Burning Midnight

by Will McIntosh

  People stared. People whispered. Thanks to the Turquoises he’d burned, Sully could hear what they were whispering:

  “Is she someone?”

  “Is that, like, a new look? Is it makeup, or spray paint?”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  Airport security did not come running with guns drawn.

  As the moments ticked by, Sully relaxed a little. He took a deep breath, reveled in how wonderful he felt—strong, quick, smart. He could read the departure screen at the far end of the terminal, probably a thousand feet away. He could smell the onions and green peppers from the Western omelet a passing businessman had eaten for breakfast. He felt like a superhero, and had the biceps for the part.

  The employee at the check-in counter, a black Caribbean woman, asked what Hunter’s coloring was for.

  Hunter tsked, as if the whole thing was such a bother. “I’m doing a commercial. The makeup artist is in New York, the shoot in Calcutta. What are you going to do?”

  “Have a good flight,” the woman said, smiling, as she handed over their tickets.

  As they turned away, Sully took Hunter’s hand. It was clammy with sweat, but you’d never know she was nervous from the way she was speaking and moving. She was a good actress.

  And so it went, at the security checkpoint, at the gate, on the flight.

  What else were people going to think—that Hunter’s skin, hair, and eyes were really gold? Who would possibly believe that?

  CHAPTER 30

  Having spent his life on the outskirts of New York City, Sully thought he knew bad traffic, but Calcutta traffic was like nothing he’d ever imagined. He watched as a periwinkle-and-yellow city bus—with passengers hanging off the sides and sitting on the roof—nudged its way past their hired car. There didn’t seem to be any lanes, just an endless tangle of vehicles.

  Hunter was looking out the back window. She was dressed in an orange-and-gold sari and veil, her hands covered with gold silk gloves. “I think we’re being followed.”

  The words jolted Sully. He scanned the crush of vehicles. “Where?”

  “See the white Volvo?” She pointed.

  It was ten or so vehicles behind them. “How can you tell it’s following us in this mess?”

  “I’m pretty sure I saw the same car parked outside our hotel last night. I noticed it because white Westerners got out.” One of those little details that you mostly forgot, unless you’d burned a Canary Yellow. Sully peered through the hazy, exhaust-filled air, trying to see the Volvo’s occupants. It was a man and a woman, and they did look like white Westerners. Could Holliday’s people have possibly tracked them all the way to Calcutta?

  Why not? He’d tracked them to Mexico City with no problem.

  Sully leaned toward their driver. “Naman? Can you take us on some side roads, even if it takes a little longer?”

  Naman nodded. “No problem.” Naman had offered his services as a driver/tour guide inside the airport, and to their surprise had been waiting when they stepped out of the hotel the next morning. Sully was grateful to have help from someone who knew the city and spoke the language.

  They turned right at the next intersection, onto a slightly less congested street. The sidewalk was lined with tiny plywood stalls covered with tarps, where people seemed to be selling anything and everything. There was trash everywhere. A boy sat on the curb washing in the water from a partially opened hydrant.

  “There they go. They’re not following.” Hunter was still watching out the back window.

  “Maybe they just don’t want to be too obvious,” Sully said. “They could be tracking us by satellite, like in Mexico.”

  They parked a block from the temple. As they walked, everyone seemed to be staring. A young boy reached out and grasped at Hunter’s sleeve. She yanked her arm away as Naman said something to the boy in rapid Tamil. Or maybe it was Hindi. Sully couldn’t believe how many languages were spoken here.

  It was a strange place. He doubted he would like it if they were doing it on the cheap, with no guide, having to flag down auto-rickshaws to get from place to place. But with fifty grand on a debit card, the place was awesome. The room they’d stayed in the night before had a freaking waterfall. It had bugged Sully to take the thirty percent hit required to sell a cache of spheres so quickly (to a private local collector he had contacted through Craigslist), but they’d needed the transaction to be fast and simple, and $850,000 was still a nice payday, even after Dom’s and Mandy’s cuts.

  A woman stepped in front of Hunter, said something to her. Before Naman could get between them, the woman lifted Hunter’s veil and let out a sharp cry of surprise. After the airport arrival and sari shopping, Sully wasn’t exactly getting used to intrusions from strangers, but they didn’t surprise him anymore.

  Naman backed the woman up, repeating the same word, which Sully guessed was “makeup,” but others surged in to fill the void, speaking excitedly and clutching at Hunter’s veil.

  “Get off.” Hunter slapped at their hands, turning her face away.

  Naman grasped Hunter’s arm. “Hurry. This way.”

  They ran, weaving through the crowd, leaving the excited, high-pitched shouts behind.

  There were monkeys swinging in the trees around the temple. Honest-to-goodness monkeys. The branches of the trees laced together to form a canopy over the temple.

  “Quick, I need five hundred rupees.” Naman held out his hand. “Foreigners aren’t allowed inside the temple. We will have to make a contribution to convince them to bend the rules.”

  At the current exchange rate of forty-six rupees to the dollar, five hundred rupees was ten dollars and eighty-seven cents. It gave Sully such pleasure to calculate that in his head. He pulled a crumpled wad of rupees out of his pocket and found a five-hundred-rupee note.

  Naman approached the guard at the temple’s entrance as Sully and Hunter hung back. Naman couldn’t have been more than two years older than them, but he seemed a lot older, probably because he knew the city so well, while they were like lost kids in this foreign place.

  Sully dabbed at the sweat already gathering along the back of his neck and glanced at Hunter. “Are you hot in that?”

  “What do you think?”

  The rupee exchanged hands. The guard waved them in.

  “This way,” Naman said, putting an arm around each of them and corralling them through the gate.

  Leaving behind the crowds, they passed under a colorful arch into a courtyard with a fountain in the center and statues of various gods along stone paths. Monkeys chattered in the trees.

  “What kind of trees are those?” Sully asked.

  “Banyan,” Naman replied without looking up.

  Hunter led them right to the fountain, which was more pond than fountain, with ornamental grasses around the edges and lily pads floating in the water. She gestured to Naman to hang back; he nodded, gave them some space. On the way from the airport he’d asked about Hunter’s coloring, but hadn’t asked anything about what they were doing in Calcutta.

  Hunter unzipped Sully’s pack. “If anyone asks what you’re doing, tell them I dropped my earring in the pond. You’re trying to find it. Dig where I drop the earring.”

  “How deep?” Sully asked.

  “Not deep.” She held her hands about six inches apart.

  Hunter leaned over the edge of the pond as if admiring a lily, touched the side of her face, and dropped one of the gold elephant-god earrings she’d bought at the hotel gift shop. It plopped into the pond and kicked up a tiny cloud of mud when it reached the bottom.

  “My earring,” Hunter said, loudly but not too loudly.

  “I got it.” Sully knelt, setting his pack down, and sank his fingers into the mud. It was loamy and gave easily. He scooped up a handful, set it aside without taking his hand out of the water, then dug deeper and set that mud aside.

  He was beginning to suspect Hunter had made a mistake, when his fingers brushed that unmistakable smoothness.
Scrabbling, he got his hand around the sphere and pulled it free.

  “I got it. The earring.” He pulled the mud-covered Midnight Blue from the fountain, stuffed it in the pack, and zipped the pack, his movements lightning fast thanks to the Peaches he’d burned.

  Slinging the pack onto his back, he stood and stuffed his hands in his pockets so no one would see the mud on his right hand.

  “Shall we go?” he asked, smiling.

  “Yes. Let’s have lunch. I’m getting hungry,” Hunter said.

  They strolled down the temple’s concrete steps, back into the chaos of the street.

  “Give me the pack,” Hunter said, holding out her hand.

  Confused, Sully handed it to her. It blended with his jeans and New York Mets T-shirt much better than her sari.

  Holding it by the strap, she headed down the sidewalk.

  “Miss Hunter,” Naman said, pointing. “The car is this way.”

  Hunter kept walking.

  Sully hurried after her. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to get the matching Midnight Blue.” She sounded perfectly confident.

  “What are you talking about? It’s in New York. And anyway, Holliday’s not going to give it to you.”

  “I think he might, if we handle this right.”

  Then Sully spotted the white Volvo, parked at the curb. Hunter was heading right toward it.

  “Wait. What are you doing?”

  She turned to face him, walking backward for a second. “You’ll see.” She stopped beside the Volvo.

  The car’s tinted window lowered, revealing a woman with black-rimmed hipster glasses in the passenger seat and a bald man in the driver’s seat. Both white Westerners.

  Hunter dropped the backpack into the woman’s lap. “Once Holliday figures out this is useless to him, tell him to get in touch with us and we’ll show him how they work.”

  Looking startled, the woman raised the window. The Volvo roared off.

  Sully stood watching, dumbfounded.

  “That was kind of cool,” Hunter said.

  “What did you just do?”

  Hunter headed toward Naman, who was waiting outside the temple. “After Holliday tries everything he can think of to burn them and it all fails, what is he going to do?”

  Sully didn’t answer. He was still trying to absorb what Hunter had just done. It had happened so quickly.

  “He’ll come to us. And once I convince him that he’ll never be able to burn them, I’ll offer to trade him a buttload of marbles for his Midnight Blue.”

  Sully stopped walking. Hunter stopped as well.

  “You think maybe you could have consulted me first? I mean, we traveled halfway around the world to retrieve that sphere, and you just dumped it in a stranger’s lap without even asking my opinion.”

  She seemed surprised by his anger. “The whole plan came to me as we were leaving the temple, when I saw the Volvo parked there. There wasn’t time.”

  “Yes there was. Chances are they would have been parked outside our hotel when we got there.”

  Hunter drew her veil back from her face, serious now. “ ‘Chances are.’ I didn’t want to take that chance.”

  People began to stop and stare at Hunter, so she and Sully started walking again. Sully still couldn’t believe Hunter had just dropped the Midnight Blue into that woman’s lap. Since she’d burned the Golds, Sully had occasionally wondered if Hunter was still completely Hunter, or if he was talking to the alien as well as the girl he knew. Her most recent move convinced him that she was still herself. This was classic Hunter. Head down, charging like a bull, not letting anyone tell her what to do. Not even her friends.

  Still, he was shaking. They’d traveled thousands of miles, spent thousands of dollars, and she’d tossed the Midnight Blue away less than three minutes after they found it, without a single thought of Sully.

  “Look, I am not your sidekick,” he said. “I’m not Tonto, or Robin. Stop treating me like I am.”

  “I’m not.” She brushed stray braids out of her face. “I’m just trying to do the right thing. Do you understand how high the stakes are? If I can get the Midnight Blues from Holliday, there are going to be so many marbles that people like Holliday won’t be special anymore. There’ll be big marbles that do epic things. I don’t know what those things are, so don’t ask.”

  Naman opened the car door for Hunter, looking perplexed.

  They drove off in silence. Sully stared out the window, still fuming. Yes, tons of new spheres that made it so people like Holliday couldn’t hog all the best ones sounded good to him, but he wasn’t sure he agreed with Hunter’s tactics. And what if she was wrong about what the Midnight Blues did?

  “I warned you,” Hunter said.

  “About what?”

  “That I wasn’t girlfriend material.”

  “This isn’t about that, though. It’s about our business relationship.”

  Hunter shifted to face him. “No, it isn’t. I asked you to trust me and come here so I could do what I needed to do. This trip was never about money and business.”

  She had a point. They’d never talked about selling the Midnight Blue if they found it. Sully reached over and took Hunter’s hand. “All I ask is that we talk things out, make these decisions together.”

  “I’ll try.” She squeezed his hand.

  Sully wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his sleeve. His head was spinning. If Hunter was right about the Midnight Blues, what would the world look like if they managed to get both?

  CHAPTER 31

  Sully pulled into the parking lot of Yonkers High in his brand-new red Corvette Stingray, riding right on the bumper of Dom’s black one. It was a showboat move, a giant brag button, but damn, did it feel great.

  Everyone in sight stopped to watch. Kids poured out through the main doors, drawn by the snarling, rumbling din of the car engines. Sully could see Mr. Looney, the principal, trying to herd kids back inside while simultaneously watching the Corvettes himself, but kids kept scooting away, wanting to see who the hell was inside those brand-new, $65,000 sports cars.

  Sully opened his door, stepped out, and waited for Dom.

  Side by side, they headed for the building.

  “Sully, Dom, what the hell?” Mike Lea caught up, grinning.

  “We found another marble,” Sully said. “A Mustard.” Eventually it would all come out, but for now that was the story. If anyone knew Hunter could find spheres at will, people would follow them everywhere they went.

  “Again?” Mike said. “You lucky, lucky bastard. How much did you get for it?”

  “A whole hell of a lot,” Dom said. He was grinning so hard it was like his mouth was inside a set of parentheses. “Like, a dump truck full of money.”

  “So when are you taking all your friends shopping?” Mike asked.

  “Soon.” Sully pointed at him. “That’s a promise.” He knew Mike was joking, but Sully had plans to spread the wealth to his Garden Apartments peeps, and eventually much further, to all the little Hunters out there freezing under bridges.

  The crowd made way as Sully and Dom passed, some kids calling out questions, like the press shouting to a couple of rock stars. Sully felt like a rock star, which made it a little strange to be heading to Mr. Caruso’s chem class.

  He was so tempted to drop out, maybe hire a tutor and get his GED once things settled down. He wanted to be out hunting. Even more, he wanted to be with Hunter.

  But once again: Mom. She wanted this, and since she was without a doubt the finest mom who’d ever lived, he was going to make her happy.

  Dom, on the other hand, was just here for the glory. He was planning to drop out as soon as he got tired, in his words, of acting like a big shot.

  —

  It was pizza day at Yonkers High, so no bag lunch for Sully. He was still a little sweaty from gym class the previous period. It was an unseasonably warm April day, so they’d played a little softball. Sully had hit two
long home runs. Mr. Gregory had encouraged him to try out for the baseball team. Chem class had made more sense than it ever had before, even though he’d missed two weeks of school. Same with trig.

  As Sully set his tray down beside Dom’s, his phone rang. A Manhattan number. This time he knew exactly who it was. He gave Dom a look, then headed into the hallway to answer.

  He put on his best smarmy-asshole voice. “Alex, buddy. How you doing?”

  “David Sullivan.” For once, Holliday didn’t sound in the mood for banter. “There’s a car waiting outside. Your associate is already inside, so, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  Sully looked out through the glass wall of the hallway. A white SUV was parked out front. He couldn’t believe Hunter had just climbed into it on Holliday’s invite. She’d been cautious to the point of paranoia up to now, and suddenly she was putting herself in Alex Holliday’s hands? If Hunter was already in the vehicle, though, Sully didn’t have much choice.

  “See you in a while.” He tried to keep his tone light, but it was hard with that SUV waiting. The last time he’d seen Alex Holliday, his bodyguard had been pointing a gun at Sully and his friends, and Holliday had told them they were all dead.

  Just to be sure, he texted Hunter.

  AH says ur in this SUV? True?

  Her reply came immediately.

  Ya. Come on.

  “Holliday?” Dom was heading toward him.

  Sully pointed at the SUV. “Hunter’s already inside. He wants to meet.”

  “This is a bad idea, Sully.”

  “We’ll be fine.” He wasn’t at all sure of that, but what choice did he have? “If Holliday was planning to hurt us, he wouldn’t call me on his private phone and send a car to pick me up. He’s not exactly trying to hide his trail.”