by Jamie Quaid
Andre stared directly at me with an expectant look. “You. You’re wanting to slam his face into that register, aren’t you? Don’t. Open the drawer. Dispense justice. Do whatever it is you do.”
“Me?” I think I actually squeaked. Andre was looking at me with an expectation and respect that not only aroused my frustrated hormones, but made me think he was actually seeing me as some kind of freakily violent Lady Justice.
I sent the tin statue above Bill’s door a quick glance. She winked at me from beneath the blindfold again.
Uneasily, I edged closer to the teenager. “Who are you?”
It was only when I got closer that I could see he was wearing my good Clark wedge-soled sandals. My shoes! He’d been in my apartment again. I would have to crush him.
He looked too terrified for me to fear. Or to crush. Was that my skull earring in his ear?
“Nobody. I’m nobody,” he said, shaking in his—my—shoes.
“Oh, you’re somebody, all right,” I said in as threatening a tone as a five-five female in kitten heels could carry off. “You’re the somebody who stole my deposit twice, aren’t you? You’re a somebody who saw that limo fly out of the bank and run over kids and you used their grief to steal my bag and run. You’re a low-down somebody scum who would sneak into my apartment and steal my damned shoes while I was sleeping!”
He was weeping and cringing, and I visualized the drawer opening and letting him go. Bill kept his hand on his collar as he collapsed on the floor, rocking back and forth in tears.
“He made me do it,” he sobbed, over and over. “He made me. . . .”
25
I didn’t have another test until Thursday. This was Tuesday. I had time to torture a teenager. I was just feeling too disoriented to put much effort into it.
The question What am I? burned a sick sensation through my skull.
Bill gave me a hamburger, but in my head, I was still seeing visuals of a senator being fried by flaming charcoal and me laughing about catching a thief in a cash drawer. I was not only a freak, but a damned dangerous one, especially since I had no way of knowing if the Forces of the Universe would take my suggestions literally.
I would surely be joining Max in hell. I desperately needed to talk to Max, but I wasn’t revealing that peculiarity to an audience currently staring at me as if I’d developed horns. Or maybe a halo.
My spaghetti-strap dress couldn’t protect me from the chill. I didn’t have a sweater. Andre noticed me shaking and poured coffee. Bill had tied up our thief, but even the ropes vanished when the kid intermittently flickered out, so Bill had to wrap the rope around a hook in the ceiling so he couldn’t run. I didn’t ask what the quite-industrial-looking hook was doing up there. It was hard to imagine anyone hanging macramé plant holders in a bar, but it would have been a good place for a plant, if plants actually grew down here. I couldn’t remember seeing any.
Maybe they were invisible, like the kid.
“It’s Leibowitz, man,” the kid kept saying. “He told me if I didn’t pay him, he’d turn me in to the station for theft. Look at me, man!” the kid cried. “You know what they do to people like me in prison?”
“You mean people who steal shoes?” I asked, not wanting my Clarks back now that his grimy feet had been in them. But I did remember the day I’d seen Leibowitz berating a skinny teen, taking advantage of a Zonie because the cop knew invisibility was no defense in the real world? “What did you do, steal Leibowitz’s pretty badge?”
I rubbed my brow, trying not to think of the patrol cop with anger or I might melt him like Frosty the Snowman. This was just a kid, probably gay if the shoes and his comment were any evidence, a misfit living on the streets, and Leibowitz had demanded bribes. Where was the justice here?
“I was hungry, man!” the kid cried, looking at me with pleading red eyes. I was guessing it was from weeping and not his natural color. “I just took his hamburger when he wasn’t looking. He doesn’t need to be eating that much anyway! I was doing the dude a favor.”
I was in such a state that I almost choked on laughter. I was actually starting to like the little twerp, in a totally condescending, Clint Eastwood sort of way. I knew what Clint would do.
If the real world couldn’t deal with an invisible thief, he would dispense justice on his own. I’d rather have dispensed of Leibowitz, but that was owing to personal dislike and wouldn’t have hinged on an objective trial. “Wild west, vigilante justice,” I muttered. “Doesn’t work. I know that.”
Bill looked at me with skepticism, but Andre followed my thinking. “You have to admit that we don’t have courts that can deal with invisible thieves. And invisible thieves don’t make good witnesses against lousy cops. The Zone needs its own form of justice.”
I shot him an angry look. “Are you a damned mind reader?” I didn’t wait for him to answer, probably because I was already creeped out and didn’t want to know. “What makes me the purveyor of justice? That’s what you want, isn’t it? Why me?”
He held out his hand. “Give me your compact.”
I must have looked incredulous as I rummaged in my bag. Andre didn’t respond, just waited. I slapped the cheap plastic powder case in his hand, wondering if Max would appear for Andre. That would serve both of them right.
Andre turned me around so my back was to the bar and held open the hand mirror in front of my nose. Since he was holding it, I didn’t see Max, more’s the pity. I really wanted to shake Andre as badly as this day was shaking me. I looked blankly at my fancy hair in the tiny compact. No horns protruded yet. “And?”
“Look at the mirror behind you. What do you see?”
Curiosity getting the better of fear, I squinted into the little mirror and tried to focus on the big mirror behind the bar. I could see the back of my head. My hair was mussed from the convertible ride. I reached out to adjust Andre’s hand so I could see to comb out the mess.
On my left shoulder blade I was wearing a small tattoo of balance scales just like Sarah’s.
• • •
Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.
“Where did that come from?” I whispered in horror. Law firms weren’t big on tattoos. And while this one was reasonably discreet, it didn’t convey sunshine and roses. I’d have to quit wearing tank tops and sundresses. And here I’d wasted all this time trying to be invisible. How long had the damned thing been there?
“I don’t drink. I don’t get tattoos while drunk!” I protested.
I reached over my shoulder and tried to rub or smudge the image; then I licked my finger and worked on it some more. From what little I could tell in the compact mirror, I had no effect.
“Two and two,” Andre said, returning the mirror to me.
Now that I was holding the compact, Max instantly appeared, looking alarmed. I shut him up and shoved him in my bag. I hadn’t come to terms with the MacNeill family just yet. I hadn’t come to terms with myself. I gave Andre the evil eye.
He shrugged. “Sarah has one just like it. She showed up the same day you tried to set fire to the bank. She killed her husband. You killed your boyfriend. Her husband was abusive, so she probably had right on her side more than you did, but you thought you were defending yourself. You were defending yourself every other time, too. Try doing something for someone else now.”
“I was saving Diane and the kitchen staff!” I protested. “It isn’t all about me. What are you getting at?”
Andre looked at me thoughtfully. “I’m not sure yet. Still doing the peculiar math . . .” He looked back at the young thief as if suddenly remembering what had begun this conversation. “Now, it’s about him.” He nodded in the kid’s direction. The boy was still flickering in and out, but now that he was watching us with curiosity, he was mostly in. “You caught him. What do you want to do with him?”
“Tina caught him?” Bill asked. “She wasn’t even here.”
“Does your cash drawer usually freeze when some-one’s hand is in it?” Andre asked, not even
bothering to look away from me. “She did it. She told me she was doing it.”
I had. And laughed. I was one sick puppy.
“What’s the tattoo got to do with it?” I whispered, looking away from Andre because I couldn’t bear the accusation in his eyes.
“Not certain yet, but coincidences don’t happen down here. Things happen because they’re meant to. Show us you’re on our side.” His voice was cold. I wondered what he’d do if I told him to jump off a cliff.
Probably jump off a cliff.
Which made him a fool or a damned courageous bastard to say such a thing to me, the dispenser of bad justice.
Saturn’s daughter, dispenser of justice. Sarah and I were daughters of a farmer god, or from a planet with rings. Whatever. Better than Satan, I guessed, but maybe not by much.
I spun the stool around and studied the kid hanging from a hook in front of the plate-glass window. “What’s your name?”
“Tim,” he said sullenly. “And you’re sleeping in my place. You changed the locks! Where was I supposed to go? It was bad enough when the old lady threw out all my stuff. I needed new digs. That takes cash.”
Suddenly things were starting to make some sense. I wasn’t happy with the invasion of my privacy, but this kid had obviously suffered a shock or two.
“What happened to turn you invisible?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Don’t know. I was just coming home from the movies one night, and some rat bastard started chasing me. I tripped, and I knew I was going to get creamed, and then I just disappeared.” He looked weary, as if he’d repeated this story to himself too often.
I wasn’t a scientist. I couldn’t analyze what chemicals had done to the Zone. Or even to Andre or Sarah. But I was willing to gather evidence.
Had that been what Max was doing—gathering evidence of Zone anomalies? It still made me furious to think he’d hooked up with me because of where I worked and not because of me. I was glad all I’d been able to tell him about was moving statues, not invisible people.
“It took me a long time to come back,” the kid continued. “I was there, but no one could see me. You know how hard it is to get food when no one sees you?”
“So you stole it. You grew up down here?” I tried to apply case law but I was pretty certain there was nothing relevant.
“Yeah. My mom had a place above the florist. But she got busted for dealing weed a few months back, and I couldn’t pay the rent. Mrs. Bodine let me do odd jobs, and I did some dishwashing and then I found a job over at a goth shop so I could make rent, and Mrs. Bodine let me have a place cheap if I did the repairs.”
“And then you got chased by a bully, disappeared, and tried to steal a sandwich from a cop.” I prodded him rudely, not liking the position Andre was throwing me into. Prosecution had never been my goal.
“I was hungry,” he protested. “I couldn’t go to work when no one could see me!”
“Make a good ghost,” Bill said stoically, polishing his bar glasses.
“I don’t think ghosts get paid,” I replied, trying to figure out what in heck I was supposed to do here. There was nothing fair about being both judge and prosecution. But Andre and Bill were just listening, while I was doing all the work. Interesting. Usually men do all the pushing around.
The kid was starting to flicker again.
“Have you been eating since you started stealing our cash?” I asked.
“I can sort of stay visible sometimes now. I can go to fast-food places,” he said, staring at his toes.
Toes. Ugly male toes in my Clark sandals. I shoved the anger back in place again. It’s not about me.
“So you pay for food now and don’t steal it? But it’s okay to steal money?”
His hands were tied, so he couldn’t do more than glare at me. “I never stole nothing until Leibowitz came along and wanted a handout every time he saw me. He said I’d disappear in jail and never get fed. I like working. But I can’t work like this.”
“You pay for your food?” I pressed, trying to determine the level of his crime. “Or do you just steal everything, now that it’s so easy?”
I was pretty certain there was a lesson for me in that question, but my head was too close to exploding for me to investigate ethics and morals and anger management and philosophy all at once.
“I pay for it when I’m visible,” he agreed sullenly. “And I would have got my apartment back but you got it first.”
Oh, right, lay on the guilt. “Those your plants?” I asked, putting florist and kid and dead plants together in a big leap of faith.
“Yeah, they were my mother’s. Mrs. Bodine said it was okay to move them in there, but she never goes outside and can’t take care of them. I didn’t want to scare her too much by creeping around.”
For caring about an old lady, I wanted to forgive him right then and there, but the shoes and the earring were eating at me. I didn’t have much, and I liked to keep what I owned. Okay, so now it was about me again.
“The shoes?” I asked sarcastically. “Did they belong to your mother, too?”
He looked at the monstrous big roses on his toes and wiggled them. “You never wear them. I thought if nobody could see me, I could see how they looked, but you came home and I had to run.”
Bill and Andre snorted. I wanted to bang my head on the bar. The kid was really getting to me.
“Is that my earring, too?” I asked, just to present all the evidence to the court of one.
He looked embarrassed. “It’s cooler than mine. You had two, and I never saw you wearing them. You wear preppy stuff. I figured you didn’t like skulls. I didn’t have time to take it out.”
I rolled my eyes and turned back to Bill. “He stole from your cash drawer,” I reminded him, then looked at Andre. “And your deposits, which I’m sure you’ll continue nagging the insurance companies to pay back. I’m not holding him because of a pair of shoes and an earring. What’s your verdict?”
I wasn’t doing this all myself. Justice demanded better.
“You’re not going to fry him?” Andre asked with interest.
“Why the devil would I fry him?” I asked. “Yeah, he made me mad.” I had another thought and whirled around to the kid again. “Is the tabby Manx your cat?”
He nodded slowly. “Sort of. I found him in the garbage and took him in. But then I disappeared. He knew where I was and followed me, so it wasn’t good for him to hang around.”
Which explained why Milo didn’t growl at my invisible intruder. Milo trusted him. Milo had good instincts.
I turned back to my jury of two. “A kid who takes care of plants and cats and has good taste in shoes can’t be all bad. He needs a home and a job.”
“I can tell you who the guys are who busted in Chesty’s,” Tim said eagerly, now that it looked like I was a pushover. “I sneaked around and listened. I could spy for you.”
I don’t like spies and I think kids ought to be in school, but I could see this was a special situation. I waited on Andre.
“I can find you a room and put you to work,” he said with deceptive disinterest, leaning back against the bar with his arms crossed. “Who are the goons?”
“You gotta let me down from here,” the kid intelligently insisted. “I can give you their names.”
At Andre’s nod, Bill let him down. A minute later, I had six names scribbled on a bar napkin.
I was seriously in the Zone. If I really could dispense justice by visualizing, I wanted vengeance on the shits who had taken my friends hostage, shot up Chesty’s, and given me gray hairs by following me and bugging my apartment. I wanted to turn them into gorillas in the zoo so people could watch them poop and fornicate all day.
But much to my distress, I realized they might have families who would miss them. I didn’t want innocents to suffer. And the owner of one of these names was already dead from chimpanzee suffocation. Schwartz had hauled two more down to the station for formal justice, and the other might not have an arm left.
Could I really dispense informal justice? And if I did, would it cause unanticipated harm elsewhere? I was itching for revenge, but I didn’t want to be a vigilante.
“Do you know which of these jerks are still on the loose?” I asked, not really expecting an answer.
Tim nodded eagerly and checked off two names.
“Very useful, man,” I commended him, tucking the information away for future pondering.
“The tattoo turns gold when you do whatever it is you just did,” Andre said nonchalantly.
I glared at him. I hadn’t done anything except ponder justice. “I need food and study time before I can employ more traditional means of hunting jackals. What are you doing with him?”
The kid was eagerly slurping down a Coke that Bill had given him.
“Let him rent the empty apartment and keep him out of trouble,” Andre said with a shrug.
Decision made, justice administered. Scary, but not the bad kind of scary. More like the Man, I really hit that hoop kind of power-proud scary. I couldn’t let it go to my head, though.
Which meant I couldn’t visualize two goons into a zoo. I needed to be alone so I could pull myself together. Maybe I could talk to Max a little. I needed to be reassured that I was still just me, although me branded with the scales of justice. I wondered when that had happened. I wasn’t prone to checking myself out in mirrors and I didn’t have a man in my life to see me naked anymore—which meant it had probably happened after Max died.
If I really had caught a thief and set fire to a senator, I was no longer in a position to keep my head down and my mouth shut. Although it might be wise if I practiced doing so before power went to my head. To be or not to be—that was always the question.
My phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number. That could just mean the Zone was hungry for meatballs. What the heck . . . I answered because it was simpler than making a decision.
“The administration at your former school just forwarded your records, along with the criminal charges filed against you,” Schwartz said. “The top brass are breathing down my neck. Someone wants you gone. Lie low, will you?”
