Burning Midnight

by Will McIntosh

  “Duh, yeah. We’d have to buy a wet suit, and a waterproof flashlight.”

  He studied the picture of the tank. It was big, and tall. How deep was that water? Ten feet? Fifteen? “You mean we’re going to swim to the bottom of these things?”

  “I’m gonna swim, Yonkers. I’ve been waiting for someone I trust who can help me get up on the roofs and help with the hatches. The hatches are heavy as hell.”

  “And you know that because?” Sully said, laughing.

  Hunter shrugged. “Reconnaissance.”

  It was a wild idea; he was breathless just thinking about it. “Wait. Aren’t the tanks cleaned out every so often?”

  Hunter messed with her phone again, held it up. It was an article in the New York Times: INSIDE CITY’S WATER TANKS, LAYERS OF NEGLECT. “They’re supposed to be, but most of them aren’t.”

  Sully laughed. That figured. “How many tanks are in the city?”

  Hunter covered her eyes. “Ten to fifteen thousand.”

  “Yikes. Ten to fifteen thousand? That would take years.”

  “That’s one of the reasons I think they’ve been overlooked. That, and because no one wants to swim down ten feet in dark water in those tin cans.”

  It made sense. It wouldn’t be easy, but she was right—it was the sort of place you might find the rarest of the rare, because the low-hanging fruit had all been picked. There were no more eights hidden in people’s bushes.

  “A lot of roofs have two or three towers on them. Some have six,” she went on. “I figure we could search ten a night if we work three or four hours, say from six p.m. to nine or ten.”

  There was no way his mother was going to let him do that. The only way he could pull it off was to lie, and he wasn’t sure he could tell Mom such an enormous lie. He would die from the guilt.

  At the same time, an eight. Aquamarine (quick healing), or Vermillion (need little sleep), or Olive (pain control). They were million-dollar spheres.

  Maybe he wasn’t giving his mom enough credit. Maybe she’d understand….

  Understand that he was climbing onto tenement roofs at night, in the city, so Hunter could dive into water towers? No way. She’d probably be okay with it if they were going somewhere safe to hunt, like the suburbs.

  What if he didn’t lie, exactly? What if he told her they were going hunting all over, that it was the only time they both had open? He’d have to do his homework during free periods, and work in the dark (and the cold in wintertime) until bed, then do it all over again the next day. It would be grueling.

  But damn, they needed the money. An eight? That would solve their financial problems forever. And as an added bonus, it would annoy the hell out of Holliday if Sully and Hunter found a rare one right in his own backyard. Almost no one was finding rare spheres anymore except for pro hunters.

  “Okay. I’m in.”

  Hunter held up her gloved hand, and Sully slapped it. She caught his hand, squeezed it for a second before letting go.

  CHAPTER 9

  Perched behind his table of spheres, one foot propped on a folding chair, Sully watched Maurice Trudell clean up his painting supplies after staining a coffee table. Trudell put the lid on the can of stain, tapped it shut with the handle end of a screwdriver.

  It reminded Sully of the time he’d been so eager to help his dad with some do-it-yourself project that he splashed white paint on Dad’s truck trying to use a hammer to tap the lid down on a can of paint. Sully could still remember his dad’s exact words: “You stupid ass.” Then he’d smacked Sully’s face and told him to get the hell out of the garage.

  Hunter had said Sully’s years with his dad hadn’t been that bad. They’d sure seemed bad. Hunter was right, though: he wasn’t haunted by them. They didn’t define him. They were in the past, and he kept them there. Being homeless had likely given Hunter a different barometer of what constituted awful.

  Sully stared down the aisle, remembering the moment he’d first seen Hunter. He’d noticed her as soon as she was in sight, almost as if he’d been expecting her.

  For the hundredth time he thought about sitting on the swings with Hunter on Christmas Eve, the snow falling. There had been a moment when he’d wanted to lean over and kiss her. Had there been something in her expression, maybe a slight lean toward Sully, that put the idea in his head? Maybe it was wishful thinking.

  Someone paused in front of Sully’s table, drawing him out of his daydream. The guy studied the sign Sully had hung from his table, announcing a Hot Pink for sale. The guy was tall and skinny, with curly brown hair bursting from the top of his head like a mushroom cloud.

  “A friend of mine saw this and gave me a call.” He pointed at the sign. “You really have a Hot Pink?”

  “I sure do. Not here, but I have one for sale.” The guy didn’t look like someone with wads of cash to spend, but you never knew who was a highly paid tech genius or who owned the patent on a new iPhone app.

  “How much you asking?”

  “Fourteen five. In Holliday’s they go for almost seventeen.”

  The guy nodded, put a hand on his chin. “You take thirteen five, cash?”

  Sully kept his expression neutral and his voice steady even though it wanted to shake a little. “I’ll take fourteen.”

  The guy took a huffing breath, looked down at the sign, as if considering. Sully waited.

  The guy looked up. “Okay.”

  Sully held out his hand. “If you have the cash, you’ve got a deal. David Sullivan.”

  “Aiden Oberon.” They shook hands. “I can go withdraw the cash. Shouldn’t take me more than twenty minutes.”

  Sully nodded. “I can get the marble here within an hour after that.”

  As Aiden wandered off, head bobbing side to side, looking like he was out for a leisurely walk, Sully got on the phone to Hunter.

  She sounded out of breath as he filled her in. Sully couldn’t blame her; if this guy was serious, she was about to be handed $8,400.

  Next he dialed Dom, who answered on the second ring. “How would you like to make two hundred bucks?”

  Dom laughed. “As long as it doesn’t involve nudity or swallowing condoms full of heroin.”

  After Sully filled him in, Dom insisted on starting out for the bank right away to save time.

  As he hung up, Sully tugged at the front of his shirt, which was stuck to his chest. He was sweating.

  “Sounds like good news,” Neal called over.

  “I think I sold the Hot Pink.”

  Neal held his fist in the air. “There you go. Good for you.”

  Neal’s praise made Sully flush with pride. When Sully had first showed up at the flea market, a fourteen-year-old kid, Neal and Samantha had pretty much adopted him. They taught him how important it was to display your merchandise in an eye-catching way, how you could “create” sales just by being friendly and getting to know the flea market’s regular customers. He’d come a long way, thanks to them.

  Fifty-six hundred dollars. Almost eight months’ rent. Handing that money to his mom was going to be one of the best moments of his life. She’d told him she wouldn’t accept more than half to put toward their living expenses, that he should save the rest for college, but she couldn’t hide how desperate their situation was. Even when Mom finally found a job, it was going to be half of what she’d made at Exile Music.

  Sully spotted his buyer heading toward the table.

  “All set,” Aiden said. He pulled a bank deposit envelope out of his back pocket and opened it, displaying crisp, new thousand-dollar bills.

  Sully nodded. “Let me make a couple of calls.” He felt like Matt Damon in a big-budget thriller as he stepped away from his table and called Hunter.

  “We’re all set. Dom is on his way to get you.”

  “We made a good call, not taking the quick sale on eBay.”

  Sully had to agree, even if it had taken him right down to the wire on rent. “Use the vendors’ entrance, not the main gate. It’s qui
cker.”

  Next he called Dom and confirmed, then turned back to Aiden. “Figure half an hour, forty-five minutes tops.”

  Aiden nodded. “I think I’ll walk around. I’ll stay close.”

  As Aiden wandered off, Sully wondered if he was an investor, or if he planned to get a pair and burn them. In all likelihood he was an investor. The way prices kept rising, nine out of ten buyers these days were investors. You had to have serious cash to spend $28,000 on the ability to call up an adrenaline rush, cool as it would be to have that power.

  Sully paced his stall, unable to sit.

  Sully heard Dom before he saw either of them.

  “Screw you!” Dom’s shout cut through the murmur of flea market chatter, jolting Sully. That didn’t sound like excitement; it sounded like anger. Sully scanned the flea market anxiously, looking for Dom and Hunter.

  He spotted Hunter running toward him, cutting between shoppers. She bumped into a guy in a knit cap and continued running without a word. Dom was a dozen feet behind her, shouting something Sully didn’t catch.

  As Hunter drew closer, Sully spotted a bloody scrape on the left side of her forehead. He left his booth and headed toward her.

  “What happened?” Sully shouted as they converged. He already knew, though, and he was already feeling sick. They’d lost it. Somehow they’d lost the Hot Pink.

  Hunter just kept coming. She raised both hands and drove them into Sully’s chest, nearly knocking him off his feet.

  “Do you think I’m stupid?” Hunter shouted.

  “What happened?”

  “You know what happened!”

  Dom pushed between them. “We got rolled. Two guys in the parking lot pulled guns on us.”

  Sully had known what Dom was going to say, but the words still doubled him over. He braced his hands on his knees to stay on his feet.

  It was the Cherry Red all over again.

  “Don’t do this,” Hunter said. “I’m warning you.”

  Sully raised his head. “What are you talking about?”

  “She thinks we’re in on it,” Dom said.

  “What?”

  Hunter was shaking. She looked on the verge of tears. “How did they know what I looked like? Hmm? A thousand people here, and they come right at me and tell me to hand it over? How stupid do you think I am?”

  “You’re not stupid, you’re just paranoid,” Dom said.

  “They knew you had it?” Sully asked, speaking over Dom. He looked around for Aiden. If that was really his name. A friendly-looking doofus with a crooked smile to put Sully off his guard. He was nowhere in sight.

  How had they known what Hunter looked like? He hadn’t said a word to Aiden about her.

  Sully turned back to Hunter. “I don’t know how they knew what you looked like, but I didn’t have anything to do with this. This guy came to my table, we agreed on a price. He went off, came back, and showed me fourteen thousand-dollar bills.”

  Hunter glared, shaking her head. Drops of blood oozed from the scrape on her forehead.

  “What happened to your head?” Sully asked.

  “Hunter wouldn’t give them the marble, so one of the guys pistol-whipped her,” Dom answered.

  Hunter spun to face Dom. “I wouldn’t give it to them, but you sure were eager to hand it over. ‘Just give it to them, just give it to them.’ I gotta say, you’re not a very good actor.”

  Dom threw his hands in the air. “I didn’t want to get shot.”

  Hunter turned back toward Sully. “ ‘Use the vendors’ entrance, not the main gate.’ That was the last thing you said to me on the phone. So they’d know which way I was coming.”

  “I said that because it’s quicker to go that way. I was trying to move fast on the deal.”

  She turned away, pressed her hand to her forehead. “How could I be so stupid? I should have known better than to trust some random dude I met at a flea market.”

  “Hey,” Sully said, “I could say the same about you. Maybe you set this up.”

  Hunter spun, gestured violently at the lump on her forehead. “I got hit. With a gun.”

  “And isn’t that the perfect touch?” Sully said. “Like no one’s ever taken a punch to make an inside job look convincing.” He knew Hunter had had nothing to do with it. At least, he thought he knew that. But he didn’t appreciate being called a thief while dealing with losing $5,600 that was going to allow him to go on living in the town he’d lived in his whole life.

  Hunter went on staring him down, the anger in her eyes almost as hard to take as the loss of the Hot Pink. “You and I both know that’s not what happened. We all know what just happened here.” She glanced at Dom, then back at Sully. “Don’t ever talk to me again.”

  As she stormed off, she added, “You’re just like Holliday.”

  “You’re wrong, Hunter!” Sully shouted after her. “You’re dead wrong about this.”

  As he turned away from her retreating form he realized people were watching. A dozen sets of eyes looked away; people who had paused went on walking.

  Dom squatted on his haunches. “Jesus, I’m so sorry. All of a sudden they were just there, one in front of us, one behind, pointing guns.”

  “No, I’m sorry I put you in the middle of that. You could have been shot.”

  They returned to Sully’s booth. Neal and Samantha were standing in the center of the aisle, keeping an eye on his booth as well as their own.

  “We heard most of it from here,” Neal said. “You going to call the police?”

  “What are they going to do?” Spheres had no distinguishing marks. You couldn’t leave fingerprints or DNA on them. Not that anyone would conduct a DNA test to solve a robbery. Sully didn’t even have proof he’d owned a Hot Pink, unless you counted eyewitnesses.

  He steadied himself, palms on his table. All the strength had gone out of his legs. The rent was due in a week, and he and his mom had nothing left in savings. They were done. Broke.

  And Hunter had the gall to accuse him of being in on it?

  Howling in frustration, Sully grabbed the edge of the table and toppled it, sending crates and display cases filled with the shitty assortment of bargain-bin spheres he had left crashing to the ground.

  Dom, Neal, and Samantha watched in silence as Sully dropped to his knees and buried his face in his hands.

  CHAPTER 10

  Dom sat sideways in his chair, spinning a pen on the little desk where Sully did his homework. He meant well, but Sully wished he would take a walk or something. He wasn’t sure how to tell Dom that without hurting his feelings.

  “Maybe you should talk to your dad, see if he can pull some strings,” Dom said.

  It made sense to consult his dad the police detective, but that would be a miserable conversation. Sully had last seen his dad three years ago. They’d gone to McDonald’s, and ever since, the color yellow made him sick to his stomach. “It’s gone. I’m not getting it back.” It took effort to speak.

  How was he going to tell his mother? She’d been counting on that money as much as Sully. Head down, Sully punched his mattress. They should have put the sphere on eBay immediately, or sold the damned thing to Holliday….

  Sully had a terrible thought: what if Holliday was behind the robbery? They’d gone to his store and asked to see a Hot Pink. A rarity five was barely worth Holliday’s time, but Sully had insulted him. He could have arranged to steal it to get back at Sully, to force Sully to crawl back and accept the job offer. He also knew what Dom looked like, though probably not Hunter. If Holliday was behind it, Sully would probably never know for sure. Holliday had the power and money to hide his tracks well.

  Sully checked the wall clock: 4:24. He wished it was later so he could go to sleep. Blessedly, he’d burned those Teals, so he’d be able to sleep.

  Thinking about the Teals reminded him of Hunter, which set his heart racing with anger all over again. How could she think he was a thief? What sort of person jumped to a conclusion like that? He
should have trusted his first impression. She wasn’t his type; she was too hard.

  Sully’s mind kept spinning back to the same thoughts, the same feelings of betrayal and hopelessness. It was like a song in his head that just kept repeating, a bad song, a song he despised.

  “I don’t want to push, but I really think it’d be a mistake not to call your father.” Dom raised his hand as Sully opened his mouth to respond. “I know he’s a first-class douche bag, but he’s a detective, isn’t he? He might know how the men knew Hunter had the marble. You’re giving up before you even try.”

  The truth was, Sully didn’t want his father to know he’d lost the sphere. He could hear it now: You lost another one? But if, somehow, Sully could get it back, some of the pain he was feeling would vanish. The rent could be paid.

  “I’ll call him in the morning.”

  In the meantime, he needed to come up with some cash, or he and his mom were going to be evicted. Dragging himself off the bed, he went to his shelf, snapped a picture of the Cherry Red on its pedestal, then took it down.

  “What are you doing?” Dom asked.

  “Selling it.” It should bring at least a thousand dollars—a king’s ransom for a burned sphere, but still less than two months’ rent. It killed him to sell it; it truly killed him.

  CHAPTER 11

  Old Darrel Hanks was doing a brisk business selling gloves and hats over in his corner. He had five or six customers digging through the boxes of irregulars.

  “Five dollars a pair,” he shouted. “No ups, no downs, all gloves just five dollars.” Darrel had to be pushing eighty, but it was obvious he still loved selling.

  Sully wished he could say the same. Flea markets had always been his escape; now the place just reminded him of the Hot Pink, of the day Hunter came strolling down his aisle. It was hard to go back to hawking rarity ones and twos.

  And, as much as he distrusted his father’s judgment, the old man’s words kept rattling around in his head.

  When fourteen thousand is on the line, you have no friends. You got that? You trust no one. I’ve seen people screwed by best friends, brothers, wives, fathers. Sully could picture just how his father had folded his arms and settled back into his seat at the diner. I’ll say it again: it was Dom or the girl. My money’s on the girl. She’s pistol-whipped, but she’s up and running a second later? That’s awfully convenient.