Burning Midnight (6 page)

“I want to sit for a minute.” Hunter settled on a waist-high rock, the Hot Pink in her hand. “I want to drink this day in.”

Sully squatted on a smaller rock and took in the view. He was still shaking. It was ironic that they'd found a Hot Pink. Burning a pair of Hot Pinks let you summon a rush of adrenaline on demand, giving you a boost of strength and energy for a few hours at a time. Much like they'd just experienced.

His phone vibrated. It was a text from Dom.

Want to do something after dinner? I need to get out of here.

Hell, ya
, he sent back.
BIG NEWS. Tell u when I see u.

“I was homeless for three years,” Hunter said.

Sully turned to look at her. “Three years?”

Hunter nodded. “My mom lost her nursing job when I was five. She died two years later. I was on my own for a couple of weeks before a Korean woman took me in. But she had to go back to Korea when I was twelve, and she couldn't afford to take me with her, so I was on my own. Now I rent space on the floor in an apartment that's got about twenty people living in it.” She swallowed, wet her lips with her tongue. “I'm telling you because I want you to understand what this means to me.” She gestured at the Hot Pink with her chin. “I hit on hunting marbles when I was ten and”—she shook her head—“I don't know, it just
felt
right. When I found my first, a Rose, it was like beautiful music going off in my head, like the marble was telling me I was going to be okay, that their whole reason for being here was so I had enough to eat, a coat to keep me warm.” She lifted her eyes to look at Sully, and there were tears on her lashes. “In the car you asked what I thought they were. All I know is, they're the best thing there is. I know some people say they're bad, but those people are wrong. They're perfect. I wish I didn't have to sell them. I wish I could take them all inside me and keep them forever.”

Sully nodded. He agreed. They were the best things in the world.

They watched the river, the sparse traffic crossing the bridge looking like toys. Sully wasn't cold any longer. His cheeks and fingertips thrummed with warmth.

“Who was the Korean woman?”

Hunter smiled wistfully. “I was at the public library. Libraries are heated and cooled, and they can't kick you out if you're quiet. She was a widow who worked there as a janitor. She started bringing me food. Cold noodles, pickled cabbage, pork, radishes. Then one day, out of the blue, she invited me to come home with her, and pretty much adopted me after that.” Hunter tossed the Hot Pink in the air, caught it, admired it for a moment. “When I wasn't in school I was hunting marbles to help support us.”

“It's weird, how strangers can become like family. Remember Neal, the guy selling CDs in the stall across from mine?”

“The sixties-looking dude?”

“Right,” Sully said, laughing at her description. “The guy's been more of a father to me than my own dad. I mean, he might be surprised to hear it, but he means a lot to me. At the flea market he and his wife, Sam, watch out for me like I was their kid.”

“It's nice to have people watching your back.” Hunter smiled as she watched a motorboat tool along the river. It was the first time Sully had seen her look so relaxed.

“So why did your Korean mom have to go back to Korea?”

“Her own mom got Alzheimer's. She had to go back to take care of her. She cried and cried when she had to get on that plane.” Hunter rubbed her hands together, then cupped them and blew into them. “You ready?” She pushed off the rock, landed on her feet with a little hop, and headed down the trail.

As the woods enveloped the trail again, Hunter's hiking gait turned into a bobbing strut. She snapped the fingers of her free hand, and sang, “Ten percent luck, twenty percent skill. Bending reality to my will.”

Sully didn't recognize the song, but Hunter just sang the refrain over and over. After a minute Sully picked it up and sang along. They danced their way down Bear Mountain with their Hot Pink.

“What should we do with it until we can sell it?” Hunter asked as they crunched through the snow, taking a shortcut off the trail.

“Right into a safe-deposit box. You want me to list it on eBay tonight?”

“No, not right away.” She blew into her hands again. “I know you need the money bad; I do, too. But if we sell on eBay we're talking at least a thousand less. That's a lot of cash.”

“Yeah. It is.” Sully was fairly sure Mom had enough money to buy food for a few weeks. The rent was due on the tenth of January, which was almost three weeks away. They could delay two more weeks after that if they paid the late fee. “How about this: if we can't find a buyer in a month, we sell it on eBay.”

“Sounds good,” Hunter said as she hopped from one rock to the next across a partially frozen stream.

“I can call around, spread the word that we're selling it.”

Hunter leaped onto the shore, then backstepped on the steep slope, her rear foot cracking through ice.

“Crap!” she shouted, laughing.

When the freezing water hit her foot she stopped laughing and grimaced. “I
hate
the cold.”

Fortunately, they were close to the car. They jogged the last two minutes, and Sully cranked up the heat as soon as they were inside. As he was putting the car in reverse, he remembered the spare socks he'd tossed in the backseat in case his own feet got damp from the snow.

“Hang on.” He reached and retrieved the socks, offered them to Hunter. “They're probably eight sizes too big, but they're dry.”

Hunter gave him a tight smile. “Thanks, but that's okay. I'm fine.”

Laughing, he pushed the socks toward her. “No you're not. Your foot is soaked.”

Hunter pulled out her phone, turned to face front. “I appreciate the thought, but I'm
fine.
” There was a bite in her tone.

Sully shrugged and tossed the socks onto the backseat, not sure what her problem was.

As he pulled onto the Palisades he glanced at Hunter's screen, expecting her to be on Instagram, posting their find like he was going to do as soon as he got home. She wasn't—she was looking at the front page of the
New York Times.

“So what do you do when you're not hunting?” he asked. “Do you have a group of friends you hang out with, or a boyfriend?”

“Holy shit,” Hunter hissed, holding her phone right up to her face.

“What?” Sully glanced at her phone, but couldn't read what was on the screen. “What is it?”

Hunter dropped the phone into her lap. “One of Holliday's hunters found a new kind of marble. It's
bigger
than the rest. It's dark blue. Midnight Blue.”

“Oh, my God.” No one had discovered a new color since the Cherry Red. “It's
bigger
? How much bigger?” Sully pulled onto the shoulder of the parkway.

“Half again as big as the rest, it says. The size of a cantaloupe.”

Sully leaned in to look at the phone, saw a photo of Holliday holding up the dark blue sphere, grinning like an idiot.

“Where'd he find it?”

Hunter read for a moment. “Africa. He won't be any more specific than that.” She shook her head. “I wish it was anybody but him. I hate that guy.”

“
You
hate him?”

“He ruins it for everyone—him and the other big marble operations. Jin Bao. ExoSphere. Hoovering up marbles with their mercenaries and computer programs. That's not the way they're meant to be found. It's the only game that's built to be fair, and they found a way to rig it.”

“A couple of weeks ago me and a couple of friends got in a brawl with four of Holliday's bodyguards.”

Hunter's head snapped up and turned toward him. “Seriously?”

Sully nodded. “Holliday was making an appearance to plug his new Yonkers store. My buddy Dom called him a thief. His bodyguards dragged us out of the auditorium.”

Hunter punched Sully in the arm. “I like it.”

“Hey, come hang out with us,” Sully said.

Hunter gave him a skeptical smile. “Sometime, maybe.” She went back to her phone. “Holliday's offering fifty million to the person who finds the match,” she said.

“I'd love to find it, just to keep it from him.”

Hunter blew air from the corner of her mouth. “Fifty million? Give me a break. You'd sell it to him. You'd get a good lawyer first, but you'd sell it.”

Sully chuckled. “Okay, you got me. If we find the match and you twist my arm, I'll let him have it and walk away with twenty million.”

Hunter propped her knees on the dash, watched the trees fly by past the window in the near dark. Sully was pushing the speed limit; he wanted to get home and tell Dom and his mom what they'd found. He also had an English test tomorrow that he needed to study for before going out with Dom. Another week and a half of school and he was home free. He was looking forward to Christmas vacation.

“What are you doing for Christmas?” he asked Hunter.

She turned, let her head loll, gave him a deadpan look. “I'm hunting on Christmas. New Year's, too, in case you're wondering.”

The idea horrified Sully. “You're going to be alone?”

She turned back toward her window. “I'm not all that close to what's left of my family.”

Her tone said it was no big deal, but Sully tried to imagine spending Christmas alone.

“No. You're spending Christmas with me and my mom.”

Hunter guffawed, folded her arms. “I'm not spending Christmas with you and your mom.”

“Yes you are. You just found a Hot Pink; you can afford to take Christmas off and drink some hot cider.”

“Your mom doesn't want some stranger in her house on Christmas.”

“If she knows you're spending Christmas alone she does. She'll drive to your neighborhood and drag you out of your apartment. She's loud, and you never know what's going to come out of her mouth, but she's got a heart of platinum.”

“I'm skipping Christmas by choice—”

“Ah.”
Sully raised a hand to cut her off. “I don't want to hear it. It's all settled.”

Hunter huffed a little, leaned back in her seat. “Fine.”

Suddenly Sully couldn't wait for Christmas. Usually it was just him and Mom, and besides watching some old Christmas movie instead of
CSI
and opening a few presents, it was about the same as any other day. He felt a flush of anticipation as he imagined staying up late into the night with Hunter after Mom went to bed, laughing, eating Christmas cookies, planning their next hunt.

Maybe more.

A Copper thunked to the carpet in Sully's room. Dom retrieved it, studied the three spheres in his hand, then tossed the Rose in the air. He managed to juggle the spheres for about three seconds before two hit the floor.

“Cut it out,” Sully called from his bed. He changed the channel to ESPN. There was a golf tournament on, with sphere-burners playing off longer tees, sphere virgins off shorter ones. Golf was one of the last holdout sports still trying to level the playing field for competitors who hadn't burned spheres. It seemed unbelievable now that baseball had ever toyed with making the National League non-sphere and the American sphere. The only way you could tell a player had burned a sphere was because he suddenly got better. When Mike Trout went from hitting thirty home runs a year to fifty, or Aroldis Chapman's ninety-nine-mile-per-hour fastball suddenly leaped to a hundred four, it was pretty damned obvious they'd burned Chocolates for strength, and probably Creams for coordination. All of the records were falling. It was kind of depressing, actually. Burning spheres sure seemed like cheating to Sully, even if MLB owners and players had agreed that since there was no way to detect who was burning, it had to be accepted.

Dom dropped the Rose this time.

“Come on, cut it out.”

“It's not like I'm gonna break them. I couldn't break them with an atomic bomb.” Dom bent to pick up the dropped sphere. “Just call her. She could be home doing nothing.”

“Why don't
you
call her?”

“Because I like her. When I like a girl I get nervous calling. My voice shakes and my mind goes blank. I sound like a moron.” The Copper hit the floor again.

From the other room, Sully's mom called, “Whatever you're doing in there, stop it. You promised you were going to do homework. You're not going anywhere until you finish yours, David.”

“Sorry, Mom. I will.” Sully swept his phone off the night table. “Fine, I'll call her. But if I do, she's going to think I'm the one who likes her.”

Dom hesitated, studied Sully. “You don't like her, do you?”

“We've gone over this already.” Sully did think Mandy was interesting, but he couldn't say he felt that spark. Since he and Laurie had broken up, Sully hadn't met anyone who lit that spark in him.

Hunter's face appeared in his mind. Maybe that wasn't completely accurate. How could he not be drawn to a girl who climbed into abandoned mine shafts? She was Catwoman. His feelings were complicated, though. He liked her, but he doubted he would like going out with her, assuming she even liked him. He believed what she said: she was all business. It wasn't that she was out of Sully's league, she was playing a whole different game.

Still, he had to admit he couldn't wait to see her on Christmas Eve. He'd always found Christmas carols cloying, but this year they filled him with warmth. The days left between Sully and Christmas felt like impositions, like annoying relatives parked on the couch yammering when it was clearly time for them to go.

“Great. Give her a call,” Dom said.

For a second Sully thought Dom meant Hunter, then he remembered they were talking about Mandy. He hit Mandy's number and put the phone to his ear. She answered on the first ring.

“It's Sully. From the brawl.”

Mandy sounded sniffly as she laughed. “I remember you. The knee-kicker.”

“Hey, anything goes in a street fight. He was a big guy. You okay?” It was pretty obvious she'd been crying.

“I always cry before Christmas. Kind of a tradition with me.”

Dom was watching him, eyebrows raised.

“You interested in being cheered up? Dom and I are going Christmas shopping. We're taking the train into Manhattan.”

“No,” she said immediately. “I appreciate you thinking of me, but I'm not going to be good company tonight.”

“Come out with us. You'll feel better.”

“Some other time I'd love to.”

Sully looked at Dom, shook his head. “You sure? We're not particularly skilled fighters, but we're good at cheering people up.”

Dom surged forward, hand out. “Let me talk to her.”

“Dom wants to talk to you.” He handed Dom the phone.

“Mandy. What's going on? You having a bad day?” Dom stuck a finger in his ear, turned toward the window. “Come out with us.” Pause. “Well, look at it from our side. We can't leave you alone and miserable four days before Christmas. What kind of people would we be if we did?” Dom waved his free hand. “So bring us down. We don't care.” Another pause. Dom pumped his fist. “Half an hour. Where do you live?”

Dom jotted down her address, said goodbye, handed the phone to Sully. “Piece of cake.”

“I thought you got too nervous to talk.”

Dom shrugged. “I didn't have time to get nervous.”

“She broke up with her boyfriend. That's got to be it,” Dom said as they climbed down the steps to the ground floor of Sully's building. A bitter wind hit Sully as he pushed open the door. It was below freezing, and would get even colder as the sun set.

“It could be a lot of things,” Sully said.

“Like what?”

“Maybe her mother's sick. Or her cat died.”

They crossed the parking lot to Dom's car, their heads down.

“If it was something like that, she would have told us right up front. ‘I don't feel like going out. My cat died.' ” Dom raised a gloved finger. “But if you're talking to people you don't know well, you wouldn't say, ‘I don't feel like going out, because my boyfriend dumped me.' It's too personal.”

He had a point. “We just got our fall grades,” Sully said. “Maybe she flunked something.”

Dom burst out laughing. “She's a brain. She probably got straight As.”

As they pulled out, Sully said, “You're probably right, then. She just broke up with her genius boyfriend.” Dom had pulled a C-plus, two Cs, and a D. To his surprise, Sully had managed all Bs except for a C in algebra. Pretty solid. No one on either side of his family had gone to college; he came from a line of mechanics, secretaries, and factory workers. Further back, to his great-grandparents' generation, it was farmers and coal miners.

Mandy lived in Scarsdale, six or seven miles away, but a thousand miles removed from Yonkers. Houses there were mansions, with lawns like golf courses.

“There she is,” Dom said.

Mandy was waiting at the end of her driveway wearing a big blue parka with fake fur lining the hood, and heeled boots that made her look freakishly tall. She seemed all legs. Her nostrils were red around the rims, her eyes bloodshot.

“I don't want to talk about it,” she said, responding to their questioning looks as she climbed into the front passenger seat. “Let's just have a good time.”

As Dom headed for the Metro-North train station, Mandy looked back at Sully. “Who are you guys shopping for?”

“I need to get something for a friend,” Sully said. “My sphere-hunting partner.”

“Who Sully happens to be madly in love with,” Dom said. It was so obviously intended to signal that Sully was not available that Sully almost laughed.

“Oh, really?” Mandy said. “Maybe I can help you pick something out.”

“That'd be great. Although I don't think she's a jewelry or clothes person. Not your typical girlie girl.”

Mandy tilted her head, gave him a look. “And I am?”

“True.” Mandy was wearing a little mascara, but no other makeup. Her parka was something Sully could see Hunter wearing. “Yeah, you might be the perfect consultant for Hunter.”

“I'll take that as a compliment, given that you're madly in love with her.”

Sully started to say he wasn't in love with her, but decided it wasn't worth it. He was in something with her.

On the train, Dom peppered Mandy with questions about where she hung out (at home, mostly), what music she liked (obscure indie stuff Sully had never heard of; she was hard-core organic—refused to listen to any singer who'd burned Slate Grays, which ruled out pretty much all Top 40 music). Sully was happy to let Dom carry the conversation as snow flurries melted against the train's windows. He passed the time thinking about Christmas, imagining conversations he might have with Hunter while they relaxed on the couch.

“What's your last name?” Mandy asked Dom. “You sound like you're Italian.”

The question pulled Sully out of his reverie.

“Cucuzza.” Dom said it with a well-practiced lightness. Sully knew that inside, he was dying.

“Any relation to, you know?” Mandy asked.

To the infamous Tony Cucuzza, she meant. Destroyer of 276 priceless works of art at the Met.

“Nope,” Dom said, his tone still light.

“So your family is Italian?” Mandy asked.

“Yup. Third-generation American. My great-grandparents made the boat ride.”

“I'm first generation. My parents were both kids when my grandparents brought them here from Korea.”

Sully tuned out. He'd been trying to think of a gift for Hunter since he'd invited her for Christmas. He wanted something that couldn't be construed as romantic, yet wasn't impersonal. Something between a gift certificate and earrings.

There was a little extra bounce in Dom's step, his arms held farther from his body than required even by his impressive muscles, as they climbed the steps leading from the subway to Fifth Avenue. When he was around women, Dom seemed to turn up his tough-guy persona a few notches.

“Tell me what she was wearing the last time you saw her,” Mandy said as they breezed into Lord and Taylor, passing women in white lab coats manning fragrance counters. The air was filled with a light, flowery scent that made Sully long for springtime.

“Jeans, combat boots, a gray sweatshirt, black gloves with the fingers cut off.”

Mandy pointed at him. “Gloves. Perfect. Intimate, but not too intimate.” She raised her head and, gazing into the far reaches of the store, picked up her pace, so Sully and Dom had to push to keep up with her long strides.

She led them to a stretch of counters offering an elaborate array of gloves, crossed her arms, considering. “What kind of gloves does she have?”

Sully tried to picture them. “Just typical fabric gloves. You can see loose threads where she cut the fingers off.”

“Good, then she doesn't have leather. If you give her leather gloves, you're giving her something you know she'll use, only nicer than what she already has.”

“Anything would be nicer than the ones she has. They've pretty much had it.”

“Perfect.” Mandy chose a pair of fingerless black leather gloves, pulled one on, held out her hand.

“Nice,” Dom said.

“Yeah,” Sully agreed. They were formfitting, simple, the leather thin and supple, the fingers ending just below Mandy's first knuckle.

“This is what I'd choose, if I was getting them for myself. If her taste leans toward androgynous, I don't think you can go wrong with these.”

They were also forty bucks. If not for the Hot Pink sitting in a safe-deposit box at the Hudson Valley Bank, they'd be out of the question. Sully took the gloves to the register, trying to suppress the idiot grin that kept forming. He couldn't wait for Hunter to see them; they were exactly right.

They made a bathroom stop after that. As Dom and Sully approached the urinals, leaving one between them, Dom said, “I'm gonna ask her out. You think I should?”

Sully smiled. As if this was a surprising revelation. “Never hurts to ask.”

“I feel so comfortable around her.”

“She's terrific.”

“Okay.” Dom took a big, huffing breath. “If I give you a look, back off so I have some room to work.”

“You got it.”

Mandy wanted to get a gift certificate to the Apple Store for her sister, so they left Lord and Taylor and headed out into the cold.

Across Fifth Avenue from the Apple Store, the black marble monolith that was the flagship Holliday's store loomed. Thick at the bottom and tapering to a slender pinnacle ten stories up, it was bathed in white spotlights. It stood out from the buildings around it like a Persian palace among hot dog stands.

“God, I hate that slimebag,” Mandy said, looking up at the store.

Dom nudged Sully. “Let's go see what a Hot Pink is selling for.”

“I don't know.”

“Why Hot Pink?” Mandy asked.

“Sully and Hunter found one in the wild last week,” Dom said.

Mandy spun to face Sully.
“Really?”

Sully nodded, unable to suppress the same huge, dumb grin he'd had while buying Hunter's gloves.

“That's a serious stone.” Mandy shook her long, straight hair out of her face. “You want to check out the price?”

He
was
curious. Holliday's did not publish prices for the higher-end spheres online; they were way too exclusive and sophisticated for that. But even stepping inside would feel like he was acknowledging the store's right to exist.

“Come on,” Dom said. “Let's go in.”

Sully eyed the store. The prices changed almost daily, mostly pushing ever higher. It would be useful to know what the biggest player in the business thought a Hot Pink was worth these days. Plus, Dom and Mandy both looked like they wanted to go in. He didn't want to rain on their fun.

“Sure. Why not?”

They hurried across the snow-covered street and headed into Holliday's.

The ground floor was packed with holiday shoppers, which wasn't surprising, since the common spheres—the rarity level ones—were displayed there.

Most of the space inside Holliday's was utterly wasted. The center was hollowed out, so each floor from two and up was nothing but a catwalk with elegant railings, the spheres displayed in cases set into the walls. Sully craned his neck to peer up at the tenth floor. No one was up there except a solitary salesperson in Holliday's signature metallic silver garb, standing motionless, legs apart, arms folded behind her back.