Minders

by Michele Jaffe

  Plum tilted her head to look at him. “What happened to your brother had nothing to do with me.”

  “But—”

  She put a finger on his lips. “This is my club. I make the rules. And I say we’ve talked about James enough. No more. Okay?”

  Nothing was making sense to Ford now. Sadie felt his mind reeling around, grasping at random snippets as he tried to find something substantial he could count on for support. “If you don’t have a job, how do you have a club?” he asked.

  Plum laughed with real amusement, wafting it over the sound of the music. “I have rich friends.”

  “Like a sugar daddy?” Ford’s mind got even more noisy, the technicalities of James dating a girl who was kept by another man boomeranging around.

  Plum stopped him with a flick of her wrist. “I do not have a sugar daddy. I have a patron.” She gave him a coquettish look over a one-shoulder shrug. “A very generous patron.”

  “What do you have to do for his patronage?” Ford asked.

  She tapped him on the nose. “Nothing that would affect you, puppy.”

  Ford said, “He really doesn’t care what you do?”

  “There’s a vast difference between caring about me and caring what I do.” She walked her fingers up Ford’s chest on the last three words playfully, but something hard had come into her eyes, and Sadie had the impression Ford had struck a nerve.

  Be careful, Sadie warned. Don’t provoke her.

  “Why doesn’t he want you all to himself? Doesn’t he love you?”

  Or you could provoke her.

  Plum’s gaze became steely. “You really are just like your brother. You don’t do drugs, you get drunk on three drinks, and you think that the ultimate compliment for any girl is that a guy wants her to belong to him.” Plum shifted, moving away from Ford. “Your brother was going to rescue me from this,” she sneered, her hand making a wide gesture that took in the club, the chandelier, the beautifully groomed crowd, ending with the thick gold bangle on her wrist. “He was going to let me be his full-time girlfriend, pick me for his one and only, free me. As though he was doing me a favor.”

  Ford’s mind was a windstorm of confused thoughts. He said, “When was the last time you saw James?”

  “Before he died.” Plum snapped her fingers, and two women in leather pants, tank tops, and shoulder holsters took up stations behind her. “Mr. Winter isn’t feeling up to par tonight,” she said. “Please show him out the back.”

  “I’m not done,” Ford protested.

  Plum patted his face. “But I am, puppy.”

  She slid down the couch toward her other guests and the two women flanked Ford. As they walked him down the stairs he stopped and turned back.

  “Did you love him? At all?” he called, but Plum, busy nuzzling the neck of a girl with a purple pixie cut, didn’t seem to hear.

  The question was so raw, so sincere, it caught at Sadie and made her heart ache a little. How do you keep doing that, Ford Winter? she wanted to ask. Have me swallowing back a lump in my throat one minute…

  CHAPTER 10

  And rolling my eyes the next. “I don’t have a sugar daddy, I have a patron,” Ford repeated in a terrible approximation of Plum’s voice as he relieved himself on the wall next to the “rear VIP entrance” of the Candy Factory.

  There were no VIPs there that night, so Ford had the whole alley to himself, and he was running through all the things he wished he’d said to Plum, an alarming number of which seemed to begin with “Oh yeah, well,” when Sadie felt his senses go on alert and his ears prick.

  There were shuffling footsteps and whispers coming from the darkness farther down the alley. A voice rang out sharply, “Careful with that!”

  A voice Ford recognized. Linc’s voice.

  He stood stock-still, listening.

  “Put some pep in that step pronto, we don’t have all night,” another familiar voice said. Willy. “Hate to have to tell the Pharmacist we got us a bunch of slackers.”

  Willy’s voice was good-natured, but there was definitely a threat beneath it. You should go, Sadie told him. Whatever is going on down there is none of your business.

  As though he’d heard her, Ford buttoned his pants—

  Excellent.

  —and started down the alley thinking, Good, it’s time we all had a little chat.

  No, Sadie admonished. His motor skills seemed dulled by the drinks, and he wasn’t entirely steady on his feet. Not good. No chats. Chats in dark alleys fall squarely into the “don’t do anything stupid” category your mother was talking about. You should go in the other—

  Something crashed. Linc’s voice boomed, “Idiot,” and the sound of a kick connecting with hard bone echoed off the walls.

  Ford’s mind flashed with images from childhood, a cookout with James and Linc and Willy, building a raft at the lake, playing cowboys and outlaws, telling ghost stories. Over it she heard his thoughts slurring, Got to talk to them, find out what happened to James.

  “What are all of you looking at? Get back to work. Wouldn’t want my friend to have to do any more damage,” Willy said, still lighthearted, now even more threatening.

  This is bad, Sadie pressed. You need to go.

  Ford stumbled forward. Why’d they lie about Plum? his mind asked now. Supposed to be James’s friends, but they lied about every—

  The alley suddenly went quiet.

  He kept going, taking another step, and another. His head was noisy, but the silence in the air was raw and unnerving. As if something is waiting at the end of the alley, Sadie thought. Something you don’t want any part of. Unhappily she felt for the panic button, just to know it was there.

  Ford stopped walking. Sadie let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

  And then he stepped into the middle of the alley and hollered, “Hey! Hey, guys.”

  Are you insane? she yelped. This is idiocy. You’re going to get—

  A bright light flashed in Ford’s face, a hand grabbed him by the neck, and Linc’s voice growled in his ear, “Tell me what the hell you’re doing here and I might not slit your throat.”

  Ford’s mind froze. Sadie pushed the panic button. From somewhere far away she heard a computer voice say, “Alert system on standby. Press to proceed to Ready.”

  Linc’s arm was on Ford’s windpipe, pressing him against the hard brick wall of the alley. Ford twisted toward him, to try to see his face, but Linc was wearing a headlamp like a miner, and the brightness was blinding.

  Ford’s eyes veered off, giving Sadie a glimpse farther into the alley. There was a panel truck with four guys standing motionless in front of it. They had computer boxes in their arms, clearly in the process of unloading them into the building opposite Plum’s club.

  “I was over there,” he managed to choke out finally, gesturing across the alley with his chin. “Heard—your voice. Wondered why—”

  Linc’s arm pressed harder against Ford’s windpipe, cutting off his air. “Don’t wonder. Don’t think. Don’t ask any questions. Do you understand?” His eyes, below the light, bored into Ford’s. They were calm and deadly.

  Ford started to nod, but the pain of trying to move made him realize the question was rhetorical.

  “I haven’t beaten the crap out of you because you are James’s brother,” Linc went on. “But that ends now. You are going to turn and leave. If I see you around here, if I see you, period, I will beat you so you can’t walk for a week.”

  A slideshow of images resumed in Ford’s mind, the group of friends at a winter formal, a spring dance, hayrides, joyrides, prom. “Why are you doing this?” he croaked.

  “I said no questions. Leave. Now. Before I change my mind.” Linc stepped back and Ford staggered against the building.

  He stayed there, rubbing his neck, trying to gauge what would happen if he lunged at Linc.

  Walk away, Sadie shouted.

  “Go,” Linc said.

  Ford started down the alley,
bleach-scented betrayal washing over him. Stepping into the street, he was engulfed by the noise of cars and people arriving at the club. The voices roared in his head, and his eyes flicked from one dark building to another, like an animal seeking refuge.

  He turned at the first major intersection and zigzagged back toward the noise of the elevated train tracks. Sadie realized he wasn’t wandering idly, and after ten minutes she sensed there was something familiar about the street they were on.

  They’d passed Huang’s PawnIt and were in front of DollarDollarDollar when it clicked: This was where Ford had been in the video footage of him she’d seen at the Survaillab before entering Syncopy. He’d been standing with his back to the camera, a little farther along, looking through a fence into—

  Ford stopped in front of Your Neighborhood Drug and stared straight ahead into the playground that filled the space between it and the corner. Even though the CCTV video had been shot during the day, the playground had been deserted, and she saw now that was because the gate, which opened off an alley behind it, was padlocked shut.

  It was lit with one light that blasted the middle, creating a weird pastiche of peeling red and blue paint and stark shadows. There was a swing set with three swings, a tube slide, a set of monkey bars, and two large plastic animals, a rabbit and a turtle, on thick springs for kids to ride like horses. In the center was a merry-go-round, and when Ford’s eyes reached it his mind started to vibrate.

  Sadie couldn’t figure out what was happening at first. The pressure in his head built quickly, but not in the contracting, suffocating way it did when he was angry; this was more expansive, like something on the verge of exploding. Dots and colors ricocheted around, starting to settle into an image one moment and knocked out of it the next, as though some force was deliberately interfering with what his mind wanted.

  All at once the pressure gave way. The dots fell into place, forming an image of a man in his underwear propped up on the merry-go-round. His feet were bare, toes turned outward, his mouth made an O shape, and there were two dark holes in his head where gunshots had entered. His eyes, above the O, were wide open. They looked like Ford’s eyes, the eyes she remembered from that first day in the video, only they weren’t. This was James.

  This was where James had died.

  Ford gave a low, agonized groan and shut his eyes, turning to rest his head on the brick wall of the pharmacy for support. A tornado of sound rose inside of him, blotting out the image. Voices whipped by, faster and faster, and Sadie struggled to tease them apart. She caught Ford’s mother, “. . . such a good boy…” Official-sounding men’s voices, “. . . found this morning…” “. . . gunshot…” “. . . drugs…” “. . . sorry for your loss…” “. . . come around to see if there’s anything you need…”

  And then the dots pulled together into the interior of a wooden shack, white winter light, everyone wearing parkas and hats and mittens. Years ago, six or seven, Willy big even then, saying to Ford, “And what will you do with your part of the fortune?”

  “Build a nice house for me and James and my mom and Lu.”

  The memory of everyone laughing, Linc the hardest. “You think you can get James to come live with you forever?”

  Ford, confident, nodding. “The house is going to be sweet.”

  James smiling. “That’s my brother. Me, I’d get a motorcycle, throw a huge going-away party for all my friends, and then take off and ride around the world. What about you, Willy?”

  “Gun range and rabbits.” Willy, needing no time to come up with an answer. “Never be lonely or hungry.”

  Linc set apart even in the memory, nervous, balking when they ask him about his plans for the fortune, saying, “If I tell, you’ll laugh.” Heads shaking, hands raised in solemn promises not to so much as giggle or fake cough. “I want to be a pastor. I’d use the money to go to divinity school and give the rest to my mom.”

  The dots dispersed, and Sadie saw a faint image of a golden rope spiraling downward, with a black glove reaching toward it.

  Ford turned and slammed his fist into the wall of the drugstore.

  The stinging seemed to clear his head, help him focus. He slid down the wall and lowered his head, his left hand clutching the prickling knuckles of his right. There were tiny beads of blood on it, but Ford didn’t seem to notice. He was shaking, wracked with grief. “I’m so sorry, James,” he said aloud. “I should have been there. I should have paid attention. I’m so sorry.”

  The pain in his hand was no match for the pain inside of him. It was huge but also somehow weightless, leaving him feeling hollow and vulnerable.

  Light strafed his eyes. Sadie felt every muscle in his body tense, immediately on guard. It was just a Royal Pizza delivery van, he saw, and relaxed, but it brought him back to reality.

  He pushed himself to his feet and began walking, navigating around knots of people trying to outbid one another to win the favor of the scarce taxis. Crossing the street under the tracks he headed up a block, where the absence of the train made it slightly quieter, if no less busy. While Ford waited to cross at an intersection he pulled out his phone and checked for messages. There were none from Cali.

  Sadie expected him to get angry and decide to wait her out, but instead he surprised her by dialing Cali’s number.

  Between the noise on the street and the way his thoughts were still subdued, almost muffled, Sadie had no idea what he was going to say. Apparently he didn’t either, because when Cali’s voice mail picked up he hesitated so long he was disconnected. He dialed again, and this time he was ready.

  “Cali, it’s me. Ford. Your stupid boyfriend. God, I hope I’m still your boyfriend.” He walked as he spoke, weaving between people. “Look, I know you’re mad at me for… it doesn’t matter for what. I was an ass, and I’m sorry. I—”

  Watch out! Sadie yelled in his head as he stepped off a curb in front of a car, and Ford jumped back. The driver yelled, “Pay attention, idiot!” and Sadie braced for Ford to do something dumb, but he just waved and kept talking to Cali’s voice mail.

  “Did you know when my mom was younger she wanted to be a painter? She had an art scholarship and everything, to go study in Paris.”

  He came to another corner, but this time he stopped before stepping into oncoming traffic. “That’s where she was heading when she got pregnant with James. Can you imagine? She wanted my dad to go with her, said they could be a family in France, but he said his prospects were better here so they stayed. Prospects,” Ford snorted. “He was an accountant at a fertilizer factory, did I tell you that? When I was in kindergarten someone noticed he’d been giving himself an unauthorized weekly bonus. After that the only job he could get was as a janitor. And he always blamed it—”

  Ford turned a corner and was standing on the edge of an eight-lane street with thick, fast-moving traffic.

  “—on me,” he finished his sentence.

  The closest crosswalk was blocks away, so he decided to cross right where he was.

  This is a very bad idea, Sadie said. Her hands tightened, looking for something to hold on to, and a distant a computer voice said, “Alert system ready. Press for immediate removal.”

  “No!” Sadie yelled, her heart rate skyrocketing. That had been a mistake; she’d completely forgotten about the panic button. She didn’t want to leave. Not now, not at all. She wanted to stay, to hear everything.

  Using her fingertips she thrust the panic button as far out of reach as she could, so there would be no chance of accidentally touching it, and took three deep breaths to slow her pulse.

  “My mother gave up everything to have James,” Ford said, experimentally stepping into the road and then jumping back as a motorcycle sped by. “And I don’t think she regretted it. I was an afterthought, and Lulu came after my dad got out of jail, when they were ‘trying’ again. There’s no way I can ever take James’s place for her, I know, but I’m worried now that he’s gone she regrets”—Ford crossed one lane, waited for a minivan
to pass, then ran across the other three to the center divider—“having us.”

  He stood there watching for a break in the traffic. It was heavier in this direction, and harder to see because it came from around a bend. “It’s probably why she feels like me trying to find out what happened to him is disrespectful. Because nothing matters except that he’s gone. And maybe it’s why I’m so desperate to figure it out. Because I feel like I’m responsible. Like I should have been able to prevent it. Should have given him a lifeline.” He took a deep breath. “Who knows, maybe I feel like if I can give my mom the truth, she’ll love me too.”

  He moved the phone from his ear to sprint across the next four lanes, sending up a chorus of horns.

  “Are you there?” he panted when he was safely across. “Of course you are. Or aren’t. I wonder if you’ll even listen to this. You’re the only good thing in my life, and I’ve been driving you away. When I look back, over my past, I feel like I’ve lost a lot of people I should have been able to count on. My dad. Bucky. Linc. Sometimes I feel so completely alone. I think—maybe—I’m pushing you away so I can’t lose you too. Like I’ll hurt me before you can hurt me. Does that make sense?”

  He waited at another light, and Sadie saw they were almost at the end of his block. “But you’ve always fought for me—you’re the only one who thinks I’m worth fighting for. Will you accept my apology? If you will, I’ll be at your house to pick you up for dinner tomorrow night at seven P.M. In the blue-checked button-down.” He turned the corner onto his street. “And if you—oh god, no. No!”

  There was a fire engine, two Serenity Services cars, and a RCHE van parked in front of Ford’s building. He looked up and saw Lulu being held between two green-shirted RCHE men.

  Lulu saw him too. In a single, fleeting motion she slipped away from her guards and took off running toward him.

  A car horn blared, brakes squealed, and Ford yelled, “Sto—”

  Silence.

  • • •

  Something was wrong.