The Girl They Couldn’t See (Blind Spot #1) (Blind Spot Series)

by Laurence Dahners

  As his mother approached, Hax suddenly realized she was shorter than he was. He wondered how that could have happened without his noticing. “Pants with cuffs?” he said.

  Tansey rolled her eyes, “Pants with cuffs, yes.” She walked to his closet and pulled down his last pair of pants. The dress pants he didn’t like. Pointing to the little folds at the bottom, she said, “These are cuffs. I can let them out to make the pants a little longer.”

  “Oh.”

  Hax ate breakfast in his pants that were too short, pondering the questionable miracle of pants that could be made longer. However, when Tansey brought them back, minus their cuffs, you could easily see where the cuffs had been because the material wasn’t as faded. He didn’t want to wear them, the kids made enough fun of him without his pants having funny creases and stripes around the bottom. However, when his mother asked if he wanted to wear shorts, he remembered the temperature outside and decided that the de-cuffed pants would be better than that. Unfortunately, they were still too short. “Mom!”

  “Son!” Tansey said, imitating his exclamation. She shook her head. “We’re going to have to get you some new pants, but you know money’s tight now. This isn’t just a problem for you, you know?”

  Hax’s stomach clenched. Everyone knew that money was tight, his father bitched about it all the time. The store still seemed to be doing good business, but additional expenses had been eating into the profits.

  No, Ravinder would not be happy to learn that Hax needed new pants.

  Tansey stood up on her tiptoes and brought her face close to his. For a panicked moment, Hax thought she was about to kiss him, something that hadn’t happened for years. Then he realized she was focused on his upper lip. “What’re you looking at?” he asked in a puzzled tone.

  “Seeing if you’ve got any hair on your face.” She looked him in the eye, “Do you have hair in your armpits yet?”

  Hax felt the blood rush to his face. He did, but he didn’t want to talk about it. Embarrassed, he said, “I don’t know!”

  Tansey rolled her eyes, “Well, go have a look.”

  Hax exhaled but didn’t leave. “Yeah, I have some,” he muttered.

  His mother sighed. “You’re growing up,” she said, sounding sad.

  Roni stepped into the kitchen. Her eyes widened when she saw Hax’s pants. It took a couple of seconds for her to process the fact that the cuffs had been let out and another few moments to realize how embarrassed Hax felt about the way they looked. She opened her mouth to make a rude comment, but then recognized the look her mother was giving her. Tansey gave a sharp shake of her head and Roni reluctantly swallowed what she’d been about to say.

  As Roni went to find her cereal she pondered why Hax’s cuffs had suddenly been let out and realized her brother must have started his growth spurt. As she started to put back the cereal box, Hax came into their little pantry and took the box from her to fill another bowl for himself.

  Roni’d noticed her brother’d been eating a lot, now she eyed him out of the corner of her eye and realized he was almost as tall as she was. She’d grown a lot a few years ago, getting taller than everyone but her dad. That meant… she turned and glanced at her mother… Yes, he was quite a bit taller than Tansey.

  How did I not notice that? she wondered. She knew Hax was the victim of a lot of teasing because he was so clumsy. A failure at sports and completely unable to defend himself from bullies, he was the perfect target. She looked down at his pants again, It’s going to be even worse with those.

  She wondered whether there was anything she could do to help him. After a few moments she decided there wasn’t. After all, it wasn’t like she had a lot of status to share with him. The dark skinned kids didn’t like her blue eyes, and the kids with blue eyes didn’t like her dark skin. She had a few friends, after all the school wasn’t completely populated by racists. Most of them were nerdy computer enthusiasts. But, Roni was somewhat of an outcast as well. Her brother, being a boy, was subjected to physical abuse while she, being a girl, bore taunts and snickers.

  Just the rest of this year in high school for me, she thought, but Hax has three and a half more years of this misery, she thought sympathetically.

  Of course, just because I get out of this school doesn’t mean my life will suddenly be better. The same shitty kinds of people with their ugly attitudes populate the rest of the world. Roni wanted to go to college. She had a vague idea that people who went to college were more tolerant and broad-minded. However, she knew her family didn’t have the money for tuition. She might get a scholarship but it wouldn’t be a full ride, and if it wasn’t full, it wouldn’t be enough.

  In fact, Ravinder was looking forward to the day that Roni could work full-time. He could lay off some of their part-time employees and improve their margin.

  Though, with a sick feeling, she wondered whether their “insurance payments” to Castano and Co. would just increase again, somehow sucking the life out of any increased profits Roni brought in. Roni was pretty sure that the payments were just a form of extortion, but she hadn’t been able to work up the courage to talk to her father about getting the police involved.

  Roni watched as Hax put his bowl in the sink, picked up his backpack and started for the door.

  “Wait a minute Hax,” Roni said, then turned to her mother. “Couldn’t he wear a pair of Dad’s pants?”

  Both Tansey and Hax looked at her with some surprise. Tansey said, “They’ll be loose in the waist.” She turned to Hax, “Do you want to try on a pair?”

  Hax shrugged. He didn’t look happy about wearing his dad’s pants, but apparently he was willing to see how they looked.

  A few minutes later Hax left the house wearing an old pair of his father’s pants. Roni recognized pants that had gotten too tight for Ravinder. They were actually a little bit long for Hax and so Tansey had folded under the cuffs.

  Roni suspected her brother still felt embarrassed, but probably less so than he had. She wasn’t surprised that Hax hadn’t thanked her.

  ***

  Carl Fox stared at his office. Or, what had been his office. Someone had broken in through the window and completely trashed it. All the books were off the shelves. File drawers were dumped out onto the floor and his computer was missing. He heard heels clicking down the hall toward him. Angela arrived behind him and peered over his shoulder. She let out a little shriek. “Mr. Fox! What happened?!”

  Carl shook his head, “Maybe someone thought I was keeping some valuables here. More likely someone thought I had some important information.”

  “They stole your computer,” Angela noticed indignantly. She glanced at him and frowned, “Do you think that’s what they were after?”

  Carl shook his head again, “No… it’s not worth enough for them to take the risk.”

  Quietly she said, “Were you keeping some… money, or something else valuable here?”

  “No,” he sighed, “but I suppose they might have thought I had some valuables.”

  “What do you think they were after?”

  “I think they were after some records. Probably something that, if it disappeared, would solve a problem for them.”

  A knock at the door at the end of the hall signaled the arrival of the police. The grizzled old investigator who arrived surveyed Carl’s office for a moment, then said wearily, “You won’t be surprised to hear that all the documentation against the Castanos disappeared out of the evidence room last night. I’d imagine you’re going to find out that any copies you had of that evidence are gone from here. I bet your computer had the CCTV videos documenting the Castanos’ thugs extorting old man Black, didn’t it?”

  Carl cursed.

  The investigator patted Carl on the shoulder in a fatherly fashion, “Somebody burned down old man Black’s store last night. Black was still in it. You should be grateful they didn’t burn your place down too.”

  A spike of fear shot through Carl. Black had come to him because the police
weren’t doing anything about the Castanos. He’d brought evidence in the form of audio-video recordings and asked Carl to bring a civil lawsuit against the Castanos. Black had hoped that if the police wouldn’t shut down the Castanos’ syndicate, the Castanos might be sued into submission.

  Against his better judgment Carl had taken the case. He needed work, and it had seemed a noble cause. Bringing justice to a crime family through the civil courts had somehow felt virtuous. Now, he had no plaintiff, no witness, and no evidence. What he did have was a lot of hassle and expense to clean up his office and buy a new computer. He was also going to have a lot of angry clients when they found out he’d lost their records when he’d lost his computer.

  His first reaction was to complain to the detective about the fact that the police obviously weren’t planning to do anything. He looked into the older man’s sad eyes and got a minute head shake.

  He took a deep breath. It could’ve been worse.

  He was still alive.

  Turning to Angela, Carl said, “We need to get started on cleaning this up.”

  She turned to the investigator, “Aren’t you going to take photographs and look for fingerprints and DNA?”

  The detective sighed, “There won’t be any. If we did find some, it’d disappear.” He looked Carl and Angela in the eye for a few seconds each. “I’d like to help but…” He gave a helpless shrug, “Just be glad you didn’t get hurt.” He pulled out his wallet and handed Carl a card, “I’d like to help you but… I love my family just like you love yours. This is in case someday you have a problem I can help you with. Maddox,” the card said.

  Maddox turned and walked away.

  Carl turned to Angela. She looked pale as a ghost. “We gonna drop the Castano case?” she asked hopefully.

  Carl looked after Maddox a moment, then nodded dejectedly, “No plaintiff, no witness, no evidence… No point to pursuing it.”

  ***

  Ravinder stared at his son’s ankles. “And those are his longest pants?” he said, looking at the pants which, even though they’d been ironed, still seemed to show the old creases of their cuffs, in addition to the strips of cloth that were faded differently.

  “Yes,” Tansey said, “and as you can see they’re still too short. He wore a pair of your old pants to school today, but they’re too big in the waist. We’ve got to buy him some new ones.”

  Ravinder shook his head involuntarily. “Take in my old pants.”

  “Pants are hard to take in. It messes up the waist.”

  “We… We don’t have enough money to buy him a bunch of pants that are also going to be too short in a little while.”

  Tansey chewed her lip, “We’ll buy him some jeans that’re too long. He can roll up cuffs, or I can roll them under and tack them up.”

  Hax looked horrified. “The other kids’ll… They’ll…”

  Ravinder looked at his son. He loved Hax, no matter how embarrassingly clumsy and geeky the boy was. However, he had distant memories of his own growth spurt. Ravinder’s parents hadn’t had the financial problems that Ravinder was facing at present, but even they’d complained bitterly of how he’d gone through clothing back then. Hax was probably going to grow the same way. Ravinder shook his head again, “One pair of long black pants, folded under and tacked up. One pair of long jeans, rolled up at the cuffs. Buy them too big in the waist, he’s going to grow that way too.” Ravinder looked into his son’s eyes. “I’m sorry Hax, but things… things aren’t going well in the store right now.”

  Plaintively, Hax said, “You have lots of customers…”

  Ravinder cut him off, “Customers aren’t all there is to it. We have expenses too.” He glanced up into Hax’s distraught eyes. Sympathetically, he said, “Black pants. They’ll assume you have several pairs.”

  ***

  As Nick opened the door to the Buchry’s store, he wondered whether he might run into Roni. He hadn’t seen her a single time in the three years since he’d graduated, even though it seemed like they must have crossed paths. He’d thought he’d seen her a few times in the distance, but when he’d gotten closer she’d always disappeared.

  He thought that she’d probably seen him too and ducked off in another direction or just hidden in a store until he’d gone by.

  Behind Nick, Mario was nattering on about something. Nick was tuning the guy out but didn’t like the noise when they were doing business. He put his hand up behind him, thumb and fingers apart like an open mouth. He snapped them shut.

  Mario stopped talking.

  Nick rounded the end cap of the store aisle and looked at the register.

  There she was, startlingly blue eyes in all their glory. She’d lost some baby fat since he’d last seen her and he thought she looked even prettier in her strange way. Still not someone I’d better bring home to Dad, he thought. “Hi Roni,” he said cheerfully. “We’re here about your insurance?” As he said it, he wondered whether her father kept the insurance payments a secret from the rest of the family.

  Roni flashed him a loathing look. For a moment she said nothing. Then, looking like she had a bad taste in her mouth, she said, “Insurance?”

  He has been keeping it a secret, Nick thought. “Yeah, our company keeps the streets safe around here at night. Keeps vandals from breaking windows and doing graffiti. You know, the kind of stuff the police don’t have the time for.” Giving her a big smile, he leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Your dad knows all about it.”

  “You mean,” she said with a disgusted tone, “he knows you’re an extortionist.”

  Nick pulled back and grinned, “That’s such an unpleasant term.” He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes in a way that seemed to frighten most people, “Sounds like you’d better get your daddy.”

  Roni stood from her stool. Nick realized she was shaking. He assumed with fear, though she looked pretty pissed. Without saying anything more, she turned and headed through the door at the back.

  “Nice ass,” Mario said. “Can’t blame you for jumpin’ that.”

  “Shut up Mario,” Nick said. Not because he really cared, or because he expected Mario to stop talking, but because that’s what he always said to Mario. He wouldn’t want Mario to think there was something different about this girl. Nick leaned against the counter and looked around, kind of hoping it’d take Roni a while to get back with her dad. He had a five minute rule for these visits. If it took longer than five minutes for the boss man to show up and make his payments, they started breaking things. He thought he’d enjoy seeing the look in Roni’s eyes if she came back and saw the place busted up.

  In fact, it’d probably only been three or four minutes when Nick’s eagerness got the better of him. He shoved the cash register off the counter, enjoying the crash. The drawer sprang open and coins spilled everywhere, adding to his delight.

  Moments later old man Buchry burst in through the door, his eyes shooting to the broken cash register. “What?!” he said, eyes flashing with anger and dismay. “What have you done?”

  Nick had just finished unwrapping a lollipop from the counter display. He stuck it in his mouth, cocked the stem up at what he thought was a jaunty angle, and said, “Someone came in here and vandalized the place.” He shrugged eloquently, “We would’ve stopped them, you know, but your insurance payment had just come delinquent.”

  Buchry pointed a trembling finger at the cash register, “That machine’s worth more than your entire payment!”

  Nick pulled out the lollipop and pointed it at Buchry. With a broad grin, he said, “So, you should be Johnny on the spot with those payments then, shouldn’t you? Shouldn’t make us stand out here waiting for our money, should you?”

  Buchry looked like he was about to pop a vein in his forehead. “She’d just told me you were here! I came as fast as I could.” He waved at the register, “Now, I won’t be able to afford to pay you next month.”

  Nick narrowed his eyes. “I’d watch how you were talking to me,” he sa
id, pulling his jacket open just enough to expose the hilt of the gun in his shoulder holster. “And, if I were you, I’d find a way to make those payments.” He put the lollipop back in his mouth and spoke around it, “On time.”

  Buchry squatted and scooped up some cash where it’d spilled out of the drawer. With trembling hands he found a bundle, evidently the pre-counted monthly payment. Buchry quickly found an envelope and stuffed the bills inside. Holding it out, he stood staring at Nick, somehow looking both furious and frightened.

  Nick took the money and smiled, “Thanks!” he said cheerfully. He lifted the sheaf of bills in an offhand salute. “I don’t think you’re aware of this, but normally when your payments lapse, like they just did, there’s a fifty percent surcharge to restart ‘em.” He looked up toward the back hallway, “But, this is your first time to be slow, and besides,” he winked, “I like that hot daughter of yours.” He turned his eyes back to Buchry’s and lifted an eyebrow freighted with meaning, “So, this time I’m gonna let it slide, understand?”

  Buchry gave him a spastic nod.

  Nick pointed his lollipop meaningfully at the back hall again, “But, you might wanna tell Roni to hustle next time, huh?”

  Ravinder’s stomach churned as he lifted the cash register with trembling hands. He didn’t want his family to know about the Castanos. He didn’t want them to worry.

  However, they couldn’t afford a repeat of what’d just happened. Anyone who might be minding the store had to know that when the Castanos’ strong-arm men showed up for their payments it had to be treated as an urgent matter. Ravinder had successfully been trying to mind the store himself on the days the Castanos collected, but of course, occasionally he had to go to the bathroom.

  Ravinder had told Roni he was expecting someone and to come get him, but he hadn’t wanted to express how urgent it might be. It was embarrassing, after all. He suspected that the two men had said something rude to her and she’d purposefully dragged her feet getting him. She certainly hadn’t seemed to be in any hurry when she’d found him.