ties to do a double fence of poultry wire, a bird cage for the lady to keep keep out the cats. Ethan, the cool black dude next door, smiled and grinned, “Looks like Mexicans are keeping fighting cocks on that porch. I’d have you do mine, but its a rental.”

The trash men down in the alley, above which the porch towered 20 feet, stopped one morning, pointed, laughed out loud and waved to Danny, who was so proud. She stepped out back one morning while Banjo was driving in the last post for the retaining wall, smiled, pointed up at the porch as she leaned on her cane and cheered, “I love it—that says FUCK YOU!”

She then handed him $400 and said, “You are an honorable man. So I know you won’t say no and I’m already guilty for asking, because I know what you’re up against.”

Banjo refused the money with an open hand, “Danny, I’m making money with Flood, Doc and Sink. I’m good. What is it you need?”

She had tears in her eyes. She cried on his chest, leaning, and he saw Ethan up there on his porch grilling, giving him the thumbs up, like Banjo should seduce this poor older lady. Banjo smiled slightly and patted Danny on the back.

She tilted her head up, “I had a good renter before those bums you sent off. He was a good man named Bobby, a Nigerian, who lived here with his teenage daughter, two years now. She disappeared. She was a good girl, school and home, no friends, her father kept her close. I taught her how to play piano. He kept after the police about it. His things are still in the middle room, why you’re sleeping in the tiny guest room. The detective told me that he threw himself off the roof of Brennen’s Bar over on Harford Road. That’s is bullshit. He didn’t drink a drop. He was looking for his daughter. Here, I brought this. Please, maybe your slumlord boss will have a lead. I called once, and the way the detectives acted when they came out here, terrified me. They searched my house without asking, took somethings out of Bobby’s room, papers he was keeping. They were polite, but so cold, like they were not human!”

He felt that fire building inside.

“Maybe you can find her?”

That blue fire rose within him as he took an envelope, opened it, and saw one 5 by 8 photo, of a small, bald, fit Nigerian and a pretty daughter about his height. On the back was inscribed in the hand of a woman which the girl was becoming, obviously in her Catholic School uniform, “Danny, thank you so much for being our blessing, for giving us a home and for teaching! Elise.”

There was also a business card: Sergeant Barry Garrison, Homicide, Baltimore City Police Department.

He sneered, placed the envelope back in her hands, took out his pen and wrote the names of daughter and father on his hand, certain he could describe them easily. He pocketed the pig card.

“Danny, you keep that. I don’t need their pictures. The only chance is to find out where such girls are being held and quick—”

“What?” she asked, as he hung the ball peen hammer he had been misusing as a dead blow for driving fence posts, from the loop in the carpenter's pants.

He looked at her house. “You don’t know me. I’m removing my ruck now. If I text you “yes,” I have a chance of finding her. If I text “no,” it means I had to go.”

Her voice searched, halted, reformed and spoke softly with a guilt-laced worry, “What? Don’t go. I just want…”

The world grew cold in the distant, not silent, but mute, as the ire roared within, 'Women do not have a clue, do they?'

She was weeping beneath him, leaning on her cane, wondering what was the matter, not knowing—but sensing—what she had done.

He looked down into her.

“Danny, we did not have this conversation. Never inquire about this again, or you will jump out of your window, bad knees and all, and commit suicide. Police are the worst people in the world. I have to try and find her, although I probably won’t, because if she has been gone for over a year, she is possibly oversees. If she is still in the area, she is being pimped out from one of the hotels downtown. If that is the case, I will get her out and probably go to prison.”

She was in horror. He had to reassure her.

“Danny, this will be over quick and I will probably text “no.”

If anybody asks, I skipped town without paying you rent.

He walked past her up into the house, held the door for her as she limped in, locked it, and suggested, “After I leave, spend a month with your daughter in Virginia, like in an hour. Don't wait. Don't pack. Get your go bag and drive.”

She smiled slightly, a flicker of happiness recalling that she had shown herself disaster ready with a go-bag, a girly go-bag, but a go-bag still, when once this strange drifter had asked.

He was upstairs and out the door with his ruck and the attached banjo case in three minutes. He was always packed and ready to go, after Omaha.

He did turn and see her looking out the security door he had installed as he put his ruck in the trunk of the beater Flood had given him, a 24 year old Toyota ghetto wagon. She waved, now more amazed than worried.

Behind the wheel he was surprised at his reaction.

‘Was it because this almost happened to you?’

‘Is it because you want to be a hero?’

‘Do you have a death wish?’

‘Are you just a suicidal zero?’

‘Are you afraid to make this place home?’

‘Is this just an excuse to go, to let go, to text back no?’

‘Just like that, with this poor woman who has taken you in like a son, you know you’re ghosting her forever?’

‘Fuck off, Second Guess—you’re second best.’

Banjo did not turn on his phone. He never ever had that phone turned on at Danny’s. He only used his phone at the parking lot of the Welcome Inn dive motel in Baltimore County, where he went to contact Sink, Doc, Flood—never Danny. This safe house was a 100% IRL meat arrangement.

It was over.

The ghetto wagon rattled to life.

He turned and looked at her, raised his hand and nodded, a smile failing to betray his fall, his accelerating plummet from the wall of serenity he had crafted, one hope at a time, for now a quarter century.

His inner critic came to the for, “You are over forty!”

He grinned, in a hurry to finally kill that whining corner of his soul. He pulled out onto the clean asphalt street that he had failed to appreciate for the wonder it was until this moment, and smiled, smiled at the shrinking coward dying in the back of his mind, smiled wider, at the quivering cipher of doubt, who he knew must have a crew cut, though he never showed his face. Driving up the road, his face lost in some useless pose, Banjo listened within to the sissy in his soul as it hyperventilated.

The car drove up and around the bend, pausing for two hoodrats to cross the street. Banjo felt the frozen pose on his face split and crack into a grin, his eyes opening emptily, thirstily wide. The driver took no notice of the two criminals who had peered into his windshield assessing a possible carjacking mark, only to gawk in horror at the grinning beast enthroned there, thirsting hungrily for the night.

“The Motel,” commanded the driver. So the hands and feet obeyed as the car turned, sneakered feet giving way with haste into this sinking world from which the suffocating captive within, thankfully a mere breath from death, had been so recently torn.

“The Motel,” obeyed the hunter, now fully awake.