Dean was lost in thought, and missed his bus stop on the way home by several stops. On the walk back, the faces he had examined got mixed together. Some were guilty, some were hiding something, some were asking for help. He made it back to the apartment and tried to clear the faces from his head.
The next morning before dawn, Dean got up and began his training. Using the wifi of a neighbor who hadn’t figured out how to set a password on their router, he quickly looked up the faces of Alana’s friends and the members of the anime club. He looked up the VC Sheriff’s Department website and reviewed the mug shots from the previous night’s arrest. Dean was not naturally good with faces. So he tried harder.
He warmed up with some simple katas and shadow boxing. Elbows, fists, knees, feet, all striking the air in the middle of his apartment. Knuckle press ups and crunches.
The apartment complex was backed by a tree line, some undeveloped land, and one of VC’s many abandoned construction sites. Dean slipped out the back window of his apartment, opening it just enough for his slender frame to slip through. He hopped the back fence and ran through the trees, trying a different route so as not to create a trail. He was getting better at avoiding the branches lashing at him as he ran in the dim morning light.
The construction site was abandoned, the builders bankrupt to the point they couldn’t hire security. Some occupied bedrolls lined just inside the fence. Dean ran deeper into the construction for some privacy. Today was weight training.
For weights he used cinder blocks and rebar, and his routine was for strength rather than show. Deadlifts, squats, pushups with cinder blocks on his back. Between sets he ran through the mug shots in his head:
Erick Rudniki, Burglary
Jeffrey Crossley, Aggravated Assault
Marquis Johnson, Evading Arrest, Northside Murder Syndicate tattoo
Dean jumped up, grabbed the end of an exposed I-beam, and did a set of chin-ups and muscle-ups, reviewing the anime club members: Cody Carston, Tina Saddler, the faces of two men and one woman he didn’t have a name for.
He jumped to a vertical I-beam and shimmied up to the next floor, jumped back down to the concrete below, practicing his tuck and roll. He finished with a jog out of the site into an adjacent park. The faces began to blur together, so he kept running and cleared his mind, concentrating only on his breathing. When he stopped, he was a mile away from where he thought he was. He jogged back to the apartment and reviewed the pictures again, quizzing himself, matching names to faces.