“Fifty.” He wasn’t about to tell her he’d borrowed it from her father. “You do this for me, and I can get you a lot more money. Later.”
Her eyes went wide. “You shit! You think you’re going to be a dealer?”
“What? No!”
“Don’t fucking lie to me, Matty.”
“I would not lie to you. I’m just going to get more money later. And I could pay you.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“No,” she said. Then: “How much are you getting later?”
That was a good question. How much money was in Mitzi’s safe? How much was his share? Grandpa Teddy would have been ashamed that he hadn’t made that clear in advance, family or no family. “I don’t know, exactly.”
“I want two hundred,” she said.
“Two hundred dollars?”
“Connection fee. Like paying a toll. Take it or leave it.”
He didn’t really have any choice. “Okay,” he said. “Two hundred—”
“Three,” she said.
“Oh come on!”
“It doesn’t matter,” Malice said. “I don’t believe you anyway.”
“Oh, I’m going to get the money.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Is this part of the secret project?”
“Secret what now?”
She plucked the bills from his hand. “I’m so tired of this Amazing Telemachus shit,” she said. “You’re so fucking special, but whenever something goes wrong, you just blame it on some ‘psychokinetic accident.’ ” She tucked the money into the waistband of her shorts, a gesture with no sexual overtones—for her. “It’s hard enough with Cassie and Polly in the house, but now Frankie’s bringing you into it.”
“Pardon?” Matty really wasn’t following. What was up with the twins?
Malice lifted the head of a ceramic monkey and pulled out a plastic bag. “This is all I have on me, but I can get more. Do you know how to roll a joint?”
He shook his head.
“Consider this lesson part of my fee.”
—
The journey to psionic superspy began that night, in Frankie’s garage. It was a lot like Luke Skywalker’s training on Dagobah, except that Frankie was no Yoda, and had no idea what his apprentice was up to. The Jedi was going to have to train himself.
“It just has to be out here,” Matty told him. They were making a bed on the garage floor out of a pair of crib mattresses—leftovers from the twins—and a couple of blankets. “And I can’t be watched.”
“So I’m going to tell Loretta that you’re sleeping out in our garage?” Frankie asked.
“I know it’s weird,” Matty said. “But I’m sure she’s seen weirder things, right?”
“You have no idea,” Frankie said. “What else do you need?” Matty hesitated, and Frankie said, “Out with it.”
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Matty said.
“Shoot.”
“How much is in there?”
“The safe?” Frankie shrugged. “Well, you’ll be able to tell me, won’t you? You’ll just—” He waggled his fingers. “—take a look.”
“Oh, right,” Matty said. “But, you know, ballpark?”
“Ballpark?” Frankie said. “It’s a big fucking park, Matty. A hundred K, easy.”
“A hundred—?” His voice squeaked.
Frankie laughed. “We’re not doing this for chicken feed. We’re going to hit them on payday, Matty. As soon as their customers fork it over, then bam.”
Matty suddenly thought: Did that mean they were stealing the victims’ money? Maybe the right thing to do was to give it back to them. But then how to figure out who was owed how much? You couldn’t do that without a ledger, something with all the names and addresses. And if they gave it all back, then maybe Frankie would get what was owed to him, but Matty would get nothing. Or rather, Mom would get nothing. And he was doing this for Mom, right?
This was all a matter of moral timing. When did the property of innocents transform into the corrupt holdings of criminals—as soon as it entered the safe? Maybe it was like the miracle of transubstantiation, but in reverse. An anti-Communion.
“Hello, Matty?” Frankie said. “You need anything else?”
“Oh. Let me think.” He examined his inventory: a Chicago-area map, spread on the floor, with big red arrows marking the way from Frankie’s house to Mitzi’s Tavern; two cans of Coke in a Styrofoam cooler; a spare pillow in a My Little Pony pillowcase.
“I’m good,” he said.
But was he?
“Almost ten o’clock,” Frankie said. “Better get crackin’. I’ll leave you to…whatever it is you do.”
Frankie closed the garage’s side door behind him. Matty reached into his back pocket for the baggie.
The door popped open. “Good luck,” Frankie said.
Matty stood very still.
Frankie started to say something else, seemed to think better of it, and closed the door again.
“Oh my God,” Matty said to himself. He waited five minutes before taking another look at the baggie. Finally he slipped out one of the three tidy joints that Malice had rolled for him (he never succeeded in rolling one himself) and flicked the Bic lighter she’d loaned him (“All part of the service,” she said).
Ready for liftoff, he thought. Ignition.
Liftoff did not occur. He sat on his baby-mattress launchpad for several minutes, inhaling and coughing, coughing and inhaling, and told himself everything would be fine if he stopped worrying. And he was right. At the same moment he noticed that he’d stopped worrying, he noticed that he was sitting beside himself.
“Hey, good-lookin’,” he said. His body giggled. The joint dangled between his fingers.
“Maybe you should put that down,” he said.
His body took one last toke, then placed the joint on the cement.
“I’ll be back in a bit,” he said. He drifted through the wall of the garage and hovered a few inches over the grass. He thought about looking in on Malice, but decided against it. That was one habit he needed to break. He couldn’t be a drug addict, a burglar, and a perv.
Flying, though, that was a pure good. He coasted over Uncle Frankie’s rooftop, and moved slowly up into the trees, then over the streets, gradually gaining altitude, until he could again make out the towers of the city, glittering in the distance. Acres of air hung below his feet, and he was only mildly disturbed by this.
He thought, Probably a good thing I’m high. (High. Heh.)
Moving took no effort at all; he was pulled along by the string of his own attention, reeled in by whatever caught his fancy. That brightly lit water tower next to I-294, painted like a rose. The jets, roaring toward O’Hare. Quick as a flash he was flying alongside the windows of a plane, inches from the face of a bored red-haired woman staring out.
Matty made wings of his arms. “I’m an astral plane,” he said. Far away, his body laughed; he could feel the echo of it.
“Focus, Matt,” he said. Where was Mitzi’s Tavern? He had no idea. And he couldn’t see the map of Chicago without zooming back to the garage, or reentering his body.
Speaking of which, where was his body?
Holy shit!
He spun in the air, panicked, lost in the night sky. Below, dots of light fenced dark rectangles of rooftops and yards. Which of those was Frankie’s house? The only time he’d gone this far from his body, he’d been sucked back into it by Malice slapping him around.
He began to fly at random, zooming close to street signs, trying to remember the map of Chicago. Why hadn’t he studied it more? Why hadn’t he arranged for Frankie to come wake him up?
His body was the anchor. He’d gotten this far from it by following whatever drew his attention. Maybe, then, he only had to pay attention to his body.
He tried to think about his arms, his chest. His throat. The tickle of smoke at the top of his lungs. He coughed—and felt hi
s body move. The sound of the cough seemed to come from far away.
“Okay, Matty,” he said aloud. His voice came through more clearly, and he began to follow it back across the network of roads and houses. “Here we go.”
A minute later, he slipped through the roof of the garage. His body said, “Next time, maybe you should be less high.”
—
He didn’t make it all the way to Mitzi’s Tavern until ten days later. The biggest obstacle was finding a place and time to smoke. He couldn’t keep staying at Uncle Frankie’s house. Grandpa Teddy’s place, though, was crowded and chaotic. The basement was out of the question; Mom had made that her second home, camping out there when she wasn’t at work to talk to the Joshinator. Buddy could barge into any room at any time. And the garage was too risky; Grandpa Teddy had a door remote, and the thought of the door sliding up while he was passed out on the floor terrified him.
He eventually settled on a spot behind the garage, between two overgrown bushes. If he sat cross-legged, with his back to the garage wall, he was invisible unless someone walked up right in front of him. He thought of it as his nest. But the only time to slip into it was between the end of work with Frankie and the return of his mother from work.
At least it was easier to travel in the daytime. He memorized the route from Grandpa Teddy’s to Mitzi’s, and after a few trips he was able to get there in seconds, as long as he didn’t let his mind wander—literally. Anything could distract him: sirens and church bells; old ladies and young girls; animals, especially birds, which were amazing, and seemed to be everywhere he turned his attention, a nation of tiny, officious observers who could not only see Matty’s astral form, but hungrily track it.
That last bit of paranoid insight, he realized later, came courtesy of the marijuana. He was having trouble fine-tuning his cannabis intake. Too much and he never arrived at the tavern, too little and he barely had time to look around before his body snapped out of it.
And time was a problem. Barney the Bartender never went to the door alarms during the day. Finally Matty was able to get there early enough one morning to see him open up the bar and type the disarm code into the alarm console: 4-4-4-2.
Frankie was overjoyed. Then almost immediately he forgot the joy and started worrying about the safe. Days went by without Matty being able to give him the combination. “What’s the problem?” he asked one afternoon in the Bumblebee van. “It’s just three numbers.”
“Most of the time I’m there, she never gets up from the desk,” Matty said. “I’ve only seen her open the safe twice—and the first time she hunched over it, so close I couldn’t see the numbers. Practically on top of it. And the next time she went for the safe, I tried to zoom in, but I overdid it. I went straight through the wall, and then—whoosh.”
“Whoosh? What’s whoosh?”
Matty felt his face grow hot. “I ended up…away. Like, really far away.”
“Like what, Glenbard?”
“Over the water. Lake Michigan.”
“What the fuck!” Frankie had said that too loud, and lowered his voice. “What the fuck?”
“I know! It kinda freaked me out. I panicked. Luckily, the—” He was about to say that the pot wore off, and squelched that. “I came to, and I was back at home.”
“Okay, okay, this is good news,” Frankie said. “You’re getting stronger. You just need control. It’s a classic Telemachus problem. Too much power.”
Matty liked the sound of that.
“Tell me what you need,” Frankie said. “Talk to your coach.”
Coach? Matty thought. Aloud he said, “I think I need to spend the night again at your house.”
“Why’s that?”
Why, indeed. Because (a) he’d smoked half the pot and needed to stock up if he was going to stay on his game; and (b) he wanted an excuse to hang out with Malice. The only reason he could give Frankie, though, was (c): “Mom’s getting suspicious of all the time I’m spending alone.”
“Right, of course she is,” Frankie said. “I’m coming over for dinner in a couple days. I’ll ask her then.”
“Thanks, Uncle Frankie.”
“It’s nothing.” He clapped Matty on the shoulder. “It’s just another obstacle. Like the twelve labors. You know what I’m talking about?”
“Sure. Hercules.”
“Heracles, Matty. Learn your Greek. That’s your heritage. We’re sons of gods—demigods at least. We come from heroes. Heracles, Bellerophon. Theseus—”
“Okay…”
“And what can stop a hero if he sets his mind to it?”
“Nothing?” Matty said.
“Damn straight.”
—
Then Uncle Buddy asked him to walk to the gas station to buy milk for dinner.
That simple request turned into an attempted kidnapping by a pedophile—at least, that’s what it looked like at first. Starting sometime when he was four years old, and repeating at frequent intervals, his mother had described exactly how it would go down: a windowless van would pull up alongside him, and a strange man would lean out and offer to show him something really neat. Maybe it would be a puppy. Or a Game Boy. And what was Matty supposed to do? Run, of course. Run away and find Mom.
Now that it was finally happening, though, Matty found himself rooted to the hot sidewalk, the cold milk jug sweating in his hand. The predator, an old black man with white hair, had leaned out of his driver’s-side window of a silver van and said, “Hey, Matty. Got a second?”
And what did Matty do? Smile uncertainly and say, “Uh…”
“Destin Smalls would like to talk to you.”
Smalls? The guy who’d been on the phone with Grandpa Teddy?
“He’s a friend of your grandfather’s. And your grandmother, Maureen.”
No puppy. Just a phenomenally intriguing teaser. Still, a cue to run. Instead, Matty waited as the man stepped out and walked around the front of the silver van. He moved stiffly, as if he had a bad hip. Then he waved for Matty to follow.
Matty obeyed. It seemed rude not to. “I considered her a friend, too,” the driver said and held out a hand. “Clifford Turner. It was an honor to serve with her.”
Serve with her? Holy cow, Matty thought. The government stuff. It was all real.
Cliff pulled back the van’s side door, which had the effect of a magician pulling back a curtain to reveal…a huge white man in a blue suit, crammed into the far captain’s seat.
“Matt. Pleased to meet you in person. I’m Agent Destin Smalls.” His voice was low and confident. And he’d called him Matt. He gestured to the empty seat next to him. “Come on in. It’s air-conditioned.”
Okay, that was straight out of the pedophile playbook. “I have milk,” Matty said.
“I see that.”
“I mean, my family’s waiting for me,” Matty said. “They’ll come looking for me.”
“This won’t take a minute. I just wanted to introduce myself.”
Matty looked at Cliff. “It’ll be fine,” the man said. “I promise.”
Matty climbed in and set the milk jug on the carpeted floor. Cliff shut the door from the outside, sealing them in.
The back of the van, behind the seats, was mostly dark, but blinked and hummed with electrical equipment. The air-conditioning (which did feel nice) was probably necessary to keep all those machines running.
Smalls saw him looking. “That’s high-tech stuff. Advanced telemetry.”
“What’s it do?”
“It helps us find gifted individuals, Matt. People like…”
Matty tried to keep his face from spasming.
“…your grandmother.”
“Oh really?” Matty said. The words came out an octave higher than he intended.
“Indeed. How much has your grandfather told you? Did you know that Maureen Telemachus was the most important operative we had during the Cold War?”
Classic Cold War, Frankie had said. High-stakes ops.
“C
uba? Maureen was there,” Smalls said. “The Straits of Gibraltar? She told us what happened when the USS Scorpion exploded and died. These were tense times. Both sides so terrified of each other, we were in very real danger of the world ending. Our job—your grandmother’s job—was to find out where the Russians were keeping their missiles and keep our eyes on them. The worst-case scenario was if the enemy believed they could launch with impunity.”
Matty didn’t know what to say, so he said, “Wow.” He was pretty sure this was the most important conversation of his life and didn’t want it to grind to a halt just because he didn’t understand most of what Agent Smalls was telling him. He knew about the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the rest of it was a mystery.
“Indeed. And the Communists had their own psi-war program as well. We were constantly on guard against psychic incursion.”
“So, Grandma Mo and the Russians, did they, like, fight it out?” Matty asked.
“Fight?”
“Psychically,” Matty said. “Like, on the astral plane.”
“Where did you get that from? Comic books?”
“No,” Matty said defensively. If his mom were here, she’d know he was lying. Psychic duels were straight out of the X-Men.
“You’re not far wrong. The gifted can sense each other. In fact, Cliff out there? He’s detected spikes of activity in this area.”
Matty felt his heart thump in his chest. Cliff detected him? Matty lost track of the conversation; his panic deafened him. Did they know what he’d been up to with Uncle Frankie? Would they turn him in to the cops?
Smalls, though, had continued to talk. “You must know your family is special,” he said in a confiding tone. “Not just your grandmother. Your uncles, Buddy and Frankie, used to have abilities. Your mother, too.”
Matty played dumb. “That was just an act. A stage show. They got debunked.”
“Did they?” Smalls asked. “Perhaps. But perhaps they merely stopped performing. The question I have, naturally, is if you’ve seen any new activity. Perhaps among your cousins?”
“Like what?”
“It could be anything,” Smalls said. “The ability to move objects. Sense water moving underground. See things from far away.”
Spoonbenders Page 22
