Duck Boy (17 page)

“Merry Christmas,” the man said again, holding a transfer up for Steve.

“Yeah. Merry Christmas to you, too.” Steve turned to face a thin crowd of
passengers, none of whom showed any interest in him. Most heads were idly
contemplating the advertisements lining the inside of the bus, or staring
blankly out the window.

The bus jerked and rolled toward the terminal. In the middle of the journey,
the winter sky tore open and began to hurl everything it held. Snow gathered
quickly on the ground. Small drifts covered the street and sidewalk in a few
short minutes.

This is going to be a wicked storm, Steve thought, eyeing the wall of
falling snow.

He stepped out of the bus at the terminal and headed inside to meet Lindsay.
He scanned the terminal’s waiting area for any sign of her. Nothing. He strode
towards the coffee shop, thinking she might have purchased something to help
her pass the time. She wasn’t there either. He took off his hat and gloves and
shoved them into his pockets. As he crossed the main floor towards the army of
waiting buses, he passed a rack of payphones. One of them began to ring. Steve
ignored it as he scanned the buses through the glass doors. Someone beside him
decided to answer the phone. Steve looked over towards the phones.

The man who answered the phone had a funny look on his face. He nodded and
looked around the bank of phones towards various people who stood around the
building. When the man saw Steve, he motioned him to come over to the phone.

“It sounds like the guy on the phone is describing you. Is your name Steve
Best?” Steve nodded, confused. “I think the phone’s for you,” he said. He
passed the phone to Steve and walked away. Steve held the phone up to his ear.

“Hello?”

“We have your girlfriend, too,” said a hoarse voice. It sounded like Mr.
Gold’s voice. “She was going to meet you at the bus terminal, and we gave her a
ride.”

Steve felt his temper and terror rise. “What do you want?” he said angrily.
“We haven’t done anything.”

“We want you,” said the hoarse voice. “You know everything. You know how to
make the stone; you know how to make things disappear.”

“How would that help you?” Steve asked. “It hasn’t helped anyone yet.”

“That’s our business, not yours.”

Steve backed away from the phone and panned the terminal, looking for
someone who stood out. He saw three men in sunglasses. Mr. Gold, talking on a
cell phone, and two others. Mr. Gold stopped walking, and the two gray suits
strolled casually towards him.

Duck Boy. Duck Boy.

Steve’s eyes met the eyes of the man talking on the cell phone.

“Hello, Steve,” said Mr. Gold’s hoarse voice. “We don’t want to hurt you.”

Fight or flight? Flight.

Steve dropped the receiver and headed for the glass doors and into a sea of
buses. The two men ambling towards him broke into a run. Steve crossed a bus’s
path as it shot out past the terminal’s doors. It locked its brakes and slid
over the snow, swerving to avoid him. The bus slid sideways and lurched to a
stop as an angry middle-aged bus driver cursed at Steve, struggling to bring
the bus to a controlled halt.

Snow licked Steve’s face as he dodged between people and vehicles. Spirals
of snow slicked the pavement with a coat of white. Steve rounded the front of a
bus and headed towards its back end on the far side. The two men weren’t far
behind, except they were wearing shoes that didn’t hold well in the world of
ice and snow, so they skated over the snow-covered road toward Steve. Steve
rounded the back end of the bus and turned around and grabbed the bus’s bumper.
By this time, the bus driver had opened her fresh-air window to shout
expletives at the two bumbling henchmen and to sound her horn to make sure they
understood how she felt.

The blowing snow gave Steve a small advantage. The two men had difficulty
spotting which direction he had gone. They finally noticed his footprints and
set off towards the end of the bus. The angry bus driver hammered the gas pedal
and sent a cloud of black diesel exhaust and the roar of the engine into the
storm.

Steve hung on to the bumper and skied behind the bus onto the street.
Fortunately, the street was amply coated with snow. He slipped past his
aggressors. The two men seemed bewildered. They inspected the bus as it passed
them. They saw Steve hanging from the bus’s bumper. He gave them a small wave.

“Hey!” one of them yelled. The other skated back toward the terminal.

Chapter 14

Steve surfed the snow-slick streets for several blocks, breathing fresh
diesel fumes as they belched from the exhaust.

Gold’s on his way by now.

When the bus turned onto King Street, Steve released the bumper and jogged
up the sidewalk. A narrow corridor between two old buildings offered discreet
shelter, so he ducked into it.

There was just enough space for him to stand.

I need my Benu stone before I can help anyone do
anything. If my stone is anywhere in this world, it’ll be at home.

He hunkered between the two buildings in his oversized dad-style coat,
enjoying the blowing snow and empty streets. The violence of the storm seemed
somehow protective—almost inviting.

Only a few moments passed before the charcoal Lincoln Continental slithered
by. He knew they would catch up to the bus he had hitched a ride from very
soon. They’d backtrack quickly once they discovered he wasn’t in tow. It was
time to move.

Steve crossed the street and headed up a few short blocks to Queen Street.
The wind stiffened and whipped the snow into white sheets. He turned up the
collar of the coat to help repel the cold. He found his school, and went to
stand by the bus stop. The school seemed like a shell—dark and hollow. Steve
shivered when he saw it.

A few minutes later a bus slowly rolled up to the bus stop. Steve had
already decided to take the bus so he could warm up on the way to his house. He
climbed on the bus, showed the driver his transfer stub and took a seat near
the back door. He was the only rider.

His eyes scanned the advertising as he waited for motion. The bus roared
away from the stop and hummed along the route. Steve looked towards the front
of the bus and met the bus driver’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. The bus
driver was staring at him carefully, but when their eyes met, turned away from
the mirror immediately.

Uh, oh. Duck Boy.

He heard the driver mumble something into his radio. Instinctively, Steve
stood and pulled the bell cord to let the driver know he wanted out at the next
stop. He was less than halfway home but he didn’t want to chance getting
caught.

Steve stepped to the back doors of the bus and waited for them to open. He
waited as the bus sat in the storm, but the doors wouldn’t open.

“Open the doors, please,” he asked the driver.

He looked up towards the front of the bus; the driver was again staring at
him in the mirror and jabbering away quietly into the radio’s handset.

“Can you open the doors, please?” Steve repeated. The bus driver shrank into
his seat while looking over his shoulder.

Steve’s mind scrambled for a few seconds. He slid into a seat next to a big
window and lifted up on the handle at the bottom labeled “Emergency Release
Lever.” The window popped open and Steve jumped from the bus window into a
white blur of snow.

Steve walked past the front of the bus. The driver fixed his eyes on Steve
while he yammered into the radio microphone.

“I’d better head in a direction I don’t plan to take,” Steve said, thinking
out loud.

He turned down a street close to where the bus had stopped and slowly
rounded the corner, hoping that the bus driver had seen him move. He crossed
the street and walked down the alleyway. At the end of the block, he crossed
the street, checking for the bus.

If I can’t see it, it can’t see me.

The bus still sat at the stop: he could see the headlights flicker weakly in
the snow. Beside the bus there was a police car with its blue and red lights
flashing. Heading into the alley on the opposite side of the street, Steve ran
towards home.

The storm will cover my tracks, too.

Through the snow,he ran. Through the angry columns of snow. He knew where to
go, more from his memory of how streets connected than by sight: the storm only
let him see a step in front of his path.

The rest of the world had taken refuge indoors. From time to time a warm
yellow glow from a house teased him with the idea of home.

Did I leave the bus and police behind?

He wasn’t sure.

After forty-five minutes of battling the storm, Steve finally entered the
back alley that ran behind his house. He walked up to the back fence and peered
through a missing fence board, to comb the yard for cops or robbers.

No one seemed to be around, though it was difficult to tell for certain
because of the snowfall. The house seemed empty, haunted by nothing. Steve
opened the back gate, pulling it open with all his strength. The falling snow
had piled around the bottom of the gate making it difficult to open. Steve
carefully shut the gate behind him, making sure it latched.

As he stepped closer to the house he noticed that the back door wasn’t
closed properly. When he reached the back door, he saw that the frame was
splintered near the lock. Snow had drifted in the kitchen through the partially
open door. Steve studied the snow around the door for any recent
footprints—there were none except for his own. Obviously the break-in had taken
place some time ago.

He stepped into the kitchen carefully and quietly. The house moaned as icy
wind blew through the open door. The narrow snowdrift led the way into the
kitchen, flattening into a light coat over most of the kitchen floor. Steve
again noticed no footprints, so he figured no one had been in the house
recently. He kicked some of the snowdrift out of the house and closed the back
door. The wind blew it open again, so he closed it firmly and slid one of the
chairs from the kitchen table against it to keep it closed.

The Bests’ house had been thoroughly wrecked, too. The kitchen was destroyed
and lay in pieces: food, dry goods, and fragmented dishes lay across the smooth
linoleum. Steve tuned his ear to the house noises, straining to hear anything
that sounded out of place. He felt the toothed edges of fear close in around
him and squeeze.

Duck Boy. Duck Boy.

“Stay here,” he ordered, speaking to himself. The urge to run, at that
moment, was overwhelming—to run away from his house, his problems, his life. He
forced himself to stand still in the kitchen.

Steve imagined the house bathed in a warm yellow light, and conjured his
mother sitting in the living room in her chair. His dad, laughing along with
the laugh track of some lame TV rerun. The warmth of memory helped to loosen
his feet. Steve stepped through the kitchen towards the living room. He removed
both of his gloves and jammed them in his pockets. Through the sheer curtains
in the front window he could see the red glow of car taillights. He watched for
a while as the storm slowly revealed the shape of the vehicle: it was probably
a police cruiser. Steve was certain that the officers wouldn’t bother checking
on the house unless they saw movement. It meant he had to work in the dark.

He edged his way down the hallway, stepping over bits of things plundered or
pitched by the intruders. The fragments, as he stepped around them, chipped
away at the control he held over his fear. He worked hard to remember a golden
summer night with his mom and dad sitting on the porch swing, teasing each
other over a glass of lemonade.

His room. Though his room was bathed in the late night darkness, he could
tell from misplaced shadows on the wall that his own room was a disaster. There
were several huge holes in the drywall where someone’s foot or fist had gone
through the wall looking for anything hidden there. It was going to be
difficult, especially in the flat darkness of the house in this storm, to find
anything to experiment with at all.

Instinctively, Steve went over to where his desk lay on the floor. Each
drawer had been removed and turned upside down. The contents lay scattered all
over the floor. Steve felt a lump build in the back of his throat. Hot tears of
anger dribbled down his cheeks as he met the dark piles of mayhem. He knelt in
the rubble and, on his hands and knees, began to crawl over and search the
drawers’ contents. The house was barely warmer than the outside. Steve could
still see the ghost of his breath hovering in the dark air. He scrambled
through the objects on the floor until he found his alarm clock. He gripped it
firmly in his left hand as he searched for other objects with his right. He
found a photo album, filled with family shots.