by Steven Gould
It was an old-school skylight with frosted glass panes, but one of the panes had been replaced with transparent glass. I could see down into the garage and though there weren’t any lights, the skylight provided enough illumination for me to make out carpeted floor and a couch.
I made sure my hood was well forward and the balaclava pulled up as far as my nose, and jumped into the garage.
No one leaped out of the shadows, which I saw, as my eyes adjusted, were not very deep. The floor was covered with irregular swaths of carpet, unmatched in color, texture, and thickness. Three couches formed an open square, facing away from the vehicle doors. An avocado-colored refrigerator flanked the side door and I heard its compressor kick in. Inside the refrigerator were several six-packs of soft drinks, two cases of beer, and some leftover fast food.
The room smelled musty, slightly mildewed, with overtones of sweat and, I thought, marijuana, which I’d smelled in Amsterdam. It was cool in the room, but not as cold as outside. Two electric radiators were plugged in at opposite sides of the space.
The rear of the garage had rough closets walled with warped and torn paneling, and in the far rear corner was what used to be a laundry room. The utility sink was still there, but the dryer and washer were long gone and a toilet had been mounted in the middle of the little room atop an old floor drain. A hose ran across the floor from the old washer fittings to the flush tank’s inlet valve. I peered into the toilet and backed away. It looked and smelled like something you’d find in the restroom of a badly maintained gas station.
I went through the closets. There was bedding, some men’s and women’s clothing, and a cluster of baseball bats, one of which had brownish-red stains on it.
In the last closet, opposite the three couches, I found the hidden video camera.
A camera mount, clamped to one of the closet’s interior studs, held the video camera lens directly against the paneling. I walked back around and found the small hole at the back of a shelf, framed on one side by a tool box and some packaged oil filters on the other.
I went back and examined the camera. It was plugged into a power adaptor, so it didn’t have to depend on batteries. It used solid-state media, a little postage stamp-sized SD card, which I popped out and examined. It was a sixteen gigabyte card. I pushed it back into the slot and powered up the camera. The directory in the little fold-out LCD monitor showed one file only, dated the previous week, too recent to be one of the freshman blackmail videos.
I hit play.
The camera was zoomed on the center couch and there was a guy sitting there, lounging back. He was old—in his late twenties or early thirties, I would say. He was looking slightly to the right of the camera, where the closet door would be, then I heard the door close and Caffeine entered the scene and went to the couch and kissed him.
Not like you’d kiss your dad, either.
When she moved down his body, unfastened his pants and pulled his zipper down, I pulled my hands away from the camera and banged against the back of the closet. By the time I turned the camera off she was going down on him.
I jumped away, all the way to my reading nook, in the Yukon, blushing furiously.
It’s not like I’d never seen porn before. Internet access and all that. I was embarrassed enough the first time I’d seen video of two humans having different kinds of sex, just as I was embarrassed when I heard kids talk about who was “doing it” at school. But I’d never put the two together—seen a person I knew in real life do that.
I shuddered.
Did I really want to find the blackmail videos? Wouldn’t I have to look at them? Was I really ready to see Grant, Tony, and Dakota “doing it?”
* * *
A blond woman wearing surgical scrubs was sitting in our kitchen in the Yukon, crying. I nearly jumped away before I realized it was Mom, wearing one of her wigs.
My next thought sent my heart thudding. “Is Dad all right?”
“He’s fine.” She shook her head. “It’s my mom.”
“What’s wrong with Grandmother?”
“She fell and broke her hip last week. While she was in recovery, she threw a blood clot into her lungs and had to go on a respirator. She’s back off of it, now, but she’s going to need to move over to the fully assisted side of her retirement community. I don’t know if she’ll ever be able to go back to her apartment.”
My heart slowed a bit. I’d only met Grandmother three times.
Some of the retirement community employees were watching for us—well, for Mom or Dad since they didn’t know I existed. Dad didn’t know if it was for them or the NSA.
Mom and Dad had jumped Grandmother away from there a few times to spend weekends with us, but the increase in surveillance after these mysterious absences had been intense. Mom and Dad decided it was too dangerous for Grandmother if they’d kept up the visits, though they’d asked her if she’d like to live with us full time.
Grandmother was torn, but in the end, refused. She had her other daughter and many friends. She wasn’t ready to walk away from that life.
I fetched a box of tissues from the living room and hugged Mom. It was all I could think of to do.
“Did you see her?”
She nodded against my shoulder, then sat back. “Yeah. Talked to her after she got off the respirator.” Mom waved her hand at the wig and the scrubs.
I saw that she was also wearing her green contacts.
Mom bit her lip. “She asked to see you.”
It was my turn to bite my lip. “What does Dad say?”
“Dad doesn’t know she asked.” She blinked and added, “Yet.” She was frowning. “Dad is in Bangladesh, seeing if there is any word of Rama. He hasn’t heard about any of this. I just found out this morning, when I checked the e-mail drop.”
“Aunt Sue?”
Mom nodded.
Sue was Mom’s sister. I’d met her exactly once.
“Yeah. There were six e-mails in the box. We should check it more often.”
“Should I visit her? I could do the Girl Scout thing.”
Mom blinked. Once she’d jumped me close by and I’d visited Grandmother posing as a Girl Scout selling cookies. We’d sat on a bench outside her apartment and talked for an hour, but we kept getting interrupted as other retirees came up to buy cookies.
Mom smiled and blew her nose. “Think you’re too big for that, now.”
“Some other disguise, then.”
“We’ll see.”
* * *
In the middle of the night I went into the school administration office and looked up Caffeine’s home address. I figured it would be in a file cabinet, but the file room was locked and windowless, blocking me effectively.
However, I found her address and basic info in the school computer system. The database client was browser based and the secretary’s computer was in sleep mode, still logged in. It didn’t even require a password on wake up.
Besides Caffeine’s address I also learned that she had three half sisters from her mother’s current marriage and four half brothers from her father’s previous and subsequent marriages, as well as two stepbrothers, children of her mother’s current husband from a previous marriage. There was a reference to ongoing behavioral issues but that info was apparently in the physical file.
Hector Guzman had three older brothers and a younger sister. There was no mention of his father in the record, just his mother.
Both of them lived near Tara: Hector in the same apartment complex and Caffeine across the street in a housing development. She lived with her mother and stepfather. There was an address in Colorado for her father, but for emergency contact. His home was not designated as one of Caffiene’s residences.
I’d worn gloves for this investigation, and left everything as I found it.
* * *
I saw the black Hummer the next day as Tara and Jade and I walked to Krakatoa for our usual after-school study session. The windows were deeply tinted and I couldn’t tell ho
w many people were in it or who they were. It had chrome wheels and a vanity license plate which said, 2KOOL4U.
“Is that the one?” I said, as it cruised slowly past.
Tara nodded.
When we turned onto Main, it was pulled over near Krakatoa, but still blocking most of its lane. The passenger door opened and a man got out, young, but older than high school. It was tricky to tell because his scalp was shaved smooth and he wore a hipster soul patch. He was big like Calvin, bigger than Brett.
He walked around to the driver’s side. The window slid down for a moment and it looked like words were exchanged, then he turned and went into the coffee shop. Just before he passed through the doorway, he glanced toward us.
“Who was that?” I asked the girls.
Jade shook her head and Tara said, “Don’t know. Seen him around.”
“Not Marius?”
“Yo no se. Could be.” She said and added in a British posh accent, “Never been properly introduced.”
The man was accepting an iced coffee from the barista when we came in. He went upstairs to the landing. I thought for a moment he’d take our table, but he took a smaller twotop near the head of the stairs.
I handed Tara some cash, as usual, and headed up the stairs to secure our table before the rest of the after-school kids flooded in.
The bald man stood up as I came up the stairs, which surprised me. He’d just got there, after all. His coffee was still on the table, so maybe he was just going to the bathroom. The staircase was narrow, against the wall, with a railed balustrade on one side, and plain paneling with no rail on the other. He shifted to the rail side, to make room for me to pass and I twisted against the paneling, holding my pack in front to eel past him.
I wasn’t expecting anything, really, but I was watching him just so I’d know him later. Just before I passed him, he rammed his shoulder across the space, right at my face.
I jumped, well, flinched, past him, just up two steps. I heard him yell as his unchecked momentum took him forward. His arm flailed, trying to catch himself on the smooth paneling, but he fell forward, down the stairs. He cushioned the immediate impact with his arms, but bumped down the remaining stairs headfirst, on his stomach, knees, and elbows, then crunching up into a ball when his arms reached the no-skid mat at the bottom of the stairway while his torso and legs kept moving.
I watched this from up above, moving up the stairs and stepping quickly over to our table. He finished in a heap, butt up in the air. The barista and the manager were there almost immediately.
“Whoa there. Stay down. I’ll call 911,” said the manager.
The man ignored her, unfolding and pushing up onto his knees. He’d avoided hitting his head, but he was holding his arms across his torso, like they needed to be supported. “I’m all right!” he snapped when the manager tried to help him.
Jade and Tara, still waiting for our drinks, stepped around the corner of the counter, away from him.
The man reached down and gingerly touched his right leg, just above the knee, then winced.
The manager had stepped back after he snapped at her, but she was still watching him carefully. “Are you sure? That was a nasty spill. I can still call an ambulance.”
“No!” He surged all the way to his feet and looked back up the stairway, then sideways, until he located me, seated at our table. I ignored him and opened my math book.
He looked furious, though, and I thought, Good.
He walked out of the shop without coming back upstairs for his coffee. I saw the Hummer pull up, again on the wrong side of the street. The window came down and my eyes went wide.
The driver was the older man I’d seen in the video clip with Caffeine. I saw him say something to my stairway friend, his head tilted in inquiry, then he looked surprised when baldy jerked his arm and said something.
The bald man moved around the car to the passenger side and climbed in. He had to shut the door twice to get it properly closed.
Arms not working so good?
I saw the manager come up the stairway, looking carefully at the stair step treads, tugging at the edges to see if anything was loose. “Did you see what happened?”
I shrugged. “He’d just passed me on the stairs. He seemed to be going pretty fast. I think he missed a step.”
She nodded and went back down the stairs.
I exhaled.
Escalation. Was it retaliation for last night’s encounter at The Brass?
At least they were coming after me instead of the boys. Tara and Jade started up the steps with the drinks, and I went cold. What if they came after Jade or Tara?
Tara said, “Why’d you throw him down the steps?”
Jade started to laugh then caught a look at my face. “What? Did you throw him down the stairs?”
I shook my head. “No. But he tried to do that to me.”
They both stared at me.
“He missed.”
Tara nodded. “I wondered what was up, especially when I saw him get in the Hummer.”
Jade looked angry, staring down at the window. “What kind of asshole pushes a teenage girl down the stairs? If you’d gone down those stairs backward, you could’ve gotten a concussion. Or even broken your neck!”
The Hummer pulled away, chrome wheels flashing in the sun.
Tara nodded slowly. “We don’t like them.”
Jade nodded. “No, we don’t.”
* * *
They were waiting for me in the woods the next morning. Four figures, two smoking. I watched from the ledge above as they shifted around until I had identified Caffeine; Calvin, his nose still swollen from our encounter at The Brass; and Hector. The last one was the shaved head of the guy from Krakatoa.
Obviously I could bypass them.
I didn’t want to.
I jumped back to the cabin and armored up—boots, gloves, armored jacket, and knee and shin guards. In the back of Dad’s closet I found the jacket.
It was black leather once, but it had faded to an irregular charcoal gray. The zipper still worked but only because it had been replaced about six times. I’ve never seen Dad wear it, but Mom puts it on occasionally, especially if Dad is away from home.
Of course, it’s way oversized on me, but it was just comfortably loose over the armor. A pair of Dad’s sweatpants covered the knee and shin guards, though the knees bulged slightly.
I checked myself in the mirror. The jacket fell past my hips. What curves I had were erased, covered. The boots and the helmet added to my height, and the jacket over the armor bulked me up, widened my shoulders. When I pulled the balaclava up over my nose and lowered the goggles, all signs of gender were obscured.
Remember the lentils from Australia? We had hundreds of the empty burlap bags left and I knew about a shaded gully a hundred yards directly down the hill that had been accumulating snow all winter.
First I took Hector, who screamed when the bag went over his head and who was still screaming when I pushed him over the edge into the snow-filled gully.
I jumped back to the cliff top and watched.
Caffeine flinched and took three quick steps backward, toward the cliff face, but the other two took a couple of steps down the hill, toward where they could hear the distant Hector, now swearing loudly as he struggled in the deep snow.
The scream must’ve sounded odd, right beside them, and then, without a break, off in the distance.
After a moment, Caffeine stepped cautiously forward, moving out in front of the other two, and I hooded Calvin from behind with another lentil bag.
Hector had made it most of the way out of the gully, but had to jump back down, out of the way, as I pushed Calvin over the edge above him.
Back on the ledge I saw Caffeine backing up the path, toward the school, her head swiveling frantically.
The guy from the coffee shop said. “Don’t separa—”
I took him like the others. But he didn’t react the same. Instead of moving both hands up to c
lear the scratchy bag from his head, he lashed back with his arm, clipping my helmet, and, as I shoved him into the gully he kicked back at my knee, but his shoe glanced off the armor and he fell forward into the snow, flailing his arms, still hooded.
In the distance, I heard Caffeine yell, “Marius!”
I jumped back to the ledge.
Caffeine was running, already clear of the woods, and headed for the bleachers.
I smiled and let her go.
When I jumped back down the hill, I chose a site well back from the gully, where they couldn’t see me appear.
They were helping each other out of the gully. Marius standing at the bottom bracing Calvin, who in turn braced Hector as he reached for the lip above.
My head came into view and Hector flinched back, twisting, causing them all to slide down. They stood there, expressions ranging from defiant (Calvin), impassive (Marius), to scared (Hector) as I walked up to the edge of the gully.
“Who the fuck are you?” Calvin said.
I pointed at them, and then, in as deep and raspy a voice as I could manage, said, “Don’t. Mess. With. My. Friends.”
Then I leaped off the edge of the gully at them, head first, arms spread, fingers curled like claws.
Hector yelled “Fuck!” They all dove away, back or to the side. By the time they’d recovered their footing and turned back around, I was twenty-five hundred miles away, in the Yukon.
* * *
I scrambled into a blouse and skirt back in my room, wool tights, flats, my nice wool coat. The armor was scattered across the bedroom floor, but I was able to pass Caffeine in the hall several minutes before second bell rang, walking demurely and looking nothing like the figure in the woods.
I ignored her but she stared hard at me as I went by. She was pale and her eyes were wide, but she had that expression even before she saw me.
Hector was late, coming in after first period. I saw him getting a tardy slip in admin and made a point of walking past him as he came out. He, too, was pretty pale and he stumbled when he saw me, but I ignored him and kept going.
