Angels of Detroit Read Online Free

the last moment he paused, catching a glimpse of something over his shoulder. “Do you play?”
    Following Darius’s finger, Dobbs saw an old Fender propped up on a chair, its red finish crosshatched with scratches.
    “I’m learning.”
    “I played once,” the black man said. “I was pretty good.”
    “Darius!” the other yelled.
    Darius might have gone on, but he saw his partner’s jaw rocking in its socket. “I’ll see you,” he said.
    Dobbs gave a broken wave. “Come again.”
    As soon as they were out of sight, Dobbs put one of the tens on top of the register. The other, his commission, he put in his pocket.

    In his dream that morning, the two men from the bookstore came to him dressed as generals, donning pointed hats and sabers. Even without a weapon of his own, Dobbs knocked them off their horses, before single-handedly taking on their armies. But then why, when he woke up in the middle of the afternoon, did he feel so afraid?

Two
    Everything on the monitors was gray: the blacks were a dark charcoal gray; the whites were like newspaper pages. The walls of bookcases appeared as undifferentiated smudges of darkness. Because of its size, the china cup was only a blur against the dark desktop, but Myles knew it was there. He’d dropped the tea bag in just moments before the meeting started, and then he’d forgotten it. All the way up the stairs and across the store—there was no way for him to get it now. And anyway the tea would be too bitter. He liked two minutes of steeping, no more, no less, with water just shy of boiling.
    “Myles,” McGee said. “Is there anything you want to add?”
    Myles turned his head at the sound of her voice, finding himself once again in the world of color. Everyone at the table was staring at him, McGee straddling her ladder-backed school chair. To see her there, surrounded by pads of yellow paper and three eager friends, made Myles happy and hopeful. They’d been meeting almost everynight this week to go over plans for the demonstration. Finally they were down to the last details.
    “It all sounds great,” he said.
    McGee frowned. “I said I’m worried no one’s going to show up. Again.”
    “It’s going to be fine,” Myles said.
    “You always say it’s going to be fine,” McGee said. “And then no one shows up.”
    Across the table, Holmes and April watched the volleys in silence.
    “It’ll be fine,” Myles said. “It’ll all work out.”
    Myles could see by her expression that she wasn’t convinced, but when was she ever? She was too hard on herself. Lately she couldn’t see the good in anything they did. More than anything else, he wished he could show her.
    He returned his gaze to the monitors, to his forgotten cup of tea. But something in that brief time had changed upstairs. Myles detected movement on one of the cameras. Two customers, men—one dark, the other a medium shade of gray—stood inside the doorway of the bookstore. The black man had pulled a book off the shelf and was leafing slowly through the pages. Arms folded across his chest, the other looked furtively up and down the aisle.
    The cameras were a recent addition, installed with Holmes’s help. Now Myles could take part in meetings while also keeping an eye on the store. If customers needed him, he would know. And then, of course, there was security. Things being the way they were these days, you couldn’t be too careful.
    The two men came in and out of view, the black man leading. The other man kept looking over his shoulder. He was stocky, with long dark hair tied into a ponytail.
    What were they looking for?
    Feeling a hand on his shoulder, Myles turned around, eyes reluctantly following his head. McGee was holding a piece of paper. She was waiting for him to take it.
    “This is a draft of the press release,” she said.
    Holmes grabbed a copy, barely glancing at it. “It’s just more of the same,” he said, letting the sheet float back down to the table.
    “I think