Soul Kiss

by Neil S. Plakcy

  He let go of my hand. “You may have to, but I don’t.” He turned and began to run through the parking lot toward the street.

  “Daniel!”

  The door of the pancake house opened and Roly stepped out. “Where’s he going?”

  “He’s running away. You’ve got to stop him.”

  Roly took off after Daniel, who was trying to dash across Collins Avenue between the traffic. My heart accelerated as I saw a yellow Volkswagen beetle decorated like a mouse, with an exterminating company logo on the side, swerve to avoid hitting him. The air was filled with the screeching of brakes and honking of horns.

  “Daniel!” I screamed. “Stop! Oh my God!”

  Egidio came up behind me and put his arm around me. I was shaking so bad and I started to cry again. I leaned my head against his and inhaled his smell of rum and lime.

  Roly was fast, and had the advantage because the traffic had already slowed for Daniel. He caught up with Daniel at the far sidewalk, grabbing his arm. As I leaned into Egidio’s side, I saw Roly talking to Daniel.

  Daniel kept shaking his head, but Roly wouldn’t give up. Finally I saw Daniel’s whole body sag, and Roly released his grip. The two of them walked down to the corner, crossed the street at the light, and returned to the parking lot.

  “In the car,” Roly said tightly. Daniel and I climbed in the back seat again, and once we were all situated I heard Roly pop the child locks. “Are we under arrest?” I asked.

  Roly backed the van out. “No. But I’m taking you to my office so we can keep talking.”

  “What if we don’t want to go?” Daniel asked.

  “Look, Daniel, I have a son of my own, and I can imagine how crazy he’d be if anything happened to his mother. But you’ve got to trust me. Right now I’m your only hope of finding out who’s after you, and, if your mother is still alive, getting her back.”

  “What do you mean, still alive?” Daniel leaned forward and put his hand on Roly’s shoulder.

  Egidio turned in his seat to face Daniel. “These people killed your father,” he said. Gently, he took Daniel’s hand from Roly’s shoulder and held it in his own. “Your mother, she would do anything to save you. You must be strong now and try to save her, if you can.”

  Daniel pulled his hand back and curled against the seat. I put my arm around his shoulders and he snuggled next to me. He was crying softly, and I felt his tears seeping through my T-shirt.

  Roly drove us up Collins Avenue and then back to the mainland across a much less scenic causeway. Even though it was Sunday, the traffic heading west was heavy. We drove past a shopping mall and the entrance to a county park, a strip club and a bunch of stores with signs in Spanish. We pulled into the parking lot of an ordinary-looking office building. The only distinguishing feature was the sign and the flagpole.

  Roly unlocked the doors and we got out. He led us inside, where a red-headed guy in khaki slacks and a dark green polo shirt with the FBI logo on it met up with us. “This is Agent Green,” Roly said. “He’s going to look after you for a while so I can do some research.”

  “We don’t need a babysitter,” Daniel said.

  “Sure you do. You acted like a baby over on the beach, running into traffic like that. So you need a babysitter.”

  He and Egidio disappeared down a hallway, and Agent Green led us into a big meeting room filled with long tables and metal chairs. There was a big American flag against one wall, and a stack of expensive looking video equipment on the side.

  “You can call me Angus. Can I get you anything? Water? Soda?”

  “Freedom,” Daniel grumbled.

  “I wish I had my freedom too. Didn’t have to work on Sunday babysitting a couple of kids. But I’m a grown up and I know I have to do some things I don’t want to. Maybe you’ll grow up while you’re here.”

  Daniel scowled. We sat down at one of the long tables, and Daniel swiveled around. “You have Internet here?” he asked.

  “Yeah, but not for guests.” Angus looked at Daniel. “So, you’re smart, right. Genius smart?”

  He shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “Prove it.”

  “Give him something to read,” I said. “He’ll read it really fast and then show you that he understood it.”

  “Good test.” He walked over to a bookcase on the side wall and pulled out a thin pamphlet. “Read this,” he said, handing it to Daniel.

  “You have one for me too?” I asked.

  “You’re a genius too?”

  “Not as smart as Daniel. But I did pretty well on my SATs.”

  “So did I, but nobody’s chasing me around the country,” Angus said. “Fine.” He got a different pamphlet and gave it to me.

  Daniel and I both speed-read. Each brochure was only about twenty pages, so it took us each a couple of minutes.

  “All right,” Daniel said, closing his. “Quiz me.”

  “Hold on, Daniel. I’ve still got a page to read.”

  “She’s slow,” Daniel said to Angus, and I elbowed him.

  “You couldn’t have read that whole thing so fast,” Angus said.

  “Duh. What do you think geniuses do?”

  Angus took the brochures from us and started firing questions, first to Daniel, then to me, then back. I could tell from his face that we hit every one.

  “Does Roly know you can do this?” he asked when he was finished.

  We both shrugged. “He never asked us to prove anything.”

  Angus stood up. “Wait here. And remember, this is an FBI field office. You try to run and we’ll catch you before you take a second step.”

  Protective Custody

  He came back a few minutes later with Roly and Egidio. “Angus tells me you put on a demonstration for him,” Roly said. He was holding a couple of printed pages in his hand. “This is some information you should know. Read it and then tell me what you think.”

  He handed a copy to each of us-- about five pages of single-spaced printing. It was an analysis of how Cuban secret service agents had been able to penetrate the United States by assuming the identity of children born to Mexican migrant workers in Texas.

  Daniel and I both put the pages down at the same time—after about a minute. “So?” he asked.

  “No way you read all that,” Roly said.

  “Way,” I said. “Ask something.”

  “How do these agents get their identities?”

  “They troll the birth and death records in states with a heavy Hispanic population,” Daniel said. “They look for children born of illegal migrant workers who died as infants.”

  I jumped in. “They assume these identities, often of Mexican children. They get drivers’ licenses and Social Security cards that way.”

  “They don’t associate with other Cubans,” Daniel continued. “That way they stay under the radar. They get jobs and work and wait to be activated.”

  “You learned all that in under a minute?” Roly said.

  “That’s the way it works.”

  Roly turned to me. “How can you do that, though? Did your mother get injections like Daniel’s?”

  I shook my head, and felt a blush rising on my cheeks. I looked down at the floor. “He kissed me.”

  “What?” Roly and Angus asked at the same time.

  I looked up. “The first time Daniel and I kissed, I felt a weird tingling in my brain. I thought it was just, you know, hormones. But then I realized I could read a lot faster, and, you know, make connections better than I could before.”

  “We tried a couple of experiments,” Daniel said. “Kissing and reading and then testing.”

  “Sure,” Roly said. “Experiments. Just your regular teenaged fooling around. It work like that for you, Angus?”

  Angus blushed and I wondered why. “Not exactly,” he said.

  “Seriously,” Roly said to us.

  “Seriously,” I said. “That’s the way it worked.”

  Roly turned to Daniel. “How about other girls you ki
ssed? The same thing happened?”

  It was Daniel’s turn to blush. It was like some kind of blushing epidemic going around. “Melissa was the first girl I kissed like that. A soul kiss.”

  Angus sighed. “How romantic.”

  Roly shot him an irritated look. “I’m still not buying this.”

  “Well, it’s true,” I said. “And it did something to my visual memory, too. I can remember any place I’ve been in exceptional detail.”

  “Really?” Daniel asked. “I can’t do that.”

  “You can’t?”

  He shook his head.

  “There’s something more,” I said. “I think maybe I can see Daniel’s dreams.”

  He looked at me. “You can?”

  “Friday night, on the train. Did you dream about that place in Havana, the Malecon? And your boat trip over here?”

  “It was more like a nightmare,” he said. “Some things that happened, like the boat trip, but other things that didn’t, like men shooting.”

  I nodded eagerly. “Like an episode of that old TV show, Miami Vice. Did you ever see it?”

  “Yeah. But scarier. Not like TV, but like it was happening to me.”

  He turned to look at Roly. “You can’t send Melissa away. You’re going to have to test her, too.”

  Roly sighed. “I can see I’ll have to call in some experts, look you two over, see what we can figure out.”

  “But what about my mother? Where is she? Who is chasing us?”

  “I called a guy in the Philly office,” Roly said. “He’s sending a team out to your apartment. I’ve got a guy tracing your movements since you and your mother got to this country. Maybe something will turn up there.”

  “What about these Cuban sleeper agents?” I asked. “Can you go arrest them and ask them about Daniel’s mom?”

  “If we knew who they were. The definition of a sleeper agent? They don’t wake up until they’re needed. Until then they could be anybody.” He reached his hand out. “Can I have your phone again, Melissa?”

  “Why?”

  “Daniel’s right. Now that we know you’re a genius too, we can’t just send you home. Whoever is after Daniel could come after you too. I’m going to have to tell your parents we need you down here for a while.”

  I gave him my phone. At least I’d get to stay with Daniel, and Roly could be the one to break the news to my mom. I didn’t envy him that.

  I could tell from Roly’s face that he wasn’t enjoying talking to my mom, and I couldn’t blame him. Finally he handed the phone to me. “She wants to talk to you.”

  “Hi Mom. You and Dad and Robbie okay?”

  “No, we’re not okay. We’re out of our mind with worry about you, Melissa. And now you’re going to have to stay in Miami?”

  I could hear the panic in her voice, the way she was almost screeching. “These guys are really nice,” I said. “Roly and Angus. And mom, how could I be any safer than being with the FBI?”

  “I knew we shouldn’t have let you date that boy! This is all his fault!”

  In the background I heard my father start arguing with my mother. Then I heard Robbie’s voice. “Hey Missy. So you’re in FBI custody? How cool is that?”

  “My name is not Missy. And we’re not in custody, exactly. More like being protected by the FBI.”

  “It’s still way cool. Wait till I tell everybody at school tomorrow.”

  “Robbie. Don’t tell anyone, all right? At least not until we get back.”

  “You’re no fun.”

  I heard my father say, “Give me the phone.” Then he was on the line.

  “Melissa? Your mother and I want you to know that we love you and we only want you to be safe. Your mother wants to come down to Florida to look after you.”

  “No, Dad. I’m fine, really. Mom would just get in the way. They want to do some tests on me and Daniel.”

  “The FBI will look after you?” he asked.

  In the background I heard my mother arguing. “Richard, this is our daughter you’re talking about. Not some business client. My baby girl!”

  I wanted to cry again, which was really annoying. I mean, here I was with a couple of real FBI agents who were trying to treat me as an adult, asking me serious questions about the way my brain worked, and I kept fighting not to burst into tears.

  My father’s voice was muffled, as if he was holding the phone away from him. “Caroline. Caroline, look at me. Melissa is not a baby any more. She’s going off to college next year. She’s smart and capable and we have to trust her.” He came back to me. “Will you promise me to leave your phone on?”

  “I promise.”

  “And call us if anything changes? And call us tonight to let us know where you are?”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll try and keep a leash on your mother. But if you pull any more tricks, I’m putting her on a plane to Miami.”

  “Yes, Dad. I’ll be good. I promise.”

  By the time I hung up, Roly was on another call. When he finished, he said, “The team is taking fingerprints at the Florez apartment. We’ll need both your prints to eliminate them. Angus?”

  Angus led us down the hall to a room full of computer equipment. “I’m going to take your fingerprints,” he said. “Let’s start with you, Melissa.”

  He entered a bunch of information about me into a database, including my birth date and my social security number. “So if I commit a crime you’ll be able to track me by my fingerprints?” I asked, as he typed.

  “Are you planning on a life of crime?”

  “You never know.”

  “Uh-huh. Okay, put your hand here on the scanner.”

  I watched as an imagine of my hand appeared on the screen, and then all kinds of software took over, mapping the ridges and whorls of my fingers. “Cool.”

  Daniel was reluctant to have his prints taken, but I told him it was no big deal. “You’re an American, Daniel. Not a Cuban any more. You don’t have to be worried.”

  “You guys are both being awesome,” Angus said. “If I were your age, and my mom had disappeared, I’d be going nuts. Lucky for me she’s safe in Scranton.”

  “Scranton? Really?” I asked. “That’s where my dad is from. My aunt and uncle still live there.” Angus finished taking Daniel’s prints and then led us back down the hall to the conference room. We sat around comparing notes on Scranton while Daniel slumped in his chair, lost in thought.

  We could hear a couple of other agents in the hallway outside the conference room, but none of them came in to talk to us. Angus found us a couple of books on FBI procedure, and Daniel and I read for most of the afternoon, sharing the earphones for my phone so we could have music playing too.

  Angus called out for pizza for all of us around dinner time, and made us promise to stay put while he went out front to sign for it.

  “You all right?” I asked Daniel when we were alone.

  “No. I don’t trust these people.”

  “Daniel. Egidio is your uncle. Of course he’s going to look out for you.”

  “How do we know that for sure?” Daniel asked. “He didn’t show us any proof. I never heard his name from my mother. For all we know he could be one of those Cuban agents. And how come he’s so tight with the FBI? He lives in that rat hole house and you can tell he doesn’t have any money.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It was true; Egidio had never given us any proof that he was really Daniel’s great-uncle. All the stories he told us could have been made up. Or maybe he was secretly working for the Cuban government. Suppose Daniel’s mother had left his name and address as a warning, instead of an instruction?

  It made me start to question the way I had been brought up. From the time I was a kid, my parents had told me to trust the police. We had studied the United States government in social studies class, and we had always been taught to believe we lived in the best country in the world.

  Sure, we had studied Vietnam and the way people protested again
st the war, and some other government missteps. But the overall message was that the police, the FBI, the CIA, and all those other alphabet-soup agencies were there to protect us.

  Angus came back in with the pizza. For a minute I worried he had put some kind of drugs into it, either a truth serum or maybe sleeping pills. But then he smiled with his goofy grin and asked if we preferred sausage or mushroom, and I discarded that idea.

  Roly and Egidio took their pizza and went back to Roly’s office, or wherever. Angus sat with Daniel and me in the big conference room. “I feel bad that we’re making you guys work on a Sunday,” I said to Angus.

  “Doesn’t matter to me. I’ve got no life anyway.”

  “You don’t have a girlfriend or a wife?” Daniel asked.

  “I’m gay,” Angus said. “And right now I don’t have a boyfriend or a husband.”

  “That’s why you blushed when Roly asked you about being kissed,” I said.

  “I did? That’s the problem with being a redhead. Everything I feel shows up on my face.” He looked at me. “You read people pretty well. You always been able to, or is that part of the whole genius thing?”

  I shrugged. “Never noticed it before.”

  “You guys really believe that some part of Daniel’s brain seeped into Melissa when you were kissing?”

  Daniel and I looked at each other. “You have a better explanation?”

  “Hey, I took as little science as possible when I was in school. But I guess there are a lot of weird things going on that science hasn’t come up with an explanation for yet.”

  Angus’s cell phone rang, and he walked over to the corner of the room to talk. I looked at Daniel. “How are you holding up?” I whispered.

  “All right. I still don’t know if we can trust these guys, though.”

  “Trust them how, Daniel? Roly talked to my parents, so they know exactly where we are. It’s not like they can lock us up somewhere with nobody knowing.”

  “Not you. But me.”

  I took his hand. “I’m not going to let them lock you up, and neither will my parents. And right now they’re giving us pizza and looking for your mother.”

  “I just feel weird. How come Egidio is so tight with the FBI? And how do we know he’s really my uncle?”