When No One Is Watching(23)

This store has been here for years, and this woman has never asked me how I was doing. I must look a mess, but Red Bull is the last thing my jackrabbit heart rate needs right now.

“No, thank you. I’m fine.”

She nods, though her expression shows she disagrees.

The salon is a fifteen-minute walk from the beauty supply since my stylist moved to a cheaper storefront, and I decide to do myself a favor and order an Uber. I’ll have to wait . . . six minutes for Terrel in his Nissan Altima, but it’s hot as balls and I already feel dizzy from the short walk to the main drag of stores.

My phone vibrates and I check it.

Terrel has canceled the ride.

“Okay, fuck you too, Terrel,” I mutter, wondering if I really need my hair braided. Then, in what feels like a miracle given the general bullshit that has been my life lately, I immediately get a new alert.

Your driver is arriving in 1 min. Look for Drew in a black Ford Crown Victoria.

Someone lays on the horn, and I jump and look up to see the Crown Vic idling at the curb in front of me. He honks again, then again, and I hurry over and pull open the rear door.

“Drew?”

An older white guy wearing a Red Sox cap and reflective aviators looks back over his shoulder at me. “Yup. Sydney?”

I get in and he jerks into traffic, making me almost fall to my side before I can finish getting my seat belt on.

I snap it into place and shoot him a look in the rearview mirror, but he’s staring resolutely ahead and his aviators reveal nothing. My annoyance starts to grow as I realize there was no damn reason for him to be honking like that when he arrived.

I look around the car’s interior. It’s old, with no decorative accents. Instead of the usual air freshener scent, it smells . . . antiseptic. The hairs on my arms rise. When I glance at him again, I notice how the hair at the back of his thick neck is cut—shaved close to the skin with brutal efficiency, like a crew cut.

“Man, things have changed around here,” he says as we roll to a stop at a red light, pointing to a billboard for an upcoming luxury condominium. The ad features a white woman with sleeve tattoos relaxing in a luxurious bathtub, and the BVT Realty logo that can be seen on most new builds around here is stamped in the corner.

“Yeah,” I say tersely, wishing I’d had time to put in my earphones.

“You don’t like the change?” he asks.

“I grew up here. I don’t like people getting pushed out of their homes by rising rent and property tax,” I say, even though I should keep my mouth shut.

“Ohhh,” he says as the light turns green and he starts driving again. “Were you one of the people who protested?”

“No.”

He laughs. “Good. It didn’t get them anywhere, did it?”

Everything about this conversation is making me regret my life choices, so I decide to bury myself in my phone. When I try to navigate away from the app screen my phone doesn’t respond. I stare at the picture of the man in the driver photo—if it’s my current driver, he’s put on a lot of bulk since the picture was taken. There’s a license plate on the screen, but I realize I didn’t have time to check if it matched, since he’d hurried me into the car.

“The way I see it, it’s just . . . Darwin,” Drew says easily. “Survival of the fittest. You can’t protest that shit.”

The click of the doors locking echoes in the car as a punctuation to his statement and my hands reflexively curl into fists.

“Why did you lock the doors?” I ask.

“Those are the child safety locks, they kick in automatically after a while,” he says.

I glance through the window, willing myself to calm down. This feels wrong, all wrong, but after we pass this corner we’ll be just a few blocks away and it’s a straightaway on a busy Brooklyn thoroughfare. I’ve been extra jumpy lately and I had an unprovoked panic attack over a beauty supply shop. I’m probably just being paranoid.

“You find something nefarious in everything,” Marcus’s voice echoes in my head. “Then you wonder why I call you crazy.”

Drew suddenly whips a left onto a side street.

“What are you doing? The beauty shop is straight down this street.”

“My GPS said there was an obstacle on Fulton, so I decided to take another route. Don’t worry about it.”

There’s no damn GPS in this car. It has a radio with a cassette deck and his cell phone is facedown in the cubbyhole below it.

“Pull over,” I demand in the steadiest voice I can manage.

“We’re almost there,” he says in a calm down tone. “But like I was saying, it’s survival of the fittest. This part of Brooklyn has been riddled with crime for decades: drugs, shooting, theft. We don’t have those problems where I live because we understand the order of things. We follow the law. Back when I was a cop, I hated patrolling this neighborhood.”

“Pull. Over.”

I search for the lock on the door next to me, but there’s a hole where it should be sticking out. Sick fear pools in my stomach as I jiggle the handle, but Drew keeps talking.

“I always thought it would be a great place to live if there were just more . . . civilized people. Right?”

He makes a right and the car glides down a street with barely any traffic that’s lined with garages, industrial buildings, and half-erected condos.