Nickel Bay Nick

by Dean Pitchford

  And just like that, he turns and heads down the walkway. I can’t believe it! Without a second thought, he delivers me into slavery! Behind me, I hear the gate buzz open and then snap shut. When I raise my chin, I find Mr. Wells and Dr. Sakata staring down.

  For a second, I consider running, but I’ve run everywhere there is to run in Nickel Bay, and all I get is short of breath.

  And a pain in my chest.

  THE BIG THREAT OF BLACKMAIL

  For the next few hours I hack up mangled branches and cut the giant, flattened cardboard gift boxes into pieces small enough to stomp into the garbage bins that Dr. Sakata keeps rolling out. Every few minutes I have to stop to blow on my freezing fingers. Now I wish I hadn’t scoffed at Dad when he asked, “Got your gloves?” this morning.

  I can be so dumb sometimes.

  As I work, I look around and notice for the first time just how big Mr. Wells’s place actually is. All these years of peering in through his wrought-iron fence, I’d never noticed that there’s a lot more to the house than you can see from the street. A three-story tower at one corner has an upside-down ice-cream-cone-shaped roof, and the rooms in that tower are hidden by trees. The wide front porch wraps around and runs down the side of the house toward a backyard.

  A hundred years ago, when people in Nickel Bay had money and dreams, a lot of these big houses got built along Sherwood Avenue. Now Mr. Wells’s place is the only one left, although I don’t know why one person would want to live here alone. Even if he does have a humongous dog.

  After a few hours, Dr. Sakata backs out of the driveway in Mr. Wells’s SUV. Twenty minutes later he returns and crosses the lawn to where I’m raking up tree branches. He pulls a pair of black leather gloves from a small shopping bag, and without saying a word, he grabs my right hand off the rake and holds it up against a glove for comparison.

  I start to complain, “Hey, what’re you . . . ?” but then I see that my hand and the glove are the same size. Dr. Sakata breaks the plastic tab that joins the gloves together and holds them out.

  “For me?” I ask. “Seriously?”

  I glance toward the house. In a window on the first floor, the corner of a curtain quickly drops, and I know I’ve caught Mr. Wells watching us. As I take the gloves from Dr. Sakata, I feel I should say something, maybe thank him, but I doubt he’ll understand a word out of my mouth. So I just bow, and he bows back.

  More hours go by. My stomach’s starting to grumble when Dr. Sakata appears and leads me around the side of the house. Inside the service porch, Dr. Sakata takes off his shoes and indicates that I should do the same. That’s when I realize how muddy and messy I’ve gotten doing my work. Once I peel off my jacket and new gloves and hang them on a wall hook, I follow Dr. Sakata into the kitchen.

  Did I say “kitchen”? It’s more like an airplane hangar! Old wood cabinets line the room. There’s a massive stove and a refrigerator as big as a garage. A football team could run sprints in here and never bump into one another. Behind me, I hear a low growl. I turn and almost scream like a girl.

  From a large crate in the corner of the room, the demon dog stares out, his head hanging low and his eyes glowing with hatred and hunger. I’m horrified to notice that the door is open, but before he can leap up and tear my throat out, Dr. Sakata snaps, “Hoko!” and the growling stops.

  Hoko! I get it now. The monster’s name is Hoko.

  “KO-ra!” barks Dr. Sakata.

  The beast sits and yawns.

  KO-ra? Maybe that means “stop growling!” or “don’t eat the pale little boy.” Whatever it is, I gotta remember that. KO-ra! could come in handy.

  Dr. Sakata has set a single place at the kitchen table with a bowl of tomato soup, a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of tea. He sure has a thing for tea. The doctor gestures for me to sit and eat, and once I pull my chair up to the table, he starts to leave.

  “Hey!” I jerk my head toward Hoko, who’s watching me like I’m his lunch. Dr. Sakata seems to understand my concern. He tears a small corner from my sandwich, holds it toward Hoko and then quickly snatches it back, wagging a “no! no! no!” finger at me.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” I assure him. “I’m not gonna feed the dog.”

  Dr. Sakata pops the sandwich bit in his mouth and walks out. Left alone under the watchful gaze of Hoko, I start to eat. I gotta admit my soup and sandwich are pretty good. I even sip the tea. Next thing you know, I’ve finished the whole cup. My stomach makes gurgling noises, and Hoko licks his lips.

  Out of boredom, I begin to study my surroundings. Behind me on a countertop a rubber-banded stack of mail sits unopened. I’m suddenly seized with curiosity about the interests and activities of my odd neighbor, so I tilt my chair back and extend an arm.

  But a threatening snarl from Hoko puts an end to that plan.

  A half hour goes by. Then forty-five minutes. I know this because there’s a big clock hanging over the sink, tick, tick, ticking. An hour passes before Dr. Sakata returns, clears my dishes and indicates, Come. With Hoko trotting behind me, we exit the kitchen and enter a long hallway.

  Then it happens. “Uh, excuse me?” I call out. When Dr. Sakata turns, I wince and squeeze my knees together, the universal sign for “gotta go!” Halfway down the corridor, Dr. Sakata opens a door. I peek into a little bathroom and exhale with relief.

  Once I’m done there, we continue down the hall, passing through a big, fancy dining room and into a massive entry with the front door on one side and, on the other, a whopping staircase that spirals up to the second and third floors. We come to a stop in front of a pair of giant sliding oak doors. Dr. Sakata rolls one open and steps aside to allow me to enter.

  Once I do, I feel like I’m not in Nickel Bay anymore.

  Mr. Wells’s living room looks as if it’s been taken from some faraway palace and reassembled here. Dozens of large rugs, woven with thousands of colors, overlap, covering the entire floor. Hanging on one wall are old, faded fabrics embroidered with scenes of stampeding horses, clashing armies and ships tossing at sea. On the wall to my right, all sorts of old weapons are mounted. Daggers. Pistols. Swords. And the wall behind me is covered with dozens of masks, all painted and twisted into freaky expressions.

  Heavy curtains frame the windows, and even though they’re tied back, they still block out a lot of the afternoon sunlight. Around the room, candles flicker from lanterns shaped like owls and warriors and turtles. In opposite corners stand two tall fountains in which water is splashing down into dark pools. Everywhere I look there are statues of ladies in veils and men in robes carved out of polished black rock or dark green jade, some of them almost as tall as me. Across the room, behind a massive desk flanked by two wooden elephants, Mr. Wells sits. The glow from a computer screen casts a blue tint on his face.

  I can’t help myself. “Wow,” I gasp.

  Mr. Wells looks over the rim of his glasses.

  “Ah, yes. Sam.” He stabs with a ballpoint pen at a chair in front of his desk. “Sit.”

  But I’m still freaking out. “Where’d you get all this stuff?”

  “I’ll be asking the questions here,” Mr. Wells says, real snippy-like.

  Fine. Be like that. I don’t want to be your friend anyway. I don’t really say that. I just think it.

  And I sit.

  Mr. Wells stares at me until I feel that I should speak. “I’m . . . I’m almost done in the front yard,” I stammer. “Then I can start on your filing stuff.”

  Mr. Wells folds his hands on the desk. “Sam, there is no filing to be done here.”

  “There’s not?”

  He shakes his head slowly.

  “Why am I here, then?”

  “You’re here because we need to talk,” Mr. Wells says.

  Even with all the candles burning and the cushy carpets underfoot, I feel a sudden chill. I turn my head to find that, b
ehind my chair, standing between me and the closed doors, stands Dr. Sakata, arms folded. My pulse races as I turn back to Mr. Wells and square my shoulders.

  “Talk? About what?”

  “This.” He sweeps his hands to indicate the piles of folders and CDs on his desktop. “Your history.”

  “I have a history?”

  “So it appears.” He taps a sheet of paper. “Tell me something—how many times have you been arrested?”

  I practically choke. “What?”

  “Are we talking one time?” he prompts. “Two? Twelve? Twenty?”

  I finally shrug. “A few.”

  “A few?” he repeats, snapping his glasses back on and reading from a folder. “Eleven times is not ‘a few.’ I see here reports of vandalism . . . breaking and entering . . . shoplifting. A digital camera on one occasion. Three pairs of sneakers on another.” He looks up. “And you stole an automobile?”

  “It was my dad’s car, and I didn’t steal it,” I insist. “We just borrowed it.”

  “And that’s not everything, is it? You haven’t been apprehended every time you’ve”—he picks his words carefully—“crossed the line.”

  “What do you mean?” Now this guy is freaking me out.

  “This, for instance.” Mr. Wells picks up a DVD and wags it at me. “This was pulled from the security system at Little John’s Eat & Run. I’ve transferred it to my laptop. Let’s take a look, shall we?”

  He spins the computer around and hits a button. On the screen, in dimly lit black and white, a short figure drops from a ventilation panel in the convenience store ceiling onto the top of a dairy case. Then the figure—his face hidden by the hood of a sweatshirt—climbs down the store shelves and scurries to the deli refrigerator.

  “Remember that night last May?” Mr. Wells reads from his notes. “May thirteenth, to be exact. Maybe you and some friends were hungry for a late-night snack. I mean, you did take three sandwiches from the deli case, as we’ll see shortly. One for you, one for Ivy, one for Jaxon, perhaps?”

  My head jerks back. “How do you know about Ivy and Jaxon?”

  “I do my research, Sam.”

  To change the subject, I point to the screen. “Who can see this guy’s face, anyway?” I scoff. “No way you can prove it’s me.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” Mr. Wells hits another computer key. The on-screen image freezes and zooms in on the thief’s left shoe, where the Nike swoosh is clearly visible. I stop breathing.

  “Look familiar?”

  “Lotta people wear Nikes,” I say.

  “But if you look carefully,” he points out, “you can see that the swoosh is peeling off the shoe.”

  I lean forward and squint. There it is, plain as day.

  “Exactly the way it is . . . here.” I look up. Mr. Wells is holding the left shoe of the pair I’d been working in all morning. The shoes I’d left on the service porch.

  I bite my lip and look away.

  “And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, isn’t it, Sam?” He drops my shoe to the floor, dusts off his hands and points to one folder after another. “I have fingerprints linking you to unsolved robberies. DNA results that place you at multiple petty crime scenes. I have pages from your school records with countless reports of fighting . . . cheating on tests . . . verbally abusing teachers . . . destroying school property.”

  “How . . . ? What . . . ? I mean, where did you get all this?”

  “In my thirty years of foreign service, Sam, I was called upon to perform many complicated and sometimes dangerous missions. Missions that required the gathering of highly sensitive information.”

  A lightbulb goes off in my thick skull. “So you were, like, a spy?”

  “Let’s just say I worked in intelligence.”

  “Isn’t that like a spy?”

  When he doesn’t answer, I go ballistic. “You were!” I point excitedly across the desk. “You were a spy! Where? Did you ever kill anybody?”

  “Must I remind you that I’m asking the questions here?”

  “Wow! That’s exactly something a spy would say!” I rub my hands together. “I always wanted to be a spy. Can you teach me?”

  Ignoring my question, Mr. Wells calmly says, “Tell me about your counselor down at Family Services. Mrs. Atkinson.”

  “What about her?” I snap. In our sessions with Mrs. Atkinson, it always feels like she takes Dad’s side. So I’m sure she hates me, but that’s okay. I hate her back.

  “Apparently she wants you taken from your home.”

  That gets my attention. “She what?”

  Mr. Wells reads from a folder. “Last year, she wrote: ‘Sam is a repeat offender and demonstrates no response to discipline and little chance of rehabilitation. If there are any further arrests, I recommend that it would be in the state’s best interest to remove this child from his father’s care.’”

  The blood drains from my face. “Can she do that? Take me away from Dad?”

  Mr. Wells nods gravely. Now I hate Mrs. Atkinson more than ever.

  Mr. Wells wheels out from behind his desk and pulls up close to my chair. “Sam, let me lay things out for you,” he says quietly. “You’ve gotten in a lot of trouble. You’ve made a lot of bad decisions. The only thing that has saved you from being shipped off into the juvenile detention system is that the cops in this town grew up with your dad, and they like him. They know he’s had a hard time. He lost his job. He got divorced. He’s breaking his back to save his bakery. And it doesn’t help that he’s got a belligerent, ungrateful son with a serious medical condition.”

  I look away as Mr. Wells continues. “So the Nickel Bay police want to help him out. They know you’re on thin ice with Mrs. Atkinson and Family Services, so they’ve stopped reporting your most recent . . . activities.”

  Now he’s blowing my mind. “They’ve really done that?”

  “For almost a year now. You don’t know it, but you’re this close”—he holds up two fingers, an inch apart—“to being shipped off to juvie hall. If any one of these folders or videos were to make its way into the hands of Mrs. Atkinson, it would be buh-bye, Sam Brattle. Buh-bye, Nickel Bay.”

  My eyes sting, but I squeeze back any tears. “Why are you doing this to me?” I’m practically choking now. “Why are you spying on me and threatening me?”

  “Because, Sam,” Mr. Wells says, sitting back in his wheelchair, “I intend to blackmail you.”

  “You what?” I jump up, knocking my chair over. “Why?”

  He shrugs. “It’s quite simple, actually. I need your help with something, and I can’t take the chance that you might say no.”

  We stare at each other for what feels like forever. Finally, I rattle my head to clear it. “You need my help?”

  “I do.”

  “And I can’t say no.”

  “I hope that you won’t.” He indicates the chair I’d just knocked over. “Sit back down.”

  As I pick up the chair and sit, Mr. Wells rolls back behind his desk. He pulls a ring of keys from his coat pocket and selects a tarnished silver one, which he uses to unlock a drawer. Out of it, he lifts a small strongbox with a combination lock.

  “Please turn away,” Mr. Wells says, so I look over my right shoulder. I hear the spinning of the combination dial and the creaking of the box’s hinges. Then Mr. Wells speaks. “Have you ever seen one of these?”

  I turn back to find him offering me a crisp, new piece of paper money. I take it and study the portrait of Benjamin Franklin.

  “It’s a hundred-dollar bill,” I say. “So? You’re rich. Big deal.”

  “Turn it over.”

  On the back, stamped in purple ink, is what looks like a carving of a bird in a circle. I squint. “Is that a phoenix?”

  Mr. Wells smiles for the first time that afternoon. “Yes, a phoenix. Th
e giant mythical bird that lives five hundred years.”

  “And then doesn’t he build a bonfire and dive into it and burn up into ashes?” I ask. We studied Roman and Greek myths in fourth grade.

  “He does. And after that, what happens to him?”

  I’m supposed to be on Christmas vacation, but I feel like I’m back in school. “He . . . what’s that word? He gets reborn again, and then he gets to live another five hundred years. Isn’t he a symbol of hope or something?”

  “Very good. So sometimes you actually do listen in class.”

  I don’t even react to his dig, because I suddenly gasp, realizing what I’m holding in my hand. “I’ve seen this phoenix before!” I exclaim. “On TV. In newspapers. Nickel Bay Nick gives away money like this every year, and it’s always stamped with the same purple phoenix so everybody knows it’s really Nick and not some copycat.”

  “Clever, isn’t it?”

  “It’s . . . it’s genius!” I stop and squint at Mr. Wells. “Wait. But Nickel Bay Nick never showed up this year. People say he’s given up on this lousy town and moved away.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard.”

  I wag the money in my hand. “So why would Nickel Bay Nick give you one of these? Doesn’t he know you’re loaded?”

  Instead of answering, Mr. Wells pulls a four-inch cylinder of green stone from the strongbox and slides it across the desk in front of me. “Please don’t touch this,” he warns.

  “What is it?” I ask, studying the object.

  “It’s called a chop,” Mr. Wells explains. “In ancient China, chops were carved from rare jade—as this one is—and used by emperors and dignitaries to stamp documents with an official seal. It was their way of preventing forgeries.” Very carefully Mr. Wells tilts the chop onto its side, exposing its bottom surface. I lower my face to desk level for a closer look. Carved into the pale green jade is the figure of a phoenix, stained purple. When I realize what I’m seeing, fireworks explode in my brain.