Weakest Lynx

by Fiona Quinn

  I pulled up to the curb, set the parking brake, and stuffed my purse under the seat to free up my hands. Carefully opening the door, I spiked my keys between the fingers of my left hand. My right hand gripped the Ruger in my belly holster. Movement coming from across the street had me ducking behind the opened door. I tilted my head to peek through the glass. Dave. He jogged around the side of Manny’s house.

  “Lexi, thank God! Come quick!” He hailed me with an urgent, wide-arcing arm.

  With the girls at my heels, I took off at a run, following Dave around to the backyard where Justin clutched his wrist and cussed. Manny stood with his mouth hanging open, staring at him.

  “He’s burned.” Dave filled in the blank. “Can you do the brush thing with your hand like you did when Fletcher pulled the boiling water off the stove?”

  I grabbed at Justin’s arm. “Justin, stand still! Justin! Stand still! I can’t help you when you’re doing that.”

  Dave clamped a vicelike grip onto Justin’s wrist to hold his arm out for me. A mean red streak ran from his inner elbow all the way down to his palm. Jeezus. I reached out and brushed the air above his wound. “How’d this happen?” I asked.

  “Fucking Manny doesn’t know fucking shit about grilling. That’s how the hell this happened,” Justin spat through gritted teeth, slitting his eyes and bouncing on his toes.

  “They were arguing about how to stack the charcoals. Manny squirted lighter fluid on the already lit coals, and the flame followed the stream. Justin was standing in the line of fire—literally,” Dave said.

  Exposed. Could it mean this burn? Exposed to the fire? That didn’t seem right. I didn’t get a sense of relief telling me I understood correctly. I scanned the backyard, across the top of the retaining wall, nothing.

  I continued to brush the air above the burn. “I’m so sorry, Justin. I think I can take this away, though. Just give me a minute.” The doubt written on his face wasn’t surprising. When Kim taught me this technique to deal with Mom’s radiation burns, I was dubious, too, until I realized how well it worked. Soon, Justin stood flat-footed and panting; some of the strain left his jaw.

  “Hey, Manny, can you grab my purse—look under my car seat—and bring it over here?” Beetle and Bella circled us, whining their concern.

  Manny marched over with my bag hanging from his shoulder. The four of us huddled in a circle; I brushed the air above the burn until the red faded from Justin’s arm. Now that Justin had stopped struggling, Dave released his wrist. I took my purse from Manny and dug around in the bottom to find my little bottle of lavender oil. I rubbed a drop into Justin’s skin.

  Justin jerked away from me. “Hey, stop with the girly stuff!”

  “How does that feel?” I asked.

  Justin looked down at his skin, then back to me. “That’s the craziest damned shit I think has ever happened to me.”

  I giggled at his comical expression—his eyes wide, his eyebrows nearly to his hairline.

  “Is that like some sort of magic trick? What the hell did you just do?” Justin examined the spot closely.

  “Magic tricks are illusions. This is a simple technique anyone can learn,” I said.

  “Like for Ruby?” Justin walked over to a lawn chair and plopped down, still examining his skin.

  “Yeah. Well, similar.”

  “Huh,” Justin grunted as the three of us grabbed chairs, too. I placed mine with my back to the house, where I had the widest view possible. Beetle and Bella flanked me. My hand rested on my stomach ready to grab my gun.

  We sat in silence until Justin said, “Yankees are playing tonight. You guys coming over after we eat?”

  I glanced over at the grill. The coals had turned gray along the edges, still a ways to go before they’d be ready for grilling. “I can’t, thanks.” I reached down and rubbed behind Beetle’s ears.

  “You don’t watch baseball?” Justin asked.

  “Sometimes, but tonight I’m going to do a set over at StarLight. Management wants to see how people like me. I thought it might be good to have a little pocket money. Do you guys know the place?”

  “It’s nice,” Dave said. “Kind of neighborhoody. Cathy and me go up every now and then when we have someone to babysit the kids.”

  “You sing?” Justin stretched his legs out in front of him and slouched down in his chair.

  “Mmmhm and play guitar.”

  “Is there anything you can’t do?” Justin asked.

  “Yeah, I don’t do geometry or pop culture.” The last of the sun’s rays warmed my face. I’d need to go get ready soon.

  Dave snorted. “Lexi can build a rocket ship and fly to the moon, but she doesn’t know the Pythagorean Theorem. Lexi was weird-schooled.”

  “Weird-schooled, Dave?” I gave him a little kick.

  “Yeah. What’s the capital of South Dakota?”

  “No clue.” I scowled at him. I didn’t like being teased.

  “I went to normal school, and I don’t know the capital of South Dakota.” Manny rested a beer on his rounded stomach.

  “I was unschooled,” I said.

  Dave grinned. “And that’s weird.”

  “It’s not. Lots of famous people were unschooled.”

  “Yeah? Like who?” asked Dave.

  “George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt.” I ticked off on my fingers.

  “They don’t count; they’re dead.”

  “They do, too.” I sounded testy even to my own ears.

  “Lexi, what does ‘unschooled’ mean?” asked Justin.

  “It means I got my education from reading tons of books and from hanging out with people. So, for example, I speak Spanish from talking to Angel’s great aunt, Abuela Rosa. I never sat in a class or studied verb conjugations. My parents saw formal schooling as a waste of time.”

  “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever learned?” Justin leaned forward, obviously intrigued by all this.

  “I don’t know.” I thought for a minute. “We had this neighbor once who worked at the National Zoo.” I shielded my eyes with my hand as a cloud moved and the sudden bright light stung me. “I went to work with her all the time. They were having trouble with the monkeys, because people were throwing things into their area and the monkeys ate the debris. The zoo was trying to come up with a better way of protecting the monkeys, so I went through their poop and catalogued stuff that didn’t belong there.” I shifted my chair to take advantage of the shade cast by the house. “I’d call that a little odd, I guess. Mostly, I learned normal kinds of things like computer stuff, cooking stuff, mechanical stuff, fighting stuff.”

  “Yeah, fighting stuff, that’s the best,” Dave said.

  Justin had his chair rocked back onto two legs, with his fingers laced behind his head, looking very relaxed. A one eighty from the way I found him a few minutes ago. He turned toward Dave. “Fighting?”

  Wow. Justin was Mr. Inquisitive today. I wasn’t too thrilled to be the center of all this attention. I searched for a topic to get them going in a different direction. Before I could say anything, Dave started in.

  “Yeah, fighting. Lexi’s parents wanted her to know something about everything. One day, my buddy Stan and me had her up to the training academy, we were going to teach her to shoot.” Dave smirked. “Stan looks over at me, and gives me a hard time because I got promoted to detective. He says, ‘They had to promote you; you’re a liability on the beat. You’re so weak you couldn’t win against a baby. Not even Baby Girl there.’” Dave gestured back at me.

  “I knew she’d been trained in some martial arts stuff, but so what, right? Stan said, ‘Come on, let’s put you two on the mats.’ I thought we were joking.” Dave paused to smack at a mosquito buzzing around his arm. “I went out there and reached to grab her wrist—next thing I knew, I’d done a face-plant. She had me in some kind of Kung Fu hold, and I couldn’t get up.” Dave was sitting at the end of his chair leaning forward, using big gestures, gett
ing into his story. “Now I gotta bruised ego, and I was gonna show her who was boss.”

  When he pointed an accusatory finger at me, I had to work hard to hold in a bubble of laughter. “Lexi handed me my butt on a plate. I tried to get her down. I was sucking wind—dog tired, sweating like a pig, bruised head to toe. Still she tossed me like a garden salad.”

  Manny grunted and choked on his beer. “Lexi?”

  “Shit yeah. All the guys stood around laughing. Then they had a go at her, and no one could get her down.” Dave leaned back with satisfaction. “Baby Girl had eleven years of daily one-on-one Kung Fu practice with Master Wang—part of the whole unschooling thing.” Dave took a swig from his bottle. “So Sergeant Christophe—he’s in charge of training recruits—was laughing his head off and says Lexi’s gonna be his secret weapon with the new classes coming through.”

  “You do that, Lexi? Beat up the recruits?” Justin grinned broadly and twisted open another bottle.

  I shrugged and pressed my lips together. I wasn’t sure I wanted everyone to know I had trained. Light and fluffy, innocent and cute, sweet little girl next-door. Dave was blowing my disguise. If someone knew I could fight—Stalker—then he’d be prepared. Keeping my skills a secret protected me. Kept me safer.

  I checked my watch. I was through talking about myself. I needed to head out.

  “Go back to the school thing.” Justin leaned toward me with his elbows on his knees, obviously intrigued. “I don’t understand how that worked.”

  “Simple, my parents thought school kids wasted a whole lot of time standing in line and waiting for the other students to catch up. They wanted me to learn by doing. I learned from people around me, mostly from people at my apartment building. Well, there were a few people Mom and Dad said I couldn’t learn from—like the guy who handed out clean needles and condoms to gang members in the inner city. Most everyone else had something to teach me, though.”

  “All of your teachers were from your apartments?” Manny asked.

  “Most. Some were family friends,” I said. Like Spyder.

  Spyder had known my parents for years. Dad did custom adaptations on Spyder’s work cars. Exactly what, I never knew. Those transformations happened in a locked bay. When I was thirteen, Spyder sat in our garage, telling Dad a story about a case he’d just wrapped up. I listened intently, then said it reminded me of the Aesop’s Fable about the Ant and the Chrysalis.

  “How so?” Spyder asked, curiosity wrinkling his brow.

  “Looks can be deceiving. The ant didn’t realize the butterfly would escape the cocoon and fly off, but it seems to me …” I never finished my sentence. Spyder leapt to his feet, grabbed his keys from Dad, and roared up the street. I stood there in shock. I had no clue what I said that made Spyder react that way. A few hours later, he came to our apartment and offered to mentor me. It was a barter deal. He would teach me, and in exchange, I’d help our neighbor Mrs. Agnew with her children. I never knew the connection between Spyder and Mrs. Agnew. It was classified. Another Spyder mystery.

  When Spyder made the offer, Mom and Dad thought the exchange was a great opportunity for me and accepted happily. I was beyond ecstatic. What I got from Spyder was brain training. I used the computer a lot to start, and then we would apply my skills to practical situations. I played the role of a modern-day Nancy Drew which I wanted to be more than anything else in the world ever since I picked up The Demon of River Heights at age six. I remembered how I walked around all day, wearing Playtex gloves and carrying a lunchbox with my magnifying glass and plastic “evidence bags.”

  When I was sixteen, Spyder’s training changed; he thought I’d make an excellent Intelligence Officer; I studied and worked in that direction. Spyder insisted my innocent, girl-next-door looks would disarm people. He thought I’d be the last person the bad guy would expect, and they’d lower their guard. Spyder drilled into me the importance of maintaining my soft look, not to have the eyes or body stance of a soldier. If I did, I’d become a target. So, I walked around and practiced looking happy, approachable, and carefree all the time. Acting like a piece of fluff created my best disguise.

  But as fluffy as I tried to seem now, it wasn’t helping. I still had an enemy on my trail.

  “What an awesome way to learn.” Justin’s voice whipped me back from my reverie.

  “Mostly, it was.” I reached for my bag. “Exposed,” pulsed in my mind. So not Justin’s burn. I needed to get out of there. I stood and tapped my leg; my dogs moved to either side of me. I was balancing from one foot to the other. It felt like a million eyes stared me down. Sweat beads formed on my nose. But weirdly, no heebie-jeebies told me to run the hell away. Dave focused on me with tense muscles. He hadn’t missed my weird behavior.

  “Hey, enjoy your dinners.” I managed to keep my tone calm. “I need to scoot.” I waved and headed toward my house. Dave grabbed at my elbow as we moved together across the lawn, my girls beside us.

  “What?” His voice sounded strained.

  “Something’s tickling at the edge of my consciousness. Sometimes picking up stuff on the ESP-network is staticky at best.”

  I unlocked the door, turned off the alarm, and gave Dave a hug. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Dave stood silently on the porch, looking like he wanted to beat the shit out of someone. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Over at Justin’s, you felt the shithead close by, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t know what to do with that. Until he drops me a clue …”

  “We’re clueless,” Dave said.

  Eleven

  Today was dressed unseasonably in cold and gray. I kicked off the blankets with a groan. Exhaustion made my muscles ache. I needed to get some sleep. But the house creaked and moaned all night, and adrenaline rallied me for a fight every time. I woke up a dozen times, sitting straight up in bed, my 9mm trained at the door, trying to locate the sound and identify it as safe. That Stalker wasn’t lurking in the shadows. Beetle and Bella must have thought I’d gone crazy.

  I pulled on a sweat suit, slid my Ruger into my belly holster, my knife into my sports bra, and laced my feet into cross-trainers. Everything seemed so messed up. Loneliness sucked. I wanted Angel home.

  “Beetle, Bella,” I rubbed my girls’ heads. “Come on. Let’s go for a run. Maybe I can snap myself out of this darned funk.”

  A change of scenery might help; hopefully a jog by the river will do the trick. I pulled open the truck door to load the girls in, and immediately saw the envelope propped on the driver’s seat.

  My mind stuttered over the details. I had locked the garage last night. I had locked the truck. I just unlocked them both. No wait. Did I lock the truck last night? Or did Stalker lock it after he put the envelope in the cab? I don’t … I was sure I locked the garage.

  Breathing hard, skin prickling, I crouched by the garage door, checking for signs someone had pried or picked or forced the doors, but saw none. Thank goodness Beetle and Bella sat right beside me acting normal, or I would have jumped right out of my skin.

  He got in. He got in? How could he have possibly gotten in? If he could get into my garage, could he get into my house? Past my security? Surely not with Beetle and Bella around. If he were inside when we got home, my girls would tear him to pieces. Unless … A tiny voice whispered in the back of my head that he might hurt my girls—incapacitate them. I couldn’t listen to the voice. It made me too vulnerable, too horrified. I couldn’t lose Beetle and Bella. I couldn’t let anything happen to them. They were my family.

  I employed Master Wang’s technique for steadying nerves. I acknowledged the fear and vulnerability. I thanked these emotions. Soon they calmed enough that I could function. I called Dave, waited for him to arrive, then we opened the envelope:

  The burn on thy neighbor lay,

  I were na far away,

  But waited for the break o’ day

  To tell you of my view …

  We sat across from each other at my kitchen
table.

  “He’s watching you, Lexi.” Dave’s eyes didn’t raise from the cream-colored stationery. “Your stalker saw you help Justin yesterday. Now he’s taunting you. Calling you out.” He shook the paper at me, then reached around to get a plastic bag from my drawer. “We should Google this. I actually think I memorized it in fourth grade for Mrs. Paulson. Had to stand in front of the class to recite it; nearly pissed myself, too. If I’m right, it’s Robert Burns’s ‘Bannockburn.’”

  “Robert Burns? Burns? Are you kidding me? Maybe this guy has a sense of humor.” I laughed. Okay, so I sounded a little hysterical. I didn’t want Stalker calling me out. I was supposed to be a suburban housewife, planting vegetables and making meatloaf. Damn it!

  The coffee pot light turned green, and I put the carafe on a trivet between us.

  “So how many Xanax are you popping each day?” Dave gingerly set his smiley face mug on the table.

  “That would be a fair indicator of how badly this guy’s getting to me. Right now? None.”

  “Nerves of steel?” He was in professional mode, eyes scanning me, assessing. It felt intrusive; I lowered my lashes for privacy.

  “Hardly. I’m trying to stay busy so when I fall into bed, I’m too exhausted to let the tap dancing in my stomach keep me awake.”

  “So Zantac, not Xanax, keeps you together?”

  I focused on the mug I slid back and forth in front of me. “I guess.”

  Dave reached out a hand to still my cup. “Lexi, I’m not making light of this. I really want to know how you’re handling everything. There aren’t any signs, other than your antlike behavior, that you have a care in the world.”

  “It’s spooky, Dave. His lurking—his watching where I go. I’m beginning to unravel.”

  “You seem pretty pulled together.”

  “You’re not looking close enough. I’m a freaking melodrama.” I clunked my head down on the table. My stomach churned. My skin felt flushed and feverish. Stalker was making me physically ill. He was the black plague. He was plaguing me. I sat up and gave a reflexive shiver. I tried to steady myself and refocus on this moment. I took a sip of my coffee then set the mug out of the way and cleared my throat.